The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic 3030408655, 9783030408657

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The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic Edited by Clive Bloom

The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic

Clive Bloom Editor

The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic

Editor Clive Bloom London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-40865-7 ISBN 978-3-030-40866-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Alpha Stock/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave…the symbol of the modern idea. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873)

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank Lesley Kacher for her unfailing help and assistance in organising the manuscript, Emily Wood, Lina Aboujieb, Petra Treiber, Aishwarya Balachandar, Meera Mithran and the entire production crew at Palgrave, and the members of the International Gothic Association who all helped to make this volume possible. The volume was made possible by a research fellowship from New York University.

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Contents

Introduction: The Black Shadow of Doom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clive Bloom

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Precursor Pulp Chapbooks, Pamphlets, and Forgotten Horrors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Franz Potter

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Penny Dreadfuls and Spring-heeled Jack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J. S. Mackley

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Subterranean Spaces in the Penny Dreadful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sophie Raine

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Gothic for a New Age The Horrors of Edgar Allan Poe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brian Jarvis

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Edward Bulwer Lytton and Poisoned Prose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marie Mulvey-Roberts

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Challenging Genre Definitions in Jane Eyre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Claire Bazin Journeys Through the English Haunted House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Alicia Edwards-Boon Gothic Spaces Haunted Space and Gender Performance in the Ghost Stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Emma Liggins Algernon Blackwood’s Storytelling and the Horrors of Space . . . . . . . . . . 161 Nicola Bowring ix

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National Gothic The Failed Heroism of Ludwig II of Bavaria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Joana Rita Ramalho Terror in Colonial Australian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Jessica Gildersleeve The Short Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Erin Janosik The Oriental World of Egyptian Gothic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Naomi Simone Borwein Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Jarlath Killeen The Rise of Terror in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Lorna Piatti-Farnell Domestic Gothic Chills Haunted Domesticity in Late-Victorian Women’s Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Maria Giakaniki Food, Eating, Appetite and Otherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Carmel Cedro and Lorna Piatti-Farnell The Plant, the Mother and the Other in Ambrose Bierce’s Fiction . . . . . . 335 Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson An Edwardian Lodging on the Victorian Horror Threshold . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Robert Shepherd Technology and Gothic Fears Nineteenth-Century Office Chills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 David A. Ibitson Typewriters, Blood and Media in Dracula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Aspasia Stephanou Visual Gothic Culture Global Pre-Raphaelitism and the Morbid Composition of Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413 Naomi Simone Borwein Cinematic Darkness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 David Annwn Jones

Contents

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Gothic Drama and the Uncanny Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453 Madelon Hoedt Spirituality, Theology and the Gothic Victorian Gardens of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 Stephen Sowerby Science and the Supernatural: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and Pseudo-Science in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509 Miranda Corcoran Theological Readings of the Victorian Ghost Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527 Jonathan Greenaway Women Writers and the Theosophical Tale of Terror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541 Christine Ferguson The Haunted Regions of Sabine Baring-Gould . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 559 Joan Passey The Cult of Pan in Nineteenth-Century Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 Katy Soar Joris-Karl Huysmans, Decadence, Satanism and Catholicism . . . . . . . . . . 595 Giles Whiteley The Supernatural Fourth Dimension in Lucas Malet’s The Carissima and The Gateless Barrier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613 Kirstin A. Mills Victorian Vampires The Steam Age Vampire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633 Simon Bacon Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Transformation of Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . 647 Marius-Mircea Crisan and Carol Senf Uncanny Humans Freaks and the Victorian Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 671 John Woolf Victorian Stage Magic, Adventure and the Mutilated Body . . . . . . . . . . . . 691 Catherine Wynne The Spectral Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711 Jen Baker

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Gothic Music Eerie Harmonies, Ghostly Melodies, Uncanny Symphonies . . . . . . . . . . . . 731 Maria Giakaniki Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, and the Schauerroman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 753 Daniel Sheridan Decadent Gothic Aestheticism and Decadence in Britain and France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 773 Giles Whiteley Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 791 Giles Whiteley Edwardian Thrills Golf and Masculinity in M. R. James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 809 David A. Ibitson Algernon Blackwood and the Classic Weird Tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 827 Antonio Alcalá González Shades of Sail: Edwardian Nautical Hauntings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839 Emily Alder List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 857 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 859

List of Figures

Victorian Gardens of Death Illustration 1

Illustration 2

Illustration 3

Illustration 4

Illustration 5

A pre-1854 view of Highgate Cemetery (before the opening of the eastern cemetery) emphasising the cemetery’s pastoral and Arcadian qualities (note the chapel building and Superintendent’s house in the foreground)—publication origin unknown . . . . A deliberately rustic image of Old St Pancras Church in 1820 (containing the Wollstonecraft & Godwin family grave) showing the typically small size of the adjoining Churchyard (note the looming factory chimneys)—from ‘Old and New London: The Western and Northern Suburbs’, by Edward Walford, volume 5, 1877 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One of the aforementioned images published in Ainworth’s Magazine emphasising Kensal Green’s classically inspired monumental architecture & idyllically rural landscape—from ‘Ainsworth’s Magazine’: Volume II, 1842 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A deliberately picturesque view of West Norwood Cemetery emphasising its landscape garden qualities (note the Anglican and Non-conformist chapels atop the hill)—from ‘The Illustrated London News’, 15th September 1849 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A pre-1905 photographic postcard of St Michael’s Church with the famous viewing platform (roof of the terrace catacombs) beneath—publication origin unknown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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485

487

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Illustration 6

List of Figures

A highly romanticised view of the Egyptian Avenue by moonlight (you can almost hear the screeching owl)—from ‘Old and New London: The Western and Northern Suburbs’, by Edward Walford, volume 5, 1877 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Transformation of Tradition Illustration 1

Illustration 2

Illustration 3

Bram Stoker’s working notes for Dracula: A list of characters for the novel (Source Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stoker’s notes on Voivode Dracula, from William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia (Source Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Illustration in Major E. C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent…, p. 263. Bram Stoker consulted the following travel memoirs on Transylvania: Transylvania: Its Products and Its People by Charles Boner (1865), Round About the Carpathians by Andrew F. Crosse (1878), Magyarland…by A Fellow of the Carpathian Society [Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli] (1881), and On the Track of the Crescent… by Major E. C. Johnson (1885) . . . . . . . . .

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Victorian Stage Magic, Adventure and the Mutilated Body Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Advertisement for Charles De Vere, reproduced from Milbourne Christopher, Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962), 108 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘The Sphinx’, reproduced from M. Young, Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic: The Art of Conjuring Unveiled (New York: M. Young, 1880), p. 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Spectral Child Fig. 1

Peter Newell’s illustration for ‘The Lost Ghost’ (1903) . . . .

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Introduction: The Black Shadow of Doom Clive Bloom

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted, but late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. If Gothic is the literature of disturbance and uncertainty it now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle-class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s to the end of the century that gradual changes to the whole culture of gothic sensibility would radically mutate. The old gothic of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe now seemed quaint and antiquated, but its power of longevity was preserved in the subtle analogies found by late Georgian and Victorian authors who disguised their inspirations in new patterns of diablerie. How did these changes come about? We are told nowadays, ‘how imaginative’ of you, how extraordinary to think such things. At school, parents are praised for their child’s imagination. We express ourselves as projections into the world. Nowadays it is strange if people do not possess ‘imagination’. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ we say, as if the absence of imagination is a personal crime, a type of sin against the self. If I say that I have no imagination, it is seen as a failing rather like not being able to swim; something to be secretly ashamed not to possess. Use your imagination we say. Yet imagination is, as it is nowadays understand, inherently modern. To use imagination in the past meant that you were different and capable of wrong thinking—a loner and a heretic. The faggots and flames awaited. Only obey and you will be saved, as writers as different as the fifteenth-century monk Thomas a Kempis and the English revolutionary Gerrard Winstanley of the seventeenth century pointed out.1 To imagine was to deviate and thereby fall into error, the error of religious heresy. Do not imagine. Imagination is a left hand path. This view changed in the eighteenth century and became a developed system by the nineteenth century. Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton) summed up the evolving attitude to imagination as follows: C. Bloom (B) London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_1

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C. Bloom Our imagination kept rigidly from the world is the Eden in which we walk with God… We learn thus to make our dreams and thoughts our companions… We acquire the doctrine of self-dependence, self suffices to the self. In our sleep from the passions of the world, God makes Eve to us in our own breasts.2

The greatest and least acknowledged ideological change brought about by the French Revolution was that of the secular human being, now absolutely free of religious hierarchical thought, and that new type of human was determined by their inner ‘imagination’. This imagination (or human will) was meant to be virtuous and that meant collective virtue accumulated to the self from its communal spirit (its patriotism). In charge of that spirit was the state or the communal collective, as theorised by Rousseau and politically evolved by the Jacobins. Those who didn’t have this characteristic were aliens, no longer truly human and wicked ‘counter-terrorists’ who were attached to the ancient regime. Strangely, these ideas were attractive to Britons otherwise opposed to all things Gallic in origin. The combination of supposed Anglican traditionalism and bloody-minded individualism, which had grown out of sectarian Christianity and the growth of secularism made this new form of individuality highly attractive to thinkers and artists. Nevertheless, the now ‘isolated’ human consciousness soon found its very reason for existence was because it was alienated from the collective state and therefore unique. This joined human existence to that of the transcendent whether supernatural or secular; the individual sense of self now contained its own sense of sublimity. The supremacy of the self was of paramount importance. This was a new religion of secular humanism. It would thus circumvent traditional religion and become virtuous by its alienation from the state or from sociological imperatives. Instead, such imperatives would be determined by the relationship between the self and pure nature. This connection would stabilise the alienated ego in the permanence of its natural surroundings rather than in the permanence of God’s universe. If, however, the imagination was merely internal and individual it had no way of connecting with other egos and could easily become hallucinatory and perverse and turn in on itself. In such a state there is no other world, but only the world of imaginative, therefore, internalised, terror. Hell was now the self. The Calvinist turn to the salvation of the self was also the turn into a cannibalistic and self-hating obsessional neurosis, or, at worst, mental breakdown. Freud made a living out of imagination. Jung made a living out of psychosis: the gothic mind. There are faculties that exists only in our imagination. This is our world. This new world of the power of the inner self was heralded in Britain by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who led the way in the exploration of the imagination for his English speaking readership in his Biographia Literaria (1817), a work in which he proposed a new way of understanding the world. This was through pure imagination, which to Coleridge had the power to transform base reality and transcend material being. This ‘new’ world was opposed to the merely combinational aspects of our perception or ‘fancy’ and was a clear advance on Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime. Although this idea was possibly based on Hume and Kant, it now suggested both a solipsistic and self-referential mode of experience devoid of prior sensory perception and capable of a creativity devoid of the material presence of the world

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and therefore of secondary combination. Coleridge summed up his views in his essay called ‘On the imagination’ (in the Biographia), in which he suggests that ‘the primary IMAGINATION [sic] I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. In other words, primary imagination is a god quality capable of producing new experiential moments in materiality, but out of space and time. To get to the imagination one might use drugs or other hallucinogens, the point being to reconnect with the spiritual aspect of human existence. This was Coleridge’s poetic solution to the loss of God which had taken place with the secularisation of French life amid the upheavals of the French Revolutionary period. Nevertheless, if you were to re-connect with the supernatural, and what amounted to a natural religiousness, there was nothing now to stop you simply imaging a reality that was at odds with your experience. In simple terms this might lead to a person imposing their imaginative space on others through perverse and hallucinatory desire brought on by mania or drug addiction, or both. Thus the scene was set for De Quincey’s renunciation of Coleridge’s abstention from drugs and recovery from drug addiction and the later explorations, by both poets and writers of alienated states of mind, which has lead right up until the twentieth century but especially clustered around the 1830s to the Edwardian period. The first English writer to understand this contradiction and to become fascinated by it was Thomas De Quincey who published a satiric article in 1827 called ‘On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. In it he proposed a ‘Society of Connoisseurs in Murder’ whose aim was to analyse the ‘design, grouping, light and shade’ and ‘poetry’ essential to study the ‘great artists’ of murder whose lives were eaten up by the secret passions of ‘jealousy, ambition, vengeance and hatred’. De Quincey’s proposal, absurd though it seemed, suggested a new heightened interest in criminal psychology, the murders themselves creating a world only a fraction apart from normality, determined by secret passions harboured by us all. It was simply too ‘vulgar’ and unimaginative to knock someone on the head for his money bag. From now on there had to be ‘sympathy’ for the murderer rather than the victim. De Quincey had been drawn to the subject by his fascination with the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders which occurred between 7th and 19th December 1812. An unknown assailant had butchered two families, including their young children, beating them senseless and cutting their throats. John Williams was apprehended and charged, but hanged himself in prison before any proof could be brought. His body was buried with a stake in its heart at a crossroads near the scene of the crime. This interest in the psychological aspects of gothic mentality greatly influenced two of the most important gothic poets of the years from 1830 to 1850, Robert Browning and Edgar Allan Poe.3 The ‘archaeological’ origins of this state of the self may be traced to the beginnings of gothic poetry itself which had begun in the eighteenth century and accompanied the rise of gothic architecture. The poetry was partly the product of the rediscovery

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of medieval history, exemplified in the building of Strawberry Hill House by Horace Walpole and partly an interest in what Walpole called ‘gloomth’, that mysterious half-understood world of shadows and bizarrerie which could be experienced from visits to ruins and graveyards and which was attached to that personal universe that the eighteenth century called sentiment. Sentiment or sensibility was an irrational and highly subjective emotional response to the sublime which itself inspired both terror and horror and could only be felt in extreme situations. Gothic poetry emphasised this interior world and especially dealt with the feelings accompanying the attractions of fear and disorientation when faced with a universe devoid of the rationality preached by enlightenment thinkers. The best way to experience such feelings was to revisit the ruined world of the past in one’s mind, or to inhabit a supernatural world where God was no longer present or was so close as to create ‘terror’ and confusion. Gothic literature was originally inspired by the world of Shakespeare, but gothic poetry had a slightly different trajectory. Memorial poetry of the time produced by the metaphysical poets, stripped of its word play and of its religious intention, soon became the memorial elegy as produced by Thomas Gray. This in turn led others to take a more sanguinary view of decay and the new vogue for ‘tour-ism’ sent crowds to ruins such as Netley Abbey, where they mused and wrote sonnets on the picturesque charms of death and decay. Poets as different as Lord Byron and Susan Evance produced poetry on decay and ruination whilst novelists such as Ann Radcliffe incorporated poetry of meditations on the picturesque in her novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Her own anodyne poems on nature (‘The Glow-Worm’) and scenery were accompanied by poems of dead brides (‘The Mariner’) murdered pilgrims (‘The Pilgrim’; originally ‘The Traveller’) and the mountain abyss (‘Storied Sonnet’) in which there is a decided hint of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later ‘Kublai Khan’. Nevertheless, Byron was the most famous poet of gothic thrills for his generation, supplying vampires in ‘The Giaour’ and re-emerging himself as the fictional aristocrat Lord Ruthven in ‘The Vampyre’ (1819) written by his doctor John Polidori. Yet it was Coleridge whose influence was eventually the strongest. The French Revolution deeply influenced both Wordsworth and Coleridge and through its prism they discovered the sublimity of nature and nature’s resonance with human emotion in a world in which nature is supreme. Coleridge’s interest in the border ballad form, then current, led to the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1795) in which the death of an albatross has to be atoned for by the sailor who has murdered the bird. The moment the mariner fixes his unknowing listener with his tale of woe and thereby curses him to repeat the story to the reader, became the spine of Mary Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein (1818). It was the German writer Gottfried August Bürger’s poem of doomed love which was to become the most influential of all gothic poems. Bürger was the son of strict Lutheran parents and set to join the Church. He rebelled and his interest in law gained him a magistrate’s position whilst his interest in British border ballads led to him becoming a poet. His most famous poem ‘Lenore’ was translated into English by

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William Taylor for the March edition of the Monthly Magazine in 1796 as ‘Lenora’ or ‘Ellenore’. The story follows Lenore as she waits for her William to return from the Crusades (changed from the Seven Year’s War in the original). Her despair leads her to abjure God despite her mother’s entreaties. Suddenly, in the night William, although clearly a spectre, appears on a steed and carries off Lenore in her night shirt to be his bride. At cock crow they plunge to earth, William returning to his tomb and Lenore left dying amidst the graves. Walter Scott translated Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jager’ as the ‘The Wild Huntsman’ and published it to great acclaim in Matthew Lewis’s ‘Tales of Wonder’ in 1796, whilst Lewis himself produced a similar version of the ballad, which he called ‘Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene’ in ‘The Monk’ (1796). ‘Lenore’ introduced the ‘corpse bride’, the girl who dies when she is about to marry, a character trait reproduced in Elizabeth in Frankenstein and Miss Haversham in Great Expectations (1860) and is still reproduced in films such as Tim Burton’ s The Corpse Bride (2005). The poem’s most famous line, ‘stil Denn die Todten reiten schnell’ (‘for the dead travel swiftly’) was used by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) just before Jonathan Harker first encounters the Count. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was the last great gothic novel of the Romantic period. It also set the tone for a different sort of gothic sensation. Instead of the horrors attendant on the supernatural world there was a greater attention to material fears made manifest by the cruelty of authority and the perversity of human nature. It was to human nature that the writers of the late Romantic gothic would turn their attention. Theirs would be a world where horror was not a consequence of violating nature, but instead would be a consequence of mental disturbance. Such mental disturbance was described and discussed by James Prichard in A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835). He called the condition ‘moral insanity’, a term for those whose outward signs are perfectly normal, but who are insane within. Prichard’s diagnosis was based on the work of the French alienist physician Philippe Pinel. Pinel had categorised mental affliction into the categories of partial and affective, insanity. His concept of ‘Manie sans délire’ described a form of insanity that existed without delusion. In other words, it was a type of rationalised madness. Robert Browning’s great gift was for psychological monologues, a term applied later to the series of poetic narratives he created between the middle 1830s to 1842 when he published the collection, Dramatic Lyrics. Such monologues are interior conversations with the reader who is drawn into the mad world of the speaker to the point where they cannot escape the knowledge that is imparted, a technique invented years earlier by Coleridge in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’(first version 1798). ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Browning, which was written in 1836 and published in the January edition of the Monthly Depository (but without its present title), was an early attempt to understand the mind of a killer who yet believes he is a lover. It was reprinted in Dramatic Lyrics under the title ‘Madhouse Cells’. The tale is told as Porphyria returns to her lover at night through a rainstorm. Although wet she sits next to the narrator and puts her arm around his waist and gently lays his cheek on her

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bare shoulder. The eroticism is heightened by the dishevelled nature of her clothes and by her ‘yellow hair’ and ‘white shoulder bare’. The narrator meditates on her absolute love for him and that at the moment of their silent clinch ‘she was mine’. The reader might expect a kiss or vow of love from the narrator, yet what he does next is both shocking and inexplicable. … I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. The infantilised tone, ‘I found a thing to do’ and the use of diminutives such as ‘little’ suggest an innocence about the narrator’s actions that speak directly of moral insanity. Indeed, he even rationalises the assumption that No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain. However, murder now has no moral consequence as the poem pointedly finishes with the cynical ‘God has not said a word!’ It is no coincidence that Porphyria is a disease of the blood and skin which may lead to manic depression in sufferers. This hint at medical complications nevertheless, leaves a world where perverse desire (in this case possibly fetishistic sexual desire: Porphyria’s hair) and the personal will of the narrator override spiritual elements and confuse moral certainties, replacing material reality with the inner disorientation consequent upon absolute loss of faith. The same effect is to be found in the more famous, ‘My Last Duchess’ which was anthologised in 1842. It takes place in the corridors of the Duke of Ferrara’s palace during 1564. The Duke is showing an ambassador around his picture collection whilst discussing his next potential bride. Everything is told in an urbane and disinterested tone created by the technique of enjambment which gives the poem a conversational voice the more to disarm its reader before the denouement. The Duke begins the conversation by stopping at a portrait behind a curtain that he has drawn back, and points out ‘his last duchess’. Sinisterly, he notices she is presented ‘looking as if she were alive’ and even more disturbingly that the ambassador is privileged to see what is shown. The Duke points out the way the painter has caught the ‘half flush that dies along her throat’, but this aesthetic detail sends the Duke off into a reminiscence regarding the duchess’s perceived over familiarity with those around her and her apparent disregard of his gift to her of, ‘a nine-hundredyears-old –name’. The Duke turns to his interlocutor and admits something in the duchess ’disgusts him’. It appears he has had her murdered, an action of so little consequence to him that he continues his tour oblivious to his revelation. The implication, however, is clear, the next duchess will meet the same fate and the Duke will continue with the same insouciant disregard. Browning was the master of insidious intent. His exploration of perverse states of mind rationalised beyond sense was a symptom of mid-century concerns regarding

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the nature of human consciousness in a world beset with existential doubts, social upheaval, rapid industrialisation and class conflict. It found its greatest expression in Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1835, but published in 1842). All of these conflicting problems seemed unwittingly to focus on women. Edgar Allan Poe, although an American, was influenced by the currents of British thought regarding mental hygiene and psychological well-being. In a series of his short tales, ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838/1839) and ‘Eleonora’(1842), Poe explored the nature of that male monomania centred on female body part fetishism, that he named ‘the imp of the perverse’. It was Poe who first integrated previously written poems into his tales to give greater psychological insight into the characters and the way they experienced the world. It was also Poe who integrated assonance and sibilance into his prose to give it a dream-like feeling which Poe remarked had the effect of language and imagery recalled from reverie or the moment between waking and sleeping. This also made the sound and rhythm of his words resonate with emotions that, as he explains, cannot be quite brought to mind. Such word patterns and sounds are the triggers to emotional states that cannot be quite brought to mind. Thus from his tale ‘Ligeia’ There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact –never, I believe, noticed in the schools - that in our endeavours to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Ligeia occupies this dreamlike and hallucinatory world in which an un-named narrator sits with his dying wife (a wife who may be a hallucination brought about by opium consumption). She intones the poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’. The poem concerns a ‘theatre’ of human woes where ‘puppets’ act out ‘mimes’ ‘at [the] bidding of vast formless things’. The action of the poem is that of humanity (or, at least, sentient beings) manipulated by the mindless entities of a meaningless universe in an endless cycle of anarchy and chaos. That motley drama- oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. Into this terrifying world crawls ‘the Conqueror Worm’ a fanged and gory entity to whom all must submit. Against this disaster Ligeia poses the overriding importance of the human will, all that is left of the spiritual possibilities of Coleridge’s imagination. When Ligeia ‘returns’ at the end of the tale it is not merely because of the triumph of her will, but that of the narrator’s, who literally wills her into life as the ‘undead’ out of the corpse of his second wife Rowena, and as with Browning, it is the fetish of her (raven) hair which is the symbol of her resurrection. The material presence of

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the gothic vampire is here transformed into the corpse bride as a product of manic delusion. Poe again made use of the incorporated poem in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ where ‘the Haunted Palace’ is a metaphoric description of Roderick Usher’s mental decline, the gothic imagery of the poem’s castle a perfect foil for the disintegration of the Roderick’s mind where red eyes and a humourless laugh betray mental disorder. And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms, that move fantastically To a discordant melody, While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh- but smile no more. The poem most associated with gothic goings on is Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (1845) whose central character (the raven itself) may have been suggested by Grip, the talking raven in Dicken’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). The complicated rhyme scheme may have been further suggested after Poe reviewed the trochaic octameter poem ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ by Elizabeth Barrett published in 1845. Regardless of its sources, the poem follows the incident of a raven landing on a bust of Pallas inside the door of a young scholar who is reading books of occult knowledge whilst mourning his lost love who is called Lenore (a clear reference to Bürger’s poem). It begins, Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.” The poem became an instant success as its theatricality made it a parlour performance favourite. It brought Poe fame, but little money, and created a host of parodies, remaining still the most famous gothic poem ever written. With its raven intoning the meaningless ‘Nevermore’, the public loved the mysterious nature of the work, so much so that Poe attempted to cash in on his success with an explanation of the poem’s creation. Nevertheless, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) did little to explain away the mysteries of what was intended. The main theme seems to be the perverse desire to both forget and remember a traumatic event, but transcending this the narrator’s need to make sense of the raven’s meaningless repetitions which suggests the loss of an irretrievable past. Beyond all this remains the attraction of the poem’s mesmeric alliteration and its verbal dexterity both of which are formulaic and yet surprising. Poe’s work represents the end for gothic taste in poetry; although the taste for medievalised gothic poetry (through William Morris and many others) continued up

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to the end of the nineteenth century, the work of Browning and Poe evolved into the work of decadents like Charles Baudelaire or symbolists such as Algernon Swinburne with poetry that catered for urban and perverse tastes unaccompanied by any interest in gothic trappings. Gothic poetry was finally sublimated into the imaginative world of the silent movie and European cabaret. The new sensational prose melodramas of the 1850s onwards, kept much of the fabric of the older gothic and covered it with a new veneer. The medieval gothic fantasies of the first phase of gothic invention were replaced with country mansions and local squires with marital life being the central theme of a world filled with the dreadful secrets of a psychotic masculinity. The walls might be crumbling and the servants not to be trusted, but dark corridors, shadow filled passageways and haunted bedrooms still held a thrill, with settings of graveyards, moorland and empty heaths combined with ubiquitous thunder and lightning to set the scene. Such scenes were nostalgic for, and reminiscent of, the worlds of the first gothic writers. Whilst the world of aristocratic medieval privilege may have vanished to be replaced with an entirely new ‘middle class’ viewpoint, based on personal status, ownership of a wife’s supposed fortune, and the sequestered and isolated manor house where the local and degenerate squire conceals his secret, the stories, nevertheless, still contained the essence of those elements of the ‘thriller’ invented by Ann Radcliffe. The newer melodramas explored as well as re-invented the notion of the inescapability of stifling marriage, money and toxic masculinity. In a word, they were thoroughly domestic. The horrors these stories described may have been sensational, but they were also mundane and sordid. What was revealed would become the stock-intrade of the gutter press and the divorce columns; tales of bankruptcy and of infidelity with lineages besmirched and reputations ruined; in other words, a world of social embarrassment rather than supernatural terrors. Everyday horrors was clearly demonstrated in the new exhibitions at Madame Tussauds in London, now run by her the sons Joseph and Francis. The original rooms displaying the wax effigies of French revolutionaries and Napoleonic relics had been called the ‘Separate Rooms’ in the early 1840s and there was a separate charge to view. It was these rooms that a paper of the time advised ‘ladies …not to enter’.4 The rooms were soon popularly called ‘The Chamber of Horrors’, but the name did not catch on until 1846 when the satiric magazine Punch used the term. William Thackeray, writing in The Sights of London remarked, Should such indecent additions continue to be made to this exhibition the ‘horrors’ of the collection will surely predominate. It is painful to reflect that although there are noble and worthy characters really deserving of being immortalized in wax, these would have no chance in the scale of attention with thrice-dyed villains.5

Indeed, Punch suggested that ‘there seems to be a sort of fascination in the horrible’ amongst all classes.6 The brothers remained undaunted and advertised the thrill of contemporary murder in their catalogue of 1851, the very same year that The Great Exhibition was showing the best of British craftsmanship.7 Charles Dickens wrote about the Chamber of Horrors in Household Words, where he has a character exclaim, ‘what a horrible place!’. Yet for Dickens the horrors were more terrible

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because more mundane: ‘What shall be said of the man who could stand at the door of the Chamber of Horrors eating a pork pie?!’8 By the 1880s Tussauds had moved into its Marylebone premises and the Chamber of Horrors with it waxworks and collected memorabilia of murder was the central attraction. The Chamber was reputedly haunted, and a play called The Whip had a scene in the Chamber and a playbill offering a reward to those who dared to spend the night in its dungeon-like atmosphere. Mrs Lowndes’ novel The Lodger (1913) about Jack the Ripper also ends in the Chamber of Horrors. The Tussaud brothers kept their eyes peeled for sensational events just like the sensationalist journalists of the day. The public’s glee in reading about or watching the salacious had been removed with the ending of public hangings in 1868, but the taste was supplied by cheap publications such as The Illustrated Police News which had a large readership from the 1870s and contained luridly printed illustrations with sensational stories of ‘real life’. Thus are there stories of ‘horrible crime’ in Spain, the murderer ‘still at large’; suicide by homemade guillotine; a woman decapitated by a train; an axe murder in Bristol; an eccentric Indian woman torn to pieces by her own cats.9 Dickens’s own journalistic interests included both gothic machinery and events, but he usually pastiched the genre or made it ironic. Miss Haversham is a clear example of both a living ‘corpse bride’ and a terrifying fireball ghoul based on real spontaneous deaths recorded in sensational news stories; the opening of Great Expectations (1861) is also clearly gothic as is The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Dicken’s knew that Christmas was the best time to sell the public spooky tales and A Christmas Carol (1843) combines both the nature of the haunted room and its cursed occupant with a sentimental commentary on social conditions. Nevertheless, the tale ‘The Signalman’ included in All Year Round in 1866, showed Dickens alive to the possibilities in haunted technology as well as having an ironic eye for older gothic sensation. As well as dastardly deeds, from the 1840s to the end of the century the old supernatural and sensational gothic still held its own in the cheap ‘bloods’ and penny dreadfuls read by the ‘lower orders’, as well as the magic lantern performances at villages and fairs for those in the country whose literacy was limited or non-existent. With their gaudy covers, part works and cheap ‘paperbacks’ filled the hours of the poor and were both read and utilised in the privacy of the midden. Such books flourished, and it was their ‘literary’ influence combined with the new fascination with spiritualism that led to the revival of supernatural gothic in the 1870s. Nevertheless, older forms of Georgian gothic never went away. They were merely disparaged by the reading classes and consigned to the rubbish heap of the new world of Grub Street, commercialism and borderline impoverishment. Writing for money was simply vulgar and these writers were considered hacks. With all that, it was writers such as James Malcolm Rymer whose 220 chapter part work, Varney the Vampire (serialised 1845 to 1847) was a catalyst for the continuance of vampiric horrors and whose work represents the nostalgia of later writers in the 1890s whose younger days were spent devouring cheap literature, just the same as Percy Shelley did years before with his forbidden ‘blue’ books. George W. M. Reynolds who worked alongside Rymer in the new fiction business, produced such shockers as Wagner the Werewolf (1847), a tales of curses and Faustian pacts

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reminiscent of themes sixty years previous in the work of Monk Lewis. Rymer, or Reynolds, or both, of course, also produced the ultimate cannibal melodrama in a penny ‘blood’ set in the mundane settings of a barber’s shop and a pie house: The String of Pearls: A Romance which appeared in Edward Lloyd’s The People’s Periodical and Family Library on 21 November 1846. This work, part comic nonsense, part a satire on Dickens, part a tale of unknown London, part faux disgust at the ultimate adulterated food, was not really a gothic work at all as it really has no obvious gothic settings, but rather it is a piece that took elements of the mundane (a barber and a cook) and demonised them; it was the very world of the everyday, outside Rymer’s window, that was truly gothic. If the respectable gothic plays of the Regency had vanished and their scenery been dumped on bonfires by the 1840s, the spirit of gothic shivers was still alive in popular reading.10 The importance of the older Radcliffian style continued to linger in its influence during the 1840s. The peculiarly cramped and constricted atmospheres of the Bronte’s novels, with their dark sexual hints, bleak moorland settings and touches of gothic supernaturalism certainly owed much to an earlier era whilst taking the genre on into new worlds of passion and female sensibility. Meanwhile Radcliffe was also an influence on one of the most popular writers of the mid-century, William Harrison Ainsworth who started life as an unsuccessful lawyer and ended up one of the most important of all the popular novelists of the century, a best friend of Dickens, a playwright, a magazine owner and a dandy. His first novel was the historical adventure romance Rookwood (1834) in which real characters enjoy fictional adventures. The book was a huge success, written, he tells us in ‘the bygone style of Mrs Radcliffe’. Ainsworth had hit on a formula for reviving gothic thrills that lasted for thirty-nine novels and which spanned the nineteenth century (he died in 1882). His most significant novel is The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (1848), in which Jacobean history and Lancashire folk lore are mingled with fictional characters and scenes. The book not only harks back to Robin Hood, Maid Marian and ‘the merrie men’, a possible nod to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) but also includes the definitive description of a classic witches sabbat, with bubbling cauldron, incantations, old hags on broomsticks, spells and black cats, all enveloped in an hallucinatory and dreamlike atmosphere, things only seen ‘repeatedly in dreams’ as one character muses; ‘We are all witches here’ exclaims the aptly named Alice Nutter and all dedicated to ‘Satan’, who even appears in the tale as a disembodied voice.11 Ainsworth owed his novel to a more influential tale, that of The Amber Witch (Der Bernsteinhexe) which was written by the German novelist Wilhelm Meinhold in 1846 and purported to be the actual account of a witch trial (with sadistic torture, descriptions of partial nudity and a truly evil and salacious villain) set in the fifteenth century. The tale was so successful it was taken as fact and discussed as truth, but may have been influenced by James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Meinhold’s story is placed in a mythic, but seemingly historical Germany of villages and peasants. The work was translated into English in 1846. It proved wildly successful, especially amongst intellectuals and artists. The Pre-Raphaelites painted its scenes and Philip Burne-Jones illustrated it; William Morris produced

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its companion, Sidonia the Sorceress at the Kelmscott Press in a luxury edition (although it had already been translated into English in 1849 by Jane Francesca Egree, the mother of Oscar Wilde); William Vincent Wallace even turned the book into a successful opera. Thus, Ainsworth had his model of witchcraft, but so too did other writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell whose Lois the Witch first appeared in All Year Round during 1859 and is a tragedy set in seventeenth-century Salem. Witches continued to be an intermittent international ‘gothic’ theme throughout the nineteenth century. Tennyson’s poem the ‘Lady of Shallot’ (1832) influenced John Waterhouse’s interpretation which he painted in 1888; the Witch of Endor was a favourite with Slavic painters such as Dmitry Martynov who painted a version of the biblical character in 1857 and Nicolai Ge whose own version appeared in 1875; as late as 1919, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem called ‘En-dor’ about his lost son. What changed was the concept of the witch. From a woman wrongly accused or an old hag, witches had, by the end of the century become aetherial and wondrous symbolist sirens. In the last great witch tale, The Witch of Prague (1891) written by the American F(rancis) Marion Crawford, Unorna is a young beautiful and mysterious woman with exotic mismatched eyes who is able to subdue men by the use of hypnotism. She is not however gothic, but her surroundings in the ‘dead’ city of Prague, her peculiar friend Keyork Arabian and the fact that she shares a house with a living ‘corpse’ suggest an atmosphere reminiscent of JK Huysmans and foreshadowing German Expressionism. The witch was now a ‘vamp’, knowledgeable in the latest scientific ideas regarding the psyche rather than the supernaturalism of the occult. Nowhere is all this taste for gothic thrills so marked than in the new magazines from the late 1850s onwards, Titles included The Cornhill Magazine at a shilling a month, Macmillan’s Magazine from the same year. Roundabout Papers in 1860, Temple Bar also in 1860, The St James’s Magazine of 1861, London Society in 1862, The Argosy in 1865, Belgravia in 1866 and numerous others, all of which thrived on the new literacy and all of which devoured new fiction.12 The proliferation of part works, magazines and especially Christmas specials greatly increased the need for writers of gothic and ghost tales which remained the favourite diet of this type of reader, especially at Christmas time. These magazines needed stories of a certain length and shape and so the ‘short story’ was born. Such tales had to have a clear setting, clear characterisation, a beginning, middle and end, a startling climax, a ghostly revenant which had to interact with the characters which was intended to unsettle or frighten the reader, and be relatively short. This was a return to the ideas of Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s. The stories, however, were not intended to be medieval. Thackeray saw the moment of change from the old world to the new in the advent of the railways and M. R. James pointed out many years later that, On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.13

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The new gothic was intended almost to be an ‘anti-gothic’, without the framework of the old context of medievalism. It embraced modernity and contrasted it with the fear of the return of the dead, the return of a repressed history belonging to a family, a place or a house. By the 1890s simple everyday life was to be the spur towards occult, supernatural and strange occurrences. Characters now chanced on each other in clubs, on trains, in lawyer’s offices or in doctor’s surgeries or they had just returned from imperial adventures or were worn out through commercial enterprise. Fifty years before Jack the Ripper, modern London was haunted by characters such as Spring Heeled Jack whose fiery appearance in London proper as well as its villages and suburbs occurred in 1839; but it was also haunted by the ‘spectre’ of communism as Karl Marx pointed out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Spectral terminology and ghostly manifestations haunted every alley of the metropolis. London, the centre of empire, was the subject of numerous apocalyptic meditations, from Richard Jeffrie’s drowned world in After London (1885), to William Morris’s post-revolution world in News From Nowhere (1890), to HG Well’s alien haunted landscape in War of the Worlds (serialised 1897) and to the ominous fantasy of annihilation that exists in the miasma that hangs over the capital in M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). Imperial collapse, sociological neuroses around worker’s rights, anarchism, ecological changes, spiritualism and the occult, Darwinian evolution, criminality, sociopaths and homicidal murderers and the fear of modern medical science created the febrile atmosphere in which ghost stories and alien invasion (mostly from Eastern Europe) formed a symbiotic association. As the magazines and journals increased in volume and middle-class reading habits became wider and more voracious, women writers realised the importance of financial stability and freedom. They were neither immune either to the vulgar lure of commercialism nor to that of the gothic. Margaret Oliphant, pouring out stories for to popular press was clear about her needs. ‘I want money’, in this she proved she was no mere possession of her husband, who had a poorer income, but an equal economic partner in the marriage.14 Other women wrote for hard cash such as Mrs Charlotte E. Riddell whose husband proved to be a financial disaster. Her immense literary output, during a long career did not prevent her from dying in poverty. Riddell wrote short novels that might be serialised in one edition of a Christmas special, but she also wrote about those whom others neglected, the clerks and petty business men who were usually unmentioned in ‘literary’ books, not to mention gothic literature. Her short novel The Uninhabited House (1875) is a story of a haunted house and the problems of falling in love with a penniless solicitor’s clerk; social commentary and supernaturalism. Riddell also produced one of the great collections of ghost stories in 1884 called Weird Tales. Riddell was joined by a legion of other women, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Mrs Henry Wood. There were many others such as Amelia Edwards (who wrote the short novel Monsieur Maurice [1873]), Rhoda Broughton, Louisa Molesworth, Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), Rosa Mulholand, Edith Nesbit and host of others.15 Many of these women (as did male writers) wrote under different pseudonyms to avoid reader fatigue and to allow the exploration of themes only associated with one of their noms de plume. Many stories were written by amateur or semi-professional writers such as Lewis Lister or Raymund Allen for whom little

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or no information is available or by ‘composite’ writers such as Mrs L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace whose identity remains shrouded in obscurity. The world of the magazine writer was highly competitive and unforgiving. Yet these writers spawned numerous anthologies of the type of ghostly tale which has now inexorably become entwined with the idea of the Victorian era. In 1848 there was only one recorded example of a ghost anthology. This was by Catherine Crowe and called The Night-side of Nature or, Ghosts and ghost-seers (a ponderous reference, perhaps, to the work of Friedrich Schiller). By the 1850s there were four such anthologies, by Elizabeth Gaskell (1855), Dinah Maria Mulock (Mrs Craik; 1857) and again by Crowe (1858 or 1859). In 1851 Sheridan Le Fanu published Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery which included ‘Schalken the Painter’. The 1860s was a lean time with only two anthologies of note, one by Amelia Edwards (1865; three volumes) and one by M. E. Braddon (1867). It was in the 1870s that things changed. Between 1870 and 1879 there were ten new anthologies including Sheridan Le Fanu’s highly influential In a Glass Darkly published by Bentley in three volume in 1872 and including ‘Green Tea’ and ‘Carmilla’. There were also works by Amelia Edward (1873), Mrs Henry Wood (1874) and Rhoda Broughton (1873). By the 1880s there were ten anthologies including one by Arthur Conan Doyle (1889), whilst by the 1890s there were thirty-two including work by Rudyard Kipling (1890), Robert Barr (1892), Henry James (1893), Bernard Capes (1899) and Edith Nesbitt (1893). Between 1900 and 1910 there were at least twenty-four new titles including work by Richard Marsh (nd), W. W. Jacobs (1901, and the 1902 volume, The Lady of the Barge which included ‘The Monkey’s Paw’), Barry Pain (1901), Gertrude Atherton (1905), Algernon Blackwood (1907), Perceval Landon, whose Raw Edges included ‘Thurnley Abbey’ (1908), Edith Wharton (1910) and Edith Nesbitt (1910). The decade also included the most famous of all these anthologies, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary published by Edward Arnold in 1904 and written by M. R. James. Americans were quick to understand the potential of the ghostly short story written for the magazines. Ralph Adams Cram produced Black Spirits and White in 1895 and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper in 1899. Yet the period was to find the defining voices of macabre literature in Ambrose Bierce, Francis Marion Crawford and Robert W. Chambers. Whilst all three acknowledged the influence of British writing they took the spectral tale in a different direction, one that looked to verisimilitude through newspaper reports (Bierce), English country house lore (Crawford) and graveyard thrills (Chambers). Bierce used newspaper reports of disappearances to create tales that make the American South and its landscape of abandoned plantation houses both unworldly and uncanny. It is Bierce who makes of disappearances and hauntings an America which is both surreal and inexplicable. What happens in Bierce happens without explanation, as if the veil of reality is merely a thin veneer covering modernity. In this he anticipates both American backwoods horror cinema and the extravagances of David Lynch. Robert W. Chambers borrowed the strange mythic landscapes of Bierce’s Carcosa in the extraordinary stories which make up the King in Yellow (1895). Here, we find ordinary modern life literally haunted by a mysterious and terrifying ‘other’ existence written in a demonic play that cannot be read without driving the reader insane. It is the epitome of decadence and decay and

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the colour of the popular press—yellow. Chambers’s stories relate a metaphysical threat that implies an occult and hidden universe wholly satanic and unbending. It is ultimately to Chambers that we owe the pulp horrors of the 1920s and the most famous of unreadable books—H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’. The steady rise in ghost stories was the result in the growing obsession with theosophy and eastern esoteric thought, brought to Britain by the formidable Madame Blavatsky and centred on a ‘secret’ cult of higher spiritual beings based in Tibet. Its central theses were contained in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s two volume work, Isis Unveiled (1877). The extraordinary reach of this fantastical new ‘religion’ of personal salvation and super humans affected many novels and influenced a great number of writers including Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) with its subterranean Sphinx-like super beings. Bulwer-Lytton (plain Edward Bulwer until 1843 when he took his mother’s name in 1843, inheriting as he did so her Hertfordshire home, Knebworth House, which he immediately gothicised) embraced Theosophy, spiritualism and the occult in a new form of paganism which grew into the secret magical societies at the end of the century. Indeed, his spiritual leanings had led him towards Rosicrucianism and the ‘secrets’ of Chaldean occultism, alchemy and astrology as early as the first mediums had emerged in New York State. His gothic tales, which were just part of a vast and eclectic collection of writing that included social satire and science fiction, and embraced the (by the 1830s) Germanic clichés of Rhine maidens, corpse brides, robber barons, doomed love, ruined castles and physically deformed villains, nevertheless also concentrated on the inner mind, insanity, dreams, reverie and mind experiments. It was stories such as ‘A Manuscript found in a Madhouse’ published in the Literary Souvenir in 1829 which took the gothic story into the realms of the criminal mind and sexual psychopathology and foreshadowed the like of Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo and ‘Eric’ the deformed maniac of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Bulwer-Lytton combined this narrative theme with his tale of doubling, hallucination, mental illness and criminality called ‘Monos and Daimonos’ which he published in the New Monthly magazine in May 1830 and here we see the outline of narratives that would mirror the arguments put forward by De Quincey and be refined by Poe. Poe was hugely influenced by Lytton’s early work as can be seen by his re-use of similar titles, his interest in perversity, in criminality and in mental illness. Moreover, Poe wrote to his friend T. H. White that Bulwer’s gothic inclinations made, ‘the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful…into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical’—a more perfect description of Poe’s own work is hard to think of here. Yet, and also with a view to his own ideas perhaps, Poe continued, ‘you may say this is bad taste, I have my doubts about it’, a most ambivalent and ambiguous prevarication. In 1859 Bulwer-Lytton published ‘The Haunted & [sic] the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain’ in Blackwood’s Magazine, following his intense experiments into telepathy and metal transference which the author undertook with the most famous medium of the nineteenth century, Daniel Dunglas Home. The tale is not merely one of the very first ghost stories, but it includes much of the author’s musings on the nature of hallucination, mind transference, occultism and the relationship between the will and the imagination,

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the unknown, inner world where space, time and distance vanish and where dreams reveal the possibilities of other better and truer worlds; a far cry from the inner voice that deceives of earlier times. By the beginning of the twentieth century ghosts were de rigeur in the English landscape and P. H. Ditchfield’s book, The Charm of the English Village (1908) praises not only the uniqueness of the English village, but the need for a good ghost in your manorial property. Indeed, he gets eloquent on the subject. Thus, he tells us, ‘these ancient traditions, ghosts and legends, add greatly to the charm of our old houses’.16 This led Peter Ackroyd to remark in his 2010 book on ghosts, that ‘England is a haunted country’.17 By the late nineteenth century the English landscape, haunted as it was by ghosts had become ghostly itself. The landscape was alive with the spirits of other worlds; fairies and fairy folk and strange remnants from times gone by. In Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm (1911) the main character, Adam Salton finds himself travelling through ‘the heart of England’ towards the Peak District where the very rocks and houses become uncanny worlds of lost and arcane prehistory and where monstrous serpents live in deep caverns under archaic stately homes. Time in Stoker stands still, as Roman, Anglo Saxon and Norman history blend into one and these into the prehistoric; all the history and myth of England and the empire coagulate in this strange landscape where black servants are ‘simiam’ degenerates haunting beautiful white women and where ancient serpentine and mythic ‘worms’ become strange erotic females bent of finding rich husbands! Even more significant in the period was the rise of spiritualism which had originated with the supposed supernatural occurrences at the Fox household in Hydesville, New York State during 1848. It arrived in Britain as an American phenomenon with Marias B. Hayden in 1852 and caused a popular sensation in which the royal family were happy to participate. Queen Victoria may have continued an interest until her death in 1901. This new form of religiosity had originated with the Shaking Quakers, but had metamorphosed into a quite different manifestation of spiritual enlightenment by the 1840s and 1850s in the strange atmosphere of upstate New York. The paraphernalia of the séance and the clairvoyant crossed the Atlantic in the 1850s and proved a convenient answer to the difficulties of Darwinism, but also a strange and comforting double of evolutionary theory. By the 1870s, the whole world of the darkened room, the séance cabinet, the clairvoyant, the flying apports, the strange music and the planchette was the most popular pastime of respectable middle-class bankers and by the end of the century of working-class labourers and their womenfolk too. The likes of Margaret and Catherine (Kate)Fox, Daniel Douglas [D D]Home (who could levitate) and the Bangs Sisters, Eusapia Palladino and Florence Cook (whose ‘extraordinary’ manifestations could walk and talk) soon became celebrities and every level of society, but beginning with the wealthy, soon had their own favourite medium. The exposure of fraudulent practice only made believers cling more closely to their favourite spiritual go-between. The world of the séance reached its height by 1874 and coincides with the rise of the traditional ghost story. It grows again in importance after World War One, to finally fade into a standard of spiritualist churches and wet afternoons, Madame Blavatsky turned into

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Madame Sosostris the clairvoyant whose powers are diminished because of a ‘cold’ in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ (1922) and later became the butt of the brilliant buffoonery of Margaret Rutherford playing Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s 1941 comedy, Blithe Spirit. Nevertheless, the cult of spiritualism took itself very seriously in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It argued that contact with the ‘dead’, mesmeric connection and kinetic operations were both scientific proof and religious assurance of an afterlife. The impact was immense, not only convincing writers like Doyle that the veridical ghost was a reality, but also convincing political movements such as the nascent Labour movement and the Suffragettes which were both heavily influenced by its message of material continuation and female spiritual independence. The phenomena spawned societies of investigators, all still active today. In 1862, a group of investigators from Cambridge University formed the Ghost Club, whilst in 1882 another group of high minded intellectuals from Oxford formed the Society for Psychical Research intending to apply scientific methods to the world of the supernatural; in 1884, William Stainton Moses, founded the London Spiritualist Alliance created with the practical purpose of allowing people to harness the new power. It is now the College of Psychical Studies which at one time had Arthur Conan Doyle as its president and Aleister Crowley renting a room. The world of ghostly revenants and peculiar mesmeric influence (an invisible etheric fluid) was reworked in stories from the 1870s onwards in which strange dreams blended with everyday reality to create new liminal experiences. Wilkie Collins utilised these ideas in The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice (1879) which combined a narrative of commercial enterprise with his stock-in-trade of murder and melodramatic secrets. In this case, one of the characters has a vision of a floating decapitated head which leads mesmerically to the solution of the family secret. The ideas were still being retailed by Arthur Machen in the twentieth century (see his story ‘North’). Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is, in many ways, the climax, unrealised at the time, of the tendencies of the 1870s onwards combined with a nostalgia for an earlier form of gothic dimly remembered from childhood. It is influence by the rise of theosophy and Madame Blavatsky, by spiritualism, orientalism, occultism, the taste for mesmerism and malevolent ghosts (the revenant and the spirit).Its themes are those imperial neuroses outlined by Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells and it is concerned with those very issues which were featured in the popular press at the time of the creation of Stoker’s novel (between 1890 and 1897). The book clearly owes its origins to the stories of Sherlock Holmes and the scientific studies into spiritualism undertaken by the Society of Psychical Research. It is also influenced by the urban gothic of London, the spectre of Jack the Ripper and of alien immigration into the East End. Stoker’s concerns, like those of Walpole and Meinhold was to produce veracity for his fictional world. In his unpublished preface of 1898, Stoker joins many of the themes of the nineteenth century gothic story from mental alienation, to spiritualism, the alien threat to London and to Jack the Ripper.

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C. Bloom I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place….such strange happenings that neither scientists nor the secret police [does Stoker mean the Irish Special Branch?] can understand. The series of crimes has not yet passed from the memory…, which at the same time created as much repugnance in people…as the notorious murders of Jacob the disemboweller [or Jack the Ripper]…Various people’s minds will go back to the remarkable group of foreigners who…[were] here in London….Both Jonathan Harker and his wife [Mina]…and Dr Seward are my friends….and the highly respected scientist [possibly a reference to Henry Sidgewick of the Society for Psychical Research or perhaps Sir William Crookes], who appears under a pseudonym [ Abraham Van Helsing].18

The taste for vampires took almost the next forty years to grow into a cult. Stoker turned to more current horrors for his other books and short stories, the most famous of which, The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903) was themed on the mythic world of ancient Egypt. Stoker’s rise to popularity would be delayed until his death in 1911, others were luckier and enjoyed great success with supernatural tales in their own lifetime. Dracula is supremely the book of nineteenth-century Western modernity from which the memory of repressed Eastern horrors have been erased, but not destroyed. Here we find the clash of civilisations in the figure of Dracula. As Jonathan Harker travels into Transylvania he muses that ‘we [sic] were leaving the West and entering the East’. The world he is leaving is one of lawyer’s clerks, real estate contracts, bicycles and dictating machines, shorthand and ‘new women’; he enters a primitive world of eroticism and violence and mythic monsters. The West is also the world of modern thought and of modern criminal detection set in contemporary mental hospitals such as the Pitie Salpetriere in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot (even if Van Helsing believes in mesmerism) Verisimilitude is not only contained in modern ideas but in real places such as Purfleet in Essex, Chicksand Street in the East End of London and Whitby. Yet it is America’s masculine and modern cowboy culture as symbolised by Quincey P. Morris which represents the future which will defeat the repressed Eastern past of the vampire. Dracula, too belongs to the modern world, and whether he is a werewolf or a vampire, a supernatural being or the Anti-Christ (blue flames and ‘pentagrams’), he still has to consult his copy of Baedecker, make use of money, banks, lawyers and merchants as well as real estate and shipping agents. He must obey the rules of the world precisely because he is not a ghost but has material presence He may be ‘Mr DeVil’ but he still has to use modern transport and live in the contemporary world of the late Victorians. Such is also the case with Richard Marsh’s horrors. Marsh, whose real name was Richard Bernard Heldmann, was the author of over eighty tales, many of them ‘boys own adventures’. Marsh published The Beetle in 1897, the same year as Dracula, but to much greater success. The story, like Stoker’s, is part horror tale and part criminal thriller set in a recognisably modern London. Nevertheless, Marsh’s premise is centred on the discovery of a secret Egyptian cult and the return of an Egyptian mummy in the heart of Hammersmith; the hero, a scientist, is working on a formula for poison gas! Marsh’s celebrity and success led to another strange tale called The Goddess: A Demon, first serialised in the Manchester Evening News in 1900. It too

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works themes of the oriental and supernatural with the erotic and violent; Marsh is the master of the extraordinary opening scene, a real connoisseur of the weird and uncanny, with a strange and byzantine imagination filled with fin de siècle degeneracy which Stoker is too prim to plumb. Marsh himself was as interesting as a person as an author of rambling adventures. He represented the Victorian paradox: a highly patriotic country man, born of two school teachers, whose own family were local sporting celebrities and who played cricket for his local village and took part in the respectable pastimes of village life, but who concealed a life based on continual little pretences, actual criminal fraud (for which he went to jail) and a worrying incestuous interest in one of his daughters. The ghost story as told by writers such as Barry Pain, Mary E. Wilkins, R. H. Benson, or Algernon Blackwood could still hold the attention of an eager reading public in the early twentieth century. The classic ghost tale had, however, incorporated demonic elements since the 1890s and rather than floating spirits, non-human revenants often returned as tangible ghouls with unspoken but diabolical intent. This new twist produced masterpieces of the genre such as Perceval Landon’s ‘Thurnley Abbey’ of 1908 (in which the main narrator actually tears a ghostly figure to shreds) and the masterfully unsettling Christmas pieces by M. R. James. The period also saw the apotheosis of the weird and uncanny in tales by Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson and Robert Chambers. The terms ‘weird’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘eerie’ joined the older expressions of fear such as ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ and came to represent, for the writers of the early twentieth century, a new terminology for the notions of alienation, inexplicable strangeness and out-of-place disassociation that these writers were trying to capture in a world seen as infinitesimally small and irrelevant within the infinity of cosmic time. Thus geology and astronomy replaced the certainties of imperial destiny, placing such aspirations within the context of an indifferent, Godless and remote cosmos controlled by demonic forces and inexplicable monsters. Humankind was no longer supreme, but rather subject to the whims of eternal struggle. Here, indeed, William Hope Hodgson marks a particular turning point in the literature of the gothic. As was the fashion of the day, Hodgson was many things, a sailor, a writer and a bodybuilding instructor. He died on 19 April 1918 at the Battle of Lys (Fourth Battle of Ypres). Thus his death and the manner of it represent in peculiar form the terminus and apotheosis of the chapters in this volume. His great claim to fame was his masterpiece The House on the Borderland (1908). The subject of this tale is a man whose ancient Irish house is subject not only to the attacks of ‘Swine-Things’ but seems to be built over a pit that leads straight to Hell and to visions of cosmic time beyond the death of our universe. What is more terrible is that the house appears to have a double (‘en rapport’) which is situated in space on a vast plain of nebulous gases. The strange narrative contained in an old crumbling book is stumbled upon by two anglers on a rambling holiday and constitutes the ‘found object’ of the horror fiction of the later nineteenth century which survived as a convenient generic mechanism for readers to enter strange worlds. The work is a mixture of gothic literature (turrets, cellars, trap doors, hell pits, discovered manuscripts, monsters), nascent science fiction (cosmic space, meditations on God, aliens and other worlds) and spiritualism (the eternal love-corpse bride theme).

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Nevertheless, in its peculiar cosmic disorientation the narrative is either the visionary hallucinations of a paranoid schizophrenic (as is hinted at by the narrator’s sister’s reactions) or the actual existential dream forebodings of a man haunted by the end of times and by his experience of seeing the old gods. Either way, the book ends ambivalently with the two anglers no more knowledgeable than before and the house and its narrator utterly erased. Hodgson and this book more than any other perhaps sent H. P. Lovecraft on his intermittent quest for the lost universe of the eldritch Old Ones and the sea monster Cthulhu. Lovecraft acknowledged Hodgson’s influence in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926) and thus through Lovecraft, Hodgson has proved as influential as Stoker in the creation of the modern weird tale. And yet, Hodgson too has a precursor in Guy de Maupassant whose short story ‘The Horla’ was originally published as ‘Lettre d’un Fou’ (‘Letter of a Madman’) in 1885 and republished with its familiar name in 1886 and again (slightly rewritten in May 1887). The Horla (whose name is roughly translated as ‘the thing out there’ or ‘what’s out there’), is a parasitic, vampiric and invisible entity that drinks milk and water and may also drain energy. It leads the central character to look for various cures until his obsession turns to murder and suicide. The story describes a world both familiar and yet unhinged, haunted by a spiritual or extra-terrestrial entity whose presence results in madness. The element of that which should ‘not be present’ or the ‘haunter without’ has the effect of making life intolerable and revelatory at the same time, opening a universe of intolerable wonders and fears. Here, the presence in the séance room has ceased to be the calming and compensatory presence of the dead. Instead, we find the presence of malicious and leech-like extra-terrestrials, part dead, part ghost, part demon, part apocalyptic monstrosity. The story influenced H. P. Lovecraft and the nature of Cthulhu, and the story well have been in Hodgson’s thoughts when he wrote his own ambivalent masterpiece. Even J. M. Barrie was not immune to the uncanny and haunters outside our rational knowledge: Wind in the Willows (1908) contains the strange episode of ‘ The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ a subject meditated upon since 1891 when Barrie published a short piece called ‘The Rural Pan’ on 25 April 1891 in the National Observer. The Golden Dawn was then at its height, theosophy and the obsession with Hindu mysticism was almost an essential of any aspiring intellectual, ancient Egypt and Tibet had not diminished their hold on intellectuals and artists, even if the world of The Yellow Book had had its last gasp in the tales of Stanislaus Eric Stenbock’s, Studies in Death (1894), whose own death from opium addiction and alcohol seemed to close an era; Crowley was beginning to experiment with the knowledge he had brought back from Egypt and the sex magick [sic] that made him notorious, the world of the Victorian fairy was still sufficiently potent to lure Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the haunted house now reigned supreme as the abiding spirit of the English countryside. From the 1830s to the end of the old ghostly tale in the summer of 1914, the old gothic castle would steadily give way to the country house, and the bannered halls of palaces would themselves give way to the setting of genteel drawing rooms; dungeons were replaced by haunted wine cellars or displaced by the sewers of the city, whilst the private chambers of moustachioed aristocratic villains gave way to the West End

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club and to the gentleman’s apartment, library (stocked with arcane and abstruse volumes) or study, now hiding a fully equipped laboratory. The villains of the early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Gray and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert, the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. The Victorians were fascinated and appalled by doctors and their studies. Professionalism was seen by the respectable upright middle-class reader to whom these books and stories were aimed, as both a type of autocratic threat dealing in secret knowledge and a window into the titillation of the perverse. Doctors might be benevolent such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson or they might be peculiar such as Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing or the drug addicted Dr Seward or they might be dangerous, secretive and disturbing such as HG Well’s Dr Moreau or duplicitous such as Dr Jekyll. The Victorian reader was torn between a belief in progress and a fear of degeneracy which provided the other side of the coin. Dr Moreau, the central character of Well’s The Island Of Dr Moreau (1896) is a ‘vivisector’ whose laboratory on its remote island is both a rewriting of Frankenstein, but this time through the lens of the current debate regarding animal experimentation, and a consideration of the idea of God in a world of scientific exploration bereft of compassion and moral compass. Wells’ vision combines racial politics and Darwinian themes in the 1890s as well as demonstrating the central difficulties of science without morality. Dr Moreau is the last and greatest ‘mad scientist’ of horror fiction. Previously, Robert Louis Stevenson’s, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) had probed another aspect of scientific enquiry, that of ‘transcendental medicine’ which represents Jekyll’s pragmatic solution to his own ‘duplicitous’ nature. His experiments to separate the two halves of human nature is far less a scientific pursuit that a theological and Manichean debate with Calvinism and has more in common with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) than with works of actual science fantasy from the period. The story makes it quite clear that Jekyll’s transformations into the alter ego of Hyde are a moral quest for some sort of ontological freedom. The fact is however, that the experiments, rather than elevating Jekyll to the Satanic beauty that Dorian Gray enjoys only debases him to the dwarflike and simian ‘juggernaut’ that is Hyde. Thus, for the Victorian (and European) mind degeneracy was the price both of progressive and metaphysical thinking, whilst at the same time leading into the realms of spiritual renewal, occult discoveries and nervous exhaustion. This ambiguity of thought lead to deep ambivalence in morality, and (even if by circuitous routes) to the fin de siècle decadence of the French School. From the late Georgian period to the brink of World War One, the period covered by this volume, we see the emergence of the great names of gothic literature and the supernatural including Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Bronte, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson as well as fin de siècle and Edwardian dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen or Richard Marsh with their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants and annihilation as well as the efforts of many who deserve to be remembered, but whose work remains the specialist interest of aficionados and academics. In France the writings of Victor Hugo and the

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architecture of Viollet Le Duc introduced the French to English medievalism, whilst Maurice Level gave Frenchmen horrible shocks in his version of the ‘conte cruel’ and Gaston Leroux created urban and urbane terrors in The Phantom of the Opera (1909); Charles Baudelaire, whose love of the work of Poe took up much of his time, gave us the whiff of sulphur which had always been latent in the decadent, depraved and occult streets of Paris. In Bavaria the creations of Neuschwanstein, or the rebuilding of Haut-Koenigsbourg later in the early twentieth century by Kaiser Wilhelm II testified to the aristocratic sense of a highly wrought Germanic sublime contained in the architectural dreaming of Ludwig II and the mythic musical ‘architecture’ of Wagner’s revolutionary reworking of national identity. America gave us Edgar Allan Poe, the greatest of all horror writers, influenced both by the British imagination and by an American sense of commercialism which forms a bridge between older forms of supernatural gothic and the tropes of modern madness. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Thomas A. Kempis, the fifteenth century Flemish monk writes, ‘that man’s nature is prone to evil [and]…it is much safer to obey than rule’. More significantly are comments such as ‘the beginning of all evil temptation is an unstable mind… we must not trust overmuch in ourselves’, and to beware of ‘false liberty of mind’. In Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, tr., Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1952), pp. 35–36; 40; 73; 81 These thoughts are repeated nearly 250 years later by Gerard Winstanley, the Protestant Digger leader. Winstanley tells us, when speaking of the Garden of Eden, that ‘the weeds are these: self love, pride, envy, pleasures, imagination’; he warns against ‘blind imagination …. [which] leads mankind aside[.]…When mankind is guided by imagination, he runs a great hazard upon life and death’. See his address ‘To all the several societies of people called churches in the Presbyterian, Independent or other form of profession in the service of God’ and ‘Fire in the Bush’ in Gerard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and other Writings ed., Christopher Hill (London, Pelican, 1973), pp. 214; 220. ‘On the Want of Sympathy’quoted in William Lawrence, The Haunted and the Haunters (Knebworth, Herts., Able Publishing, 2000), p. 9. A modified version of the section on poetry appeared in Matt Cardin ed., Horror Literature through History An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears, Vol. I (New York, Greenwood, 2017). Chapman, Pauline, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: Two Hundred Years of Gruesome Murder (London, Grafton Books, 1985), p. 69. Ibid., 83. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 86. See Leonard De Vries, ‘Orrible Murder: Victorian Crime and Passion (London, Book Club Associates, 1974).

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10. See Clive Bloom, ‘Gothic Theatre’ in David Punter ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 346–357. The gothic touch does, nevertheless, linger. See the last act of Leopold Lewis’s The Bells which played at the Lyceum, London from November, 1871. See Volume One of the Gothic Handbook for a loger discussion of early Gothic theatre. 11. William Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches: A Romance of Pendle Forest (Bolton, Aurora Publishing [1849] nd), pp. 300; 203. 12. Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, eds., Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xii–xiii. 13. Ibid., xvii. 14. Ibid., xiv. 15. Ibid. 16. P. H. Ditchfield, The Charm of the English Village (London, Bracken Books, [1907] 1985), p. 38. 17. Peter Ackroyd, The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (London, Chatto and Windus, 2010), p. 1. 18. Bram Stoker, Dracula, Clive Leatherdale ed., Dracula Unearthed, SouthendOn-Sea (Essex, Desrt Island Books, 2006).

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter, The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (London, Chatto and Windus, 2010). Adams, Paul, Written in Blood: A Cultural History of the British Vampire (The Mill, Stroud, The History Press, 2014). Anstruther, Ian, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament, 1839 (London, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1963). Bloom, Clive, Victoria’s Madmen: Revolution and Alienation (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Cardinal, Roger, German Romantics in Context (Littlehampton, Littlehampton Book Services Limited, 1975). Chapman, Pauline, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: Two Hundred Years of Gruesome Murder (London, Grafton Books, 1985). Churton, Tobias, Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Epoque (Rochester, Vermont, Toronto, Inner Traditions, 2016). Cox, Michael and R.A. Gilbert, eds., Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992). De Vries, Leonard, ‘Orrible Murder: Victorian Crime and Passion (London, Book Club Associates, 1974). Ditchfield, P.H. The Charm of the English Village (London, Bracken Books [1907] 1985). Downey, Dara, Palgrave Gothic: American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Doyle, Arthur Conan, The History of Spiritualism (Complete) (Teddington, The Echo Library, 2006). Elliot, Chris, Egypt in England (London, English Heritage, 2012). Fisher, Mark, The Weird and the Eerie (London, Repeater Books, 2016).

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Haining, Peter, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack (London, Frederick Muller Limited, 1977). Jones, David J, Palgrave Gothic: Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern, Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Lamb, Hugh, Gaslit Nightmares 2 (London, Futura, 1991). Logan, Guy, The True History of Jack the Ripper (The Hill, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Amberley, [1905] 2013). Machin, James, Palgrave Gothic: Weird Fiction In Britain 1880–1939 (Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Mack, Robert L., The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd (London, Continuum, 2007). Oppenheim, Janet, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985). Punter, David, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Sayer, Karen and Rosemary Mitchell, eds., Victorian Gothic (Leeds Centre for Working Papers in Victorian Studies, Vol. 6, 2003). Silver, Carole G., Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). Smith, Andrew and William Hughes eds., The Victorian Gothic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2012). Woolf, John, The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age (London, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 2019). Wynne, Catherine, Palgrave Gothic: Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Precursor Pulp

Chapbooks, Pamphlets, and Forgotten Horrors Franz Potter

On a rainy summer day in 1860, Charles Dickens discovered an old pamphlet titled The Voyages, Distresses, and Adventures of Captain Winterfield, written by himself in a book closet of a country house. He noted nostalgically that it came from the series English Nights Entertainment originally published by Ann Lemoine in 1802. The collection consisted of histories, adventures, biographies, and tales all composed, it advertised, by the most illustrious writers. However, he recalled the entire series, in actuality, contained the ‘most tremendous “Gothic romances,” and most unauthentic ghost stories’.1 Dickens’s fond recollections of Ann Lemoine’s gothic chapbooks some fifty-eight years after their publication, underscores the influence these short tales of terror had on the development of gothic genre well into the nineteenth century. The chapbook remains a forgotten spectre that once stalked in the shadows of the gothic novels. A series of short tales of terror that proliferated in the wake of gothic novels following the success of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, these chapbooks and pamphlets appeared at the booksellers, stationers, and permeated the recesses of the local circulating libraries. It was in one of those circulating libraries that the youthful Percy Shelley first encountered those ‘…haunted castles, bandits, murderers, and other grim personages—a most exciting and interesting food for boys’ minds’2 which fuelled his predilection for the Gothic. Indeed, the popularity of these 24–72 pages long booklets, distinguished by their elaborate frontispiece and cheap blue, yellow, or green covers, was undeniable. They were perused by all classes of readers who clamoured for tales of terror in their simplest, shortest, and crudest form. The success of these publications was due, in a large part, to their sensationalism enhanced by three simple features: the double-barreled title, the frontispiece, and the price. The outrageous double barrel titles of the gothic chapbooks certainly contributed to their popularity. Titles such as The Cavern of Horrors; or, The Miseries of Miranda (1801), The Tomb of Aurora; or, The Mysterious Summons (1802) and F. Potter (B) National University, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_2

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The Horrible Revenge; or, The Assassin of the Solitary Castle (n.d.) were designed not only to attract the notice of readers, but to advertise the horrific substance of their wares. Fundamentally, the purpose of the title was to persuade the reader to purchase from the bookseller or borrow the tale from a circulating library. In an age of plain covers, one way to judge a tale was by its title. Gothic chapbooks frequently exploited this device with great aptitude. Some titles proved their own advertisements providing both the title (and some even a summary of the novel) as well the original source of the material be it from a popular drama or novel. For instance, publisher Simon Fisher advertised Charlotte Frances Barrett’s The Black Castle; or, The Spectre of the Forest, A Historical Romance as Founded on the Spectacle of that name, Performed at the Amphi-Theatre of Arts, with unbounded Applause, for Nearly One Hundred Nights. To which are added Tracy Castle; or, The Parricide Punished. Fate of Edeliza; or, Sacrifice to Superstition (1800) and publisher Ann Lemoine provided a lengthy summary of The Sicilian Pirate; or, The Pillar of Mystery. A Terrific Romance. Forming the Singular Life and Adventures of Adelmorn; Who, After Selling Himself to the Devil, at the Instigation of a Lapland Wizard, Becomes a Notorious Pirate, and, By His Depredations and Cruelties, Renders Himself the Terror of the Northern Parts of Europe. At Length the Wizard’s Predictions is Fulfilled, and He Ends His Days Overwhelmed with Anguish and Despair (1804). Each title was carefully designed to provide the reader, first the primary content of the tale, and second, the primary event or principal protagonist. Readers for their part were duly rewarded with the assurance that the content of the tale was exactly what they desired. Gothic chapbooks also included a frontispiece which ranged from crude woodcuttings to elegant aquatints. The illustrations themselves were usually of a dramatic scene from the tale and often portrayed a supernatural event which could vary from vindictive spectres to walking skeletons to crafty demons hunting for a soul. After 1820, gothic chapbooks often contained a fold-out page of colour illustrations depicting four principal scenes from the story as well as a small portrait of the main character. Early gothic chapbooks generally contained woodcuts illustrations which were carved from blocks and frequently reused and repurposed before selling it other another printer who recycled them for their own publications. The aquatint process though was more time intensive, but it also allowed tonal gradations and deeper shadows by applying acid to etched copper plates. Publishers also hired draftsmen and engravers to draw and etch the image as well as a colourist to daub the yellow, red, and blue paint, often carelessly. Even well-known illustrators George and Robert Cruikshank regularly worked with publishers producing sensational illustrations for these tales of terror. Gothic chapbooks were, if anything, inexpensive and provided readers access to knowledge and entertainment that otherwise was out of reach. Generally, chapbooks cost between 4d. and a shilling depending on length, quality of paper, and type of frontispiece. A 36-page chapbook such as Sarah Wilkinson’s Monastic Ruins; or, The Invisible Monitor: A Romance (1805) cost 6p. The 48-page The Children of the Priory; or, Wars of Old. An Historical Romance (1802) cost 9d. Each came with an uncoloured aquatint frontispiece, but the price increased if colour was applied

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as it added an extra cost for the printer. Some gothic chapbooks cost as much as a shilling such as The Secret Tribunal; or, The Court of Wenceslaus. A Mysterious Tale which ran 72 pages. If the cost was still prohibitive readers could access gothic chapbooks at the circulating library. Chapbooks were generally listed under the Pamphlet designation and could be borrowed for as low as a penny a night. The price of these productions certainly contributed to their popularity and provided the enterprising bookseller or printer access to a large and active readership. The gothic chapbook lurched into life, following the growing controversy surrounding Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and on the heels of the grand ballet sensation Raymond and Agnes; or, The Castle of Lindenberg written by Charles Farley, which was performed at Covent Garden, London from 16 March to 1 June 1797. Just as the third edition of The Monk was withdrawn, censored, and reissued with a new title Ambrosio, or, The Monk, an enterprising publisher Simon Fisher collaborated with bookseller Thomas Hurst to issue the lurid sounding Castle of Lindenberg; or, The History of Raymond and Agnes. A Romance; With the Story of the Bleeding Nun: and the Method by which the Wandering Jew Quieted the Nun’s Troubled Spirit early in 1798. An abridgement rather than an adaptation of the novel, the 148 page pamphlet focused on the Raymond and Agnes narrative with particular attention given to the Bleeding nun episode at the Castle of Lindenberg. The commercial success of the Castle of Lindenberg encouraged a number of smaller firms including John Ker, Robert Harrild, Thomas Hughes, and John Bailey to likewise engage in the expanding gothic chapbook trade. By 1800 dozens of these sensational titles had flooded the marketplace and production increased rapidly. In truth, it was only a relatively small number of publishers and printers in London who were actively engaged in the production and dissemination of gothic chapbooks. The few firms who produced the largest amount of gothic material included John Bailey, Ann Lemoine, Thomas Tegg, and Dean and Munday and were often book dealers who issued a wide range of literature from political pamphlets to cookbooks to religious tracts with their gothic publications comprising only a small amount of their overall output. Intriguingly, each of these firms uniquely focused on a different aspect of gothic chapbook marketplace. The means of dissemination of gothic chapbooks varied by publisher. Thomas Tegg, for example, recognized the potential expanding marketplace especially with readers with access to circulating libraries and money. He focused his energy on a magazine or series of gothic chapbooks titled The Marvellous Magazine or Compendium of Prodigies, which was almost exclusively contained adaptations of popular English and German gothic novels. A magazine or chapbook series was designated by the regularity by which individual pamphlets were issued. The Marvellous Magazine was initially launched by Thomas Hurst and for a shilling offered one pamphlet complete with an elegant frontispiece once a month either individually or to be bound in a volume every six months. The magazine was launched 1 May 1802 with The Midnight Assassin; or, Confession of the Monk Rinaldi: containing a Complete History of his Diabolical machinations, and Unparalleled Ferocity. Together with a Circumstantial Account of that Scourge of Mankind the Inquisition; with the Manner of Bringing to Trial those Unfortunate Beings who are at its Disposal, an adaptation of

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Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian: or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797). The 72-page abridgement focused on the adventures of Giovanni di Sardo and Amanda Lusigni (Vivaldi and Ellena) as they are pursued by as the duplicitous monk Rinaldi (Schedoni). The simplified narrative removed the impassioned speeches by the lovers and cumbersome subplots which detracted from the Vivaldi/Ellena narrative. While Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian is still recognized as a gothic masterpiece, most of the adaptations in The Marvellous Magazine and Compendium of Prodigies were based on contemporary bestselling and popular novels, many of which are now forgotten. Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory; or, The Fortunes of the House of Rayo, A Romance founded partly on Historical Facts (1794), for instance, was redacted into The Wandering Spirit; or, Memoirs of the House of Morno and published 1 August 1802. The novel itself received poor reviews which described it as merely a catalogue of collected gothic horrors. Despite less than stellar reviews, The Haunted Priory achieved enormous popular success throughout the 1790’s extending well into the nineteenth century. Initially published anonymously in 1794, Cullen claimed authorship with the second edition in 1795, a third and fourth editions were issued in 1796 and 1832. In 1833, an anonymous dramatic adaptation title De Rayo; or, The Haunted Priory: A Dramatic Romance also appeared, though it is unclear if it was ever staged. Such enduring popularity eventually earned the novel a place in William Hazlitt’s The Romanticist and Novelists Library: The Best Works by the Best Authors in 1839. The romance’s appeal even spread to the United States where editions appeared in 1794, 1796, and as late as 1850. Given its popularity, it is no surprise that readers recognized The Wandering Spirit as a straightforward abridgement of The Haunted Priory. While Cullen’s narrative had the potential to be adapted into a polite moralistic or didactic tale of love lost, the anonymous redactor instead chose to focus on the supernatural aspects of the original text. In fact, that determination to be strictly accurate to the romance reveals how the redactor went about transforming a two volume novel into 36 pages. Absent are the philosophical discourses on warfare, duty, and honour. Expunged are the descriptions of nature, excessive dialogue, and minute details of love lost. Sensational scenes involving the supernatural, spectres, and warnings were retained if not embellished. One particularly intriguing feature of The Wandering Spirit was the blatant carelessness in which popular novels could be redacted. Not only does the redactor confuse the principal character’s names, Alphonso casually appears instead of Carlos at least twice, the narrative was so abridged that part of the main plot was completely overlooked. Notwithstanding its shortcomings this tale of terror not only offers readers an intriguing insight into the techniques of abridging a long narrative, but also the life span of what is now considered only a minor gothic novel. Notably, the quality of The Marvellous Magazine, including paper and illustrations, were well beyond that of traditional ‘chapbooks’. In fact, a number of other chapbook publications, mostly Gothic in nature, were of a higher quality than regular chapbooks of the period which were often uncut, unstitched, and printed on poor quality paper. These newer publications were closer in quality and content to the pamphlet which, as Leslie Shepard in A History of Street Literature observed, ‘… appealed chiefly to the middle classes. The language and the finer points of religious

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and political controversy were complex, and besides, the pamphlets were too expensive for most poor readers. Chapbooks were the popular pamphlets of the poor’.3 This is an important point especially in regard to how the gothic chapbook has been critically considered. By designating these booklets as chapbooks rather than pamphlets, critics have dismissed them as street literature only suitable for the poor, while this was certainly not the case. Readers of all classes had access to these publications either bound in an elegant volume or sold individually wrapped in blue covers. Another means of dissemination was the collection or anthology. Publishers would frequently assemble thematically linked chapbooks, that had already been published, into a compilation. Ann Lemoine focused on publishing collections including English Nights Entertainment (1801), The Tell-Tale Magazine; or, Universal Museum (1804– 1805), and Popular Tales, Lives, and Adventures (1805–1806). These collections or anthologies of multiple chapbooks which, like Dickens observed, contained a variety of tales, biographies, voyages, and adventures were produced with the intent to appeal to a large general readership. Almost all publications contained some gothic tales though Wild Roses; or, Cottage Tales (1808–1809) was exclusively Gothic. That collection contained some of the most popular and enduring gothic chapbook titles including Barbastall; or, The Magician of the Forest of Bloody Ash (1808), The Mysterious Spaniard; or, the Ruins of St. Luke’s Abbey (1808), The Monks of Cluny; or, Castle-Acre Monastery (1808), and Twelve O’Clock; or, The Three Robbers (1808). Like Tegg, Lemoine not only offered the tales bound in a collection but they were sold individually as well. Sarah Wilkinson’s Albert of Werdendorff; or, The Midnight Embrace. A Romance from the German from 1805 exemplifies the types of chapbooks that Lemoine assembled into these collections. The tale was originally published in Popular Tales, Lives, and Adventures as an adaptation of the ballad ‘Albert of Werdendorff’ which first appeared in the anonymous Tales of Terror (1801). The ballad was initially and incorrectly attributed to Matthew Lewis, but was a parody of Lewis’s ballad ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’ which appeared in Tales of Wonder (1801). Albert of Werdendorff recounts the seduction of the lovely Josephine by Lord Albert. The lovers would meet every midnight, but when visits suddenly stop she seeks him out at his castle where she arrives in time to witness his nuptials to Guimilda. She returns home distraught, but at midnight, Albert again comes to her door explaining that his father forced him wed Guimilda. The couple spend the night together and as he leaves in the morning promises to return to her at midnight. However, at the instigation of Guimilda, Albert had poisoned Josephine who died a dreadful death the following day. At midnight, a terrific storm arose and Josephine’s death-like form appeared to confront her unfaithful lover. Wrapping her arms around him and pressing her blackened lips to his, Josephine dragged the unfaithful and wretched Albert to hell. Wilkinson ended her tale with a not so subtle warning to young women, not the seducer, to resist the flowery words and actions of a rake at their own peril. Such tales, often with a moral attached to them, proved particularly profitable for Lemoine. While Tegg predominantly focused on adaptations, Lemoine’s gothic publications were generally a mixture of adaptations of popular novels and dramas as well as a

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variety of original tales of terror. Sarah Wilkinson (1779–1831), a prolific writer of gothic chapbooks and novels, authored at least twenty chapbooks for Lemoine between 1803 and 1806. In 1803, Lemoine published The Subterraneous Passage; or, The Gothic Cell, the only chapbook by Wilkinson not to be included in any of her larger collections. The principal characters of Edward Mortimer and Emily de Cleve were loosely modelled on Valancourt and Emily in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic masterpiece Mysteries of Udolpho, which appeared some nine years earlier in 1794. The tale narrated the trials of Emily and Edward including her kidnapping and forced marriage to the Marquis Dubois. Once removed to the Marquis’s castle, she discovers an imprisoned female in a subterraneous cell, Dubois’s supposedly dead first wife, and that her husband was a leader of the notorious banditti. As in other gothic chapbooks and pamphlets, there are few if any inexplicable mysteries in The Subterraneous Passage. The action is confined, and justice is meted out with immediate determination. The plot is in simple chronological order with the necessary moral of providence and noble perseverance at the conclusion. What differentiates this particular tale from other gothic chapbook is that the tale is fundamentally a moral tale of good and evil which explores the finite line between domestic terror and connubial obedience. This basic tension would be present in Wilkinson’s later chapbooks and novels, and in part, define her writings. The Subterraneous Passage is centred on the horror of secret, arranged, or forced marriages. Emily de Cleve is kidnapped by Dubois with the assistance of Madam Rambouillet, Emily’s governess. Rambouillet and Dubois were partners in vice; Dubois desired Emily’s money and Madam Rambouillet wanted the daughter out of the way, that she might not hinder her designs on the father, the Marquis de Cleve. Marriage is forcibly performed with Emily the unwilling partner: ‘In vain she shrieked, and implored for mercy: no friendly hand was near to give her aid; and the servile priest performed the office in spite of her resistance, and pronounced them man and wife’.4 Marriages, for the most part, were arranged affairs, not of the heart, but of fortune. For Wilkinson such marriages were inevitably loveless and a source of domestic terror. Yet, despite condemning forced and arranged marriages, Wilkinson seems to support the traditional importance of duty within that marriage. Emily’s kidnapping and forced marriage to the Marquis, while lamentable, does not negate her responsibility to her ‘husband’. It is precisely this conflict which turns the domestic into terror for Emily and her inability to escape only leads her to seek refuge in the subterraneous passages beneath the castle. While most gothic chapbooks and pamphlets were populated with castles, subterraneous passages, and assorted paraphernalia, there were other authors who used the Gothic for political and social purposes. William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), for example, explores the ‘Gothic’s suitability for socio-political critiques’.5 Sensing the same potential for gothic chapbooks, Stevens and Co. Circulating Library, Borough Road, London commissioned an anonymous writer to pen The Bloody Hand; or, The Fatal Cup for their readers. Uniquely, the chapbook specifically targeted the working-class audience with a clear political message which is only slightly tempered by the gothic motifs which dominate the narrative. The Bloody Hand, like many gothic chapbooks, focused on the sins

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of the parents visited on the heads of their children. The chapbook relates the woes of the O’Mara family, originally of Ireland, but lately of France, whose Patriarch dares to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of the heart. Not only does the Marquis bring the wrath of the Church upon his family, but he incurs the curse of the vindictive Priest St. Pierre. The political subtext is carefully intertwined with the historical situation in France leading to and during the tumultuous Revolution. The horrors of religious persecution are set out in the suffering of O’Mara and underline the oppressive and horrifying realities of life under the authority of the Church. References to secret societies, common in gothic novels, entice the readers of The Bloody Hand, but are merely utilized as an emblematic gesture to the intellectual rebellion common to gothic characters who never fully adhere to the tenants of the Church. The power of the Church extends beyond even that of the King and for attempting to remove his lover from a convent, O’Mara is captured and imprisoned in the dungeons of the Church. It is, of course, the revolution that eventually frees the O’Mara family from the clutches of the church. The grandson of the Marquis, destined for the monastery because of his Grandfather’s sins, eagerly embraces the ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ of the Revolution, only to get caught up in the bloody nightmare of the Reign of Terror and rise of Napoleon. Though the chains of religion no longer bind the family, the vindictive priest, now a blood thirsty Republican, continues to remind the family of his curse, and his tool of choice is the prisons and cells of Napoleon. The Bloody Hand is ultimately an unprejudiced extolling of English religious and political values. The narrative is more than didactic in nature, it is undisguised propaganda trying, only slightly, to hide behind gothic motifs. Readers, if drawn into the text by the promise of gothic horrors, came away with the clear reminder that England had a ‘free and happy government, where there are not prisons like Bastilles, no prison abuses, no persecution for opinion, no secret incarcerations, no tortures inflicted upon the body, and where all enjoy freely the fruits of their labour’.6 Appropriately reminded of their freedom, the readers of The Bloody Hand could revel in the knowledge that they will never experience the gothic horrors of an unjust religious and political system. The gothic chapbook and pamphlet was widely available throughout the early nineteenth century. The booksellers, printers, and circulating library proprietors often produced manifold titles each to capitalize on readers’ interest in the supernatural, sensational, and gothic tale, but also to exploit the popularity of contemporary dramas and novels which were too expensive for most working-class readers. The works of Sir Walter Scott, for example, were frequently abridged and adapted including Ivanhoe; or, The Jew and His Daughter. An Interesting Old English Tale (1820), Waverley; or, The Castle of Mac Iver. A Highland Tale of Sixty Years Since. From the pen of the celebrated author of ‘Kenilworth’, &c.; epitomized from the original by Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson (1821) and The Pirate, or, The Witch of the Winds: with the adventures of Captain Cleveland and Minna Troil also an account of the ceremonies & incantations of Norna of the fitful head with the mysteries of the Northern Sagas (1823). Dramas were likewise regularly adapted by enterprising publishers. Charles Maturin’s tragic drama Bertram; or, The Castle of Aldobrand was quickly adapted into The History of Count Bertram, an Italian nobleman, whose ambition roused

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the Jealousy of a rival courtier, etc., within weeks of the drama’s premier at Drury Lane in 1816. Another adaptation of the same drama was later published in 1825 as Bertram; or, The Castle of Aldobrand Being a Romance taken from the tragedy by the Rev R. C. Maturin [sic] highlighting the continued popularity of the drama and the interest in the (re)presentation of it as a sensational tale. The gothic chapbook and pamphlet continued to be published into the 1820s even as the interest in gothic novels began to decline dramatically. Publishers continued to find a small market for yet another adaptation of Lewis’s The Monk this time as The Bleeding Nun of the Castle of Lindenberg; or, The History of Raymond & Agnes and other sensational titles like The Fiend of Normandy, or the Repentant Criminal; a Romance of ancient Times (1821), but a profound shift was taking place. The number of individual gothic chapbooks and pamphlets dramatically declined from twelve titles in 1825 to only two issued between 1826 and 1828. However, the gothic chapbook simply refused to die, but what did change was the way in which these tales were circulated. Gothic chapbooks continue to be repackaged and repurposed in collections of ‘legends, romances and tales’. Two significant series and collections of gothic chapbooks and pamphlets, Endless Entertainment and Legends of Terror! were published between 1825 and 1830. Each collection contained both previously published chapbooks as well as new tales of terror. A clear example of the shift from individual gothic chapbooks to large series or collections was George Herbert’s Endless Entertainment; or, Comic, Terrific, and Legendary Tales which was published with eighteen spirited cuts and written by J. Mark. The series, following The Marvellous Magazine model some twenty-three years earlier, offered a single chapbook for 2d. weekly (rather than monthly) which could be bound together when the series ended. The series was launched on 6 May 1825 with an adaptation of James Planché’s drama Der Frieschütz, or the Fatal Bullet and the Forest Fiend. (Translated from the Legendary Tale on which the popular drama is founded). Another seven chapbooks were issued weekly, but the series came to sudden end on 24 June with Rinaldo Rinaldini, The Great Bandit Captain. Of the eight pamphlets published separately, six were adaptations of popular gothic novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers: A Romance (1803). One of the most intriguing gothic tales in the series was an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first published in 1818 simply renamed The Monster Made by Man. The tale originally appeared on 17 June 1825 and sold for 2d. When Mary Shelley (1776–1850) published her monstrous gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818 in three volumes, second edition in 1823 in two volumes and a revised edition in 1831 in a single volume) it gave the narrative that would influence generations of horror connoisseurs for two centuries. Frankenstein inspired a number of dramatic adaptations, the most wellknown being Richard Brinsley Peake’s (1792–1847) Presumption; or The Fate of Frankenstein, later retitled as Frankenstein; or, The Dangers of Presumption in 1823. Peake’s success at the box office immediately resulted in several imitations of his drama including The Man And Monster! or, The Fate of Frankenstein also called Frankenstein; or, The Monster (1826), The Monster and the Magician; or, The Fate

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of Frankenstein (1826), Frankenstein; or, the Model Man (1849), The Man and the Monster (1850) and Frankenstein; or, The Vampire’s Victim (1887). The Monster Made By Man is the first known literary adaptation of Frankenstein. The short tale of terror blends Shelley’s horrific tale with significant elements borrowed from Peake’s drama. For the modern reader the result is a tale of terror closer to the classical celluloid representations of Frankenstein than to Shelley’s monster. The adaptation simplified Shelley’s complex moral and philosophical implications of Frankenstein’s questionable actions, and instead place the emphasis on Peake’s theme of presumption. The redactor, J. Mark, stripped the novel of inset tales and narrative framing to maximize the dramatic horror of Frankenstein’s fatal act. This abbreviated tale divests itself of the wandering sensibilities of the creature and allows it to embrace the dark side of the creation. Another tale The Dwarf; or, The Deformed Transformed which appeared on 10 June 1825 was an adaptation of Joshua Pickersgill’s sadistic, ruthless, and extremely complicated gothic novel The Three Brothers (1803). The novel not only inspired two short adaptations, but it attracted the attention of Lord Byron who published his fragment The Deformed Transformed in 1824. Clearly benefiting from Byron’s drama, the redactor simplified the convoluted narrative into a Faustian tale of violence and revenge. Five years later, another redactor undertook the task to expand the 1825 version reinstating the voyeuristic revolutionary scenes surrounding the death of the dwarf in Arnaud the Devil! or, The Dwarf in Legends of Terror! The remaining ten tales did not appear as either an individual chapbook or pamphlet, but instead were bound with the first eight into a single collected volume and sold for 3s. 6d. The other tales in Endless Entertainment were also influenced by well-known gothic dramas and novels. The Skeleton Witness: A Spanish Romance, for example, was a virtual compendium of gothic motifs and characterizations with echoes of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), T. J. Curties’ romance, Ancient Records, Or, The Abbey of Saint Oswythe (1801), and The Animated Skeleton (1798). While the redactor blended and merged those familiar gothic motifs and characterizations, they attempted to frame the narrative in a landscape grounded in the law. Rights and principles are the foundation of revenge, even when the spectre of the deceased demands retribution. This unique pamphlet recounts the familiar tale of jealousy, revenge, where the murdered directs the living to execute righteous vengeance on the wicked. Zaminta, the daughter of an old Moor, had fallen in love with Don Alphonso Villebon. His friend, Don Cosmo Rugelli, arranged the murder of Alphonso and married Zaminta. Meanwhile, Alphonso’s nephew Hernando was visited by a cloaked figure and directed to the woods where he discovered his uncle’s remains. After various adventures, Hernando takes Cosmo to court to regain his family’s estates, and as the sentence is being read a ‘stranger raised his head, and unfolding his cloak, discovered to the amazement and horror of all, a skeleton figure under it’. Terrified by the return of Alphonso, Cosmo admits his guilt and plunges a dagger into his breast. The law prevails, the spirit of Alphonso is laid to rest and order is restored. This amalgamation of recycled plots from familiar gothic chapbooks including ‘The Mysterious Monk; or, The Cave of Blood, A Fragment’, from Romances and Gothic Tales (1801) and The Black Forest; or, The Cavern of Death,

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A Bohemian Romance (1802) offers a simple narrative replete with supernatural intrigue and suspense. The series also contained The Mysterious Bottle of Old Hock. An Ancient Legend, an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels which was published in 1816 and translated into English as The Devil’s Elixirs in 1824. The author framed the narrative with the legend of Saint Anthony’s temptation with two bottles of wine. The saint withstood the temptations of the first bottle and placed the second bottle in a Capuchin convent near Mullendorf. The short narrative focuses on the monk Josephus who was tricked by Count Rosenberg into tasting the devil’s elixir with him, and undergoes a series of misfortunes and crimes. In the end, the Count and Josephus are brought together, and their confrontation is condensed into two short paragraphs. Perhaps to fit the expectations of a pious middle-class readership, or to control the length, Josephus and Count Rosenberg’s redemption were brought about with easy and order restored. The second collection, Legends of Terror! and Tales of the Wonderful and Wild was published in 1826 with a ‘new series’ this time a complete collection of legendary tales, national romances, and traditional relic, of every country, and of the most intense interest. The enormous collection contained reprints of a number of popular pamphlets such as The Black Forest; or, The Cavern of Death. A Gothic Tale (1802) and Sarah Wilkinson’s Albert of Werdendorff; or, The Midnight Embrace, A Romance from the German (1805) and as well as short tales of terror from periodicals including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. An American Legend (1819) and William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Spectre Bride (1821). It also contained yet another adaptation E. T. A. Hoffman’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1816) this time renamed Saint Anthony’s Flask; or, The Devil’s Wine! A German Legend and, most intriguingly, it contained The Wanderer; or, The Magic Phial! A Spanish Legendary Romance, an adaptation of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Maturin’s lengthy and often convoluted romance recounted the marvellous tale of Melmoth, who sold his soul for immortality emerging now and again from the shadows in a hopeless endeavour to find someone to take his place and release him from his curse. The Wanderer; or, The Magic Phial! A Spanish Legendary Romance was an interesting effort to authenticate its own tale as the original inspiration for the novel, and the ‘editor’ of the tale frames the text as an historical, rather than a supernatural narrative. In an attempt to establish historical legitimacy, they included an epitaph which read: ‘This wild and marvellous, though far from immoral story, may be traced to a course from whence no one would have expected a romance, viz. Barnavius’s History of Spain, vol. II pp. 211–213 and is the foundation of Maturin’s celebrated Romance of “Melmoth the Wanderer.”’7 The anonymous redactor divested Melmoth the Wanderer of its cumbersome and complex inset tales, so intrinsic to the novel, and concentrated on the Faustian elements of Melmoth’s wanderings as he searched for another soul to replace his own. The tale itself focused the trials of Carlos and his brother Baltazar de Lucena who briefly encountered a supernatural figure named Azanaga the Moor, an old incarnate demon who arrives in the form of a gentleman traveler. Like Maturin’s John Melmoth, Carlos was warned about the arrival of a mysterious man, and actively sought to find the stranger as to uncover

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the legend surrounding his longevity. Once found, Azanaga tempted Carlos to drink from his phial, an act that would not only extend his life, but transform him into a living demon thereby releasing Azanaga. However, Baltazar smashed the contents of the phial on the ground but not before Carlos drinks from it and attempted to rape their young ward Teresa. Once the phial was destroyed, the family discovered ‘a deformed hairy monster, scarcely bearing a human appearance—decrepit, ghastly, and manifesting every symptom of the most extreme age and infirmity’ in place of the stranger.8 The tale was concluded with no moral insight or witness of divine providence. Instead, it ends with an observation of the editor that Carlos withdrew from society ‘not altogether of sound mind’. The tale, satiated as it was with gothic paraphernalia, provided readers the exact dose of terror and horror they expected from gothic tales and chapbooks. The narratives found in the Legends of Terror!, like The Wanderer, provide an insight into the final arch of the gothic chapbook. The tales, a mixture of gothic chapbooks, tales of terror from periodicals, and even ballads, provided readers with an encyclopedia of gothic terrors and horrors ad nauseum. Eventually, the individual hand-stitched small pamphlets replete with their blue covers and sensational frontispieces, disappeared from booksellers’ shelves and the circulating libraries. However, the legacy of gothic chapbook continued to linger throughout the nineteenth century. They continued to appear in literary collections, as children’s books, and in countless periodicals and serials. Children books, often published by the same printers who issued countless numbers of gothic chapbooks, in particular, were often dark and disturbing, stubbornly holding on to a blend of horror and moralization that had their roots gothic tales. Notes 1. Charles Dickens, ed., All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal (London, No. 26, Wellington Street), Volume 3, p. 488. 2. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847), 29–30. 3. Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), 26. 4. Sarah Wilkinson, The Subterraneous Passage; or, Gothic Cell. A Romance (London, Lemoine, 1803), 15. 5. Carol Margaret Davidson, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press), 124. 6. Anonymous, The Bloody Hand, or, The Fatal Cup. A Tale of Horror! In the Course of Which Is Described the Terrible Dungeons and Cells in the Prisons of Buonaparte (London, Published by Stevens and Co. Circulating Library, Borough Road; Reprint Camarillo, Zittaw Press, 2004), 30. 7. Franz Potter, ed., The Monster Made By Man: A Compendium of Gothic Adaptations (Concord: Zittaw Press, 2004), 30. 8. Franz Potter, ed., The Monster Made By Man: A Compendium of Gothic Adaptations (Concord: Zittaw Press, 2004), 62.

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Bibliography Frank, Frederick S., The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (New York: Garland, 1987). ———, ‘Gothic Gold: The Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 26 (1998), 287–312. Garside, Peter, ‘J. F. Hughes and the Publication of Popular Fiction, 1803–1810’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 9 (1987), 240–258. Garside, Peter, James Raven and Rainer Schowerling (eds.), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Gerard, W. B., ‘“Absence Has Not Abated Your Love”: The Nostalgia for an Idealized Aristocracy in The Castle of Lindenberg During the Romantic Era’, Word & Image, 32:4 (2016), 393–408. Hoeveler, Diane Long, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780– 1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). ———, ‘More Gothic Gold: The Sadleir-Black Chapbook Collection at the University of Virginia Library’, Papers on Language & Literature, 46 (2010), 164–91. ———, ‘Sarah Wilkinson: Female Gothic Entrepreneur’, Gothic Archive: Related Scholarship, 7 (2015), https://epublications.marquette.edu/gothic_scholar/7. Potter, Franz J., The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Shepard, Leslie, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973).

Penny Dreadfuls and Spring-heeled Jack J. S. Mackley

In the early nineteenth century, the labyrinthine London streets and the fog-swathed open spaces provided a perfect settling for tales of ghostly apparitions. One figure in particular stalked the city and the surrounding villages, a sinister entity who committed violent assaults on young women which were reported in the press and investigated by the police: Spring-heeled Jack. Two decades after these attacks, Jack became romanticised in “Penny Dreadful” serial novels which were often published in weekly parts, and he became a shadowy figure whose terrible exploits appealed to the general populace. Disguised by a devilish mask, Jack is often an aristocrat who conceals his alter ego, whose motivations—avenger or criminal—depend on the version of the story, but who appeared long before other masked crusaders and criminals such as the Scarlet Pimpernel, Fantômas, Zorro and Batman. These concealing locations became the perfect setting in which one could hide, as seen in contemporary stories such as Oliver Twist and Bleak House, as well as later novels such as The Picture of Dorian Gray. This chapter will consider the historical sightings of Spring-heeled Jack, alongside his appearances in the serial novels and stories and how Jack’s character develops from malicious prankster, to aristocratic avenger and amoral marauder. There had been numerous accounts of ghostly or otherwise apparently supernatural figures in London, for example the Hammersmith Ghost of 1803, or a masked or armoured individual who could leap high walls. These were treated as “the sorts of rumours that tended to circulate among servant girls.”1 The reports of Springheeled Jack began in 1837, although the name was applied retrospectively after a few months.2 Some twentieth-century commentators have added other assaults they attribute to Jack, but these do not appear in contemporary sources and have been discussed in detail by Mike Dash and dismissed as “fakelore”.3

J. S. Mackley (B) University of Northampton, Northampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_3

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At the end of 1837, it was reported that a group of “many persons, believed to be a member of a certain band of aristocrats [had] … in the shape of a large white bull” attacked several people on Barnes Common in South London.4 Concerns were raised in a letter by a “Resident of Peckham” to the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan.5 The letter claimed “some individuals (of … the higher ranks of life) have laid a wager … [to] take upon himself of visiting many villages near London in three disguises—a ghost, a bear and a devil”. The correspondent further observes “This affair has now been going on for some time, and … the papers are still silent on the subject”.6 Clearly, as Karl Bell observes, one letter about an urban myth would not generate a level of interest to be included in the mayor’s public announcements, suggesting such rumours were already in circulation.7 Indeed, following the Resident from Peckham’s letter, the Morning Chronicle reported several previous sightings. Initial descriptions varied, but a figure had appeared in the local London villages which later newspapers reported as a ghost, imp, devil, a man in armour, a white bear or white bull, a demon or baboon.8 Some reports were highly exaggerated: women were frightened to death and children torn to pieces, and no one dared leave their homes “without a lantern and a thick club stick”. Some reports claimed he was dressed in “armour of polished brass … and large claw gloves” and there is the first mention of “spring shoes” with which he had leapt over high walls.9 Furthermore, a commentator noted the purpose of these attacks were an answer to a wager “that the monster shall kill six women in some given time”.10 However, when a reporter investigated these accounts, he found no one had witnessed the events first-hand.11 Early newspaper reports refer to “the ghost”, although he is named “Spring Jack” in a headline in the Greenwich, Woolwich and Deptford Gazette12 and “Spring-heeled Jack” in The Times.13 The epithet “Spring Jack” is also used in a short article in Franklin’s Miscellany published on 27 January 1838. The accompanying illustration depicts Spring Jack “taking flight over a house” where the inhabitants all have their arms up in terror. The figure is shown wearing a devilish mask with curled horns, long talons protruding from his fingers; he is muscular, caped and booted and the description acknowledges his boots give him the ability to leap. The narrative contains a fantastical account of a public house landlord challenging a strange figure who announced he was “the devil, at your service”. The landlord witnesses the figure melting a pewter mug and then “knawing” at the ale which was a “congealed round mass in his fingers”. After this event, the landlord regularly attended Church and has since “filled his pots and given good measure”.14 In effect, the incident has all the hallmarks of a morality tale. The early reports appeared to be a circulation of an urban legend; however, the events had gained credence with the joint authorities of the Lord Mayor and the publication of these events in The Times. Three pamphlets were circulated in 1838, and although these were destroyed during the Blitz of 1941, details given in All the Year Round, published in 1884, describe the illustrations: “The ladies are shown as suffering an extremity of terror, with their mouths extended to their utmost capacity, presumably screaming”.15 The events became more serious when The Times reported an “Outrage on a Young Lady” which is considered to be the first of three attacks attributed to Spring-heeled

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Jack, and indeed, this was the first time the name was used in the press.16 According to the newspaper article, John Alsop, a “man of considerable property” employed at the Bank of England, complained about an attack on his 18-year-old daughter, Jane, at his isolated home on Bear-bind Lane, situated between the villages of Bow and Old Ford. The article describes how, on 20 February, Jane answered a “violent ringing” at the gate and was told the caller was a policeman who claimed to have caught Spring-heeled Jack. When Jane returned with a candle, the man threw off his cloak and applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flames from his mouth, and his eyes resembled red balls of fire. … She observed that he wore a large helmet, and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her to resemble white oil skin.17

Although Jane attempted to flee, her assailant caught her by the head and proceeded to attack her “with considerable violence”, tearing her dress, and the combs and hair from her head, and then dragging her down steps until her sister pulled her back to safety. Even then, the attacker continued to knock at the door until the women called for the police. John Alsop further reported there were two perpetrators, as the fleeing assailant did not pick up his cloak, so someone else must have recovered it. The assault was reported to the police and investigated. Two men named Payne and Millbank were examined at court, and while there was at the very least a case to answer, they were acquitted through lack of evidence.18 What is noteworthy about this incident is, although this is potentially the first time the name “Spring-heeled Jack” appeared in print, Jane Alsop was clearly familiar with the name through the circulation of oral tales in the way that she responded to the “policeman’s” summons. Jack’s second appearance was on 25 February. A servant boy answered the door of a property on Turner Street, Commercial Road in Whitechapel; the visitor asked for the owner, Mr Ashworth, by name. Then the visitor—reported by Ashworth as “one of the Spring-heeled Jack gang”—threw off his cloak and “presented a most hideous appearance”, but he ran away when the boy screamed for help.19 These are all the details presented in The Morning Herald. More recent commentators add additional embellishments: Vyner cites an obscure but contemporary article in The Morning Herald but this does not mention a cloak nor a crest, although Dash concedes Vyner may have had access to a contemporary source that has since been lost.20 Peter Haining adds an ancestral crest and the embroidered W to bolster his hypothesis of Jack being the alter ego of Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquis of Waterford (1811–1859), whose name often reappears in relation to Spring-heeled Jack, and will be discussed below.21 However, given that Jack has gone to such lengths to disguise himself, he would be unlikely to carry such clear items of identification on his person.22 The event considered the final documented appearance of Spring-heeled Jack in 1838 occurred on 28 February when eighteen-year-old Lucy Scales and her sister were walking home from visiting their brother, “a respectable butcher” in Limehouse, East London. The two women were assaulted by a person wearing “a bonnet or something of that description” and “enveloped in a large cloak” which concealed a

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lamp within it. He then “spurted a quantity of blue flame right in her face.” However, unlike the attacker’s sustained harassment of Jane Alsop by knocking on her door until the police were called, Lucy’s attacker left immediately, even though she “was enveloped in a violent fit”.23 All three attacks took place within a two-mile area in London. What is notable are corresponding details between the Alsop and the Scales assaults: both attackers carried a lamp, presumably to produce the blue flame, and each wore a bonnet or helmet. Both women were attacked, although the assault on Jane Alsop was physical, violent and sustained; conversely, the surgeon’s report following Lucy Scales’s assault described her as “suffering from hysterics and great agitation, in all probability the result of fright”, but the assault does not match the violence shown to Jane, even though Lucy was left prone and vulnerable. Given John Alsop’s position in the Bank of England and his home’s isolated location, it is plausible the family were targeted by someone known to them. Equally remarkable is that Lucy’s brother mentioned “one of the sisters had been reading in a newspaper, a few minutes before they left his house, the account … of Spring-heeled Jack”, and while the women were reassured no such assaults were likely to take place in Limehouse because “there were so many butchers residing in it”, an attack almost immediately afterwards pushes the boundaries of coincidence. Nevertheless, the investigating officer concluded the Alsop and Scales attacks were “disgraceful outrages … committed by the same individual, and not by several”.24 Other stories circulated at the time, but these are believed to have been undertaken by imitators, rather than the original perpetrator(s).25 The Morning Herald reports “The notoriety of this miscreant has obtained seems to have had the effect of making many silly young men take upon themselves to enact the ruffian in a small way, considering it clever to frighten women and children under the belief that ‘Springheeled Jack’ was attacking them”.26 Jack’s actions are seen as “pranks”27 and “playful ways”28 rather than horrific physical and psychological assaults against women. There were a series of copycat assaults and pranks, and although, as Westwood and Simpson give an example of how, in the 1840s a gang of youths in Bushey, Hertfordshire, were armed with sticks and shouting for Spring-heeled Jack to appear,29 David Clarke argues the newspapers had lost interest in early 1838, and thus the spontaneous panic subsided.30 Indeed, Dash’s publication of contemporary sources shows there were no newspaper articles published between April 1838 and September 1845, with only six published in the 1840s and then nothing between April 1847 and October 1872.31 While the newspapers ceased to report on Jack’s antics, he still captured the public’s imagination in terms of theatrical performances and published fiction. Haining mentions a play called Spring-Heeled Jack—The Terror of London, written by John Thomas Haines in 1840, but while Bell’s examination of contemporary local and national newspapers shows Haines’s prolific output between 1838 and 1841, he observes there are no advertisements or reviews for a production featuring Spring-heeled Jack.32 Bell notes a “comic ballet” featuring Jack performed in 1848, but Jack’s reemergence into the public consciousness was most notable in 1863 when a four-act

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drama written by Frederick Hazelton entitled Spring-Heel’d Jack, or the Felon’s Wrongs was performed.33 In addition, 1863 saw the publication of a 40-issue “Penny Dreadful” story called Spring-Heel’d Jack: The Terror of London (reprinted in 1867– 1868). Clarke notes such stories were popular among young men of “a newly literate working class”.34 The title page of the reprint attributes authorship to “The author of the ‘Confederate’s Daughter’”. This is a two-act drama written by Colin Henry Hazelwood adapted from the “popular work” by Alfred Coates and performed in the Britannia Theatre in August 1865. Thus we can reasonably ascribe authorship to Coates. The 1863 story opens by acknowledging the link between the narrative and the events of 1838, beginning: IT IS now a little over a quarter of a century since the inhabitants of London and its suburbs were kept in a continual state of terror by a man who, under various disguises, and in different shapes and forms, would suddenly appear before the unsuspecting pedestrian, and, after having nearly frightened the traveller out of his or her senses, would as suddenly disappear, with terrific bounds, from his side, leaving for a time the impression upon his affrighted victim that His Satanic Majesty had paid a visit to the earth, and especially favoured them with his presence.35

The narrator describes how Jack used disguises, frightened travellers and would “suddenly disappear” with terrific bounds. While the story says his motives were unclear, it admits the purpose of Jack’s escapades was a matter of conjecture, although “robbery was not the cause, for he was never known to take a single coin from his victims”. Even so, while accepting that he did not practice “any other degree of cruelty beyond affrighting [his victims]”, it acknowledges “in one or two instances, death was ultimately the result of his actions”.36 This story revolves around vulnerable women and their plight. Jack is presented as a trickster throughout, but he acknowledges his past misdeeds, and no longer frightens and assaults young women and children. Instead, he assumes the mantle of defender, protector and avenger of the vulnerable and oppressed. There is no veil of Victorian sensibility: Jack defends women from the likes of the drunkard landlord who attempts to bully his tenant for rent, the immoral clothier who attempts to force a seamstress to pay extortionate prices for cloth stolen from her, and the libertine aristocrat who tries to deceive a young woman to enter a bigamous marriage. Thus, Jack stands up against the corrupt—the boasters, the proud and the bullies—and defends those who have no one to champion them. In one case, he hurls himself into a river to save a woman from drowning herself, when he is “resolved to save [her] or perish in the attempt”.37 Furthermore, he must also outwit authority figures, for example, by sending policemen searching for him in the wrong direction. In all these cases, Jack tries to humiliate, rather than harm. The first woman Jack defends is Jane Slater, a woman blackmailed to save her husband who, in a moment of desperation, forged a cheque from his employer, Ralph Grasper. Grasper attempts to solicit sexual favours from Jane, entreating her to betray marriage vows and church law, to save her husband from transportation—the penalty for forgery. Jane must then carry “the shame, the disgrace, the injury to the man I have sworn to love”.38 This abuse is taken to a ghoulish extreme when Jane receives

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sexual advances when grieving at her husband’s funeral! When Jack intervenes, he notes “I may be able to do a good turn in part payment for the many bad ones I’ve had a hand in”.39 True to his word, Jack attempts to save those who have been pushed to their limits by the corrupt members of society. He does not always succeed, but, when he does, the violence against these miscreants is severe, and even fatal. These consequences are reserved for the cruellest of tormentors. The pity Jack shows to the vulnerable causes them to question the reputation he has earned: “could this be Spring-heel’d Jack—this the man who had been the terror of the metropolis and its surroundings? … Surely, then, he was not the wretch he had been represented—not all bad”.40 As most incidents take place in darkness, they lend themselves to the chiaroscuro of the gothic mood, from the impoverished seamstress working late into the night by the “sickly glimmer of a halfpenny rushlight”41 to the encounters in sewers, graveyards and burial vaults, cellars, covered passages by the river, the darkened streets and fields around London where the terrifying creature roams, and even in residential homes illuminated by cheap candles. Often characters believe, upon seeing Jack’s mask, that he is the devil, and his presence becomes an outward expression of their own guilt. Their superstitious fear for their immortal soul often turns them (briefly) from their malicious ways. This superstition is often the source of grizzly humour, for example, where Jack startles to the appropriately named grave-robber, Joe Filcher, in a burial vault and inadvertently scares him to death. There are many other plot strands than those mentioned here. However, the 1863 story is a complete narrative which comes to a satisfying conclusion, where, through a series of lucky coincidences, the major characters’ fates are all woven together and (when possible) the good end happily: the character who was switched at birth discovers he is heir to a fortune and who finds his sister is one of those protected by Jack, and then he falls in love with another central character. Likewise, the bad end unhappily, meeting gruesome ends. In addition, although Jack can no longer stay in England, he evades capture by fleeing to Spain … for the time being. To conceal his identity throughout the story, Jack wears a devilish mask, as seen in the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales in February 1838. Throughout the 1863 story, the person behind the mask is unnamed, although there are four occasions where he reveals his true identity and is identified as “The Mar—” before those who would name him are silenced. Jack’s only confirmation is an utterance along the lines of “Suffice it that you know me”.42 It is as if speaking Jack’s name out loud would give his adversaries power over him. Historically, no one was ever charged with the Spring-heeled Jack crimes; however, as noted above, one name was circulated: Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquis of Waterford, a young aristocrat who has been cited in connection with his general anti-social behaviour, including allegedly coining a phrase when he literally “painted the town red”, although it is generally accepted that this expression was applied decades after the incident.43 It is suggested the pranks attributed to Jack were a wager carried out by “individuals” of “higher ranks of life” as early as the “Resident of Peckham” letter.44 He is mentioned in The Satirist in April 1838 as having “supposed implication in the Spring-heel’d Jack blackguardism”, showing, as Dash argues, there was early speculation concerning

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the relationship between Jack and the Marquis.45 In 1884 All the Year Round mentions the connection between Jack and the “Mad Marquis”, although it concludes “not a shadow of proof could ever be adduced to support this theory”.46 Likewise, he is mentioned in relation to these same attacks in Brewer’s Readers’ Handbook (1896) which argues “The Marquis of Waterford, in the early parts of the nineteenth century, used to amuse himself by springing on travellers unawares, to terrify them; and from time to time others have followed his silly example”. However, Brewer comments “I myself investigated some of the cases reported to me, but found them for the most part Fakenham ghost tales”.47 Although the 1863 story was reprinted in 1867, it is fifteen years after the original publication, that Jack appears in a serial again (1878–1879). In the period between these two serials, a further play, also called Spring-Heel’d Jack, was first performed in the Royal Grecian Theatre in Shoreditch in 1865, and later in the Effingham Theatre in Stepney. The play-bill is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The poster offers “£500 Reward” and continues WHEREAS, a Notorious Robber named SPRING HEEL’D JACK! who has, for some weeks, eluded the Officers of Justice. It has been discovered, on reliable authority, that he will be lurking in the neighbourhood of the Effingham Theatre, on May the 8th next. Though Robbing the rich of their Gold & Jewellery, it cannot be said that the above Criminal ever committed the Henious [sic.] Crime of MURDER. … The said Spring Heel’d Jack boldly asserts that he intends being Theatre on that night.48

Bell observes the stage performances of the Spring-heeled Jack play at the Marylebone and the Britannia theatres correspond with the publication of the serial in 1878–1879. The theatre notices claim W. Travers Esq. wrote the play “expressly for this theatre … taken from a Popular Work now Publishing”. The notice promises “On Whit Monday, and every evening, to commence with a New Drama of intense interest, with New Scenery, Appointments, and Extraordinary Effects, Spectral Illusions &c. The announcement in the newspaper The Era lists the characters’ names and the actors and, except for Richard Clavering whose name is changed to Richard Clancy, the names are all the same as those in the serial.49 Away from the theatre and the pages of the serial stories, Clarke has researched the appearance of “the Park Ghost” in Sheffield in April and May 1873. Dash observes that this has all the hallmarks of the manifestations of Spring-heeled Jack, but contemporary sources fail to draw a correlation between the two.50 Jack was clearly the subject of oral tales being circulated at this time: in her journal entry for 1 March 1877, Beatrix Potter mentions that for two months in Manchester “a gang of young men calling themselves Spring-heeled Jacks have been going about in the dusk and frightening people. They wore India-rubber dresses which would puff up at will to a great size, horns, a lantern and springs in their boots”.51 Another encounter which is included in the canon of Spring-heeled Jack sightings is the “sheet-clad phantom” which appeared at the army camp at Aldershot in Hampshire also in March 1877. On the first occasion, the figure appeared around midnight at the North Camp and set to “dodging about the sentry box in a fantastic fashion for some little time [and] made off with astonishing swiftness, not however until the sentry had loaded his rifle and fired”.52 Other reports from Aldershot include the

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“ghost” attempting to steal a sentry’s rifle, as well as a “dead-cold hand” slapping the guard on duty’s face.53 The Aldershot encounter was covered in 1954 by Valentine Dyall, the English character and voice actor in the “Have you a theory?” section of Everybody’s Magazine, suggesting “he was no ordinary mortal [and] … a high proportion of those who saw him were convinced that he was not of this world, but either a spirit or a visitor from some distant planet”. He asserts that the audience accepts this theory unless a natural theory can be found to take its place.54 In fact, the Aldershot sightings ended in August 1877 when a sentry bayonetted “Jack” in the leg and it was discovered the man perpetrating these pranks was a subaltern officer.55 However, in November of the same year as the Aldershot appearance, there was a report that appeared uniquely in the Illustrated Police News. A man, “dressed in a sheep skin [and] has springs to his boots”, had leapt fifteen or twenty feet high in Lincoln, gaining access to a college through a rooftop window and “so frightened the ladies that one has not yet recovered”. The article contains an illustration of Jack leaping the Newport Arch, a 3rd-century Roman gate north of the castle and the cathedral in Lincoln. Here Jack is pursued by a mob of townsfolk and is shot at by two of them, but “so tough is the hide he wears, that the shot did not penetrate it”.56 Jack escapes to another part of town where he is shot at again, but to no avail. Notably, the name “Spring-heeled Jack” only appears in the article heading and the caption of the illustration, and not in the body of the article at all, suggesting that the editors had themselves inserted Jack to connect an unconnected incident in Lincoln with the Aldershot “ghost”. A year after Jack’s appearance at Newport Arch, a play written by the Irish writer W. G. Wills was performed. This adapted the earlier story: Jack Wraydon is an inventor who is forced to flee England after assaulting his sister in law. Set during the Napoleonic wars, Jack becomes a spy for the French and embarks on a murder spree, sharing similarities with the 1904 version, which will be discussed below. This presentation of Jack is the foundation of the 1946 film The Curse of the Wraydons, directed by Victor M. Gover. The name Spring-heeled Jack is mentioned only as a nickname for someone who can leap very high. Curiously, Jack does not do this when the chance presents itself at the end of the film. John Matthews notes the film’s “undoubted success” as it “played to full houses across the country”, but he is correct in his opinion that “it makes for hard viewing today”.57 At the same time as the Wills play, a shorter serial piece was published in The Boy’s Standard (1878–1879, reprinted in 1885), which deals with Jack’s origins. The authorship is usually attributed to George Sala.58 It begins by repeating verbatim the reports of Jack’s attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales,59 but dismisses the Marquis of Waterford as a possible candidate for Jack’s alter ego. Instead it claims the narrative is based on the journal of a character calling himself Jack Dacre, although his true name has been concealed because “the descendants of Spring-Heeled Jack are at the present time large landed proprietors in the South of England, and … had it not been for our hero’s exploits they would not at the present time be occupying that position”.60 Jack Dacre is the heir to a baronetcy, but, on his return home, he discovers his father’s cousin, Michael Dacre, in possession and denying Jack’s legitimacy without proof; while Jack is invited to be a guest at Michael Dacre’s

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house until proof is forthcoming, Michael Dacre also plots to murder Jack while he sleeps, and convinces Alfred Morgan, Jack’s solicitor, to expose Jack as an impostor in return for the Dacre estates overseas. Morgan declares Jack’s parents’ marriage invalid because Jack’s mother “had a husband living at the time”, concluding Jack has “no right to the name of Dacre”.61 Unlike other serials, the Origin story includes a description of how Jack constructed the spring-boots, commenting to his assistant, Ned Chump, he had learned the skills from an old “Moonshee” which “enabled him to spring fifteen or twenty feet into the air, and from thirty to forty feet in a horizontal direction”.62 Even so, once the boots are constructed, Ned feels “the whole thing savoured strongly of sorcery”.63 Jack uses the boots to collect the rent due to the Dacre Estates, money he argues already belongs to him by rights. The characters he targets are morally repugnant, for example Farmer Brown who “possessed himself of the lease [of the farm] in an unlawful manner … [while] his niece, Selina Brown, who was the farm’s rightful owner, was kept a prisoner somewhere within the walls of the solitary farmhouse”.64 Jack even leaves a receipt for the rent he has taken and leaves Selina in the care of the local Justice of the Peace. The narrator acknowledges Jack “caused immense amounts of harm by frightening servant girls and children … but we are not writing to justify Jack’s conduct”.65 He also argues the newspapers are “incorrect” when they say Jack committed many robberies.66 Indeed, when Jack holds up a stagecoach, he only takes valuables from Michael Dacre and his solicitor, leaving the other passengers alone. The story concludes with Jack falling in love at first sight, but witnessing an attempt to murder the young girl and uncovers a conspiracy arranged by her stepmother; Jack exposes the conspiracy while Alfred Morgan takes his own life for the guilt of his part in trying to defraud Jack of his inheritance and Michael Dacre flees the country, leaving Jack and his new bride to enjoy the comforts of Dacre Hall. The story ends with the message “Many scamps and ruffians played the part of Springheeled Jack in various garbs in and around London, but the story which we have told of brave Jack Dacre is the only authentic history of Spring-heeled Jack”.67 Up to this point, Jack has been the focus of the serial stories; however, in later stories, Jack is always on the periphery of the action, although his alter ego may well be a central character. A year after the Origin story’s reprint, a further serial was published, again entitled Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London. The British library catalogue attributes this to Alfred Burrage under the pseudonym of Charlton Lea, although John Adcock argues that Burrage did not use this pseudonym until 1902.68 The story was published by Charles Fox in 1886 over 48 issues and reprinted in 1889.69 Unlike the other extended Spring-heeled Jack fictions, Jack is not the focus, instead, the story revolves around the machinations of Sir Roland Ashton. From the outset, Herbert Leigh has papers to prove his claim to the title and ownership of Ashton Hall, but he is murdered when he refuses to give them up to a poacher employed by Sir Roland Ashton. Leigh’s daughter, Daisy, is a witness to the assault, but is protected by a creature with the features of Satan himself: “a bat-like body, in

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red tight-fitting garments, with wide wings, and a devil’s face, sulphurous flame and smoke issuing from his mouth”.70 A confrontation with Ralph Ashton, whose claim on Ashton Hall Sir Roland also disputes, reveals Daisy was a witness to the assault and has revealed the name of her father’s murderer and, furthermore, that the attack was carried out on Sir Roland’s orders. Ralph also tells Sir Roland: “You know you hold your title and your property by a fraud. I don’t believe there is a drop of Ashton blood in your veins”.71 He is forced to flee, and his escape is covered by the appearance of Spring-heeled Jack. Sir Roland plans to dispose of Daisy, but in the meantime, when his ward, Constance, reaches the age of sixteen, Sir Roland proposes to marry her, even though he knows her heart has been given to his brother Ralph. To manipulate Constance, Sir Roland reveals her father is an escaped criminal, and it is within Ashton’s power either to reveal her father’s whereabouts to the authorities or to lend him the money to escape abroad. The latter is conditional on Constance agreeing to marry him. Spring-heeled Jack does what he can to thwart these plans. Thus, as with the 1863 story, the 1886 serial follows two women in distress who are protected by Spring-heeled Jack, as well as a villain who is intent on ruining his rival, financially and emotionally, while also attempting to defraud the women of their inheritance. Jack appears only at the peripheries, the principal focus is on the attempts to protect Constance and Daisy from their peril, and the conflicts between Sir Roland and Ralph Ashton. The lengthy novel—over 500,000 words—is riddled with subplots that do not always drive the narrative forward. Despite the many diversions, subplots and subterfuges in the narration, after a final showdown between Sir Roland and Ralph, the latter reveals he has been Jack all along, assuming the role “to punish … wicked persecutors”.72 He reveals he has defeated all of Sir Roland’s associates who have assisted in denying Ralph to his true claim as the only son of Sir Guy Ashton, and when Roland is defeated in open combat, the guise of Spring-heeled Jack is laid to rest. There is a mention of a sighting of Spring-heeled Jack in Everton in 1888, although this did not attract much press attention. In 1888, London had a new terror stalking her streets, and the name “Jack” was synonymous with the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper. Dash argues that if the sightings of Jack leaping over local landmarks, which include the reservoir in High Park Street and Childwell Abbey, were accurate, it did little more than to suggest the name of Spring-heeled Jack was still popular in 1888.73 These incidents may have rekindled an interest in the serial stories and plays about Jack’s exploits leading to the reprint of the 1886 story in 1890. However, there is no new material featuring Jack for a while: the next two pieces of fiction were published in 1895 and 1897 respectively. The first is a novel-length story written by Thomas Hoyer Monstery published by the Beadle Dime Library in New York.74 Set in Georgian London, this story draws on the perceived relationship between Britain and the world. Space dictates these shorter pieces of fiction cannot be explored in detail, but, in summary, it deals with George Howard, an officer of the Guard at the Tower of London, and heir to the Duke of Norfolk, and his acrimonious relationship with his brother, Oliver. Rose, the

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woman George intends to marry is attacked by “a horrible figure … with long skinny fingers like claws outstretched [and] glaring eyes that glowed like fire but which has the ability to vanish “with a mocking laugh”.75 These attacks occur both in the Tower and at Hampton Court Palace where Rose is removed for her own protection. During the final attack Rose recognises Jack to be Oliver Howard in disguise; further investigations reveal his Gypsy ancestry. Oliver’s motives were to kill his (half-) brother George and to assume the title of the Duke of Norfolk. Thus, stopping Oliver preserves the aristocracy’s pure bloodline and Englishness. The second story, “The Mystery of Springheel Jack or the Haunted Grange” was written by S. Clarke Hook and published in a single issue of The Halfpenny Marvel in 1897.76 “The Haunted Grange” also focuses on two brothers: Hal Langton, who wishes to marry Alice, the daughter or Sir Richard Thornton. Sir Richard refuses permission because of the shame of Hal’s brother, a criminal convicted and imprisoned for forgery and who is killed when trying to break out of prison. Meanwhile, local gossip tells of a ghostly figure called “Springheel Jack” who is believed to dwell at the “Haunted Grange” in Sherwood Forest. A group of locals attempt to show their bravado by hunting Jack. Hal and his associate, Henry Carr, meet the group close to the Grange. Unknown to Hal, Carr has his own desires with Alice Thornton, and has secured Sir Richard’s approval. Carr arranges for a local thug to murder Hal. The group’s mission is unsuccessful and the terrified group from the inn are driven away by Jack’s mocking taunts. However, the next time Jack appears, he saves Alice Thornton from her burning home and delivers her to Hal as he rushes into the burning building. The group from the inn lead a final assault on the Haunted Grange to find Springheel Jack. Hal returns to the Grange with Carr and his henchman and Springheel Jack confronts them, demanding that Carr tells Hal about his dead brother’s innocence. Carr’s henchman confesses that it was Carr himself who was the forger and who planted the forgeries on Hal’s brother. Hal laid a trap so there were witnesses to Carr’s confession, so Sir Richard can approve Hal’s marriage to his daughter. In the final scene it is revealed that Springheel Jack is none other than Hal’s brother Jack whom Hal helped to escape from prison and Springheel Jack’s supernatural presence was achieved by a mask, some phosphorous, mirrors and some clever ventriloquism. It is curious that these two stories, written thousands of miles apart, draw together a variety of similar themes—in both cases, Jack is revealed to be the brother in disguise, although in “The Masked Mystery of the Tower”, Jack works against his brother, and in “The Haunted Grange” he works alongside him. Jack’s final appearance was reported in September 1904, where a “reputed ghost” drove people from their homes in William Henry Street in Liverpool, reminiscent of the encounter in 1888. The London Star describes the events as evoking memories of “lurid stories” of Jack’s “notorious” deeds as he hurled bricks and bottles at the residents, while the News of the World notes his means of escaping as “huge springs”.77 Dash observes this was not reported in any local papers, and it was not until 1967 that a pensioner recalled the incident and described “Liverpool Jack” as a man suffering from religious mania, leaping across rooftops to escape the police. The

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locals witnessing the delusions of a terrified man no doubt merged with the legend of Spring-heeled Jack to create the reported story.78 The final major serial in the Spring-heeled Jack canon was also written by Charlton Lea. Twelve issues were published by the Aldine Publishing Company in 1904. This would have been around the time of the leaping man in Liverpool. The story begins with the principal character, Lieutenant Bertram Wraydon, meeting with his halfbrother Hubert Sedgefield at Dover, commenting he had travelled to Paris to “enjoy himself”, but that “every mouth speaks of war, … every man shrugs his shoulders and points to these cliffs”.79 Thus, against the backdrop of Napoleon’s armies amassing on the other side of the English Channel, Wraydon is arrested as Prevention Men find incriminating documents among his possessions and he is accused and found guilty of treason by supplying plans of Dover’s fortifications to the enemy. Wraydon’s lawyer, believing him innocent, helps him to escape. After Wraydon flees, Sedgefield inherits Wraydon’s wealth and estate and assumes the mantel of squire of Wraydon House. However, the new squire is taunted by the chilling and mocking laughter of a creature: “Man or fiend, it dropped into the hall, leapt upwards, spreading out what appeared … a pair of bat-like wings, then flapped and wriggled on its hands and toes towards him like some uncouth monster, part man, part beast, part bird” and “it had the face of Mephistopheles; it leaped and ran as no human ever leaped and ran”.80 Initially, Spring-heeled Jack is the subject of rumour and gossip, but his appearances become more frequent and more pronounced. They cease to be warnings; instead the conspirators encounter Spring-heeled Jack who steals jewels from Wraydon House and whomever he encounters he either brands with his mark, or otherwise attacks and incapacitates his adversaries. One by one, Jack deals with Wraydon’s enemies. He also aids when Wraydon is manipulated into passing secrets to the French, the very crime for which he was unfairly tried. He manages to avoid treasonous actions with the help of Spring-heeled Jack. Despite the trial and verdict, many people believe Wraydon is innocent and there has been a collusion between Sedgefield and operatives on both sides of the channel. However, as an escaped criminal, Wraydon is sought by the Bow Street runners’ celebrated Chief Officer, Townsend, and while Townsend does not believe Wraydon is guilty, it is his duty to arrest him. It transpires Sedgefield is in league with French spies, and the crimes of which Wraydon is accused are those of Sedgefield himself. Still, Spring-heeled Jack slips between France and England at will, thwarting the Napoleonic army’s plans and dealing with those who have incriminated Bertram Wraydon. One by one, Wraydon’s adversaries fall to Spring-heeled Jack’s machinations. Even so, Wraydon cannot return to his own estates because of the Court’s guilty pronouncement of treason. For a while, it seems like Wraydon has a guardian angel in Spring-heeled Jack who helps him to avenge himself against those who have attempted to defraud him. Jack commits murder and other atrocities. Townsend may initially have been willing to assist Wraydon in clearing his name, but Wraydon becomes a wanted man for the crimes committed by Spring-heeled Jack to prove his innocence and to enact his revenge. Jack targets Wraydon’s adversaries as well as those who bully and defraud the more vulnerable of society. That said, his compassion leads him, on occasion,

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to give financial aid to those needing a “start in life”81 or, at the other end of the scale, Jack takes the blame of the survivor of a duel so the actual killer (whom Jack believes was in the right, even if he has taken the law into his own hands), can go free. Towards the end of this series, it is revealed that Jack is Wraydon’s alter ego. Hubert Sedgefield draws himself deeper into the mire of corruption as he tries to outwit his half-brother, but eventually Spring-heeled Jack kills Sedgefield in cold blood, announcing “I am the man you wronged, the man whose life you have made a curse, the man you have driven from his home to the shadow of the gallows!”82 As this serial concludes, there is no attempt to separate the man from the masked vigilante. He announces: “I am Bertram Wraydon, known as Spring-heeled Jack”.83 Thus, a host of crimes are laid at his door, and, despite being innocent of the first crimes with which he was charged, he cannot return to his estates because of the further crimes committed in the names of Bertram Wraydon and Spring-heeled Jack. In the final instalment, the Bow Street runners trap Spring-heeled Jack and his henchmen in a property and bring forth cannons to destroy the house with them in it. However, despite promising the “date of publication of the next four numbers of the Spring-heeled Jack library will be announced shortly”84 these were never forthcoming. Advertising also ceased in the sister publications and the story was never finished. This was a common practice for the Aldine Publishing company when stories did not sustain their readership; on the other hand, more popular serials—for example the “libraries” of stories about Dick Turpin, Robin Hood, Claude Duval, Rob Roy and Jack Sheppard—ran to considerably more issues. There remain two major serials warranting attention, both published in The Funny Wonder (later, simply, The Wonder). The first is The Human Bat, published 20 May 1899–21 December 1901, and the second, The Winged Man published 11 January–19 July 1913. These stories are inspired by Spring-heeled Jack’s exploits, although he appears in a much-altered form. The Human Bat was described as “An exciting and interesting story of a vampire known as Spring-Heeled Jack”. The story opens with the protagonist, Lionel Hope, reading a newspaper about the mysterious “Human Bat” who has terrified his neighbourhood, leading to the death of one of its residents. The likeness of this criminal is so close to Lionel’s own that even his own father believes him guilty. With the help of two friends, Lionel first sets out to establish his innocence, and then to establish the Bat’s identity and to bring him to justice. They eventually discover that the Bat is the local Police Inspector who has been investigating the case and although one of his motives is to highlight corruption, he ultimately moves towards anarchy and planning “to overthrow every form of odious government”.85 Although he is, on occasion, sympathetic to Lionel and his companions, as they are often caught by the Bat and they subsequently escape or are released, the Human Bat also presents a threat to Englishness and the protagonists are often described in terms along the lines of “the kind of stuff of which Empire builders are made”.86 There are many gothic elements and settings, including: the passion-driven hero (representing the British Empire), the corrupt authority figure (representing the enemy within), who is described as a vampire and a Human Bat and like an “evil genius”, who has also developed a suit which gives him the ability to fly. He taunts

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is victims, but does not shy away from murder. The encounters take place in tunnels, caves and mines. There are secret codes, traitors to the country, dead characters reanimated, ghosts and other supernatural or bestial adversaries. However, the story fails as a serial narrative as it appears to have been written by multiple authors who paid little attention to what happened before: suspense-filled events are not explained, explanations rely on coincidence, characters change names, personalities/ and even drop out of the story without explanation. “The Winged Man” published in 1913 has been included in this list only to note that it links with “The Human Bat”. From the outset it uses similar phraseology (including referring to the adversary as “The Human Bat”) but the tone quickly changes, and there are only a handful of mentions of Spring-heeled Jack; but the parallels are there: The Winged Man is described as “an improved edition of the Spring-heeled Jack of forty years ago”.87 The Winged Man is without mercy as he amasses his personal wealth, and hunts his victims, but he is the Moriarty figure in this story, and he is constantly thwarted by the detective he simultaneously respects and loathes, Danby Druce. Many, but not all, of the stories contain images of Jack, either as the serial covers, or as in-text images, and these also demonstrate the way that Jack’s character changes through the decades. In the story, he appears to be wearing a devilish mask, but, at the same time, the character is always smiling and has the semblance of a gentleman. In the 1886 serial covers, Jack is depicted as bestial: shaggy hair, piercing eyes, horns and talons, black wings, breathing fire, wearing a tight-fitting costume so he appears to be naked. In the 1904 covers, Jack is once again presented as human and refined, although he is often depicted in darkness, making him a frightening figure. He wears a skullcap with a feather, black wings, a black top with a design of his ribcage making him look skeletal, and white trousers. There are many images in the two newspaper stories: in “The Human Bat”: he initially looks like a bat, flying without recognisable human features, just an enlarged body. Later, he is dressed all in black with just his face showing. That said, most of the newsprint images feature the adventures going on around the Bat, and not the character himself. In the serial of “The Winged Man”, the character is all dressed in black with wide wings, white face peers oy from a black hood; a torchlight is fixed to his head, and the fingers forming the shape of wings. Despite all the self-serving and avaricious things he does, his face is often kindly and peaceful. One final serial which is worth mentioning is Dandy Dick or the King’s Highway written by Ned Neolan and Ben Brightly, published in The Halfpenny Marvel in 1900–1901. Here Spring-heeled Jack is a minor character. The story focuses on a group of highwaymen led by Dandy Dick, but anachronistically including Colonel Blood and Dick Turpin, who were the subject of their own serial novels. Dick has been forced into the life of an outlaw after his cousin blames him for forging papers relating to the father of his fiancé, a crime which carries the death penalty, but Dick maintains his innocence. In the meantime, Dick and his team must evade capture by the corrupt Newgate thief-taker, Jonathan Wild (the subject of Henry Fielding’s satirical novel). In this story Spring-heeled Jack is a “feeble-minded” boy known as Will the Witless who uses a long pole to spring from place to place at great speed.

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Will’s identity is not known to Dick and his comrades, although Colonel Blood (who is famed for attempting to steal the Crown Jewels) describes him as “man or monster” and a “mystic being”. While Will describes messages written in snowflakes given to him by the “good fairies”, and identifies the Bow Street Runners as “bad fairies”, these are often seen as the “witless boy’s” ramblings.88 Will also serves as a means of defeating Dick’s adversaries by means of dropping bags of soot, or striking them with his pole, or warning the outlaws: “The Red Robins are coming after ye!”89 Sadly, Will vanishes from the story, other than as an incidental character, and, while the main plot strand is satisfactorily concluded, many other questions are left unanswered, but such is often the case in serial novels. Spring-heeled Jack is an example of multiple identities: as well as his role and character changing over the decades, there is a dualism within. As Jack, he can do things he would be unable to do in an undisguised form. Each time Jack is nearly named as the Marquis in the 1863 story, it becomes a duality, and a deconstruction of the multifaceted ego. Jack needs the alter ego as a means of atoning for past deeds, or being justified in overthrowing those who have stolen an aristocratic title. In many cases, Jack is either an aristocrat or landed gentry such as in the 1863, 1878 and 1904 serials, or he is opposed to these classes, as seen in the 1886, 1895 and 1900 stories. However, in many cases, Jack is forced to assume an alternative person as someone has stolen his real identity. In other cases, it is a form of wish fulfilment: the disguise is a means to overcome a family member, or even to amass great wealth amid a pathological desire to eradicate the perceived hypocrisies and fallibility of society. In the 1863 serial, Jack is never seen inside his home because this would confirm his identity and “divide” Jack between his identity and his alter ego. In the 1904 serial, Jack terrorises the inhabitants of Wraydon House as a masked vigilante, but also explores the tunnels beneath the house as a means of finding treasure there—the dichotomy of “stealing” from oneself, as well as undermining the present occupant of Wraydon House. As with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the Wraydon family’s fortunes are linked to the building itself, but by defeating the occupant of the house, Bertram Wraydon also crosses the line which means he can no longer return to his ancestral home. What conclusions can we draw of Spring-heeled Jack? Over a period of fifty years, Jack moves away from the violent assaulter of women, to an avenger of the vulnerable. He uses his abilities to prove his innocence for crimes that have been committed, and to restore his lands and titles. However, by the twentieth century, his character reverts to an evil criminal, working against society to achieve his own aims. Westwood and Simpson describe him as an “imaginary bogeyman” rather than a real serial killer and “Spring-heeled Jack” was a general nickname attributed to the perpetrators of mysterious crimes in early Victorian London.90 Likewise, Chesney argues that servants, pressurised for witness statements, exaggerated common thievery into the descriptions of Jack’s feats.91 Middleton argues Jack should be seen as a literal “zeitgeist”—a spirit whose manifestations embodied the uneasy relationship between the population and their physical environment at the dawn of the Victorian era.92

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By the end of the nineteenth century the name of Jack had become synonymous with Jack the Ripper, and by the start of the twentieth century, there were reports of sightings of Spring-heeled Jack in America. Ufologists such as Vyner in the Flying Saucer Review (1961) had argued that Jack’s ability to leap was because “a being from a high-gravity planet might be able to duplicate some of his feats on our own” suggesting Jack was an alien creature from outer space and his visitations caused “widespread hysteria” which was “associated with magnetic disturbance—or saucer landings”.93 The blue fire reported in some of his sightings was “a super-weapon—a raygun” or “the visible product of a magnetic effect transmitted along a beam of polarised light from Jack’s mysterious lantern”.94 Jack has enjoyed an appearance in popular fiction and a variety of other media in the last few decades: Spring-heeled Jack is the title of a part-prose, part-graphic novel written by Philip Pullman (1989) where Jack is the “scourge of evil-doers” protecting two children from an orphanage from the murderous Mack the Knife. He also appears as an antagonist to Valkyrie Cain in two of Derek Landy’s Skullduggery Pleasant novels, Playing With Fire (2008) and Dark Days (2010) and the novella, The Maleficent Seven (2013), although in this series Jack is an assassin who does not know his own origins, just that he is unique. Jack’s assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, as well as his later reported sightings, are investigated by Sir Richard Burton and Charles Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, a steampunk novel by Mark Hodder (2010). His name is used by a serial killer in the second series of the BBC crime drama, Luther (2011). David Hitchcock published a three-issue mini-series entitled Springheeled Jack (2003) which was republished as a graphic novel (2014) in which Sir Jack Rackham, believing Penny Dreadful novels “hold a good deal more truth than we are first led to believe”, hunts for the mysterious creature that took his wife. There are also nine atmospheric episodes over three series called The Legend of Spring-Heel’d Jack which began in 2017 written by Gareth Parker and Robert Valentine, and published by the Wireless Theatre Company where incidents (the documented sightings as well as the “fakelore” circulated by Haining) are investigated by Constable Jonah Smith. These, along with the recent studies from Karl Bell (2012) and John Matthews (2016) demonstrate that Springheeled Jack will continue to be a presence for many years, in whatever form that takes. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Mike Dash, “Spring-Heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost” in Steve Moore (ed.), Fortean Studies Vol. 3 (London: John Brown Publishing, 1996): 7–125, p. 10; cf. Joseph Middleton, Spirits of an Industrial Age (CreateSpace, 2014), pp. 1–27; 58–82. Karl Bell, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), p. 19. Dash, pp. 25–29. The Morning Chronicle, 10 January 1838; Dash, p. 45. The Times, 9 January 1838, published in Dash, p. 44.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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Dash, p. 45. Bell, pp. 21–22. The Morning Chronicle, 10 January 1838; Dash, p. 44. Dash, p. 46. The Times, 11 January 1838, Dash, pp. 48–49. The Morning Chronicle, 10 January 1838; Dash, p. 46. Greenwich, Woolwich and Deptford Gazette, 13 January 1838. The Times, 22 February 1838. Peter Piper, “The Spring Jack”, Franklin’s Miscellany, 27 January 1838, p. 53. All the Year Round, A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens. New Series, Volume XXXIV: 9 August 1884, p. 348. The Times, 22 February 1838, Dash, p. 52. Cf. Dash, p. 26. n. 88; Peter Haining, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1977), p. 7. The Times, 22 February 1838, Dash, p. 53. Dash, pp. 13–14; 57–62. The Morning Herald, 27 February 1838; Dash, pp. 14, 55; J. Vyner, “The Mystery of Springheel Jack”, Flying Saucer Review v7n3, May–June 1961, p. 4. Mike Dash, online updated version of “Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo From Suburban Ghost”, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7bb]#000 000000000000000090_e0f718375aa54f789586c062f29dd204.pdf [Accessed 4 September 2019], p. 32, n. 105. Haining, p. 52, cf. Dash, p. 26. Haining, p. 53. The Morning Post, 7 March 1838; Dash, p. 63. The Morning Post, 7 March 1838; Dash, p. 64. Dash, p. 15. The Morning Herald, 2 March 1838, Dash, p. 57. The Morning Chronicle, 10 January 1838. All the Year Round, A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens. New Series, Volume XXXIV: 9 August 1884, p. 348. Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to English Legends, from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 343. David Clarke, “Unmasking Spring-heeled Jack: A Case Study of a 19th Century Ghost Panic”, Contemporary Legend. N.S. 9 (2006): 28–52, p. 48. Dash, 66–70. Haining, p. 114; Bell, 182 n. 43. Bell, p. 182. Clarke, “Unmasking Spring-heeled Jack”, p. 30. Alfred Coates, Spring-Heel’d Jack: The Terror of London, London: News Agents’ Publishing Company, 1868, pp. 1–2. Coates, p. 2. Coates, p. 32.

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

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Coates, p. 4. Coates, p. 4. Coates, p. 94. Coates, p. 19. Coates, p. 44. See for example, The Satirist, 16 June 1837, p. 16. The Times, 9 January 1838, Dash, p. 44. The Satirist, 29 April 1838, “Directory Extraordinary”, p. 131; Dash, p. 44. All the Year Round, A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens. New Series, Volume XXXIV: 9 August 1884, p. 346. E. Cobham Brewer, The Reader’s Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots and Stories (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1895), p. 939. I am grateful to the V&A for providing this information. The Era, 31 May 1868, p. 8; cf. Bell, p. 185. Dash, p. 17; Clarke, “Unmasking Spring-heeled Jack”, pp. 31–43. Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881–1897 (London: Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd., 1966), p. 181. Sheldrake’s Aldershot & Sandhurst Military Gazette, 17 March 1877; Dash, p. 17. The Times, 28 April 1866; discussed by Dash, pp. 17-19; Roman Golicz, Springheeled Jack: A Victorian Visitation at Aldershot, 2nd ed. (Farnham: Don Namor Press, 2006), p. 2. Valentine Dyall, “Have You a Theory?” in Everybody’s Magazine, 20 February 1954, pp. 12–13, 38–39. Bell, p. 40. Illustrated Police News, 3 November 1877, Dash p. 96. John Matthews, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: From Victorian Legend to Steampunk Hero (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2016), pp. 225–226. Bell, p 179, n.32. The Origin story incorrectly dates these assaults as 1837. George Sala, “Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror of London”, The Boy’s Standard, 18 July 1885, p. 157. Sala, 18 July 1885, p. 159. Sala, 25 July 1885, p. 172. Sala, 25 July 1885, p. 173. Sala, 25 July 1885, p. 173. Sala, 8 August 1885, p. 204. Sala, 1 August 1885, p. 189. Sala, 22 August 1885, p. 239. John Adcock, “Boys’ Serials by Alfred Sherrington Burrage”, http://john-adc ock.blogspot.com/2014/01/boys-serials-by-alfred-sherrington.html [accessed 30 October 2019]. Charlton Lea, Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London. 48-part serial (London: Charles Fox, the Aldine Publishing Co, 1889). Lea, 1889, p. 4.

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

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Lea, 1889, p. 11. Lea, 1889, p. 575. Dash, p. 20. Thomas Hoyer Monstery, “Spring-Heel Jack; or, The Masked Mystery of the Tower”, Beadle’s Dime Library vol. xxvi, no. 332 (New York, 4 March 1885). Monstery, “The Masked Mystery of the Tower”, p. 4. S. Clarke Hook, “The Mystery of Springheel Jack, or the Haunted Grange” in The Halfpenny Marvel, Vol. VIII – 189 (London: Alfred Harmsworth, 18 June 1897), pp. 1–13. London Star, 24 September 1904; News of the World, 25 September 1904; cf. Dash, p. 96. Liverpool Echo 19 May 1967; Dash, online version of “Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo From Suburban Ghost”. Charlton Lea, “Man or Fiend”, Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London. 12-part serial (London: the Aldine Publishing Co., 1904), part 1, p. 1. Lea, “Man or Fiend”, Spring-Heeled Jack, part 1, p. 5. Lea, “Swift Vengeance”, Spring-Heeled Jack, part 8, p. 13. Lea, “A Fugitive from Fate”, Spring-Heeled Jack, part 10, p. 9. Lea, “Hemmed in by his Foes”, Spring-Heeled Jack, part 11, p. 22. Lea, “Spring-Heeled Jack’s Ambush”, Spring-Heeled Jack, part 12, p. 24. Anonymous, “The Human Bat”, The Funny Wonder, 21 April 1900, p. 6. Anonymous, “The Human Bat”, 14 October 1899, p. 6. Anonymous, “The Winged Man”, The Wonder, 19 April 1913, p. 10. Ned Neolan and Ben Brightly, “Dandy Dick, or The King’s Highway” in The Marvel, Vol. XIV, no. 340 (15 May 1900), p. 13. Neolan and Brightly, “Dandy Dick”, Vol. XIV, no. 365 (31 October 1900), p. 15. Westwood and Simpson, p. 343. Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972), p. 194. Jacob Middleton, “The Haunted Landscape” in Fortean Times 310 (January 2014), pp. 30–35, p. 30. Vyner, p. 5. Vyner, pp. 3, 5.

Bibliography Versions of Spring-Heeled Jack Anonymous. “The Human Bat”. The Funny Wonder. 20 May 1899–20 July 1901. ———. “The Winged Man”. The Wonder. 11 January 1913–19 July 1913. Coates, Alfred. Spring-Heel’d Jack: The Terror of London. London: News Agents’ Publishing Company, 1868.

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Hook, S. Clarke. “The Mystery of Spring-heeled Jack or, The Haunted Grange”. The Marvel 189. London: Alfred Harmsworth, June 1897. Lea, Charlton (pseudonym of Alfred Burrage). Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London. 48-part serial. London: Charles Fox, the Aldine Publishing Co, 1886, 1889. Lea, Charlton. Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London. 12-part serial. London: the Aldine Publishing Co, 1904. Monstery, Thomas. “Spring-Heel Jack; or, The Masked Mystery of the Tower”. Beadle’s New York Dime Library #332, 4 March 1885. Neolan, Ned and Ben Brightly. “Dandy Dick, or The King’s Highway”. The Marvel. 337–378. 18 April 1900–7 February 1901. Piper, Peter. “The Spring Jack”. Franklin’s Miscellany. 27 January 1838: 53. Sala, George. “Spring-Heel’d Jack: The Terror of London”. The Boys’ Standard. 1st Series, 1878; N.S. 219–224, 1885. London: Charles Fox, 1878, 1885.

Secondary Sources Adcock, John. “Boys’ serials by Alfred Sherrington Burrage”. http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/ 2014/01/boys-serials-by-alfred-sherrington.html [Accessed 3 October 2019]. Bell, Karl. The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012. Bennett, John D. The London Confederates: The Officials, Clergy, Businessmen and Journalists Who Backed the American South During the Civil War. Jefferson, NC and London, 2008. Brewer, E. Cobham. The Reader’s Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots and Stories. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1895. Chesney, Kellow. The Victorian Underworld. London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972. Clarke, David. “Unmasking Spring-heeled Jack: A Case Study of a 19th Century Ghost Panic”. Contemporary Legend. N.S. 9 (2006): 28–52. Dash, Mike. “Spring-Heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost”. Fortean Studies Vol. 3. Ed. Steve Moore. London: John Brown Publishing, 1996: 7–125. Also, online updated version of “Spring-heeled Jack To Victorian Bugaboo From Suburban Ghost”. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7bb]#000000000000000000090_e0f718375aa54f7895 86c062f29dd204.pdf [Accessed 4 September 2019]. Dyall, Valentine. “Have You a Theory?” Everybody’s Magazine. 20 February 1954: 12–13, 38–39. Golicz, Roman. Spring-heeled Jack: A Victorian Visitation at Aldershot. 2nd Ed. Farnham: Don Namor Press, 2006. Haining, Peter. The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack. London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1977. Hitchcock, David. Springheeled Jack. London: Titan Books, 2014. Hodder, Mark. The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. London: Snowbooks, 2010. Landy, Derek. Dark Days. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2010. ———. The Maleficent Seven. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2013. ———. Playing With Fire. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2008. Matthews, John. The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: From Victorian Legend to Steampunk Hero. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2016. Middleton, Jacob. “The Haunted Landscape”. Fortean Times 310. January 2014: 30–35. ———. Spirits of an Industrial Age. CreateSpace, 2014. Parker, Gareth and Robert Valentine. The Spring-Heel’d Saga (9 episodes). Dir: Robert Valentine. London: The Wireless Theatre Company, 2011–2016. Potter, Beatrix. 1966. The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881–1897. London: Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd.

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Pullman, Philip. Spring-Heeled Jack. London: Doubleday, 1989. Villiers, Elizabeth. Stand and Deliver. London: Stanly Paul, 1928. Vyner, J. “The Mystery of Springheel Jack”. Flying Saucer Review 7, no. 3, May–Jun 1961: 3–6. Westwood, Jennifer and Jacqueline Simpson. The Lore of the Land: A Guide to English Legends, from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Subterranean Spaces in the Penny Dreadful Sophie Raine

With scandalous narratives involving murder, highway robbery and grave robbing, the penny dreadful was considered pernicious reading material with the potential to influence its young readers into committing the violent crimes it often portrayed. The penny dreadfuls were a form of cheaply produced, serialised publications that were highly popular during their heyday in the 1840s until their eventual decline later in the nineteenth century. However, not only focused on sensational entertainment, the penny dreadful often sought to unveil the social injustices inflicted upon the working classes and expose the avarice and cruelty of the upper echelons of society. Many of these texts often mirrored topical concerns providing both literary entertainment and disseminating local news stories and current debates that would often not have been as accessible to many urban working-class readers. The original penny serials (also known as penny bloods) modelled themselves on gothic chapbooks and broadsides telling stories of pirates, highwaymen such as Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads and Murderers (1836) and History of the Pirates of All Nations (1836); both of these texts were published by Edward Lloyd, by far the most prolific publisher of penny serials. Later penny dreadfuls such as Varney the Vampire (1845–1847) by James Malcolm Rymer and Wagner, the WehrWolf (1857) by George W. M. Reynolds focused on the supernatural elements of Gothic taking inspiration from texts such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) whereas Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–1848) and Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846)1 looked to the urban gothic style drawing upon the concept of the ‘monster’ within the city. Though these texts could be very disparate in style and narrative, one of the reoccurring images was that of the burial and the subterranean. As David L. Pike has highlighted in his work Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (2005), many popular Victorian novels were reluctant to clearly depict S. Raine (B) Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_4

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underground spaces such as the sewers, while Parisian underground spaces were portrayed in great depth by writers such Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. However, as Pike demonstrates in his vast survey of subterranean depictions, many of the representations of the underground were to be found in a range of ephemera, including penny dreadfuls such as the anonymously authored The Wild Boys of London (1866), The Mysteries of Old Father Thames (1848) by Thomas Frost. Extending the research of Pike, this chapter will focus on the penny dreadfuls written in the 1840s where it is clear to see a pattern emerge in the narratives whereby working-class characters are entombed or buried and then resurrect to the surface, refusing to be consigned to their allocated space. Issues regarding class and burial were particularly pertinent to the time of writing due to the on-going debates regarding overcrowded graveyards and concerns over potential contamination. Urban burial was seen as an unsanitary practice that left metropolis vulnerable to miasma; this concern resulted in the Burial Acts of 1852. Many penny writers used this anxiety of contamination as well as gothic images of premature burial to make social commentaries on class relations. Concerns of the dead contaminating the space of the living, becomes a metaphor for the close proximity of the wealthy and the poor. Many of these penny dreadfuls represent London as a living tomb where housing and working conditions of the living poor reflected the burial conditions of the dead. As Hwang has suggested, London was seen to be operating on a vertical axis which divided London into two parts—the over ground of the metropolis and the secret, hidden world of the underground. Hwang further writes that ‘The sewer inevitably became the extension of the working classes, separating them from the other classes in a chasmic divide that attempted to banish labour from sight’.2 It is through these penny serials that the working classes and the roots of exploitative labour become unearthed. The sewer no longer becomes a place to expel and conceal, but is reframed as a place in need of excavation. However, representation of burial in these underground spaces in the penny dreadful did not act as an all-encompassing metaphor for working-class living conditions, but made a range of political and social commentaries regarding labour exploitation, the anonymity of city life and the oppressing of working-class literature. The tomb in which each character is confined adapts; the living tomb is not only a site of entrapment and oppression, but can also be one of transformation, resistance and refuge. The sewer and other underground spaces are therefore subject to imagination and are used to project the fears and desires of the occupier. To demonstrate this, I will be referring primarily to, The Mysteries of London (1844–1846) by George W. M. Reynolds, The String of Pearls (1846–1847) by James Malcolm Rymer, Life in London (1846) by Herbert Thornley and The Mysteries of Old Father Thames (1848) by Thomas Frost as these texts have narratives centred on these underground spaces and evoke the imagery of burial; moreover, these texts illustrate how the burial metaphor was one which adapted over the period. Inspired by Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843), George W. M. Reynolds’s highly successful serial The Mysteries of London remains one of the most famous and influential of the penny serials and involves many scenes that take place underground in either cellars, vaults, dungeons or sewers. Underground

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London, for Reynolds, is synonymous with criminal activity; it becomes a place where criminals gather, conspire and imprison their victims as well as a place they are driven to when they flee from the law. In the first volume of The Mysteries of London, Reynolds shows characters such as The Resurrection Man and Bill Bolter, hiding in underground lairs in order to escape justice. In doing this, Reynolds solidifies the concept of the underground being a dangerous and unchartered place, ideal for criminal activity. The first volume of Reynolds’s serial focuses on the working-class criminal seeking refuge underground. Though The Mysteries of London focuses heavily on upper-class villains such as George Montague, the text has its fair share of working-class criminals, the most high profile of which being Resurrection Man, the Buffer, Dick Flairer and Bill Bolter. This criminal gang engage in all manner of nefarious activities including grave robbing, burglary, highway robbery, blackmail and murder. Following the murder of his wife, Bill Bolter goes into hiding below The Old House on Chick Lane, the den of Bolter and the rest of his criminal associates. This subterranean cell is located in such close proximity to the ‘above’ London, so much so that Bolter can hear the conversations of Chick Lane residents. This underground space is crucial in exploring the ways in which the gothic trope of the live burial is used in order to communicate the idea of a dual London. Unlike the texts that follow this, the underground metropolis Bolter finds himself in, is one which is not imposed upon him as a result of poverty, nor does it reflect the underhanded and hidden models behind which capitalism operates. Instead, Bolter’s confinement signifies the concept of a hidden London which carries out parallel activities without the knowledge of the above-ground citizens. However, unlike the plight of the destitute characters in the later penny dreadfuls, Bolter is electing to stay in this confined space; this means that although Bill Bolter is in effect buried alive, he is his own overseer and can choose whether to remain in the refuge or go above ground and risk a far less figurative death. When Bolter first retreats under the trap door at the Old House, Reynolds evokes gothic images of burial. While in the cell, a place where many of his victims have been consigned in the past, Bolter encounters ghostly spectres, skeletal remains and other paranormal phenomena. As well as seeing the anonymous ghosts, Bolter begins to hallucinate his dead wife, and other spectres garbed in shrouds. Reynolds writes that: This phantasmagoria became at length so fearful and so real in appearance, that the murderer turned his back towards the little grating through which the light struggled into the dungeon in two long, narrow, and oblique columns. But then he imagined that there were goblins behind him; and this idea soon grew as insupportable as the first;—so he rose, and groped his way up and down that narrow vault—a vault which might become his tomb!3

The duality of over-ground and underground London, it appears, is more than the dichotomy of the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead, but also separates the real from the imaginary. The parallel subterranean space that Bolter occupies not

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only acts as a place of fantasy, but also has purgatorial elements. The cell is a liminal space itself as Bolter teeters on the boundary of the mobile, living populous and the static ghosts of the past. The figments of Bolter’s imaginations reframe this space not as an empty or isolating sanctuary, but as a place where he is forced to confront his past crimes and decide whether to turn himself in or risk starvation underground. The moral retrospection required from Bolter increases the agony of his supposed solitude and makes his entombment a potentially transformative place than a passive one. Beneath the trap door, Bolter is able to relive the experiences of his past victims who were thrown under the trap door and disposed of at a later date. Like these victims, Bolter is able to hear the conversations of those above him, all of which are incidentally about his own crimes. Amid these conversations, Bill Bolter hears the news-vendor’s announcement: “A full and perfect account of the bloody and cruel murder in Upper Union Court; showing how the assassin first dashed out one of his victim’s eyes, and then fractured her skull upon the floor. Only one Penny, together with a true portrait of the murderer, for whose apprehension a reward of One Hundred Pounds is offered! Only one Penny!”4

Overhearing the conversations serves to emphasise the paralysis Bolter is subject to while he lays low underground. Forced to listen to the recounting of his crimes, and the derisive comments from the citizens above, further solidifies Bolter’s tomb as one which is purgatorial—while Bolter ironically hides from justice, he is still forced to confront his crimes by both the living who haunt from above, and the ghosts from below. A conversation between a group of Londoners above further increases paranoia in Bolter, who will quickly be discovered by the police in the coming chapters. In this conversation, a fifth anonymous speaker comments that: “It is a very strange fact, that murderers always linger near the scene of their crime; they are attracted towards it, seemingly, as the moth is to the candle. Now, for my part, I shouldn’t at all wonder if the miscreant was within a hundred yards of us at the present moment.”5

Bolter’s inability to move away from the area of his crimes leaves him more vulnerable. Rather than the cell being a space of refuge and safety, it condemns him as the police later return to the Old House and arrest Bolter. In the second series of The Mysteries of London, the concept of the subterranean being a burial site for criminals is explored further using wealthier, upper-class gentlemen focusing on two half-brothers, Arthur Earl of Ellingham and Tom Rainford (also known in the criminal underworld as Tom Rain). Unlike the first series, it is the wealthy characters such as the Earl of Ellingham who is to be held captive underground. Ellingham is confined in a dungeon by the criminal Old Death to prevent him from stopping Rainford’s execution. As Ellingham attempts to find his way out of the dungeon via the sewers, we can see how underground London is a seemingly unmappable city as the Earl even doubts he is still in London: And this clue was not possessed by Arthur; for in what part of London his dungeon was situate, he had not the least idea. It could hardly be said that he was confident of this dungeon

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being in the metropolis at all…he had ascertained that his cell was situate in the very vicinity of a common sewer, and sewers were not at that time formed in the villages surrounding the metropolis6

The disorientation that comes with being in subterranean spaces further emphasises how these spaces are largely illusionary, or require imagination to try and navigate. Similarly to Bill Bolter, though for entirely different reasons, the Earl attempts to try to recreate the city in his mind in order to further understand his position. It is here we start to see how the spaces under ground are not only reserved for lower-class criminals but can be places where anyone can find themselves. The underground was not only represented in literature as a way of hiding criminals, but as a way of shelter and livelihood for those in poverty. In all cases, retreating below was necessary for survival. As well as these underground spaces demonstrating the complexities of the criminal nexus and the crimes which go on below the feet of presumably respectable citizens, these underground areas constituted a second home for those who could not find what they needed in the city above. While the sewers are presented as a receptacle for the city waste and the debris of city life, whether that be for discarding rubbish or disposing of bodies, they function, for the lower classes, not only bury but to, paradoxically, sustain. The sewers, and the discards of the city, while keeping the labouring classes physically below and ‘buried’, this ‘living tomb’ becomes a necessity for survival. Now it was not only the sanitation issues and fear of miasma that was a cause for concern, but in criminalising those who inhabited the sewers, these subterranean dwellings became further associated with danger and recreated the space under London as one which was an imagined space, open to morbid speculation. In addition to this, the sewers also contained the city’s refuse and occasionally, dead bodies would wash up on the shore from suspected suicides or murders. It is for these numerous reasons, why I will be considering the sewers and spaces under London as burial sites. In regard to this burial site, London can be viewed as a ‘heterotopia’, a concept discussed by Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces (1984). In this paper, Foucault’s discussion of the cemetery as a type of heterotopia can be readily applied to the subterranean dwellings of the working classes. Foucault argues that: The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living… This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.7

As with the living and the dead, middle-class Victorians were concerned regarding their proximity to the London slums and its inhabitants. Likewise, men-of-letters such as established writers and literary critics, were cautious of how the penny dreadful appeared to be infiltrating the literary marketplace. The sewers, in the penny dreadful, constitute this ‘other city’ that Foucault refers to, and the citizens of this other city live in anonymity below. Texts such as Life in London and The Mysteries of Old Father Thames use the gothic imagery of the live burial to reflect the close proximity

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between the burial conditions of the dead and the living conditions of the poor as well as representing the sewer as a tragic necessity for those in poverty. Both these texts address the precarious living conditions and work of the mudlark and how this group of people existed outside the periphery of London life as well as having, by the nature of their jobs, a deep connection with the city. Mudlarks was the name given to a group of people who scavenged around the docks at the river collecting discarded metal and other paraphernalia in order to sell. Often this would involve going into the sewers and foraging there. The parallel underground city, through representation of mudlarks, becomes not a place of punishment that law-abiding citizens can easily avoid, but a type of destitution that any individual can be vulnerable to. Social philanthropist and journalist, Henry Mayhew wrote a well-known piece in London Labour and London Poor (1851), which gave readers a deeper insight into the struggles of this class of individuals. However, many years prior to this, discussions regarding the peculiar and often macabre nature of this job had been vast. On a number of reported cases, this occupation resulted in the discovery of corpses and skeletons which had been discarded into the sewers. In September 1839, a skeleton was discovered by two mudlarks, Charles Walker and Thomas Lake, near The Strand. The Hampshire Advertiser claimed that the discovery of the body by these men was ‘under circumstances of a singular character, and in connection with a mode of living…which few persons [were] aware of’.8 The mudlark, far from the criminal characters of Reynolds, becomes a sympathetic yet equally unknown and mysterious figure. Moreover, the mudlark and the space they occupied, becomes not only a deadly and treacherous place but one which is symbolic of the average citizen’s lack of knowledge and awareness. The gap between the above London and below London narrowed through the reporting of articles such as this and the work of Henry Mayhew. In addition, by bringing the mudlark out of relative obscurity, questions regarding social responsibility and the downward trajectory of the working classes were beginning to emerge even more forcefully. The discovery of Walker and Lake was by no means an isolated incident as shown in September 1841 when Bell’s Weekly Messenger reported that an individual roaming the sewers in Brixton had discovered a large quantity of human bones—it was suggested these came from a museum or surgery.9 The article is quick to point out that these macabre discoveries were restricted to town, referencing a case the year before in which a skeleton of a man was discovered in the Strand. The discovery of the skeletons becomes symbolic of the detritus of the city being unable to be flushed away and how the fear of pollution and disease from the Thames was edging closer to respectable city life. The 1839 report in the Hampshire Advertiser reads very much like the work of gothic fiction, evoking images of entrapment, burial and unchartered spaces. It is no wonder why the individuals who would willingly go down there are considered to be alien to city-dwellers. Life in London and The Mysteries of Old Father Thames does much to try and portray the Thames mudlarks as individuals who are either forced to

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enter the sewers out of desperation or who have retreated there to escape the chaos of the metropolis. The Mysteries of Old Father Thames by Thomas Frost focuses primarily on a young man named Sam Skelter. Skelter, having just been released from prison, decides to never resort to crime again regardless of his desperation. Skelter meets a mudlark who shows him an honest, if not unpleasant, way of living and allows him to reside with him in his home in the sewers. Frost describes the sewers as labyrinthine and covered in deadly vapours. He tells us that ‘“[t]he only living creatures which inhabit them are scores of large black-water rats, whose lives are passed in darkness and filth’”.10 The concept that no other human inhabits the sewers confirms the idea that Skelter and the mudlark are entombed in the sewers, haunting the underground metropolis. Frost further goes on to establish the difference between the city above and the sewers below: These dark and silent passages contrast strangely with bustle and animation of the streets above. Along the gloomy and pestiferous sewers of London no sound is heard, save the squeaking and splashing of huge rats, and the gurgling of the fetid stream; but above resound the rattle of carriages, the cries of itinerant traders and the noises of the modern Babylon. In the city above are the shops of the traders, the haunts of the gay, and the mansions of the noble by descent; but in the dark and silent below, all is solitude and filth.11

Frost here presents London as a divided place, one that is also oblivious to the living conditions of the poor ‘other’. The mudlarks here come to represent all working-class individuals who go unseen in the city. It is of particular importance that the mudlark and Skelter are able to hear the city above them, imbuing those who live above with a seemingly constant mobility; in contrast, the tomb below the city completely immures its citizens, much like the cemetery, so that the metropolis above can happily ignore the sufferings of the anonymous working classes. This city divided between living and the (metaphorical) dead can also be seen in Herbert Thornley’s Life in London, which features the struggles of another mudlark who, unlike Skelter’s companion, resides in the city but works in the sewers in order to provide for his children. Similarly to the mudlark in The Mysteries of the Old Thames, the mudlark in Thornley’s text is also anonymous, perhaps commenting on the homogenisation of the working classes who were often inadequately represented as individuals even in sympathetic portrayals, such as that of Henry Mayhew. Thornley described the mudlark’s journey through the sewers in similar terms claiming that he ‘heard the carriages and vehicles rumbling over his head; he heard the footsteps passing to and fro, passing and repassing, in all the confusion predominant in the modern Babylon; he heard all but saw nothing. He was entombed alive’.12 Thornley further connects the sewers to the graveyard by comparing them to the ‘famous catacombs of Rome’.13 The distinction between the entombment in Thornley’s text and in Frost’s is permanence. While the mudlark in Frost’s text has a home in the sewers, Thornley’s mudlark is not a permanent resident. This stresses how the mudlark in Thornley’s text has physical mobility and is not confined to the oppressive underground. Thornley’s mudlark is restricted by his inability to alter his situation and break free from the cycle of poverty. This ultimately results in the mudlark’s suicide.

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Like Frost, Thornley draws upon concerns regarding the proximity of the urban slums to middle-class homes by musing ‘How little do the rich and affluent for one moment imagine that human beings, urged on by despair and starvation, are crawling beneath their stately mansions!’14 However, the description of the sewer–dwellers not only provokes anxieties regarding the effect of slums on wealthier citizens but portrays the ways in which the working classes are able to operate and organise without being under surveillance. The real concern for middle-class lifestyles is not the threat of disease, but the challenges to dominant ideologies that were being fostered by underground organisations. Though Frost describes the sewers as being diametrically opposed to the city above, he points out some interesting parallels. When Skelter visits the city at dawn, there are clear comparisons to be made: ‘the streets are silent and deserted, as if it were the city of the dead. The honest and industrious are buried in the repose necessary to prepare them for the cares and toils of the coming day’.15 The living death experienced by the working classes below the city, is mirrored in the inertia of the city above. While the mudlark is sustained by the underground spaces and kept alive, in effect, through the discards of over-ground London, the inverse is true in the case of The String of Pearls and to a lesser degree, The Mysteries of Old Father Thames where the above world cannot function without those working below. The use of the cellar in Rymer’s text does not only confine and restrict the character’s captured within, but is used to illustrate the hidden mode of production in city businesses. As Marx famously argued in his work Capital, ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’.16 These texts use the image of burial to illustrate a ‘living death’ through monotonous and exhausting tasks which ultimately dehumanise them and leave them cut off from the rest of the outside world. The String of Pearls and The Mysteries of the Thames use gothic imagery as a way of evoking images of resurrection. Both of these texts show their working-class characters emerge from their tombs and breaking historical patterns. The dividing of London into two distinct spaces is also a concept explored by both of these texts through the image of the cellar. Though the cellar is not as removed from the city as the sewer system may appear to be, it functions, in these texts, as an alternative burial site within the city. The cellar is used in both these texts to show the close proximity of the labourers to the establishment and its consumers, while the mode of production remains hidden. The characters in these texts are trapped in these cellars in order for their captors’ businesses to thrive. Unlike the mudlarks in The Mysteries of Old Father Thames and Life in London, the working-class characters are able to escape and effectively re-emerge to the surface where they are able to expose the crimes of their captors. One of the most highly adapted penny dreadfuls, The String of Pearls focuses its narrative on Sweeney Todd, a murderous barber, and his accomplice Mrs Lovett. Todd murders his clients for money and, via a trapdoor, sends the bodies to Mrs Lovett for them to be made into pies for her bakery at the Bell Yard and sold to the unwitting public. Mrs Lovett employs a series of cooks who are kept in the cellar

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and paid in food and lodgings; they are, however, unable to leave and must live in the subterranean vault producing for the bakery. The cellar in the Bell Yard doubles up as both a ‘living tomb’ for the workers and an actual burial site for the victims of Lovett and Todd. However, the bodies of Todd’s victims are profitable post-death as they are repurposed in Lovett’s shop; conversely, the cooks remain profitable by being contained and buried beneath. We are first introduced to the horrors that lie below the Bell yard when shown Mrs Lovett’s cook, Skinner. Lovett’s cellar does have some similarities to the sewers as it too is labyrinthine in design and is vast and far-reaching further adding to the enigma of the place: To stand in the cellar when this immense manufacture of what, at first sight, would appear such a trivial article was carried on, and to look about as far as the eye could reach, was by no means to have a sufficient idea of the extent of the place; for there were as many doors in different directions, and singular low-arched entrances to different vaults, which all appeared as black as midnight, that one might almost suppose the inhabitants of all the surrounding neighbourhood had, by common consent, given up their cellars to Lovett’s pie factory.17

Much like the sewers, the pie vault is an extension of the city and, unbeknown to the public, a receptacle for the city’s refuse. The vastness of this subterranean space gives Skinner more space than would be typically associated with a ‘live burial’, but is claustrophobic in its own way. Spatially, the cellar is comparable to the neighbourhood above and Skinner is not as confined as he was initially believed to be. However, the only space which is of any utility or that can provide any source of stimulation, is the baking area. Lovett’s vault, therefore, acts as a shadow of the city; it occupies the same amount of space and has the same labyrinthine qualities associated with urban London in the nineteenth century, yet it devoid of any interesting characteristics or any social interaction that would be experienced by the citizens directly above him. This uncanny paralleling of the world above emphasises Skinner’s dwelling as a living tomb. Skinner’s burial plot can be taken as an extension for the spaces occupied by the working classes in sub-par living conditions in very close proximity with middle-class housing (a point previously laboured). Moreover, the illusion of freedom of Lovett’s cellar is representative of the social immobility of the working classes under capitalism. The working classes are free to roam the metropolis in the same way as the middle and upper classes, however, as they are restricted by poverty, many areas are figuratively ‘sealed off’. Like Skinner, the working classes participate in a simulation of the metropolis, one which only allows for interaction through labour. Though usage of the term ‘living tomb’ may indicate complete stasis, in relation to these texts the tomb of London allows for movement but movement that is ultimately restricted; these restrictions are expanded to allow for increased utility of the worker yet limited in a way which denies workers their agency. The scope of the tomb can be altered, therefore, to suit the political, social and pecuniary agenda of the middle classes, represented in this text by Mrs Lovett. Stripped of the last remnants of his humanity, Skinner effectively becomes a machine for Lovett as the narrator remarks that it ‘seems astonishing that such a man, even with the assistance of Mrs Lovett, could make so many pies as are required in a day; but the system does wonders’.18 This reference to ‘the system’ is particularly

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revealing in how the demands of capitalism can be met even when such demands are oppressive and seem unfeasible. When Skinner becomes insubordinate, Lovett has him killed and quickly replaces him with another cook, Jarvis Williams. Jarvis (who is later revealed to be the missing Mark Ingestrie), takes on the role at the bakery after he becomes impoverished and desperate for work. By changing his name to Jarvis, marks a significant turning point in this character’s arc as he join the labouring classes. For this new life, Lovett’s new cook assumes a new identity, in effect attempting to ‘killing’ Mark Ingestrie and being resurrected as Jarvis. Moreover, the changing of Ingestrie’s name becomes significant for the way that the working classes were often unnamed in both larger society and often in fiction—this can be seen in The Mysteries of London with working-class characters given nicknames such as The Rattlesnake or in Life in London with characters such as ‘the mudlark’ and ‘the Barker’. Similarly to those characters, Jarvis’s name quickly becomes redundant as, once employed by Lovett, he is not referred to by any name and all forms of communication become perfunctory. As Eve Sedgwick writes of the live burial: The inside life and the outside life have to continue separately, becoming counterparts rather than partners, the relationship between them one of parallels and correspondences rather than communication.19

Lovett’s business must function in a similar way and therefore she does not communicate with either cook rather just gives orders and ultimatums. Furthermore, once Jarvis enters Lovett’s cellar, and his name ceases to be used, this signposts the death of Jarvis as he is literally buried under the city, believed to be dead by his close acquaintances, and by denying his own name, this becomes a death that he resigns himself too due to desperation and poverty. He foregoes any communication and must only be satisfied with keeping himself alive. Once inside the cellar, like Skinner, Jarvis is unable to escape and is shrouded from the outside world, occupying a liminal space between life and death in which he merely exists for the purpose of production. The cycle of Lovett’s cooks shows the way in which the labouring body is seen as easily replaceable. Though, as I suggested earlier, the city is dependent on the complicity and the efficiency of the worker, the abundance of available workers means that the position of Lovett’s cooks is precarious. Similar to Bill Bolter in The Mysteries of London, Skinner and Jarvis must choose between a literal death at the hands of Lovett and Todd, or a metaphorical death through monotonous labour and social isolation. The image of the underground workhouse also occurs in The Mysteries of Old Father Thames. In the case of Frost’s text, however, the space is used as a brothel which, over the course of the text, is revealed to be engaged in sex trafficking. Similar to The String of Pearls, the brothel functions as an exploitative business which operates by burying the women in the cellar who become defiant and cease to be profitable for the brothel-keepers. The reader is told the story of Susan Walters, a character who has just escaped a brothel run by Mrs Jones and her companion Bill Sampson. Susan Walters narrates

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her suffering at the hands of Mrs Jones including the death of her child. When her captors are away, Susan takes this opportunity to go into the cellar which is locked and out-of-bounds. The main difference between Jarvis and Susan is that while Jarvis is underground, he considers himself a worker and only later really discovers the nature of his imprisonment; Susan, instead, seeks out the cellar and attempts to escape out of worry of being buried there. She states that ‘holding the light in one hand, and carrying the dead infant in the other, I entered the gloomy hole, but scarce had I advanced a step when I perceived to my horror and amazement, a human skeleton’.20 Images of decay here serve as a threat to the women as well as reinforcing the space below as a type of profane burial site. Like the skeletons discovered by the mudlarks in the sewers, Susan’s discovery signifies how that which has been buried will always re-emerge. Walters goes on to say that the skeleton was ‘doubtless, that of some wretched girl’.21 In death, due to the decomposition of the body, the women are still shrouded in anonymity, their image and name eradicated by their employers by concealing them in the cellar. The cellar becomes a premature burial ground as well as a place to store dead bodies. This re-emergence serves another purpose—to warn the living so they may escape their own premature burial. In The String of Pearls, the reader can see a similar narrative emerging. As Jarvis becomes discontent with his situation at Lovett’s, he too explores the cavernous cellar and discovers notes left by his predecessor(s) which read: Whatever unhappy wretch reads these lines may bid adieu to the world and all hope, for he is a doomed man! He will never emerge from these vaults with life, for there is a secret connected with them so awful and so hideous, that to write it makes one blood curdle, and the flesh to creep upon my bones.22

The warning from Jarvis’ predecessor, as well as the skeletons in Jones’ cellar, serve to transform the place from a prison into a place of enlightenment and potential rebellion. By moving and exploring the spaces they have been buried in, Susan and Jarvis are able to try and formulate a plan of escape through confirmation of what awaits them should they remain there. The text further discusses the concept of resistance to capitalist labour through resurrection. The first rebellion against their captors comes when Walters describes a young woman who murdered one of her clients, and was subsequently killed by Bill Sampson: ‘the old man whose skeleton was found in the cellar met a retributive death at the hands of his intended victim, the young woman whose skeleton was found lying across his own’.23 Though the young woman did not manage to make her escape, her attempt signals the start of a rebellion from the remaining women there. This results in Walters herself escaping from her captors.

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Similarly, in The String of Pearls, Lovett and Todd meet their end when Jarvis springs out of the trapdoor to the pie shop and declares the true ingredients in the pies: …to the astonishment and terror of every one, away flew all the pies, tray and all, across the counter, and a man, who was lying crouched down in an exceedingly flat state under the tray sprang to his feet…“Ladies and Gentleman, - I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites; but the truth is beautiful at all times, and I have to state that Mrs. Lovett’s pies are made of human flesh!”24

By liberating themselves from their living tombs, Susan and Jarvis are able to warn others of the villainy of their captors. Even within their tombs, associated with stasis and paralysis, the characters are able to re-emerge to the world of the mobile and agent despite the power of their oppressive captors. The live burial, in many of these penny dreadfuls, is not a death sentence once these characters are disentombed, they are able to take control and gain autonomy, once they are fully aware of the nature of their situation. The enduring image of the sewer and its associations with working classes were importantly foregrounded in the earlier penny dreadfuls in the 1840s. The motif of the subterranean in these texts does more than evoke gothic imagery for its capacity to horrify; it reaffirms how underground spaces can be utilized to discuss poverty, exploitation and, eventually, empowerment. The sewer is recreated as a paralleling of the metropolis above which is equally disorienting and unmappable. Moreover, the subterranean as a receptacle for the detritus of the city is a way of not only showing the sewer to be an enigmatic and macabre place, but in revealing the city to be secretive itself. The criminals of Reynolds’s world and the hardship-ridden characters of Frost, Rymer and Thornley all enter these unknown spaces for varying motives, but ultimately are transformed by them. During their live burials in this purgatorial space, each character emerges differently revealing that the sewer is not simply a place to bury the undesirables of society, but a place for them to reflect, judge and become enlightened, away from the chaotic noise of the bustling city above. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The String of Pearls has been previously attributed to Prest but is now generally accepted to have been written by James Malcolm Rymer following Helen Smith’s New Light on Sweeney Todd, Thomas Peckett Prest, James Malcolm Rymer and Elizabeth Caroline Grey (London: Jarndyce, 2002). Haewon Hwang, London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 24. George W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, 4 vols (London: G. Vickers, 1845), i, 71. Ibid., 73–74. Ibid., 74. George W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, 4 vols (London: G. Vickers, 1847), iii, 159.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. “Discovery of a Human Skeleton in the Strand Sewer”, Herald Advertiser, September 21, 1839. “Discovery of Human Bones in the River Effra at Brixton”, Bell’s Weekly Messenger, September 25, 1841. Thomas Frost, The Mysteries of Old Father Thames (London: W. Caffyn [1848]), 48. Ibid., 48–49. Herbert Thornley, Life in London: A Romance (London: British Library, Historical Print Editions, 2011),12. Thornley, Life in London, 11. Ibid. Frost, The Mysteries, 53. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), 224. James Malcolm Rymer, Sweeney Todd (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2010), 85. Ibid. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 13. Frost, The Mysteries, 124. Ibid. Rymer, Sweeney Todd, 159. Frost, The Mysteries, 125. Rymer, Sweeney Todd, 256–257.

Bibliography Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. Frost, Thomas. The Mysteries of Old Father Thames (London: W. Caffyn [1848]). Hwang, Haewon. London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954). Mayhew, Henry. London Characters and Crooks (London: The Folio Society, 1996). Pike, David L. Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (London: Cornell University Press, 2005). Reynolds, George W. M. The Mysteries of London, 4 vols (London: G.Vickers, 1845–1848). Rymer, James Malcolm. Sweeney Todd (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2010). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London and New York: Methuen, 1986). Thornley, Herbert. Life in London: A Romance (London: British Library, Historical Print Editions, 2011).

Gothic for a New Age

The Horrors of Edgar Allan Poe Brian Jarvis

Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. The poet and critic Daniel Hoffmann may not have written the definitive study of Edgar Allan Poe, but his work certainly has the most eye-catching title. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972) is both an unforgettable and apposite appellation. Hoffmann’s title foregrounds the extent to which Poe’s writing is driven by a manic repetition that includes the repetition of repetition. Certain tableaux, tropes and thematics are reiterated compulsively: the tragic death of beautiful young women with raven tresses and white dresses; premature burial; transgressive violence; madness and the supernatural. Poe repeats himself and is also repeated. Critics, biographers and fellow artists have identified multiple ‘Poes’— alternate and at times contrary iterations—so that the writer and the man begin to resemble an elaborate hoax in a Hall of Mirrors. Accordingly, we shall begin with a brief attempt at biographical sketch before proceeding to a consideration of the impressive generic breadth of the Poe oeuvre and on to a more detailed inspection of the classic gothic verse and tales. Many details of Poe’s life have been the subject of fierce debate amongst biographers from his date of birth through to the circumstances surrounding his death. In the absence of an official birth certificate, most biographies in the nineteenth century claimed that Poe was born in Baltimore in 1811. Poe himself once proposed that he was born in 1813. During a short-lived military career, Poe also falsely declared that he had fought in the Greek War of Independence and that he was the grandson of Benedict Arnold. Poe’s predilection for mischievous hoax and deceitful self-publicity complicates the biographer’s task. The consensus is that Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 to the travelling actors Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe. Poe’s mother died on 8 December 1811 and his father apparently abandoned the children and then died of unknown causes just a few days later. The orphaned Poe was separated from his brother Henry and infant sister Rosalie and taken in although never B. Jarvis (B) Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_5

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formally adopted by John Allan, a successful tobacco merchant based in Richmond, Virginia. Poe received a classical education at strict boarding schools in America, England and Scotland and entered the University of Virginia in 1826. He did well academically but ran into financial difficulties due to gambling and dropped out of university before the end of his first year with over $2000 of debt. Poe was infuriated by the lack of assistance from his wealthy foster father (John Allan subsequently cut Poe out of his will) and headed to his biological father’s hometown of Baltimore in search of support from family relations. He was taken in by an aunt, Maria Clemm, who had a seven-year-old daughter called Virginia. Poe, separated from his own sister early in life, became increasingly fond of his first cousin whom he referred to as ‘Sis’ and ‘Sissy’. The two married in 1836 when Poe was aged twenty-seven and his child bride was thirteen. There were no laws or strict taboos against marrying first cousins at this time and the age of consent for girls in most states was between ten and twelve. The couple themselves never had children. According to one legend they enjoyed attending the funerals of strangers. Then, in January of 1842 whilst playing the piano and singing, Virginia Poe began to bleed profusely from the mouth. The haemorrhaging was a sign of tuberculosis. Poe, who lost his mother and his sister in early childhood now had to watch his wife wasting away. The tales he had written about the tragic death s of beautiful young women from horrific diseases appeared to have come true. The year before Virginia Poe died, her husband wrote ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) in which he declared that ‘the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.1 During this period and then after the loss of his wife, Poe’s struggles with alcohol and opium addiction intensified. He joined the Sons of Temperance in an effort to reform, but then went missing for five days and was found severely inebriated on a street in Baltimore on 3 October 1849. He was taken to the Washington University Hospital and died there, on 7th October, aged forty. That, at least, is one version of Poe’s death. Reports that Poe was intoxicated were contradicted by the attending physician. Dr John Moran insisted that Poe had no alcohol in his system and died from wounds probably inflicted following a beating by thugs. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence, numerous theories have been advanced. Poe died from alcoholism, or syphilis, or cholera, or a brain tumour, or rabies. Poe committed suicide. Poe was murdered. Poe was drugged and dragged around Baltimore to vote in several wards as part of an electoral fraud. Poe’s last words were either ‘Lord, help my poor soul!’ or a poem about demons and God. On his death bed, Poe repeatedly called for an unidentified person called ‘Reynolds’. In The Poe Shadow (2006), Matthew Pearl’s fictional exploration of the writer’s death, Henry Reynolds is a funeral attendant who discovers Poe’s final letter. In Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2010), Reynolds is the vampire who kills Poe. The date of Poe’s funeral has been recorded as the 8th and the 9th of October. His grave was originally unmarked and there was debate over whether it was to the left or the right of his grandfather’s final resting place. For several decades on the anniversary of Poe’s death, a mysterious figure dressed in black visited the grave at midnight to raise a glass of cognac and leave three roses. Before the ‘Poe Toaster’, the first tribute to Poe was an obituary that appeared in the New York Tribune

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on 9 October 1849. This memoir caricatured Poe as a drunken and immoral madman who ‘had few or no friends… He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers’.2 The author of this anti-eulogy was Rufus Griswold writing under the pseudonym of ‘Ludwig’. Griswold was one of many figures on the literary scene whom Poe managed to offend and unfortunately this act of vengeance helped pave the way for a legend which cast the writer as a double for one of his own fictional creations: incestuous paedophile and half-crazed, drug-addled necrophile creeping from the shadows of moonlit cemeteries. This almost supernatural archetype was reinforced in the nineteenth century by legends of Poe’s ghost and then canonised by popular culture in the twentieth century as Poe became a gothic icon. Other accounts have bordered on hagiography with Poe figured as the incarnation of the tragic but divinely inspired romantic artist shunned by the literary marketplace. Alternately, Poe has been denigrated as a hack who exploited sensation and self-promotion for pecuniary purpose. Poe spent much of his working life struggling to secure a regular income. He worked as an editor and essayist, reviewer and journalist and regularly submitted his creative outputs to competitions. Considered in a commercial context, Poe’s work might be read less as literary expressions of deviancy and derangement than as calculated attempts to cash in by following the formula of his day’s most successful genres. Poe is best known for his classic tales of gothic fiction and poetry, but he also wrote drama and philosophy and works of criticism. Genre in Poe is polymorphous and promiscuous with wild stylistic and tonal miscegenation spawning mixed and even indeterminate literary progeny. Before turning to the seminal gothic texts, we shall sketch some of the ‘other’ Poes which testify to his range as a writer as well as the motley and at times conflicted impulses within his oeuvre. Despite his reputation as a melancholic, Poe’s wicked sense of humour is evident throughout his work. Poe managed to ‘prank’ the public with fake news stories about balloon trips across the Atlantic (subsequently published as ‘The Great Balloon Hoax’ [1844]) and to the moon (‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’ [1835]), the discovery of an alchemical formula for creating gold from lead (‘Von Kemplen’s Discovery’ [1849]), the use of hypnosis to cheat death (‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ [1845]) as well as tales of exploration in Antarctica (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym [1837]) and the Rocky Mountains (The Journal of Julius Rodman [1840]). (The exposé of a fake chess automaton in ‘Maelzel’s Chess Player’ [1836] suggests that Poe also enjoyed exposing hoaxes by others.) Less mischievously, but still in a comic vein, Poe authored erudite parody (‘A Tale of Jerusalem’ [1832]), romantic skits (‘The Spectacles’ [1844]), an ironic treatise on how to be a better crook (‘Diddling considered as One of the Exact Sciences’ [1843]) and satirical swipes at various subjects including editing (‘The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.’ [1844]), journalism (‘X-ing a Paragrab’ [1849]) and didactic literature (‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’ [1841]). Poe often combined comedy with the Gothic. Indeed, at times it can be difficult to discern the degree of seriousness in his classic gothic tales since they splice horror with hilarity, the grotesque with sheer slapstick and farce. An instance of this indeterminacy from ‘The Black Cat’ (1843) would be the moment when our narrator speculates that a passer-by seeing

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a house on fire determines to cut down a cat hanging from a tree and use the noose to sling a dead pet through an upstairs bedroom window as a means of raising the alarm. In Poe’s overtly parodic critique of gothic conventions, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838), the eponymous Mr. Blackwood advises an aspiring author that ‘hanging is somewhat hackneyed. Perhaps you might do better’.3 The founder of the Edinburgh monthly magazine proceeds in Poe’s caricature to offer further guidance on the prerequisites for a successful tale that include writing with ‘very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib’, devising a bizarre ‘scrape [such] as no one ever got into before’ and being both vague and as extravagantly erudite as possible: Hint everything - assert nothing. If you feel inclined to say ‘bread and butter’, do not by any means say it outright… If you know any big words this is your chance for them. Talk of the Ionic and Eleatic schools - of Archytas, Gorgias, and Alcmaeon… Put in something about the Supernal Oneness.4

The writer to whom this advice is offered appears as the protagonist in a companion piece entitled ‘The Predicament’ (1838). Signora Psyche Zenobia ventures into a gothic cathedral with her dwarf servant Pompey and a miniature poodle only to get stuck in the clock tower and slowly decapitated by the minute hand. The aesthetic parodied in ‘A Predicament’ and ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ mirrors aspects of the work from which Poe earned his own bread and butter. Blackwood even refers to a seminal gothic story from the pages of his magazine—‘The Dead Alive’—on the subject of premature burial: ‘the record of a gentleman’s sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body - full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin’.5 The possibility of a degree of self-parody is evident in Poe’s other comedy gothic tales such as ‘The Duc de L’Omelette’ (1832), ‘Loss of Breath’ (1832), ‘King Pest’ (1835), ‘Bon-Bon’ (1832), ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ (1839), ‘The Man That Was Used Up’ (1839) and ‘The Angel of the Odd’ (1844). Readers will discover further comedic elements alongside fantastic creatures and Orientalist tropes in ‘Four Beasts in One’ (1836), ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade’ (1845), ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) and ‘The Sphinx’ (1846). In ‘The Sphinx’ a man sitting by a window believes he sees a huge monster creeping up the side of a mountain only for a companion to explain that there is in fact a tiny insect on a strand of spider web hanging directly in front of his eye. The title of the tale refers initially to the appearance of the ‘monster’, but then subsequently to the solution of an optical riddle. As he made clear in ‘A Few Words on Secret Writing’ (1841), Poe was fascinated by puzzles, cryptograms, mysteries and the method of their solution. In the opening to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), our narrator muses on the figure of ‘the analyst’ who is ‘fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural’.6 ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ introduced the amateur sleuth C. August Dupin and is often referred to as the first modern detective story. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes certainly follows in the footsteps of Poe’s eccentric

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investigator. Dupin is an amateur sleuth with a sidekick who narrates his exploits in solving mysterious crimes that have baffled the authorities. ‘Ratiocination’, the term Poe preferred to describe Dupin’s method, involves the forensic scrutiny of details that have been deemed insignificant by others but secretly hold the key. ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842), Poe’s second ratiocinative tale, was based on a true crime story—the unsolved murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in 1841. Without leaving his armchair, Dupin is able to dispel popular theories and deduce both the identity and the M.O of the murderer. In ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844–1845), the Parisian prefect of police approaches Dupin with a puzzle regarding a highly sensitive stolen document. The police search the premises of their chief suspect looking into every potential hidey-hole. Dupin, however, begins his investigation by considering the character of the suspect and deduces—correctly—that the stolen missive is in fact hidden in plain view. In addition to the Dupin trilogy, Poe also wrote a comedy detective tale entitled ‘Thou Art the Man’ (1844) in which a corpse appears to come back to life and accuse his killer and a ‘ratiocinative’ adventure story—‘The Gold Bug’ (1843)—packed with puzzles and cryptograms whose decipherment leads to the buried treasure of Captain Kidd. ‘The Gold Bug’ is one of several sea-faring adventure stories by Poe which included strands of ratiocination, genre parody and the Gothic. ‘The Oblong Box’ (1844), for example, recounts a sea voyage in which a narrator puzzles over the contents of a pine container in one of the cabins. It is revealed to be a coffin and following a hurricane which wrecks the ship, a husband refuses to be parted from the mortal remains of his beloved wife and ties himself to the eponymous box. In ‘A Descent into the Maleström’ (1841), our narrator survives an encounter with a giant whirlpool by clinging onto a barrel whilst larger vessels are sucked into the vortex. The sight of the maelström drives some of its victims insane, but the narrator whilst terrified is also awed by its sublime beauty. Hurricanes and whirlpools feature in ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ (1833) alongside ghost ships in a tragic journey which ends with a vessel drifting in darkness towards an oceanic black hole at the South Pole. A similar trajectory across the Antarctic ocean is followed in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Poe’s only completed novel begins as a conventional sea-faring yarn, but becomes progressively more fantastic and difficult to categorise. The narrator stows away on a whaling ship and nearly lapses into a coma after weeks in pitch black claustrophobic confinement. (A similar set-up features in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ [1842] when an unnamed narrator is punished during the Spanish Inquisition by being placed in a darkened cell with a scything pendulum swinging back and forth above him. In Poe’s hands this tale of adventure and eventual escape displays gothic colourings in the sadistic ingenuity of the torture engine and the sheer intensity of the narrator’s terror.) Pym’s adventures include the decoding of cryptic messages, brushes with cannibals and a ship full of decomposing corpses before a bizarre and inconclusive final entry to his narrative as he approaches the South Pole: ‘But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow’.7

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Whilst Pym concludes in media res, The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) is an unfinished novel. The entries that were completed and published are tales of adventure and exploration, but on land rather than at sea. Specifically, Poe began a fictionalised account (mistaken by some readers as autobiography and cited in the US Senate as an actual expedition) of the first expedition in 1792 across the Western Wilderness and Rocky Mountains. ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ (1844) features a similar setting but is a far more surreal adventure where the narrator’s experience might be a dream, or drug hallucination, the product of mesmerism, evidence of reincarnation or even time-travel. Alongside his pioneering contribution to adventure and detective fiction, Poe was also a pioneer of science fiction. ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ and ‘A Descent into the Maleström’ both include passages of weird scientific speculation. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym explores the ‘hollow earth’ theory and may end with an image of first contact with a subterrestrial species. The material on mesmerism in ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ is amplified in ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ (1844) when a man dying from tuberculosis is hypnotised and questioned about God and the nature of the universe. The following year, Poe developed this scenario further in ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845). The figure at the centre of the story is dying from tuberculosis and placed in a deep mesmeric state. When Valdemar dies his skin goes cold and pale and there is no sign of breathing or a pulse and yet miraculously, he is still able to respond to the questions of the mesmerist. After a period of several months, the decision is made to awaken the subject from his trance. Valdemar shouts ‘Dead! Dead!’ repeatedly and as the mesmeric state is broken his body undergoes a grisly metamorphosis: his whole frame at once - within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk – crumbled - absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome - of detestable putridity.8

The details in this seminal early work of science fiction horror were so convincing that many readers—including some members of the medical community—believed it to be a scientific case study. In the final year of his life, Poe produced a very different science fiction hoax in ‘Mellonta Tauta’ (1849) (Latin for ‘things of the future’). Poe frames this text as an ‘odd-looking MS. which I found’ despite the fact that it purports to be a letter dated ‘April 1, 2848’ in which the author offers an unintentionally satirical sketch of a dystopian society of the future whilst speeding along in a balloon-ship called ‘Skylark’.9 The range of Poe’s proto-science fiction is extended further by a triptych of dramatic conversations between spirits in heaven. ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ (1839), ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ (1841) and ‘The Power of Words’ (1845) address the end of the world when a comet crashes into Earth, the transcendence of conventional categories of time and space and the continuation of consciousness, energy and matter after death. The final tale written by Poe before his death was provisionally titled ‘The Light-House’ (1849). It is set on an island off the coast of Norway and presented as a series of diary entries beginning on New Year’s Day, 1796. The recently appointed keeper is happy to be away from society with just his dog, Neptune, for company. At the same time, he wonders nervously about ‘some peculiarity in the echo of these cylindrical walls’

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and the structural stability of his new dwelling.10 There is a heading for January 4th, but no entry. It may simply be that the tale was unfinished, but there is also a possibility that our narrator has been done for. Was that echo evidence of something behind the walls? The Fall of the Light-House? Either way, the master of gothic mystery managed to sign off with a final inscrutable mystery. Much of Poe’s literary reputation rests on his prodigious contribution to the Gothic, but as the sketch above suggests, his generic range was remarkable. Detective fiction and science fiction, adventure and humour, fantasy and fable (such as ‘The Island of the Fay [1841] and ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ [1847]), pastoral vignettes (‘Morning on the Wissahiccon [1844] and ‘Landor’s Cottage’ [1849]) and urban proto-noir (‘Man of the Crowd’ [1840]), decorous disquisitions on interior design (‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ [1840]) and blood-splattered barbarism, mature philosophy and puerile hoaxes, supernatural tales of the inexplicable alongside hyperrational tales of science and ratiocination. The Poe oeuvre is defined by its wildly miscegenated and at times contradictory generic and psychological impulses. The detective stories are often gothic and the gothic tales compel elements of detection (both by the narrator and the reader). One genre informs us that the world is capable of order and susceptible to reason whilst the other conjures a realm of primitive violence and unfathomable mystery. Poe often used fiction as a vehicle for philosophy as, for example, in ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (1845) where (and not for the first time) he anticipated Freud by positing the existence of profoundly self-destructive impulses within the human psyche. Further evidence of Poe’s lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries is apparent in his tendency to practice philosophy and non-fiction in an unapologetically literary style. Most notoriously, Eureka (1848), Poe’s essay on the ‘Material and Spiritual Universe’, is subtitled ‘A Prose Poem’ and reads for much of its 40,000-words more like a weird cosmic sci-fi epic than a conventional scientific treatise. Throughout Poe’s career, the lines between fact and fiction, theory and practice, were deeply entangled. Poe’s literary reviews and criticism were typically a thinly veiled apology for his own work. ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) rather immodestly offers ‘The Raven’ (1845) as an exemplar and lays down strict guidelines on content (‘the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’) and form with regard to method, ‘unity of effect’ and optimum length (must be capable of being read in a ‘single sitting’). An equally prescriptive formula was underscored in ‘The Rationale of Verse’ (1848) and ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1848) again with not infrequent allusions to the writer’s own metrical composition. As an aspiring artist during his adolescence, Poe’s first passion had been poetry and in particular the romantic verse of Byron, Coleridge and Shelley. His first published works were three volumes of poetry: Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831). Despite some encouraging reviews, poor sales forced Poe to recognise that he would not be able to secure a living as a poet and he channelled most of his creative energies to prose. (In 1835 Poe wrote a play entitled Politan (1835), but poor reviews ensured that his career as a dramatist was short-lived).

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The seventy or so poems Poe did write display his characteristic generic range and thematic obsessions. His earliest pieces are often romantic evocations of nature (‘The Lake’ [1827] and ‘Serenade’ [1833]), or Byronic homages featuring angels (‘Israfel’ [1831]) and exotic Orientalism (‘Tamerlane’ [1827] and ‘Al Aaraaf’ [1829]). Later work ranged from religious poems (‘Hymn’ [1835]) to satire and comedy (‘Lines on Ale’ [1848] brazenly celebrates the pleasures of inebriation and was allegedly penned to settle a bar bill), lullabies and puzzles (‘Enigma’ [1833]), semi-autobiographical and character sketches alongside verses on youth and romance (‘Eulalie’ [1843]). Whilst appreciating the range it is also important to recognise the gothic core. Death is by far the most prominent theme in the Poe poetic. In ‘The Conqueror Worm’ (1843), life is a meaningless play in which Death vanquishes all in the final act whilst in ‘The City in the Sea’ (1831) a personification of Death rules over a doomed city rising from a blood-red ocean. Following in the footsteps of the English graveyard poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Poe composed a number of poems set in cemeteries and tombs (see, for example, ‘Spirits of the Dead’ [1827]) that offered melancholy meditations on mortality. The theme of being haunted by the deceased beloved resonates with the regularity of a funeral drum. ‘Bridal Ballad’ (1837) is distinctive as one of the very few works by Poe to adopt a female perspective as the joy of a newlywed is dispelled by her grief for a former dead love. Elsewhere Poe returns to his ‘most poetical topic’ of the death of a beautiful young woman in ‘The Sleeper’ (1831), ‘Fanny’ (1833) and ‘Lenore’ (1843). The couplet ‘Deep in Earth’ (1847) was written shortly after the death of his wife: ‘Deep in earth my love is lying/ And I must weep alone’. ‘Ulalume’ (1847) and Poe’s final completed poem ‘Annabel Lee’ (1849) are cryptic elegies for Virginia Clemm which dramatise the anguish of the bereaved: at night a grieving lover walks alone beneath starry skies towards a tomb where he lies and dreams of her who is lost evermore. Dreams are another obsession in Poe. In ‘Dream-Land’ (1844), the sleeping world is imagined as a physical location between life and death and in other phantasmagorical lyrics the reader encounters disconcerting challenges to epistemological borders: ‘All that we see or seem/ Is but a dream within a dream’ (‘A Dream Within A Dream’ [1849]). Poe’s most famous poem combines the subjects of death, mourning and liminal hypnagogic states. In ‘The Raven’ (1845) a grief-stricken lover is apparently visited by a bird who repeats the gloomy word ‘Nevermore’. Following its initial publication in the New York Evening Mirror, ‘The Raven’ was widely reprinted and became a sensation. Poe’s fame spread to Europe and he received plaudits from fellow writers. Elizabeth Barrett wrote to tell Poe that ‘The Raven’ ‘has produced a sensation, a fit o’ horror, here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music. I hear of persons haunted by “Nevermore”’.11 ‘The Raven’ was far more successful and widely known than any of Poe’s tales during his lifetime and subsequently cast its shadow over American popular culture with numerous appearances in film, television, advertising, comics, video games and even a football franchise (the Baltimore Ravens). Despite and perhaps at times because of its success, ‘The Raven’ and its author was subjected to parody and derision. James Russell Lowell envisioned ‘Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,/ Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge’.12 Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed Poe as the

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‘Jingle Man’. Whilst some readers found the rhythmical repetitions of ‘The Raven’ hypnotic, others believed them to be mechanical and contrived as, for example, in the clunky coincidence of the deceased wife’s name—‘Lenore’—with the limited vocabulary of her widowed husband’s nocturnal caller. Much of Poe’s reputation today rests less on poetry than his fiction and in particular the major gothic tales to which will shall now turn. Poe’s first published short story, ‘Metzengerstein’ (1832), was initially subtitled ‘A Tale in Imitation of the German’ and features so many classic gothic ingredients that it borders on pastiche: a gloomy European castle; a feud between ancient families; a cryptic motto and curse; a tapestry which seems to come to life; and a supernatural horse with hellfire eyes. Poe subsequently declared his intention to compose a Gothic ‘not of Germany but of the Soul’ and even in this early work melodramatic formula is supplemented by the possibility of psychological intricacy.13 The eponymous Baron Metzengerstein murders Count Berlifitzing by burning down his stables. Subsequently, he becomes obsessed with a horse who is branded with the initials of his rival and appears to have survived the fire. The two become inseparable and when Metzengerstein’s own castle catches fire, the horse carries him into the flames. As a ‘German romance’ this appears to be a straightforward case of spectral vengeance in which the horse is possessed by the spirit of its original owner. At the same time, ‘Metzengerstein’ can be approached as the first of Poe’s psychodramas in which violent crime leads to guilt, obsession and self-destructive behaviour. Poe’s next gothic tale similarly combines romantic theatricality with psychodrama. ‘The Assignation’ (1834) is set in Venice, but the material city threatens to dissolve into a dreamscape. At midnight, on the Bridge of Sighs over the Grand Canal, a beautiful woman screams as a baby falls from her arms into the water below. Bizarrely, her husband looks on whilst ‘thrumming a guitar’ leaving the rescue of the infant to a cloaked stranger who leaps from a darkened niche.14 The mystery of these proceedings is compounded by the stranger’s enigmatic utterances: ‘to dream has been the business of my life… I have therefore framed for myself a bower of dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better?’15 By the close both stranger and mother are dead apparently as part of a suicide pact. Against the backdrop of this tragedy, however, an intense focus on the narrator’s confused perceptions in a city of ‘dim visions’, labyrinthine staircases and shadowy chambers lends ‘The Assignation’ a surreal ambience and leaves the reader suspecting that the dark ‘secrets of [the city’s] silent waters’ are yet unsolved. The death of a beautiful young woman seems to be repeated in ‘Berenice’ (1835), but there is nothing in Poe’s previous work to prepare the reader for the weird fixations and gruesome epiphany of this tale. Our narrator, Egaeus, confesses that when his beloved cousin Berenice became mortally ill he developed a ‘monomania’: ‘the white and ghastly spectrum of [her] teeth… The teeth! -the teeth! -they were here, and there, and every where, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them’.17 When Egaeus is informed that Berenice has died and been interred there is some dead time in the narrative followed in rapid succession by a series of shocking revelations. Egaeus wakes from what he thinks is a dream full of vague horror and the sound of a woman’s screams. A servant points out that his master’s garments are ‘muddy and clotted with

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gore’, that his hand is ‘indented with the impress of human nails’ and there is a spade against the wall.18 Egaeus grabs and then drops a box which bursts open to reveal with a rattling sound ‘some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor’.19 In denial, the narrator refuses to use the tell-tale word ‘teeth’ thus leaving the reader to fill in the missing piece to a grisly jigsaw. One box opens into another and we are confronted by the double horror of premature burial and violent disfigurement. Freud famously, but also apocryphally was said to have claimed that ‘[e]verywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me’. This misquotation has a particular poignancy in relation to Poe. ‘Berenice’ reads like psychoanalysis avant la lettre with its condensation of wild dreams and monomania, repressed trauma and amnesia, taphophobia and vagina dentata. ‘Berenice’ is also the first in a cycle of ‘Dark Lady’ tales. The woman in each of these is raven-haired and diseased, dead but also undead. The names of the eponymous heroines in ‘Morella’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838) and ‘Eleonora’ (1842) all echo that of Poe’s wife, Virginia, but the compulsively recycled scenario of loss and return also resonates with the author’s traumatic experience in childhood of losing his mother and being separated from his sister. In ‘Morella’, the unnamed narrator’s wife dies in childbirth, but then as his daughter grows older, she seems to become an uncanny reincarnation of her mother. The father is wracked by ‘tumultuous thoughts’ as he gazes ‘day after day, upon her holy, and mild, and eloquent face’, but also her ‘maturing form… Strange, indeed, was her rapid increase in bodily-size’.20 The father seeks to exorcise his daughter by having her baptised, but when he gives his wife’s doppelganger the name ‘Morella’ she cries out ‘I am here’ and immediately dies.21 At the close, the narrator carries his dead daughter to the family tomb only to discover that his wife’s body is missing. In the context of Poe’s marriage to his child bride whom he nicknamed ‘Sis’, some readers have detected undercurrents of incest and paedophilia in ‘Morella’. (In Nabokov’s Lolita [1955], Humbert Humbert names his first love after Poe’s final poem and homage to young love, ‘Annabel Lee’ [1849]: ‘She was a child, and I was child,/ In this kingdom by the sea’). ‘Ligeia’ repeats the master plot of the wife who dies and then returns whilst also hinting at the transgression of Oedipal taboos. When the narrator loses his beloved wife, he chooses to remarry but only to procure a corporeal vessel for the return of Ligeia’s soul. The climax is poised between the possibilities of madness and metempsychosis as the deceased first wife appears to have returned and taken over the body of the second. A frantic narrator believes he recognises in his new bride the ‘full, and the black, and the wild eyes – of my lost love – of the lady – of the LADY LIGEIA’.22 The monomaniacal fixation on teeth in ‘Berenice’ is displaced in ‘Ligeia’ by the beloved’s eyes. The narrator is mesmerised by the ‘large and luminous orbs’ that always loom over him.23 When this detail is considered alongside the role Ligeia plays as her husband’s teacher (as in ‘Morella’, the wife is a scholarly instructor) and references to the narrator’s ‘child-like dependency’, the Oedipal dynamics underpinning the relationship come into focus.24 The narrator, as is often the case in Poe, is unnamed and offers the eccentric confession that he never knew the ‘paternal name of her… who was the wife of my bosom’.25 The

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absence of proper nouns masks improper passions. If ‘Ligeia’ seems haunted by the dread of maternal abandonment, in ‘Eleonora’ the death of a spouse is more explicitly ghosted by the tragedy of Poe’s domestic circumstances. Written after Virginia began to display symptoms of a terminal disease, ‘Eleonora’ follows another unnamed narrator who lives with his aunt and falls in love with his youthful cousin. Following her inevitable demise, he remarries despite a deathbed promise, but Eleonora visits and offers her blessing ‘for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven’.26 Collectively, the Dark Lady tales dramatise the psychic possession of the living by the dead and also distil Poe’s tortured relations with women. Despite the foregrounding of physical features, it is worth underlining the extent to which the female characters in these tales are a gothic and patriarchal phantasm. Poe’s women never speak for themselves—their voices are always ventriloquised by a male narrator. The feminine is the source of life, but also a deathly Other. The presence of a woman, or rather ‘Woman’, in Poe is terrifyingly blissful whilst their absence is almost blissfully terrifying. In the mythological terms Poe favoured, the Dark Lady tales are torn between Eros and Thanatos. In the psychoanalytical terms which Poe anticipated, the relationship to the feminine Other is driven by sadomasochistic impulses. The Woman must be worshipped and punished. She is maternal and masculinised as a dark, desirable and deathly dominatrix. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) features another of Poe’s Dark Ladies. At the invitation of an old friend, our unnamed narrator arrives at a gloomy ancestral mansion next to a ‘dark and lurid tarn’.27 Roderick and his sister Madeline Usher are afflicted with a mystery illness. Madeline dies and is interred in the family tomb only to return at night during a storm. The Dark Lady is covered in blood and after she lunges at her brother, they both fall to the ground dead. The narrator beats a hasty retreat and looks back to see the house has cracked down the middle and is sinking into the tarn. Whilst the narrator remains permanently perplexed and believes this to be a ‘mystery all insoluble’, Poe’s gothic tales are also detective stories in which the reader is invited to solve the puzzle.28 A supernatural explanation might contend that the House of Usher is a vampire lair. The occupants are described as ‘cadaverous of complexion’ and Roderick insists on drawing curtains due to photosensitivity.29 Splattered in blood, Madeline rises from the grave at night and kills her brother in a terrible embrace. A clue to a less otherworldly reading of the Usher’s curse lies in their genealogy: ‘the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent’.30 Since Roderick and Madeline are the last in the line, the only thing which can prevent the Fall of the House of Usher is going beyond aristocratic inbreeding amongst cousins to incest between siblings. The incest taboo may explain why Roderick inters Madeline when he knows she is not dead. Ignoring the fact that his sister has been diagnosed with catalepsy which leaves her in death-like comas and the evidence of a ‘faint blush upon the bosom and the face’, Roderick hurries her into a coffin perhaps in a desperate attempt to literally bury the evidence.31 Usher is flustered by the ‘obtrusive and eager inquiries’ of medical men who visit the family mansion.32 Is Madeline in mourning, or could this be morning sickness? Could the Lady’s illness be a symptom of a perversion that is strictly prohibited, but also very

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close to a family tradition? The blood on the Dark Lady’s white shroud at the end might be a tell-tale sign of miscarriage or abortion. In the climax as the siblings come together the house is literally torn apart. The narrator has been the only guest invited to witness the Ushers at their own funeral, or weird wedding in a classic gothic commingling of death and sex. Given the nature of Poe’s subject matter and the frequency with which certain symbols and scenarios are repeated, Freudian readings of tales including ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as symptomatic expressions of the author’s psychosexual dynamics have become conventional. According to this approach, the live burial of Lady Madeline speaks to a fundamental confusion in Poe between womb and tomb. Premature burial is a conspicuous plot in Poe and it is worth considering the extent to which it might be susceptible to historical as well psychoanalytical interpretation. Madeline’s malady, like her predecessor Berenice, is catalepsy: ‘a species of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself - trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution’.33 The narrator in ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844) shares this cataleptic condition and is almost paralysed by the phobia that he will be buried alive. To allay this fear, he builds an elaborate tomb with various devices enabling him, if necessary, to raise the alarm. In case this is dismissed as the peculiar and personal hang-up of the narrator and his creator, one should recall that premature burial was a widespread cultural obsession in the nineteenth century that resulted in instances of bespoke coffin and tomb design. A number of historical cases recorded in newspapers and medical journals are cited by the narrator of ‘The Premature Burial’. Whatever Freudian diagnosis might be offered of Poe, for a professional writer to engage with this subject matter would also have been a shrewd commercial decision. ‘The Premature Burial’ concludes with an upbeat note that is uncharacteristic for Poe. The narrator awakens and to his horror discovers he is immersed in pitch darkness in a confined space. He cries out in anguish only to be told to quieten down by a chorus of voices. At this point he recalls his location in a berth on a small ship. In the wake of experiencing his greatest fear, the narrator is no longer obsessed and manages to move on: ‘I became a new man, and lived a man’s life’.34 No such optimism is offered at the end of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846), but this tale of premature burial strengthens the case for reading Poe’s fiction in relation to its cultural and historical context. Our narrator, Montresor, recounts the story of how he exacted a pitiless revenge on his rival, Fortunato. During a carnival in an unnamed European city, Montresor exploited Fortunato’s inebriated state and pride in his ability as a wine connoisseur to lure his victim down into the catacombs beneath his home on the pretence of sampling a rare vintage of sherry. Deep underground, Montresor then chains Fortunato to the wall in a niche and calmly proceeds to build a brick wall to close the aperture. Swimming against the tide of Freudian readings of Poe, David S. Reynolds offers a compelling interpretation of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ in its cultural context.35 Reynolds begins by suggesting a specific source text in Joel Tyler Headley’s ‘A Man Built in a Wall’ which appeared in the Columbian Magazine in 1844 and helped to fuel the public fascination with tales of live burial. Alcohol plays a major role in Poe’s story and Reynolds contextualises this in relation to the contemporary temperance movement and in particular the Washingtonians—a group

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of reformed alcoholics who attempted to shock their audience into abstinence by telling tragic and often violent tales about the dangers of drunkenness. In one of many moments of wicked humour in ‘Cask of Amontillado’, Montresor reveals a trowel from beneath his cloak when Fortunato asks him if he belongs to the brotherhood of Masons. Suspicion about this secret society was inflamed by anti-Masonic political rhetoric and lurid newspaper reports of its horrendous crimes. Cultural fears about Masonry were aligned with anti-Catholic sentiments which swelled amongst the Protestant majority in the 1830s and 1840s alongside a significant rise in immigration from Europe. Catholics were routinely demonised as depraved in popular literature of the day and the setting of ‘Cask of Amontillado’ during Carnival in a European city would have been familiar to contemporary readers hungry for tales of Old World papal iniquity. ‘The Black Cat’ (1843) is another gothic detective tale of premature burial in which the key question is not ‘who’ but ‘whydunnit’. The narrator is an animal lover who becomes a violent alcoholic. One night in a rage he attacks his favourite pet, a large black cat called Pluto; first cutting out its eye and then hanging it. Subsequently, he encounters and takes in a second large black cat that has only one eye. In another drunken frenzy he decides to kill the new arrival, but when his wife intercedes, the narrator murders her instead and then bricks the body up behind a wall in the cellar. When the police arrive to investigate, the crime is uncovered because the cat has been inadvertently bricked up with the corpse only to issue an unearthly howl. The narrator rehearses a series of alibis—alcoholism, a ‘spirit of PERVERSENESS’, the supernatural—but readers have suspected deeper motivations buried in the text.36 As a proto-Freudian case study, ‘The Black Cat’ has been read as a dramatisation of male sexual anxiety. The couple has no children but surround themselves with a menagerie. The narrator’s interactions with his pets and in particular the cat, act as a surrogate and a symptomology for his relations with his wife. The fondness he publicly professes masks a private fear of physical intimacy. During the day, the cat rubs up against the narrator, ‘[covers] him with its loathsome caresses’, pounces, claws and springs up suddenly between his knees.37 In bed at night, the narrator wakes ‘from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face’.38 Given the mythological equation between the feline and the feminine, the double cat is already the double of the wife and this explains the sudden transfer of violence from one to the other. For those inclined to insist that sometimes a black cat is just a black cat, a historical reading would again position Poe’s work in relation to contemporary Temperance tales and developments in criminal justice. ‘The Black Cat’ appears to be a confession composed on the eve of an execution and John Cleman has suggested that this and other Poe tales such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ need to be considered alongside a debate in American jurisprudence concerning the legitimacy of the insanity defence.39 Poe tales also resonate with the history of race in America. ‘The Black Cat’, in this context, has been read as an allegory of slavery that hinges on a violent, perverse and guilt-ridden relationship between a white man and a black animal. The Dark Lady tales are similarly haunted by racial ghosts. Ligeia is associated with Orientalist imagery, but also approaches the antebellum archetype of the tragic mulatto with

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hair that is ‘glossy’, ‘naturally curling… [and] raven-black’ and dark eyes ‘far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race’.40 The aristocratic House of Usher falls due to a ‘curse’ caused by the violation of incest taboos. In the racial imaginary of the Southern slaveocracy at this time, the twin ‘curse’ of miscegenation and incest threatened the Fall of the House of Bondage: as white masters raped ‘Dark Ladies’ the lines between black and white as well as between family trees became increasingly tangled and thorny. The Southerner Poe did not write explicitly on the history of slavery, but its spectre bedevils the colour symbolism and trajectory of tales about curses and the crossing of bloodlines, guilt and vengeance, desire, danger and death. The figure of the double and the motif of self-destruction appear again in ‘William Wilson’ (1839). On his deathbed, our narrator offers his life-story under the pseudonym of ‘William Wilson’. The choice of doubled Ws is apposite since the narrator has been plagued since his youth by a doppelganger. At school he was popular with all of his peers with one exception—a boy with whom he shared his name as well as birthday and exact height. At each stage in his educational career from school to Eton college and then Oxford University, the narrator encounters problems due to the presence of the other ‘William Wilson’. Fleeing to Rome proves futile as the rival appears wearing an identical costume at a masked ball. In a rage, the narrator attacks his nemesis with a sword and stabs him repeatedly in the heart only to discover that he is standing before a mirror and the wounds are in his own chest. As the narrator dies, he hears, for a final time, the voice of ‘William Wilson’ reporting on this Pyrrhic victory. ‘William Wilson’ is another of Poe’s proto-Freudian case studies which anticipates psychoanalytical work on how the subject can be a stranger to themselves, on the self-torture of the ego by the super-ego and on the uncanny elision between the familiar and the strange produced by the figure of the double. ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (1845) makes for a compelling companion piece alongside ‘William Wilson’. Self-destruction is still the centrepiece, but here the driver is the id rather than the super-ego and Poe anticipates Freud’s formulation of the death drive. The murder story in ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ provides a flimsy pretext for Poe to expound a philosophy of self-destruction which recalls the definition of the ‘spirit of PERVERSENESS’ in ‘The Black Cat’ as ‘one of the primitive impulses of the human heart’.41 In a scene from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator is standing on a cliff edge and is overcome by a desire to let himself fall. In ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, Poe proposes that this is a universal human desire. We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss —we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain… it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height… for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.42

‘The Imp of the Perverse’ offered a disturbing gothic challenge to Enlightenment reason: ‘[i]n theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong’.43 The challenge was continued in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843). Our narrator appears to be in discussion with a lawyer or prison guard on the eve of execution and opens with a vehement insistence on his sanity. As evidence that he

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is not mad, the narrator draws attention first to his articulacy and second to the meticulous M.O he employed in the commission of his crime. His victim was an old man with whom he lived. The narrator claims to have loved the old man with the exception of an eye which was clouded, pale and ‘resembled that of a vulture’.44 Each night he spied on the ‘Evil Eye’ by shining a sliver of light from a lamp whilst the old man slept.45 On the final night, however, the old man awoke and the narrator determined to kill and then dismember his victim before concealing the remains beneath the floorboards. When the police arrived to investigate the screams of the old man, the killer is initially calm but becomes increasingly agitated by the sound of a beating heart from under the floorboards. Eventually, he cracks and tells the law officials where they can find the evidence. The actual source of the sound is left indeterminate: it might have been supernatural, or an auditory hallucination inspired by the ticking of a clock, or the beating of the narrator’s own heart. Other details are obscure. Readers who remain unconvinced by the narrator’s alibi concerning the Evil Eye might speculate that ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is an Oedipal drama, but there is no conclusive evidence that the key players are Father and Son, or even that the narrator is male. In place of tidy closure, Poe offers a cryptic and fetishistic circling around scenarios: violent crime and madness; bizarre monomania, self-destructive behaviour and eleventh-hour confession. On the surface, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ might appear to be a very different type of crime story. Whilst Poe’s murder tales typically insist on mystery and the power of the irrational, the ‘ratiocinative’ detective cases seem to insist on the efficacy of reason. At the same time, the super-sleuth shares certain characteristics with Poe’s madmen. Dupin’s assistant describes the investigator’s extraordinary deductive powers as the product of ‘a diseased intelligence’.46 The man of reason’s sensitivity to tell-tale details is similar to the ‘over acuteness of the senses’ that afflicts the madmen in other Poe tales.47 ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is the most gothic of Poe’s detective stories even though Dupin manages to dispel the aura of supernatural phenomenon from the crime scene. Two women are brutally murdered in a locked room. One, the mother, is almost decapitated whilst the other, the daughter, is stuffed upside down in a chimney. Neighbours report a voice speaking, but in a language which no one can identify and some suspect occult agency. Dupin’s solution is almost as incredible. From the available facts he posits that an escaped orangutan made its way into the room before it was locked and accidentally murdered the mother whilst attempting to imitate a barber shaving a customer. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ is part of a cohort of urban gothic tales by Poe and shares with ‘The Assignation’ more than a shade of surrealism. ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) also belongs to this group. It commences as another tale of ratiocination, but then becomes increasingly phantasmagorical in its depiction of London as a teeming dreamscape of secrets and crime. A man sitting in a coffee shop composes intricate profiles of passers-by using a deductive method identical to that of Dupin. The mystery begins when the narrator spies someone he cannot place: an old man who displays a set of incompatible characteristics in both his countenance and clothing. The narrator stalks this inscrutable character for almost a full day through the streets of London before deciding to confront him. Instead of a dramatic revelation, however, there is

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non-recognition. The old man fails even to notice his follower. The narrator decides that this ‘man of the crowd’ is ‘the type and genius of deep crime’, but no proper explanation for this damning judgement is provided.48 Did the old man even exist or is the ‘man of the crowd’ another William Wilson chasing his own shadow? The clash between science and gothic unreason is dramatised again in a European setting in ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather’ (1845). The narrator visits an asylum in the south of France which has devised a radical new method for the treatment of mental illness. On arrival, however, he discovers that the ‘system of soothing’ has recently been replaced by a tougher regime founded on the pioneering work of ‘Doctor Tarr’ and ‘Professor Feather’.49 During his tour of the facilities and at a lavish dinner with musical entertainment, the narrator notices various oddities and eventually discovers that the lunatics have literally taken over the asylum. ‘HopFrog’ (1849) also involves a turning of tables at a gala. ‘Hop-Frog’ is a court jester and ‘also a dwarf and cripple’ who finds himself bullied alongside his fellow performers by a King with a sadistic sense of humour.50 As a ‘last jest’ and act of vengeance, Hop-Frog arranges a masquerade in which the King and his cabinet wear orangutan costumes before being chained together and set alight.51 The carnivalesque dark comedy of the masquerade in ‘Hop-Frog’ is absent from one of Poe’s most sombre fables: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842). To escape the plague which has ravaged his land, Prince Prospero and his nobles secure themselves in a castellated abbey. The Prince decides to hold a grand masquerade and decorates each of the main rooms in a different colour: blue, purple, green, orange, white and violet. All of the ornaments, tapestries and carpets are matched and then illuminated by stained glass in the gothic windows. The seventh chamber is anomalous in that the interior design is black whilst ‘[t]he panes were scarlet – a deep blood colour’.52 The central feature in the seventh room is a gigantic clock made from ebony. Each time it chimes the hours the revelry stops. At midnight, Prospero notices a new arrival who appears to be dressed as a personification of the Red Death. The Prince is outraged and pursues his guest through each of the rooms before confronting him in the final apartment. When the guest turns to face his host, Prospero utters a ‘sharp cry’ before he falls ‘prostrate in death’.53 The other guests descend on the mummer and unmask him only to find the costume ‘untenanted by any tangible form’.54 The revellers all die, the party is over and in the final sentence we learn that ‘Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all’.55 Death is the single most important subject in Poe. Most of his stories and many of the poems deal with death in relation to violence or illness. The key motifs in this regard are premature burial and the tragic death of young women. Poe’s aestheticization of female death and suffering has been the subject of critique in particular by feminist critics. Women are at the heart of Poe’s gothic work and whilst they rarely have a voice of their own, the feminine is a powerful and even dominant force. Psychobiographical readings—of which there are many—routinely contend that the gallery of mother figures in Poe’s work and the monomaniacal fixation on eye and mouth and hair are symptoms of the author working through his own traumatic experience of maternal and sibling loss. Woman in Poe produces an explosive admixture of affect: sexual and spiritual, desire and denial, sadomasochistic longing

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and grief. ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842) is a key fable for any reader grappling with the sexual politics of Poe as it suggests a rare moment of self-consciousness about the objectification of women by the obsessive male artist. A painter devotes his life to capturing the beauty of his beloved wife who is forced to pose for him each day. At precisely the moment the artist feels he has rendered life on the canvas his subject dies. As a literary artist, Poe’s major contribution was as a pioneer of psychological Gothic. This ‘Germany […] of the Soul’ focuses with fierce sensitivity on extreme emotions and precarious mental states: fear and love, grief and guilt, madness and monomania. Often in Poe, relatively little happens in terms of melodrama, but the psychodrama is compelling. External settings—landscapes, houses and rooms—are folded into interior states as psychological allegory. In the process, Poe anticipated a number of concepts that would become central to psychoanalysis and in particular the power of the unconscious. When Freud famously quipped that psychoanalysis ‘suits Americans as a white shirt suits a raven’ he certainly did not have Poe in mind. There is no critical consensus on Poe’s achievement. He has been dismissed as a hack, a deviant and a ‘vampire’ (by D. H. Lawrence).56 T. S. Eliot proposed that Poe had ‘the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty’.57 Henry James cautioned that an ‘enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection’.58 And yet an enthusiasm for Poe is evident throughout and beyond the gothic tradition. Poe’s fiction inspired other writers. ‘The Oval Portrait’ influenced Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-Mark’ (1843) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) whilst classic novels by Melville, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson were heavily indebted to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In France, Poe was practically worshipped by Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets and in the twentieth century his legacy was evident in the work of writers as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Vladimir Nabokov and Jose Luis Borges. Poe and his most famous works have made innumerable appearances in popular culture ranging from film and television to theatre and radio dramas, from comic books and cartoons to video games and advertising. Throughout his work, Poe taught us that something can die and yet continue to live. The shadow of Poe looms over the gothic tradition like his enigmatic raven evermore. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), J. Gerald Kennedy (ed.), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 548. Griswold, Rufus (‘Ludwig’), ‘Obituary’ in The New York Tribune, October 9, 1849 cited in E.C. Stedman and G.E. Woodberry (eds.), Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Stone & Kimball, Vol. 10, 1895), 239. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838), Adrienne J. Odasso (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Collected Works (San Diego, Canterbury Classics, 2011), 493. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838), Edgar Allan Poe: Collected Works (San Diego, Canterbury Classics, 2011), 492, 493, 494. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’ (1838), 493.

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6.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 238. Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 175. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 79. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Mellonta Tauta’ (London, Read Books Ltd., 2012), 9. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Light-House’, in Christopher Conlon (ed.), Poe’s Lighthouse (Chicago, Wicker Park Press, 2011), 23. Elizabeth Barrett, ‘Letter to Poe’, cited in Sidney P. Moss, ‘Poe and the Saint Louis Daily Reveille’, Poe Newsletter, October 1968, Vol. 1, No. 2, 20. James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (Sydney, Wentworth Press, 2019), 35. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Preface’, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) cited by J. Gerald Kennedy (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), ix. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Assignation’ (1834), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 87. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Assignation’, 95. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Assignation’, 85. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Berenice’ (1835), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 102. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Berenice’, 104. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Berenice’, 104. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Morella’ (1835), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 108. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Morella’, 109. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’ (1838), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 125. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, 114. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, 115. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, 111. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Eleonora’ (1842), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 150. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 127. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 126. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 130. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 127. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 138. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 137. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Berenice’, 99. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 69–70.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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35. David S. Reynolds, ‘Poe’s Art of Transformation: “The Cask of Amontillado” in Its Cultural Context’, Kenneth Silverman (ed.), New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). 36. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’ (1843), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 194. 37. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’, 197. 38. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’, 198. 39. John Cleman, ‘Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defence’, American Literature, No. 63 (December 1991), 623–640. 40. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, 112–113. 41. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’, 194. 42. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (1845), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 205. 43. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, 203. 44. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 187. 45. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, 188. 46. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 243. 47. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, 189. 48. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 237. 49. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather’ (1845), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 360. 50. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Hop-Frog’ (1849), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 215. 51. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Hop-Frog’, 223. 52. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006), 38. 53. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 42. 54. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 42. 55. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 42. 56. See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003). 57. T. S. Eliot, ‘From Poe to Valéry’, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 35. 58. Henry James, cited in Yvor Winters, ‘Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism’, in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1966), 66.

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Bibliography Cleman, John, ‘Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defence’, American Literature, No. 63 (December 1991), 623–640. Conlon, Christopher (ed.), Poe’s Lighthouse (Chicago, Wicker Park Press, 2011). Eliot, T.S., ‘From Poe to Valéry’ in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1991). Grahame-Smith, Seth, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (London, Constable & Robinson, 2010). Griswold, Rufus, ‘Obituary’ in The New York Tribune, October 9th, 1849 cited in E.C. Stedman and G.E. Woodberry (eds.), Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Stone & Kimball, Vol. X, 1895). Hoffmann, Daniel, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York, Doubleday and Company, 1972). Kennedy, J. Gerald (ed.), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (London, Penguin, 2006). Lawrence, D.H., Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003). Lowell, James Russell, A Fable for Critics (Sydney, Wentworth Press, 2019). Moss, Sidney P., ‘Poe and the Saint Louis Daily Reveille’, Poe Newsletter, October 1968, Vol. 1, No. 2, 18–21. Odasso, Adrienne J. (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Collected Works (San Diego, Canterbury Classics, 2011). Pearl, Matthew, The Poe Shadow (London, Vintage, 2006). Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘Mellonta Tauta’ (London, Read Books Ltd., 2012). ———, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). Reynolds, David S., ‘Poe’s Art of Transformation: “The Cask of Amontillado” in Its Cultural Context’, in Kenneth Silverman (ed.), New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). Stedman, E.C. and G.E. Woodberry (eds.), Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Stone & Kimball, Vol. X, 1895). Winters, Yvor, ‘Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism’, in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829 (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1966), 66.

Edward Bulwer Lytton and Poisoned Prose Marie Mulvey-Roberts

In his day, Edward Bulwer Lytton was a household name whose novels outsold those of his friend Charles Dickens. After the First World War his reputation fell into decline. Yet Bulwer (as he is commonly known) was without doubt an eminent Victorian deserving of greater recognition in modern times, not least for his gothic writings. Ironically, his sayings which are an established part of the English language, such as ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’,1 are more recognised nowadays than the man who coined them. Bulwer was a polymath and, through his twin careers of writer and politician, lived out his belief that a man of letters needed to be a man of action too. Never entirely at home with any one particular political party, he started off as an independent radical, became a Whig reformer for a couple of decades and then served in Queen Victoria’s cabinet as a Tory Secretary of State for the Colonies (1858–1859). His greatest political achievements were to have presided over the secession from New South Wales of what became known as Queensland and to have established the colony of British Columbia. During his highly successful writing career, he was a poet, journalist, editor, dramatist, historian, political writer and author of twenty-seven novels. The extent of his prodigious output is evident from the thirty-seven volumes of collected works (1873–1877) published after his death. But it was his dense and often prolix fustian writing style, love of erudition and his esoteric and moralising tendencies which failed to appeal after 1918 to readers attracted by more accessible works. More recently, his name has gained dubious fame through the annual Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest whose entrants submit the worst openings of imaginary novels, inspired by the first sentence of his novel Paul Clifford (1830): ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.2 During his lifetime, Bulwer acquired notoriety through his failed marriage to Rosina Wheeler, which led to an acrimonious separation. His estranged wife turned novelist publicised her grievances against him, drawing attention to his infidelities and refusal to allow her M. Mulvey-Roberts (B) University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_6

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to have contact with their two children. She retaliated by attacking his reputation on many levels, as a husband, father, politician and novelist. As a successful novelist, Bulwer was a highly visible target. He had established himself as a leading practitioner in a wide variety of literary genres including: the Silver Fork novel with his highly successful Pelham (1828), whose hero’s preference for wearing black evening wear permanently changed men’s fashions; the Newgate novel, whose criminal heroes included the robber in Paul Clifford (1830) and murderer in Eugene Aram (1832); the metaphysical or Rosicrucian novel, Zanoni (1842); the Romantic sentimental novels Ernest Maltravers (1837) and Alice or the Mysteries (1838); the historic catastrophe novel in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834); science fiction with The Coming Race (1871) and the acclaimed ghost story, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’ (1859). A common thread running through this diverse fictional output is the Gothic. Indeed, Bulwer helped transport the gothic novel from its sublime European settings into the realm of British domesticity, as demonstrated by his Newgate novels which drew on actual criminals from the true crime chronicle, the Newgate Calendar. Not only did Bulwer help bring the Gothic nearer home but he also brought it up to date with more modern settings, which spoke to contemporary concerns. One such pressing issue was a rampant fear of poisoners, which he exploited in Lucretia, or, The Children of Night (1846). The success of the novel backfired on its author since it was regarded by detractors as an incitement for wouldbe and established poisoners. As such, it represents Bulwer’s darkest and most gothic work. Through this novel and several others, he anticipated sensation fiction, which peaked in the 1860s and 1870s. Bulwer was also drawn to the earlier aesthetics of Romanticism and philosophical idealism, most apparent in his occult novels Zanoni and A Strange Story (1862), while his The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834) contains gothic ballads, fables and tales. For this virtual travelogue, he utilised elements of the Germanic Bildungsroman formula, though he does this more consistently in a number of other works, including his final novel, Kenelm Chillingly (1873).3 Bulwer was exceedingly popular in Germany and was considered by Thomas Carlyle to be second only to him in transporting Germanic culture into England).4 As Caroline Norton enquired of him: ‘Do you not wish instead of an English baronet you were Edward Von Bulwer’?5 The artist Theodore von Holst, whose work abounds in German influences, attracted the interest of Bulwer, who became his patron and purchased the artist’s large painting, ‘The Drinking Scene in Faust’. This was part of a series of illustrations of Goethe’s Faust, whose author both men greatly admired. So impressed was Bulwer by Holst that he commissioned him to paint his portrait. Holst’s most wellknown work is the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, an admirer of Bulwer’s fiction. Holst’s image of Victor Frankenstein’s creature at the moment of creation appeared in the new ‘Standard Novels’ series, for which he provided illustrations of other novels including The Ghost Seer (1787) by Friedrich Schiller, whose poems and ballads Edward translated from the German. Bulwer excelled as a trail-blazer. His best-selling novel Pelham and, to a greater extent his Newgate novels, such as Night and Morning (1841), were also precursors of the mystery novel. Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Night and Morning and it may well

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have influenced his short stories, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Other tales by Poe were inspired by Bulwer’s short story ‘Monos and Daimonos (1830)’,6 a dramatisation of the split psyche, experienced as a doppelgänger haunting a man who longs for solitude. Poe paid tribute to Bulwer by reproducing the line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, in his short story ‘The Bargain Lost’ (1832). The influence of Bulwer’s futuristic The Coming Race can be detected in H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, which prefigures the subterranean lost worlds of early twentieth-century popular fiction. This novel also provided a blueprint for a number of conventions within modern science fiction. These include robotic servants, intercontinental ballistic missiles and a mysterious energy called Vril (which inspired the name Bovril). The title, The Coming Race, alludes to the ascendency of the United States as a world power and, presumably, Bulwer had in mind dominant American women for his seven-foot-tall females known as ‘Gys’, who were more powerful than the males. As Bulwer indicated, this was ‘an important element in the consideration and maintenance of female rights [….] Thus they can not only defend themselves against all aggressions from the males, but could, at any moment when he least expected his danger, terminate the existence of an offending spouse’.7 It is tempting to read into this a projection of Bulwer’s own anxieties regarding his enraged spouse. Not only is this novel an early utopian/dystopian satire but it was also one of the first hollow earth novels. George Bernard Shaw would later acknowledge that his concepts around ‘Superman’ had been influenced by reading The Coming Race in his youth.8 In addition, Bulwer’s occult novels, Zanoni and A Strange Story, had a powerful influence on nineteenth-century occultism, including the theosophists, whose co-founder Helena Blavatsky was an admirer. Bulwer’s rapid rise to fame had been fueled by notoriety from the very start since his first novel Falkland (1827) had been condemned for condoning adultery, a fact not overlooked by his aggrieved wife Rosina, who was quick to point out how the author, through his own marital infidelities, practised what he preached. Bulwer’s Newgate novels were criticised for immorality by celebrating the careers of rogues and criminals and the author did not help his cause by insisting: ‘It is not immoral, it is moral, and of the most impressive and epic order of novels, to arouse and sustain interest in a criminal’.9 Deeply sensitive to criticism, Bulwer’s sense of being torn apart by his critics is reflected in his gothic fable, ‘The Three Sisters’ (1838), in which it is necessary to protect your back against fellow-citizens driven by an overwhelming urge to attack an imaginary dragon that has attached itself to you from behind: Thus, the moment your back was turned, half-a-dozen of your countrymen made a rush at you, one with a sword, to hew, another with a saw, to saw, a third with redhot pincers, to pluck off, the creature of their imagination: if no other weapon was at hand, they fastened on you with their nails and teeth. What made this malady more singular, while their victim perished under their mutilations, they kept congratulating him on his approaching delivery from the dragon.10

Attacks in the press were all the more excruciating for Bulwer simply because he took them so personally. He even threatened to challenge William Thackeray to a duel for adversely reviewing his poetry.11 While admitting that an author’s ‘works alone

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make not up a man’s character’, he insisted nonetheless that ‘they are the index to that living book’.12 As a living book, Bulwer can be read as a predominantly Gothic text. Like Horace Walpole, William Beckford and Walter Scott, he externalised his inner Goth through architecture, which for him was Knebworth House in Hertfordshire. He saw himself as a victim of misfortune in regard to his marriage, which gave him scope for identifying with the victims in his Gothic novels. Mercilessly lambasted for the scandals surrounding his marriage, Bulwer bitterly complained of how his estranged wife dragged his domestic sores into the public arena. By conjuring up other-worldliness in his gothic novels, peopled by magicians and astrologers, such as Volktman in Godophin (1833) and Alamen in Leila or, The Siege of Granada (1838), and by the devil in ‘Asmodeum at Large’ (1833), Bulwer gained respite from his unhappy marriage and from what he describes in A Strange Story as ‘the absorbing tyranny of every-day life’.13 A life-long disciple of the occult, Bulwer was intrigued by the ancient mysteries and claims have been made that he was a member of the Rosicrucians,14 a secret brotherhood which had absorbed the teachings of alchemists and Neo-Platonists and whose members were believed to have acquired powers of invisibility, an occult skill which the theosophist Annie Besant attributed to Bulwer himself.15 Bulwer was fascinated by astrology, mesmerism, the supernatural, paranormal and spiritualism. Brought up in Knebworth House, which is reputed to be haunted, he was well acquainted with ghostly tales prompted by the eerie sound of Jenny the ghostly spinner and sightings of the more sinister yellow boy, whose apparition was said to presage a death. After inheriting the house in 1843 from his mother, Bulwer eventually converted the originally Tudor building into a gothic extravaganza with gargoyles and griffins, wyverns, turrets, crenellations and stucco battlements. The Pugin-inspired John Crace was employed for the interiors which he helped gothicise. Suits of armour captured the atmosphere of medievalism which Bulwer sought to recreate in the spirit of the Victorian Gothic Revival. As a man eager to converse with ghosts, Bulwer invited mediums to his house to conduct seances, most notably the well-known Daniel Dunglas Home who claimed to have influenced Bulwer’s novel, A Strange Story. Bulwer believed that one day science would be able to explain psychic phenomena. In ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, the narrator spends a spine-chilling night in a haunted house and is determined to find a rational explanation for the ghostly occurrences, convinced that they emanate from a telepathic source, saying: They are but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the means) from one mortal brain to another, Whether, in so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or fiendlike shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood – still am I persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another.16

Significantly subtitled ‘The House and the Brain’, the story tells of how the narrator traces the receiver of what he believes to be a telepathic influence to a hidden room, containing occult apparatus consisting primarily of a compass whose points are seven strange symbols, resembling astrological characters. At Knebworth House, above the haunted tower bedroom in which Bulwer, Dickens and Wilkie

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Collins once picnicked, there is a hidden room and it is tempting to see a connection with this and the ghost story. While the secret chamber in Bulwer’s tale is eventually destroyed, the one in Knebworth House remains there to this day. In A Strange Story science and the supernatural are brought together. The evil magician Margrave, whose life has been prolonged by the elixir of life, craves to possess its formula and to that end seeks out the scientific knowledge of the materialist skeptic Dr Fenwick who acquires the secret of immortality, while Margrave is eventually destroyed by the demonic forces he unleashes. This comes about due to his failure to face these phantoms, which equate to his own fears and are indicative of a lack of spiritual preparation. In Zanoni, the title hero is a Rosicrucian sage possessing eternal life, which he also loses, only in his case it is forfeited for love rather than for the pursuit of power. Zanoni embodies the Ideal whereas his counterpart, the adept Mejnour represents the Actual in the form of scientific empiricism. Through his sacrifice, Zanoni brings the two together by effectively actualising the ideal. Indeed, the novel gives the reader the opportunity to glimpse the invisible ideal through the visibility of the real. Bulwer regarded the artist as having a duty to invoke the sublime in human nature. By seeing art as a key to the supernatural and the metaphysics of Romanticism, this permitted, in his view, the artist to become a visionary, who was able to unlock the sublime. Thus, fiction could serve as a conduit through which the actual and the ideal could be united. For Bulwer, art was the expression of the infinite spirit manifest in the finite and this form of magical idealism lent itself to the concept of the poet as magician. One danger of becoming fully immersed in the terrain of the mystical, magical or spiritual is that it can involve a loss of reason. In Godolphin (1833), Lucilla, the daughter of the Danish astrologer Volkmann, after being abandoned by the title hero who marries someone else, retreats into her father’s spirit world and succumbs to madness. Indeed, Bulwer feared for his own mental stability, at a time when definitions of madness were widening in order to fill the asylums that were being built across the country on an industrial scale. In the process of purging itself of individuals deemed to be mad, Victorian society aggravated the prevailing fear of insanity. Bulwer incorporated these contemporary anxieties into his fiction. In the short story ‘A Manuscript found in a Mad-House’ (1829), a Frankenstein-like monster, shunned by the human race, is revealed at the end to be the inmate of a lunatic asylum. In Pelham, after the innocent Gertrude is seduced and then betrayed, she loses her reason and is transported to a lunatic asylum. Bulwer’s wife Rosina parodied this episode in her first novel Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour (1839), through which she roundly attacked her husband and his family. His horrified reaction to her roman à clef was to look for ways to silence her.17 Eventually, he would have her incarcerated in a private lunatic asylum, though her early release meant that it was not the lasting solution he had hoped for. Nevertheless, within the warning pages of Lucretia, Bulwer succeeds in consigning a far more troublesome wife to a madhouse from which there is no prospect of escape. Lucretia’s nefarious career as a husband-killer and poisoner helped exacerbate the Victorians’ poison panic, which is laced throughout this gothic novel.

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For the Victorians, criminal poisoning occupied an invisible and intangible terrain since the most common deadly poisons could enter the body surreptitiously, leaving a corrosive trail of death and destruction. The fear of poisoning could corrode trust and contaminate the sense of sanctity and safety within the home. During the 1840s, at a time when divorce was difficult to obtain, especially for wives, over twice as many women as men were reported by The Times to have poisoned or tried to poison their spouses.18 ‘The Angel in the House’, who first put in an appearance in 1854 in Coventry Patmore’s poem of that title, by the following year had degenerated into the ‘Poisoner in the House’. This became the title of an article in the Leader which enquired: If you feel a deadly sensation within, and grow gradually weaker, how do you know that you are not poisoned? If your hands tingle, do you not fancy that it is arsenic? How can you be sure that it is not? Your household, perhaps, is a ‘well-regulated family’; your friends and relations all smile kindly upon you; the meal at each period of the day is punctual and looks correct; but how can you possibly tell that there is not arsenic in the curry? … It literally, without exaggeration, is impossible to tell.19

Fears of the secret poisoner produced for the Victorians a collective paranoia, which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, reached almost epidemic proportions mainly due to reports on celebrated trials in the press which, in turn, were reflected in popular sensation fiction. Notably, the writing of Lucretia was informed by contemporary poison trials. As this demonstrates, accounts of poisoners in novels and newspapers fitted neatly together, not unlike a hand inside a poisonous glove. Attempts to regulate the ‘poison trade’20 were drops in a pharmaceutical ocean, for as Paracelsus had observed: ‘all things are poison and nothing is without poison’.21 The prospect for the poison hunter was as futile as that of a knight errant in pursuit of a poisoned Holy Grail. Rather like trying to limit the range of the Gothic, poisons oozed out of their taxonomic containers. While legislation insisted upon the labelling and keeping of poison within a designated poison cabinet, Dr Downward in Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866) inspired in part by reprieved poisoner, Thomas Smethurst, reveals to the poisoner protagonist, Lydia Gwilt, the widespread availability of poisons: ‘look about you round the shelves of this room. There are all sorts of medical liquids and substances in those bottles – most innocent, most useful in themselves – which, in combination with other substances and other liquids, become poisons as terrible and as deadly as any that I have in my cabinet under lock and key’.22 The criminal poisoner’s arch opponent was the burgeoning toxicologist or forensic detective who, armed with a test-tube, stood at the forefront of medico-legal expertise as a guide to an invisible world of unseen crime. The science of toxicology aimed to throw light on the dark alchemy of poison as murder weapon. While scientific treatises, such as Alfred Swaine Taylor’s taxonomic work, On Poisons in Relation to Medical Jurisprudence (1848), endeavoured to supply some kind of medico-legal dyke to hold back the flow of unregulated poisons, their success was being thwarted by would-be poisoners finding instruction and inspiration from the pages of gothic or sensation novels, particularly on how to avoid detection through slow poisoning. The way in which sensational accounts of notorious poison trials found their way into sensation fiction transported the anxieties, associated with the foreign courts

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of the Medici and Borgia dynasties, into the homes of the British middle-classes. This chemical version of the bloody dagger looked back to the Renaissance and antiquity, as well as to the debaucheries of imperial Rome when wives poisoned their husbands, as described in Henry G. Liddell’s History of Rome, published in 1855 at the height of the Victorian fears over poisoning as a female art. The London Medical Gazette, edited by the toxicologist Dr Taylor mentioned above, published a series of editorials in 1847 condemning three popular poison romances, for having revived the crimes of the Borgias, describing them as ‘handbooks on poisoning’.23 These included Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Christo (1844) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Ethel Churchill, or The Two Brides (1837), in which Henrietta Marchmont poisons both her husband and her lover and then goes mad. But the front-runner was Bulwer’s Lucretia, which now found itself in the dock, accused of opening up a Pandora’s box of poisons in providing, ‘a most complete revelation of the art of murder by poison’ and constituting ‘a work which almost appears to have been written for the express purpose of reviving in the public mind an interest in the lost art of Italian poisoning’.24 Lucretia discovers a poison which, in being able to mimic angina pectoris, managed to conceal its tracks during autopsy, thereby throwing the toxicologist off the poison trail. In his defence, Bulwer denied that his intention was to inspire and instruct would be ‘modern Borgias’25 but the Gazette remained unconvinced as did his estranged wife Rosina, who commented acerbically in a letter to her friend Rebecca Ryves: ‘Have you seen that resumé of the Palmer poisonings in “The Leader”? if not I will send it to you – as they say “the amiable Mr William Palmer seems to have derived his code of Domestic morality from Bulwers [sic] Lucretia. [sic] – how delightful it would be if it turned out that the Palmer was a “Pal” – of Sir Liar!’.26 Dr William Palmer had been accused of poisoning his wife’s mother, his wife and brother with strychnine for financial gain in order to pay off his gambling debts. Found guilty at the Old Bailey in London, he was hanged on 14 June 1856 in front of an enormous crowd. Rosina read in the press about another poison trial connected with Bulwer’s novel which, as she explained, was from ‘an Edinburgh paper that had been sent me, which said that Miss Madeleine Smiths [sic] Education had been perfected by going from her catechism to the study of Bulwer’s Lucretia’.27 Madeleine Smith, the twentyone-year-old daughter of a Glasgow architect, was tried for poisoning Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a poor man of French extraction from Jersey, in the summer of 1857. After promising marriage, she jilted him and was then accused of dosing him with arsenic. To mass protest, Miss Smith was acquitted, which Rosina satirically linked to her husband’s sympathetic portrayal of criminals in his Newgate novels as well as registering how he made use of contemporary poison trials for his fictional characters, ‘I have just read with great disgust the acquittal of Miss Laffarge [sic] [Marie Lafarge was convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic in 1840.] Madeleine Smith – and think by its flimsy sophistry and grandiloquent tinsel perorations – it must have been written by the Lord Rector of Glasgow [Bulwer] [….] she is now quite fit to become a great Literary character’.28 Bulwer’s narrative of criminal mania was a tale too dark even for devotees of his Newgate fiction. The Athenaeum declared it to be ‘a bad book of a bad school’.29

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Thackery chastised the author, saying that ‘for his infamous and murderous propensities, as lately shown in his most appalling and most arsenical novel of Lucretia, [he] deserves to be brought up with a tight hand’.30 Bulwer was so reviled by the public outcry that he resolved never to write again. But in 1853, he rewrote Lucretia and, to appease public disapproval, slightly reduced the death toll. His protagonist’s name, Lucretia Clavering evoked for his readers both historical and contemporary poisoners. Lucretia Borgia, a member of the Florentine Renaissance dynasty, had gained notoriety as a poisoner and Bulwer’s villainous heroine is acquainted with female Italian poisoners from reading the following passage from a book entitled Life of a Physician of Padua in the Sixteenth Century: It related to that singular epoch of terror in Italy when some mysterious disease, varying in a thousand symptoms, baffled all remedy, and long defied all conjecture, —a disease attacking chiefly the heads of families, father and husband; rarely women. In one city, seven hundred husbands perished but not one wife! The disease was poison.31

Lucretia’s surname, Clavering, was resonant for contemporary audience as the name of an Essex village, which became the scene of a sorority of domestic poisoners, known as the Essex Poison Club.32 A recent and well-publicised case of a female poisoner, which has parallels with a minor character in Lucretia, was that of Sarah Westwood, whose affair with the lodger, Samuel Phillips was discovered by her husband John. Witnesses reported that the two men were seen fighting in the street and that Sarah was heard goading her lover to kill her husband. Slightly over two months later, John complained of stomach pains and died shortly afterwards. His sudden death prompted a post-mortem and a large amount of arsenic was found in his body. Sarah was convicted of murder and hanged at Stafford goal on 13 January 1844, the very same prison where William Palmer would meet the hangman over ten years later. The opening of Lucretia culminates in an execution scene during the Reign of Terror with the guillotining of a woman for taking a lover who was out of favour with the authorities of the French Revolution. She had also betrayed ‘a good, easy friend of the people who had long loved her’.33 This refers to the father of her son, who perversely takes the child to witness his mother’s execution with no forewarning. As the moment of her beheading approaches, the father hisses in his ear, ‘Learn how they perish who betray me!’34 For Rosina, this must have seemed like a cautionary message directed at her for being a disobedient wife, especially since after suspecting her of adultery Bulwer had meted out punishment by taking their son and daughter away in 1838 and subsequently poisoned them against her. A fictional equivalent can be found in how Lucretia’s second husband takes her son away from his mother. Rosina was ever-ready to make links between her husband’s fiction and real life and identified Lucretia as ‘one of Sir Liars Brothel Biographys [sic]’,35 insisting that he had drawn on extensive first-hand experience.36 Bulwer might have been recollecting the toxicity of his own unhappy marriage in the description of Lucretia and her victim-husband Olivier Dalibard as sharing ‘that mute coma of horror’ while at night ‘[…] they lie down side by side in the marriage-bed, —brain plotting against brain, heart loathing heart. It is a duel of life and death, between those sworn through life and beyond death at the altar [….] the monsters in the hell

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of the abyss war invisibly below’.37 But it is the wife who turns out to be the deadlier of the pair. After a narrow escape from being poisoned by her husband, she arranges for his murder, remarries and eventually disposes of his replacement through poison. The female poisoner was widely perceived to be an aberration of Victorian ideals of femininity, not least as a perversely masculinised woman. This is indicated in the following description: ‘Lucretia had none of the charming babble of women, none of that tender interest in household details, in the minutiae of domestic life, which relaxes the intellect while softening the heart. Hard and vigorous, her sentences came forth in eternal appeal to the reason’.38 Lucretia is clearly modelled on Rosina’s mother both physically and mentally. A communitarian radical philosopher, known as the ‘Goddess of Reason’, Anna Wheeler was the co-author of Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretentions of the Other Half men, to Retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825), a treatise that was unlikely to endear her to her son-in-law. She was a transnational mediator between French and English radicals, who moved in Benthamite and Owenite circles, spoke in public, renounced marriage and was a declared atheist. Wheeler was a revolutionary and Bulwer’s novel reflects the fears of anarchic political insurgency represented through the lawlessness of the female criminal poisoner who imperiled domestic values. He reveals the dangers of a woman like Lucretia with her machine-like will and reified utilitarian intellect, as well as her desire to be active outside the home, which was contrary to the Victorian ideal of female domesticity. “Aha! There is ambition under those careless curls,” said Mr Vernon, with his easy, adorable impertinence. Lucretia winced. “But if I were ambitious, what field for ambition could I find in London?” “The same as Alexander, —empire, my cousin.” “You forget that I am not a man. Man, indeed, may hope for an empire.”39 Mr Vernon retorts by saying that women have an empire of their own, to which Lucretia responds disdainfully by pointing out what it really amounts to: ‘A woman’s empire [is] over gauzes and ribbons, over tea-tables and drums, over fops and coquettes […]’.40 Lucretia’s manly inclinations chimed with Bulwer’s imperial ambitions as a future minister for the colonies. Her tutor Dalibard and future husband tell her that she has the seeds of masculine ambition within. It is these which she plans to cultivate through her son: Yes, my heart swells, but not with the mawkish fondness of a feeble mother. In a son, I shall live again […] It is because I was born a woman, —had woman’s poor passions, and infirm weakness, — that I am what I am. I would transfer myself into the soul of man, —man, who has the strength to act, and the privilege to rise. Into the bronze of man’s nature I would pour the experience which has broken, with its fierce elements, the puny vessel of clay.41

The ‘puny vessel of clay’ is the female form, container of Lucretia’s inner masculine self. Similarly, the poisoner harbours a secretive self, which equates to her hidden masculinised interiority and belies the Victorian ideal of redemptive female morality.

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Her statuesque figure resembled that of Rosina’s mother, Anna Wheeler, who was praised for her beauty and perfect figure. But in the case of Lucretia, there is a tell-tale sign denoting her masculine nature as revealed in the following passage: Lucretia Clavering was tall, —tall beyond what is admitted to be tall in woman; but in her height there was nothing either awkward or masculine, —a figure more perfect never served for model to a sculptor […] Fortunately, the sole defect of her form was not apparent at a distance: that defect was in the hand; it had not the usual faults of female youthfulness, —the superfluity of flesh, the too rosy healthfulness of colour, —on the contrary, it was small and thin; but it was, nevertheless, more the hand of a man than a woman: the shape had a man’s nervous distinctness, the veins swelled like sinews, the joints of the fingers were marked and prominent. In that hand it almost seemed as if the iron force of the character betrayed itself.42

Possessing the mind and hands of a man, Lucretia is both divided and divisive as she is only impersonating the unitary illusion of the feminine. This split between masculine and feminine may be traced back in part to Thomas Carlyle’s essay on ‘Characteristics’ (1831) which, as Laura Ciolkowski explains, identified division, the separation of mind from body etc.…as a source of sickness in Victorian society which, in Lucretia’s case, propels her towards the lunatic asylum. Ciolkowski sees Lucretia’s gender performance as a form of gendered counterfeit: Forgery in Lucretia works from within the field of cultural frictions whereby feminine redemptive morality and purity of soul inevitably clash with the commodity culture posturings of masculine subjects in the public sphere. The simulation of a female subject who joins masculine ambition and egoism to the delicate form of femininity is a dis-simulation of the culturally intelligible model of femininity it displaces.43

This forgery of femininity in Lucretia’s performativity exposed the Victorian myths of gender that were held in place by the angelic feminine ideal. The gendered forgery in this text corresponds to a trial involving both forgery and poison, relating to Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847), the Romantic artist and model for Lucretia’s partner in crime, Gabriel Verney. Wainewright was charged with forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1837. He forged powers of attorney on his inheritance supplemented first by the funds he collected following the death of an uncle, who died in suspicious circumstances as did his motherin-law. In addition, he had planned to benefit from an insurance policy, which he arranged for his wife’s half-sister, Helen Abercrombie, not long before her sudden unexpected death in 1830. Her autopsy revealed antimony and strychnine in her blood. According to rumour, Wainewright more or less admitted to the poisoning by blaming his motive on her very thick ankles.44 Bulwer was fascinated by the case and pumped Wainewright’s friend, fellow-artist Holst for information about him to use in Lucretia. Even though Holst gave Wainewright refuge, there is no evidence that he was aware of any involvement that his friend may have had in the deaths. While researching the case, Bulwer informed one of the insurance companies connected with it that Wainewright had died in Australia, noting, ‘I think that he never lived to know the everlasting fame to which he has been damned in Lucretia’.45 Lucretia’s litany of crimes, like those allegedly carried out by Wainewright, decimate her family circle. These include having her first husband, Olivier Dalibard,

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assassinated, poisoning her second husband, destroying the life of her half-cousin, killing her niece Helen with slow poison, the colourless and tasteless acqua di Tufania) and unwittingly murdering her son, whom she mistook for a crossing sweeper, by stabbing him with a poisoned ring. Her reaction to his corpse anticipates the manic laughter of Mr Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), who burns down his family home, Thornfield Hall: ‘a laugh rose close at hand, – it rang through the walls, it was heard near and afar, above and below; not an ear in that house that heard it not. In that laugh fled forever, till the Judgment-day, from the blackened ruins of her lost soul, the reason of the murderess-mother’.46 There were only two outcomes for such a woman—death, as in the blazing inferno of Thornfield Hall, or incarceration in a lunatic asylum, the fate of Mary Braddon’s attempted husband-killing heroine in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and it is to the madhouse where Bulwer takes the reader in the final chapter of his novel: Nearer and nearer, you hear the yell and the oath and blaspheming curse; — who are in the heart of the madhouse, where they chain those at once cureless and dangerous, —who have but sense enough left them to smite and to throttle and to murder. Your guide opens that door, massive as a wall; you see (as we, who narrate, have seen her) Lucretia Dalibard, — a grisly, squalid, ferocious mockery of a human being, more appalling and more fallen than Dante ever fabled in his spectres, than Swift ever scoffed in his Yahoos!47

Here the masquerade or, to use Bulwer’s term, ‘mockery’, is exposed and Lucretia is desexed and denounced as a ‘domestic traitor’, a ‘being apart from the orbit of criminals’.48 For her disloyalty to her husband, Rosina was described in similar terms as a ‘traitor wife’ and ‘fire-side spy’49 in the anonymous poem, Lady Cheveley or, The Woman of Honour (1839). It had been written in retaliation for the ‘poisonous darts’50 aimed against her husband and his family in her first novel Cheveley. There is every possibility that Bulwer’s fictional mad woman was modelled on his estranged wife whom he would incarcerate in an asylum nearly ten years later. His description of Lucretia as ‘more fallen than Dante’ corresponds to Rosina as a fallen woman for having cohabited with him before marriage, while the comparison with Swift’s Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) could be a jibe at her Irish nationality. The bestial quality of the Yahoo is in keeping with Benjamin Disraeli’s description of Rosina as the ‘tigress of Taunton’,51 which in turn anticipates the hyena-like Bertha Mason, who appeared the following year in Jane Eyre (1847). The most horrific image of Bulwer’s mad woman is of her shackled in her cell: ‘Only where all other feature seems to have lost its stamp of humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid never closes over it’.52 This all-consuming and all-seeing eye, which evokes the brilliance of the arsenated eye, might have seemed to Edward a recreation of Rosina’s Gorgonesque reproachful and unrelenting gaze, surveying him for the purpose of exposing his private misdemeanours to a hostile world. Unlike the enchained Lucretia, Edward put Rosina in the hands of Dr Robert Gardiner Hill, a leading advocate for the abolition of mechanical restraints in asylums, but instead of chains or a straitjacket, patients were now transfixed by the gaze within the confines of moral therapy. It was

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this clinical observation which Rosina alludes to in a letter to her husband (31 May 1861) insisting that he ought to be ‘under the surveillance of a Keeper’.53 As Michel Foucault pointed out, ‘Madness no longer exists except as seen’.54 Fundamental to the Victorian treatment for moral insanity was the act of observation, a secular version of the All-Seeing Eye, represented here by the asylum director. The irony in unravelling connections between life and fiction is that, after Lucretia was published, it was Bulwer’s separated wife who claimed to have been the victim of attempted poisoning by her husband. In a letter of 21 August 1857, she complained to her correspondent Rebecca Ryves about her husband’s mistreatment of her, confiding her fears that if her mediators ‘succeed in extorting any pecuniary redress from that monster for me – he will effectually contrive to poison me in less than six months’.55 A few years earlier, after having taken refuge in a hotel in Llangollen, she claimed that Edward sent up his mistresses, one of whom was accompanied by his illegitimate son and her mother, under the assumed name of Mrs Pyke, insisting, ‘the wretches mean to give me slow poison as I suspected old Pyke had done I was so awfully ill with constant wretchings while she was here, or to forcibly abduct me, and shut me up where I’d never be heard of more’.56 Parallels exist between her husband as the first Baron Lytton of Knebworth, who incarcerated her in an asylum in 1858, and Sir Percival Glyde, a baronet in Collins’s novel Woman in White (1859), who also has his wife confined within an asylum. Both women were tricked into travelling to London and shortly afterwards imprisoned in lunatic asylums. Another comparison between the two novelists is that Collins, like Bulwer, also drew on contemporary poison trials for his novel, which John Sutherland relates to William Palmer’s trial.57 In a letter to Collins, Rosina referred to his villainous character Count Fosco, who is skilled in the use of poisons, pointing out: ‘The great failure of your book is the villain; Count Fosco is a very poor one, and when next you want a character of that sort I trust you will not disdain to come to me. The man is alive and constantly under my gaze. In fact, he is my own husband.’58 This slur does not appear to have dented the friendship between Bulwer and Collins, which had been cemented after the latter accepted a part as Smart the valet, and later as Shadowy Softhead, in an amateur production of Bulwer’s play, Not So Bad as We Seem, performed in 1851. Rosina threatened to disrupt the premiere by entering the theatre as an orange seller dressed in Nell Gwyn costume and hurl fruit at the guest of honour, who was none other than Queen Victoria. Over a decade later, she protested against the monarch’s elevation of her husband to the peerage in 1866 for his contribution to literature. Throughout his life, Bulwer received the accolades of the great man of letters, culminating in his burial in Westminster Abbey despite the controversies and notoriety which had beset him. But for Bulwer, the greatest torture lay in his self-doubt. He was haunted by a nagging suspicion of failure that he could never match up to the heights of his own lofty ambition. His aspirations to be a Romantic scholar-magus or the reincarnation of Byron’s sublime heroic genus clashed with the success of his mass-market fiction. He would have been dismayed had he known that posterity would not place him at the forefront of his craft but primarily as having paved the way for others, some of whom would leave him far behind. The dynamo for success during his lifetime was his tireless productivity and capacity for innovation which

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held the interest of his reading public, but once the relentless flow of new publications ceased after his death, interest in his work started to fade. While Bulwer’s gothic writings provided him with an outlet for his fears and insecurities, more latterly they have helped revive a burgeoning interest in his work. For the influence he exerted through his occult novels, stories of the fantastic, seminal ghost story, dystopian novel, sensation and Newgate fiction, it can be said that there are few gothic writers who did more in encompassing, innovating and advancing so many aspects of the genre. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Henry Cobbold, Marion Glastonbury, Nigel Biggs and Joseph Crawford for their helpful comments on this essay.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Edward Bulwer Lytton, Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy: A Play in Five Acts, 9th ed. (London: Chapman and Hall [1839], 1856), 35. Edward Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford (London: Walter Scott [1830], 1887), 1. See Walter Göbel, ‘Kenelm Chillingly: The Bildungsroman Revoked’, The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan Conrad Christensen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 236. See T.H.S. Escott, Edward Bulwer First Baron Lytton of Knebworth: A Social, Personal and Political Monograph (Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press [1910], 1970), 5. Caroline Norton, The Selected Letters of Caroline Norton, ed. Ross Nelson and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 3 vols (Houndmills: Routledge, 2020), 2: 391. See Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1976), 224. Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race (Stroud: Alan Sutton [1871], 1995), 30–31. See Michael Dolzani, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks in Romance, 30 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 15: 408. Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (London: Hambledon, 2003), 116. Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters and other Gothic Tales (Knebworth: Able Publishing, 2000), 127. See Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1963), 199–200. Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton, 114. Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Edward Bulwer Lytton, 4 vols (UK: Leonaur [1846]), 2011), 2: 314. See Marie Mulvey[-]Roberts, Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (Abingdon: Routledge [1990], 2016), 157–160. See Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton, 149. Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Haunted, 154.

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17. See Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour, ed. Marie MulveyRoberts (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), ix–x. 18. See Ian Burney, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 36n. 19. Ibid., 122. 20. Ibid., 60. 21. Ibid., 59. 22. Wilkie Collins, Armadale (London: Penguin Books [1866], 1995), 641. 23. Burney, Poison, 54. 24. Ibid., 55. 25. Ibid., 56. 26. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, The Collected Letters of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts with the assistance of Steve Carpenter, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto), 2: 208. 27. Ibid., 2: 362. 28. Ibid., 2: 311–312. 29. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800– 1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 143. 30. Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 199. 31. Bulwer Lytton, Collected Supernatural, 4: 181. 32. See Burney, Poison, 18–33. 33. Bulwer Lytton, Collected Supernatural, 4: 14–15. 34. Ibid., 4: 16. 35. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Letters, 2: 205. 36. See Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), 232. 37. Bulwer Lytton, Collected Supernatural, 4: 204–205. 38. Ibid., 4: 375. 39. Ibid., 4: 69. 40. Ibid., 4: 69. 41. Ibid., 4: 278. 42. Ibid., 4: 64. 43. Laura Ciolkowski, ‘The Woman (In) Question: Gender, Politics, and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Lucretia’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 26, no. 1 (Autumn), 90. 44. See Small, Love’s Madness, 145. 45. Ibid., 145. 46. Bulwer Lytton, Collected Supernatural, 4: 448. 47. Ibid., 4: 458. 48. Ibid., 4: 112. 49. Anonymous, Lady Cheveley; or, The Woman of Honour: A New Version of Cheveley, the Man of Honour (London: Edward Churton, 1839), 15. 50. Ibid., vi. 51. Benjamin Disraeli, Letters: 1857–59, eds. Mary S. Millar, Ann P. Robson and M.G. Wiebe, 10 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 7: 201.

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52. Bulwer Lytton, Collected Supernatural, 4: 458. 53. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Letters, 3: 127. 54. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge [1967], 1997), 250. 55. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Letters, 2008, 2: 353. 56. Ibid., 2: 109. 57. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1995), 33–42. 58. Escott, Edward Bulwer, 331–332.

Bibliography Anonymous, Lady Cheveley; or, The Woman of Honour: A New Version of Cheveley, the Man of Honour (London: Edward Churton, 1839). Bulwer Lytton, Edward, The Coming Race (Stroud: Alan Sutton [1871], 1995). ———, The Haunted and the Haunters and other Gothic Tales (Knebworth: Able Publishing, 2000). ———, Lucretia, or, The Children of Night, in The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Edward Bulwer Lytton, 4 vols (UK: Leonaur [1846], 2011), vol. 4. ———, Paul Clifford (London: Walter Scott [1830], 1887). ———, Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy. A Play in Five Acts, 9th ed. (London: Chapman and Hall [1839], 1856). Bulwer Lytton, Rosina, Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005). ———, The Collected Letters of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts with the assistance of Steve Carpenter, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). Burney, Ian, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Christensen, Allan Conrad, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1976). Ciolkowski, Laura, ‘The Woman (In) Question: Gender, Politics, and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Lucretia’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 26 no 1 (Autumn, 1992), 80–95. Collins, Wilkie, Armadale (London: Penguin Books [1866], 1995). Disraeli, Benjamin, Letters: 1857–59, eds. Mary S. Millar, Ann P. Robson and M.G. Wiebe, 10 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Dolzani, Michael, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks in Romance, 30 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Escott, T.H.S., Edward Bulwer First Baron Lytton of Knebworth: A Social, Personal and Political Monograph (Port Washington, NY and London, Kennikat Press [1910], 1970). Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge [1967], 1997). Göbel, Walter, ‘Kenelm Chillingly: The Bildungsroman Revoked’, The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan Conrad Christensen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 236–248. Hollingsworth, Keith, The Newgate Novel, 1830–1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens and Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1963). Lytton, Victor, The Life of Edward Bulwer Lytton First Lord Lytton by His Grandson (London: Macmillan, 1913).

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Mitchell, Leslie, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters London: Hambledon, 2003). Mulvey [-] Roberts, Marie, Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (Abingdon and New York: Routledge [1990], 2016). Norton, Caroline, The Selected Letters of Caroline Norton, 3 vols. ed. Ross Nelson and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). Small, Helen, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Sutherland, John, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1995). Wise, Sarah, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (London: The Bodley Head, 2012).

Challenging Genre Definitions in Jane Eyre Claire Bazin

Labelling Jane Eyre a gothic novel would be a historical mistake as the gothic trend predates the publication of the novel. Jane Eyre stands at the crossroads between the Gothic and realism in the transitional Victorian period, as Simon Avery convincingly argued in his article.1 There is no denying however that Charlotte Brontë resorts to numerous gothic devices, be it in the description of the locations or in the delineation of some of the characters (the most obvious example being Bertha Rochester): “Much of the intense power of the Brontës’ works stems from the inclusion of motifs and paradigms derived from their gothic inheritance (…) a particularly female dominated genre”.2 I will focus here on the emblematic scenes in the book, such as the red room (where Jane has been locked up by her wicked aunt, Mrs Reed), which foreshadows the scene when Bertha “pays Jane a visit” the night before her wedding. These two scenes echo each other, integrating the gothic element of the mirror. In each case it reflects to Jane a distorted grimace she cannot recognize, which in turn causes her to faint as though this were the only possible way for her to escape from an unbearable reality. Gateshead (Gateshell) and Thornfield are both under the yoke of the patriarchal law, embodied in one case by Mrs Reed and her son John, and in the other by Rochester, the master of the mansion. At Gateshead, Jane’s rebellion against her tyrannical cousin leads to her imprisonment in the red room, the punishment for her crime: “Female gothic narratives ground their plots within a spatial network, the latter being significantly used as a symbolical representation of cultural forces that counteract women’s identity and/or sexuality”.3 It is indeed the places, the houses, the rooms which serve their owners’ plots, remakes of gothic villains who lock up their “disobedient” wives. Lowood school could also be seen as a (less obvious) gothic place where the young girls are isolated, locked up, deprived of food and care, under the yoke of a religious tyrant.4 At Thornfield, Bertha, Rochester’s mad Creole wife (“folle créole” in French), has been locked up in an attic for years. She tries to escape or make herself heard with her shouts and her “vampiromaniac” attacks. C. Bazin (B) Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_7

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Her eventual “visit” to Jane could also be read in terms of a sorority warning against marriage: it might be safer to avoid marriage lest one might end up in an attic/prison, the “Bridewell” evoked in the game of charades previously organized by Rochester. After the aborted wedding, Jane leaves Thornfield looking (or not) for an “antiRochester” embodied by St John Rivers, another (gothic?) villain whose tyranny may be less obvious but just as efficient as Rochester’s. Thanks to the miraculous intervention of a rather convenient providence, Jane manages to leave St John to go back to Rochester who by now has lost an eye and an arm in trying to save his wife from the flames. He lives in an asocial setting, “far from the madding crowd”, like a hermit, almost like a gothic heroine waiting to be delivered by a brave gallant knight. The gothic perspective adapted here owes a great deal to three pioneering critical studies: Sue Wolstenholme’s Gothic (Re)Visions and in particular the chapter entitled “Charlotte Brontë’s Post-Gothic Gothic”,5 Heilman’s “Charlotte Brontë’s New Gothic”6 and Laurence Talairach’s already quoted “Charlotte Brontë’s Female Gothic”. The red room, an enclosed and claustraophobic place where Jane has been locked up. It “functions as punishment for female defiance of patriarchy”,7 even if patriarchy is here embodied by a woman who is acting “as agent for men”8 : “this terrifying process of gender socialization is so firmly established in society that it is implemented by women just as much as men”.9 In this room, Jane is the prey of a real psychological seism, increased by the falling night, the solitude of the place and its secret. “Mirrors are doors through which death comes and goes” wrote French writer Cocteau.10 Death hovers in the red room: “a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room – the spell which kept it so lonely despite of its grandeur” (JE, 11).11 Jane is first riveted to her stool, before daring to leave it to check if the doors of her prison are locked. By passing in front of the mirror—another miniaturized chamber according to Gilbert and Gubar12 —, she discovers an image of herself she cannot recognize: And the strange little figure there gazing at me with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. (JE, 11)

The mirror is a proleptic-topical echo of the mirror at Thornfield. The exploration of the depths that the child embarks upon, looking for herself, opens onto a discovery that is as traumatic as the preceding experiences. The “half fairy, half imp” that the mirror sends back to her is the representation of a split ego, the result of a schizophrenic dissociation, compounded by manichean superstitions. Jane pre-sees what she should not be: neither angel (Helen Burns), nor demon (Bertha Rochester), who are counter, impossible, extreme models: “Jane learns how not to be”.13 It is actually the child or the older narrator (the two sometimes merge) who makes a diagnosis of her state at the beginning of the chapter: “I was a trifle (…) out of myself as the French would say” (JE, 9; italics, the author’s). The very expression is to be taken at face value and is actualized in this split hybrid image. Jane doesn’t recognize herself in mirrors

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or she sees something or somebody else and it will need the whole narration for the two parts of this split ego to be reunited. Jane is a prisoner in this room: “Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure” (JE, 11), like a gothic heroine under the yoke of (budding) domestic tyrants. John Reed demands that she call her “Master”, as she depends on the Reed family as he keeps telling her (voicing his mother’s wishes). She is “a discord in Gateshead Hall” (JE, 12) as she herself fully realizes. Like Bertha, Jane is punished for the crime of her difference. John Reed calls her “a bad animal” (JE, 7). The “animal bestiary” goes crescendo in Bertha’s case who is compared to a hyena or many other wild animals whose ferocity must be tamed: “give your Bertha a bad name and hang her”. It is essentially women who are imprisoned in this patriarchal society that feels threatened by their rebellion, even their mere wish to exist. The gothic inhabits places, houses, rooms. Karen Chase has underlined the gothic architecture of Thornfield, especially its interminable corridors, its multiple doors. The house strikes Jane on her arrival with its gothic features: battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing tenants were now on the wing (…) an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion’s designation (…) hills (…) seeming to embrace Thornfield with a seclusion I had not expected to find existent so near the stirring locality of Millcote. (JE, 84)

Thornfield is the shrine of memory, of a past haunting the present. The house is isomorphic with its inhabitants, and especially Bertha Rochester, Rochester’s mad wife whom he hides from the world to keep up appearances and a simulacrum of order: “the glamour of inexperience is over your eyes (…) you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs” (JE, 183–184). All that glitters is not gold. Rochester does nothing to undeceive Jane because it would—so to speak— “rock the house”. Theatrical metaphors are legion in the text: thick curtains, (as in the red room) which can help hide or stifle secrets, or the tapestry which hides the door leading to the attic and which Rochester lifts up, but only partly: “the tapestry was now looped up in one part” (JE, 178). Jane’s stay in the red room ends with her fainting, as if a curtain was falling: “unconsciousness closed the scene” (JE, 14), another common point with gothic heroines overwhelmed by emotions: “Fainting is the point of physical submission”.14 Jane is convinced she has seen her dead uncle’s ghost. In life he would undoubtedly have stood up for her against the enemy—that is his own wife—but that imagined prospect quickly gives way to her fear of the ghost: “This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realised” (JE, 13). Ghosts and spectres haunt the narrative (Charlotte Brontë was known to be very superstitious). Bertha Rochester herself, whom Jane cannot describe or identify with precision, is like a gothic ghost. During the month preceding her wedding, Rochester covers Jane with presents, which she resents. She feels anxious, her nights are full of nightmares, to the point that she would like to postpone the wedding. The day before, she dreams of Thornfield in ruins. That is as she will see it when she returns, before receiving Bertha’s visit, who has already manifested her presence with her shouts, her laughs and her “vampiromaniac” attacks. This episode which follows the two premonitory dreams hinges upon two key moments: Bertha’s appearance (or apparition), the veil and Jane’s fainting (an echo

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and repetition of her first fainting in the red room). Bertha’s appearance is more like an apparition: the dream is close to reality, and reality looks more like a dream or a nightmare and Bertha is more like a nightmare herself with her bulging Fuselian eyes. The moon, a stereotypical gothic element, turns candle in Jane’s “nightmare”. Jane’s suppositions (she desperately tries to reassure herself by choosing Sophie as a probable candidate) are all invalidated. The intruder’s mysterious presence is announced by a rustling before materializing into “a form”: the indefinite article and the very word testify to the difficulty of defining her: “It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet or shroud, I cannot tell” (JE, 242). Bertha—or what she wears—is defined negatively. She (literally) “comes out of the closet” like a skeleton in the cupboard, taking Jane’s veil which Jane also sees as a ghost: “the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained” (JE, 235). Jane’s reification of Bertha echoes Rochester’s: Bertha is in- or an-human, a spectre, a vampire, a monster. When Rochester tells Jane about their trip back to England, he uses that very word: “such a monster in the vessel” (JE, 264), a Frankensteinian gigantic creature who attacks her husband in the attic. As in the red room, a sudden paroxysm overwhelmed Jane: “first, surprise, then bewilderment, came over me; and then my blood crept cold” (JE, 241), in imitation of death which anticipates her final fainting, another echo to chapter XX when Jane hears Bertha’s shout for the first time: “My pulse stopped: my heart stood still; my stretched arm was paralysed” (JE, 175). In this scene, Jane’s definition of Bertha, preceded by an entreaty to Rochester begging him to confirm her story, is a quadruple negative: “Mr Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not Leah, it was not Mrs Fairfax” ending with: “it was not even that strange woman, Grace Poole” (JE, 241). It is as if Jane were working by elimination, from the least to the most likely person, without being able to find any satisfactory answer. Bertha is the Unheimliche, but there is a method in her madness, which Grace Poole will later confirm. The confirmation comes as a sort of warning on the wedding day: “She’s so cunning” (250). Here, as elsewhere, mysterious suspense is interfused with gothic symbolism: When mad Mrs Rochester, seen only as «the foul German spectre, - the Vampyre» – spreads terror at night, that is one thing: when, with the malicious insight that is the paradox of her madness, she tears the wedding veil in two and thus symbolically destroys the planned marriage, that is another thing, far less elementary as art.15

At this point in the novel, Rochester and Jane follow two separate paths, since he knows the secret that he cannot reveal lest it may destroy his plans. Jane is Rochester’s dupe and many (feminist) critics were shocked by her so easily forgiving him. If the series of anxious questions he asks Jane to check what she has exactly seen ends on this humorous note (an echo to the preceding reference to Much Ado): “Ghosts are usually pale, Jane” (JE, 242), his laugh is no doubt forced. Rochester has everything to lose. Jane’s efforts at trying to give him as exact an image of her vision as she can, are however very hesitant: she wavers between the “she” and the “it”, which reinforces the preceding difficulty at defining Bertha, or what she wears. Like Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights, who wonders about her husband, Heathcliff’s humanity

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(“Is Mr Heatchcliff a man?”16 ), Jane could wonder if Bertha is really a woman. Her hair, which resembles Jane’s watercolour and announces the final jump to death, evokes a (night)mare’s hair. Jane discovers Bertha’s face “through the looking glass”. The vampire, un-vampire like, does cast a reflection. This “mirror scene” is an echo to the scene in the red room where Jane saw a split, deformed image of herself. Mirrors in Jane Eyre lack their Lacanian function and deform the I. Many critics have seen Bertha as Jane’s monstrous double, her hidden, buried Mrs. Hyde, which enhances her gothic characteristics. According to Gilbert and Gubar, Bertha is “Jane’s hunger, rebellion and rage”17 . She could also be the coming-to-life of Jane’s watercolours: “the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy” (JE, 107). Jane insists on the horror the vision triggers: Bertha’s face is that of a vampire: “her bloodshot eyes, and the roll of the red eyes” (JE, 242). The insistence on the colour red links Bertha to passion and crime—or is it to the crime of passion? In Jane’s description, Bertha undergoes a process of inflation. She is so to speak “blackened”, as if to justify Rochester’s and everybody else’s disgust. Rochester justifies his imprisoning her on the pretext that she is a danger for the rest of a humanity to which she doesn’t seem to belong: “that demon’s vicinage is poisoned” (JE, 256). Like Jane at Lowood (when Brocklehurst forbid the other girls to come near her) but even more radically, (Bertha “out-others the other”), the fear is that of contamination. When Bertha takes Jane’s veil to put on her own head, before tearing it in two, she acts like a jealous wife who wants to oust the usurper: “She is a hybrid of poetic symbolism and human character”.18 With Jane’s veil on (veil is an anagram for evil), she could be reenacting her own wedding ceremony or parodying Jane’s, which should not be taking place. When she tears the veil and stamps on it, she proleptically destroys the illegal marriage. Or perhaps her gesture is to be interpreted as a warning to Jane to dissuade her from marrying Rochester or from marrying at all. Carl Plasa analyses nineteenth-century marriages as enslavement, which tallies with the game of charades formerly organized by Rochester and the play upon the word “Bridewell”: “Amidst this sordid scene sat a man with his clenched hands resting on his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground (…) As he moved, a chain clanked; to his wrists were attached fetters” (JE, 157). By symbolically, then literally, destroying Rochester and Jane’s union, Bertha forces him into revealing her so carefully hidden existence. With Jane’s veil on her head, she is no more familiar to Jane than her own face in the mirror on the wedding day: “a robed and veiled figure, so unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger” (JE, 244). Jane should remain Eyre. Bertha is an exacerbated, “uglified” version of an angry, passionate Jane. Charlotte Brontë’s Juvenilia were entitled Angria. Gilbert and Gubar think that, more than anything else, it is Jane’s anger that frightened the Victorian public, who felt threatened and destabilized by such a character. The attic, a room without a view, “womb or tomb” is the topical echo of the red room and as in the red room, Jane loses consciousness “for the second time in (her) life” (JE, 242), a faithful and frightening repetition of the first time, as if reality had once more become unbearable. By appropriating a veil that should be hers, Bertha symbolically lifts the veil upon Jane’s illusions, though for the time being, Jane remains in total darkness, because Rochester refuses to reveal the mystery: “since even you cannot explain to me the mystery of that awful visitant”

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(JE, 243). It is only after the aborted wedding that the truth will be out, destroying all her hopes: she will indeed wake up from her dream of happiness and find it not true. If the Thornfield “section” first follows an ascending positive movement, Rochester gradually becomes a dangerous figure. As a gothic place, Thornfield looks like its owner, isomorphism being part and parcel of the gothic dynamics. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Montoni is his castle, as much as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights: the house is anthropomorphized, taking on some (in)human features: “Even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words”.19 At Thornfield, Jane is aware of the house’s influence upon its owner, especially the mysterious third floor to which Rochester often glances: “his dark eyes darted sparks” (JE, 176), or again: “lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare, such as I never saw before or since” (JE, 121). His dark eyes link him to other gothic or romantic/Byronic heroes: “In Conrad’s form seems little to admire/Though his dark eyebrow shades a glance of fire”.20 Rochester borrows his dark falcon eyes from Zamorna, the Juvenilia’s hero. At the end of the novel, he is compared to an eagle. No wonder that he should be struck with blindness, as if his power of seduction had disappeared in the final arson. From a Freudian perspective, his blindness is but another form of symbolic castration. The portrait Jane makes of Rochester (Jane is an amateur artist, a talent she inherited from her creator who had thought of becoming a professional painter and who was also an adept of physiognomy and phrenology) evidences the power he exerts over her: “My master” (she confides to the reader) “strong features were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me: they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me – that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his” (JE, 149; my underlining). The term “fetters” recurs throughout the novel, be it in the game of charades orchestrated by Rochester or later in Jane’s relation with St John. Terry Eagleton21 had insisted on the sado–masochistic relationships in the Brontës’novels. The day after the aborted wedding, Rochester tells his whole story to Jane, his fascination for Bertha who was beautiful (the beauty has turned into beast after years spent in the attic) and her beauty was a fatal lure: “fair is foul”.22 That attic is a cage, from which the mad woman sometimes escapes, either with her shouts and laughs or even more directly, by going down to the lower floors to attack her husband-jailer or pay a visit to her rival. Each of Bertha’s movements demands a return movement from Rochester for whom each ascent to the attic is a descent into Hell, in a reversal of French philosopher Bachelard’s topology23 . Bachelard analyses the house as a human body with the attic/head as the superego, whereas the cellar would be the id, the seat of unleashed instincts. The house of Thornfield seems to have fallen on its head. It is like Bluebeard’s castle—the simile comes to Jane’s mind on her first visit. The Gothic is mixed with fairy tales. Bertha could be one of Bluebeard’s wives’ corpses, only more noisy. Her savage shouts (beginning of chapter XX) link her to an animal, or even worse, to something unknown, unimaginable: “What a cry!” (JE, 175). An indefinite shape, with indefinite clothes on, pays Jane a visit the day before the wedding. The fantastic must be defined by its indefinition, its uncertainty, its mystery. Bertha’s madness is never questioned and the reader, like Jane,

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has to accept Rochester’s diagnosis, which thus justifies her imprisonment. When Jane “pleads not guilty” for Bertha, Rochester refuses any extenuating circumstance. It is only 150 years later that Jean Rhys gives the mad woman a voice and a story in Wide Sargasso Sea,24 making Rochester the victimizer he was not in the Ur-text. The master of Thornfield is more “sinned against than sinning”,25 the victim of a family plot which aims at gaining a fortune denied to the second born by the law of primogeniture. Somewhat like nineteenth-century young women, Rochester was forced into a marriage to a woman he didn’t know and didn’t love. One could however wonder about his decision of imprisoning a woman who could have benefited from a hospital treatment. But that would have meant the impossibility of marrying another. Rochester’s plan demands the preservation of the secret. The whole house is built on lies. I’ve already pointed the recurrence of theatrical metaphors, emblematized by the game of charades and disguises. Rochester plays the Sultan with Blanche Ingram (the text has also been analysed from a post-colonial perspective).26 That metaphor is resumed later on by Jane, in a more ludic, ironical mode: Jane rebels against any form of patriarchal tyranny which forces women into submission, dependence or incarceration. It is through flight or death that women escape Rochester. Jane leaves him after the aborted wedding, refusing to become “a slave in a fool’s paradise” (JE, 306), which would become hell, looking for an anti-Rochester. St John might be a more seductive tyrant, but he is just as dangerous. If Rochester is on the side of fire, St John Rivers, be it because of his name, is on the side of water. But still waters (or rivers?) run deep. There is “fever in his vitals” (JE, 304), which makes him an oxymoric, complex character. The first months at Moorhouse are a relief from Thornfield, before St John starts imposing his iron will. He is associated with furious or frozen water: “the torrent of his will” (JE, 356), “his freezing spell” (JE, 339), which might engulf a less and less resistant Jane. Physically speaking, St John has nothing of a gothic hero, but his demands and severity towards Jane bear some resemblances: “He could (…) kill me” (JE, 350). St John is a “murderer by default”, who could kill Jane without shedding a single drop of her blood. Diana Rivers, his sister, is convinced of that, advising Jane not to follow him to India (an idea that Jane had evoked before as a joke to Rochester), lest she might “be grilled alive in Calcutta” (JE, 354). The flames that will kill Bertha are less exotic and less metaphorical. The danger embodied by St John becomes increasingly threatening when he insists on Jane marrying him and following him to India. If the ideal offered by Rochester was too passionate, transgressing morals and religion, St John’s is disembodied and transgresses the laws of humanity. The scene where he reiterates his proposal, with his hand on Jane’s head, as if to impose his will, takes place in a gothic atmosphere: “All the house was still (…) The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick” (JE, 357. This echoes Jane’s state in the red room, but this time the scene ends on a miraculous intervention that bears Rochester’s voice, which Jane hears in time. Some have judged this call as the improbable manifestation of a convenient Deus ex machina. Jane is in Wonderland, receiving a telegram from heaven. The narrator will defend herself against any accusation of superstition. Answering Rochester’s triple call, Jane goes back to Thornfield, which has been destroyed by fire. Rochester has found shelter at

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Ferndean, “far from the madding crowd”, in a distant, isolated place, where dense undergrowth goes hand in hand with the dereliction of the place: The manor house of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood (…) He would have let the house; but could find no tenant, in consequence of its ineligible, and insalubrious site (…) the windows were latticed and narrow, the front door was narrow, too, one step led up to it. The whole looked (…) ‘quite a desolate spot’. (JE, 366–367)

This is another gothic dwelling, Rochester’s and the novel’s last: “the grim, almost roadless forest surrounding Ferndean is more than a harrowing stage-set when it is also felt as a symbol of Rochester’s closed-in life”.27 It is in this isolated house, that had been judged as too insalubrious for Bertha, that Rochester lives alone, condemned by his handicaps to a reclusive life, like a wild beast, which could reinforce the comparison between him and Bertha, as if Bertha was the absolute criterion to judge all the other characters. The words used by the narrator associate him with Bertha: “a form”, “a figure” before he becomes “a caged eagle”, “a wronged and fettered wild beast, or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe” (JE, 367). He is as inhuman and animal-like as Bertha, as if imprisonment and isolation produced the same effects. The only difference is that Jane dares to approach the beast, however dangerous: “And, reader, do you think I feared him in his blind ferocity?” (JE, 367). Jane has to tame the wild animal she has come to deliver. Like Prometheus, Rochester is bound to his suffering and only Jane can rescue him. If the gothic pattern is respected in its traditional distribution of the parts all along the novel, where it is women who are locked up, it seems that a reversal is taking place at the end, which might have been announced on Jane and Rochester’s first meeting. If the gothic elements are regularly evoked in the novel, here it is the fairy tale that takes over. If Jane first thinks she hears a Prince Charming arriving on his black horse, preceded by a Gytrash, the fairy tale falls back into realism when the rider falls down from his horse and asks for Jane’s help: “Man and horse were down (…) ‘you must just stand on one side’” (JE, 96). “Gothic is constantly brought down to earth in Jane Eyre”.28 At the end of the novel, she does become his “prop and guide”, and literally the apple of his eye. By having wanted to help Bertha escape the fire, in one of his rare altruistic gestures, Rochester has lost an eye and an arm (it has cost him an arm). In his solitude and blindness, he has had time to meditate upon his condition and to discover God. The end is almost surprising in this respect: Rochester keeps on thanking God who has saved him. Charlotte Brontë has often been reproached with what was considered as too traditional an ending, all the more so as, as we know, the very last words of the text are St John’s who announces his imminent death. I would like to nuance this analysis, with which I agree but only partly. It is true that Jane becomes a traditional wife and mother, but she nonetheless upsets the conventional patterns. Her return to Rochester’s place could be read as the reversal of a traditional fairy tale: she is the Princess Charming, come to deliver her knight or the gothic hero-turned-gothic-heroine. When she arrives at Thornfield which has been devastated by the fire, she becomes the lover coming to deliver his mistress

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in distress: “A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank (…) He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone-dead” (JE, 361), a proleptic echo to “stoneblind” (JE, 365) that the inn-keeper mentions. If Rochester is not really locked up, like Jane at Gateshead and Lowood or Bertha at Thornfield, he lives a buried-in life to the point that Jane wonders on discovering Ferndean: “‘Can there be life here’?” (JE, 367). It is she who gives Rochester back his appetite for living. If some feminist critics regret this poor “gift” Jane gets at the end: an insalubrious place, a crippled husband, they however enjoy that Rochester should suffer the usual lot of women. Jane’s egalitarian claims—“equal, - as we are!” (JE, 216)—are finally realized. Jane is even more equal then Rochester: she is rich (the fairy tale takes on an economic dimension) and independent. The obstacles have all disappeared. The only reservation that Plasa convincingly underlines is that such an asocial marriage can be but utopian.29 All’s well that ends well. The heroine who, thanks to her perseverance, her prudence, and to Providence, has managed to escape her prisons and her jailers—the five stages in Jane’s life are like the stations of the Cross—has found her place at last and her partner, who might be a cripple but who is tamed. Ferndean is not the P(a)lace in fairy tales but it replaces the prestigious manor of Thornfield, the seat of burning passions. By setting fire to it, Bertha has killed herself as if the house had delivered and eliminated its too long-kept secret. If Brontë borrows some of the most obvious features of the Gothic—enclosed or isolated places, rooms without a view, mirrors, premonitory dreams—she uses the Gothic not as an end but as a means (to other ends), taking the genre as a springboard to something both different and new. Rather than an imitator, she is a creator: “Her novels take advantage of the potential of earlier Gothic novels to call into question the authority of narrative vision”.30 Her vision is a revision. If, like gothic heroines, Jane was under the yoke of gothic tyrants, she has managed to escape them, without any external help and even goes further, since the end testifies to her superiority in a reversal that some feminist critics, too quick to denounce an apparent conformism, have not sufficiently underlined: “Long live Jane Eyre!” Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

Simon Avery, “Some Strange and Spectral Dream’: The Brontës’ Manipulation of the Gothic Mode”, Brontë Society Transactions, 23.2, 1998, 120–135. Ibid., 121 (italics, the author’s). Laurence Talairach, “Charlotte Brontë’s Female Gothic: Thornfield Hall’s Second Story”, in Anglophonia, French Journal of English Studies, Caliban, PUM, Toulouse, 2004, 119–130. I tend to disagree with Simon Avery on this point as he says that “gothic only really plays a part in two of the five houses or institutions into which Jane enters” (126). The very word “institution” tends to prove self-contradictory. Sue Wolstenholme, Gothic (Re)Visions, State University of New York Press, 1993. Heilman, “Charlotte Brontë’s New Gothic”, in Jane Eyre, A Norton Critical Edition, Richard Dunn (ed), New York, London, 1971, 457–462.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Carl Plasa, Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism, St. Martin’s Press, London, 2000, 66. S.M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 351. Simon Avery, art.cit., 123–124. Jean Cocteau, Orphée, film, 1950. All references to Jane Eyre are from Richard Dunn’s A Norton Critical Edition, New York, London, 2001. “A mirror is also a sort of chamber, a mysterious enclosure in which images of the self are trapped like divers parchments”, in S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, op.cit., 341. Karen Chase, Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Methuen, New York and London, 1984, 78. Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge Women Writers to 1850, Macmillan Press, London and Basingstoke, 1982, 129. Heilman, art.cit., 459. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847, A Norton Critical Edition, New York and London, 1972, 115. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, Op. cit. Twitchell, The Living Dead, Duke University Press, 1981, 73. Emily Brontë, Op. cit., 13. Byron, The Corsair, 1814, Canto IX, 3–4, Wikisource. Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1975. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1623, I, 1, L.12. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace, PUF, Paris, 1957. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, Penguin Books, London, 1966. William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1608, 3:2, Wikisource. Peter Childes, An Introduction to Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999. Heilman, art.cit., 459. Simon Avery, art.cit, 126. Plasa, Op. cit., 81. Sue Wolstenholme, Op.cit., 57.

Bibliography Alexander, Christine, and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontë, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. Chase, Karen, Eros and Psyche the Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Methuen, New York and London, 1984.

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Childs, Peter, (ed) Post-colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999. Eagleton, Terry, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1975. Figes, Eva, Sex and Subterfuge Women Writers to 1850, Macmillan Press, London and Basingstoke, 1982. Gilbert, S., and Gubar, S., The Mad Woman in the Attic, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1979. Heilman, Robert, “Charlotte Brontë’s New Gothic”, in Jane Eyre, A Norton Critical Edition, Richard Dunn (ed), 1971. Plasa, Carl, Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification, Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, 2000. Shakespeare, William, King Lear, 1603 or 1606. Wikisource. Talairach, Laurence, “Charlotte Brontë’s Female Gothic: Thornfield Hall’s Second Story”, in Anglophonia, French Journal of English Studies, Caliban, PUM, 2004, 119–130. Twitchell, James, B., The Living Dead, Duke University Press, 1981. Wolstenholme, Sue, Gothic (Re)Visions, State University of New York Press, New York, 1993.

Journeys Through the English Haunted House Alicia Edwards-Boon

Who has not either seen or heard of some house, shut up and uninhabitable, fallen into decay, and looking dusty and dreary, from which, at midnight, strange sounds have been heard to issue—ariel knockings—the rattling of chains, and the groaning of perturbed spirits?—a house that people have thought it unsafe to pass after dark, and which has remained for years without a tenant, and which no tenant would occupy even were he paid to do so? There are hundreds of such houses in England in the present day …. which are marked with the mark of fear—places for the timid to avoid, and the pious to bless themselves at, and ask protection from, as they pass—the abodes of ghosts and evil spirits.1 —Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and Madness in the Crowd (1841)

Haunting was, indeed, endemic to the nineteenth century. The fervent interest in supernatural culture that pervaded Victorian consciousness may be to blame, but we can certainly ascribe its towering status, like Charles Mackay, to the production of literary haunted spaces. In The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, Owen Davies argues that ghost tourism did not come to fruition until the twentieth century2 ; a statement that may be accurate if we limit the totality of its definition to the commercialised practice ubiquitous in the United Kingdom today. Yet, to adopt this standard definition of ghost tourism dismisses the rich historical tradition of ghost tourism inspired by literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is, in short, to ignore the very cultural practices which, later, became absorbed and adopted by the modern tourism sector. Visibility is an essential precept of tourism. John Urry posits ‘anticipation’ as a requirement of tourism, an affect which may be constructed and sustained by popular cultural production.3 Additionally, as many places have little visual prominence, it is the role of literature to grant meaning to the hidden experiences that haunt the landscape.4 This chapter advocates for the crucial role the literary haunted house tale plays in codifying the Victorian haunted house as a gothic tourism landmark, and offers an historical case study of haunting—50

A. Edwards-Boon (B) Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_8

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Berkeley Square, London—to illustrate the correlation between the ghost story and nineteenth-century ghost tourism. Avid readers of ghostly tales may not have physically visited a haunted house, but they have undoubtedly made countless journeys through the haunted houses found in their stories; those places hung with the shadow of fear, those literary spaces of mysterious and sinister delight. We, as readers, are tourists of these gothic sites of reverie, and obviously take our adventures beyond the pages. To visit a haunted house is to participate in what Emma McEvoy defines as gothic tourism: tourism that is inextricably connected with gothic narrative. It is an intermedial cultural practice, McEvoy adds, that ‘plays to those already in the know’, those who possess knowledge of a specific body of texts, their tropes, narratives and conventions.5 Put simply, tourist encounters and performances are scripted by literary models.6 Thus in the nineteenth century, the ghost story served as the literary model to define the criterion of the haunted house, script its performance, and instigate the attachment of its textual horrors to the material environments of readers. Kevin Corstorphine aptly observes that the common motifs of haunted houses have been relatively unchanged for two millennia.7 While the haunted house precedes Gothic fiction proper and its antecedents featured in Latin writings, it was the nineteenth-century ghost story which supplied a set of distinct features, invented its own spatiality, and became the most popular gothic topos of the period.8 Hence, this chapter argues that the haunted house is an inherently textual phenomenon. Scholarship has given attention to the imaginary of the American haunted house but with the exception of Emma Liggins’s recent publication, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945, lacuni remain on matters of the English haunted house. This chapter will be a sustained meditation on the English haunted house tale within the context of literary and non-literary haunted house stories set across the English landscape. The spatiality of any given house is riddled with ambiguity. By definition, a house is a ‘building for habitation’.9 As such, its signification is not dependent on its architectural features but its social function. As a geometrical object, a house may come in many shapes that articulate a variety of meanings in the consciousness of the reader. As Dale Townshend argues, eighteenth-century gothic writing in its many forms ‘is nothing if not the writing of Gothic-architectural association, an imaginative, self-consciously “romantic” response to architecture’.10 A response the nineteenthcentury revival of the Gothic continued to build upon with a modest alteration: the Victorian haunted house tale is a ‘“romantic” response to architecture’ that writes, forges, and actively constructs these haunted edifices. Thus, Gothic literature is not only architect but interior designer, replete with the horrid scenes, sounds and scents of gothic effect and affect. Architecture as a literary object undergoes an imaginative “renovation” as authors use these sites as vessels for social anxieties and transgressions. In this literary exchange between the haunted house and the imagination, the supernatural is written into the architecture as part of a larger, richer, affective landscape.

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It is crucial to turn to Gaston Bachelard’s work on memory and domestic spaces to flesh out the imaginative construction of the haunted house. The psychoanalyticalcum-phenomenological study The Poetics of Space invites us to reconsider the domestic dwelling beyond its materiality. Bachelard advocates for an understanding of the house as a spatial microcosm which the individual experiences ‘in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thoughts and dreams’.11 The imagination—thoughts and dreams—according to Bachelard, augments the value of reality because it has precedence.12 For Bachelard, then, ‘space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. It mows and ploughs’.13 Space, in this instance, is an abstraction requiring interpretation. Hence, to think of a particular ‘space’ is to imbue it immediately with certain associations and interpretive meanings. For Bachelard, the house constitutes a body of images that we constantly reimagine. Each room is an interconnected space with its unique imaginaries that compare and contrast with the house and generic ‘houses’ as a category. The heterogeneity of each room is dependent on each individual’s imaginative arrangement of its narrative layout. For example, where the house in question is topographically located dictates its interior spatiality and imaginative furnishings.14 And yet, this house always has an origin, a point of genesis that becomes the blueprint or ‘first house’. It is because he grounds his paradigm of domestic space in the navigation and performance of material spaces, that it is possible to reconcile his approach with an imaginative gothic space. It is therefore significant that Bachelard accepts the role of literature as inspiration for our spaces of reverie when he assigns agency to books, or more broadly stories, to ‘give our day-dreams countless dwelling places’.15 When the house is treated as a dream space, we must also contend with the adjective ‘haunted’ as a modifier of its imagined spatial and material conditions. The two words are complex signs with variable meanings and connotations which Gothic literature engages and, to a certain extent, codifies. It is therefore useful to consider this gothic topos as an archetype, in the sense of Northrop Frye’s ‘specific learned associations which are communicable because a large number of people in a given culture are familiar with them’.16 These associations are a long-standing and meaningful collection of literary, architectural, iconographical, and sensory characteristics that combine to produce the cultural competence to navigate the haunted house. This imaginary is not necessarily unified, complete or stable, but a bricolage of textual sources combining and synthesizing to formulate the blueprint of the haunted house. The haunted house tale, then, participates in a semiological process of signifying the domestic space, scripting a series of prompts, settings, and cues. Ultimately, it is a natural extension of Bachelard’s dream space to a nightmare space of haunting and ghostly possesion. In his 1865 review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels and the novelty of sensation fiction, Henry James acknowledges the change in readers’ perception, suggesting ‘instead of the terrors of Udolpho’ the relocation to ‘cheerful country houses and busy London lodgings…were infinitely more terrible’.17 James’s commentary may have been made to render the gothic obsolete, but he effectively achieves the opposite by recognizing the ability of gothic effect to engulf and mutate familiar places and spaces, rendering them uncanny. Catherine Crowe in her The Night Side of Nature;

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Or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848), summarized two typical architectural forms of the Victorian English haunted house: Everybody has heard of haunted houses; and there is no country, and scarcely place, in which something of the sort is not known or talked of; and I suppose there is no one who, in the course of his travels, has not seen very respectable, good-looking houses shut up and uninhabited, because they had this evil reputation assigned to them. I have seen several such, for my own part; and it is remarkable that this mala fama does not always, by any means, attach itself to buildings one would imagine more obnoxious to such a suspicion. For example, I never heard of a ghost being seen or heard in Haddon Hall, the most ghostly of houses; nor in Holyrood, nor in many other antique, mysterious-looking buildings, where one might expect them, whilst sometimes a house of a very prosaic aspect remains uninhabited, and is ultimately allowed to fall to ruin for no other reason, we are told, than that nobody can live in it.18

Crowe’s observation sheds light on the dyad of the haunted house topos: the antiquated ancestral home and the more modern prosaic building found in urban areas and suburbs. Each dwelling as a haunted house codifies a peculiar and fully intertextual spatial imaginary. The antiquated ancestral home, ostensibly a commonly presented haunted space, is a foundational supernatural locale in Victorian writing. For Charles Dickens, ‘There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and dismal state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years’.19 A powerful emblem of longevity, the great country houses adorning the English landscape are unique microcosms for supernatural possession and were adopted in the earliest ghost stories such as Sir Walter Scott’s ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ (1828). The country house serves as a medial setting in the shift from feudal and wild landscapes of earlier Gothic fiction, easily accommodating many similar characteristics from the great gothic ruins of England and continental Europe. In the opening paragraph of Albert Smith’s ‘A Real Country Ghost Story’ (1846), the narrator remarks how the narrative unfolds to form a fitting addition to the repertoire of unaccountable romances, which, taken from the pages of Glanville and Aubrey…induce dread when retiring to rest and cause a yearning for modern apartments.20

The narrator’s nod to the Radcliffean romance complements David Punter’s remarks that the ghost story is indebted to themes and styles of earlier gothic writings.21 The genre draws upon well-established supernatural tropes, and more, a highly visual and spatial writing style that is deployed to mirror the language of gothic affect. The use of a common vernacular of haunting contributed to the weak boundaries between literary ghost stories and the accounts of ‘real’ haunting. Andrew Smith notes the striking similarity between spiritualist writing and supernatural literature, remarking that ‘the culture of spiritualism played an important part in shaping a language of spectrality which in turn informed literary representations of ghosts’.22 For example, the impetus for Crowe’s work is a ‘higher aim than merely to afford amusement’23 ; to engage readers in a worthy cause of evidencing the supernatural. This is not to say the work is immune to interjections of spectacle, entertainment and literary flare. One story about a house in St. J—Street, though written in a matterof-fact tone, reads like a literary ghost story. In the tale, workmen were hired to

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complete repairs on a house that had stood empty for a considerable amount of time. When the rest of the men were away at dinner, the master tradesman went to inspect the progress on the building, ‘he heard a man’s foot behind him’, when ascending the stairs.24 Although he was alone, he still heard someone or something following him. Feeling rather queer, he retreated to the drawing-room ‘where a fire had been lighted, and wishing to combat the uncomfortable sensation that was creeping over him’, he took hold of a chair, and drawing it resolutely along the floor, he slammed it down upon the hearth with some force, and seated himself in it; when, to his amazement, the action, in all its particulars of sound, was immediately repeated by his unseen companion, who seemed to seat himself beside him on a chair as invisible as himself. Horrorstruck, the worthy builder started up and rushed out of the house.25

Despite Crowe’s efforts to mark her text’s difference from purely entertainment-based stories, she can escape neither the effect nor the affect of its expression. Many of the ‘real’ accounts of haunting replicated the patterns and strategies of contemporaneous popular literature. Correspondingly, literary ghost stories incorporated models of spiritualism or were used as a conduit for the authors’ own supernatural enquiries, such as the writings of Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Just as those in the eighteenth century could ‘know’ gothic castles imbued with horror and terror, so too did the readers of ghost stories immerse themselves in sites of haunting. In many cases, writers of the Victorian ghost story mimicked the painterly images of their gothic predecessors, producing literary scenes of rich visuality and dimensionality, to coax a reader’s imagination to develop an architectural imaginary. The resulting mental map of the specific haunted house manifests as a gothic narrative which deploys vivid imagery to spark both the imagination and distinct spatiality. Ghost stories tend to dedicate a significant portion of the narrative to mapping out the landscape and its major landmarks. For example, in Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Open Door’(1882), the narrator, Theophilus Edlyd, volunteers to solve the mystery of the open door and remedy the ailing property value. Edlyd describes his first visit to the idyllic Ladlow Hall, as he walks up the avenue ‘bordered by rows of the most magnificent limes’he had ever beheld, as follows26 : It was a long avenue, but at length I stood in front of the Hall—a square, solid-looking, old fashioned house, three stories high, with no basement; a flight of steps up the principal entrance; four windows to the right of the door, four windows to the left; the whole building flanked and backed with trees; all the blinds pulled down, a dead silence brooding over the place: the sun westering behind the great trees studding the park.27

The narrator’s observations sketch the major architectural features of the house and their placement. This information permits readers to speculatively sketch the Hall in their imagination. Later, from the attic window, he gives the reader a panoramic account of the surrounding landscape: Leaning out of one, I could see, that to the right of the Hall the ground, thickly planted, shelved down to a stream, which came out into the daylight a little distance beyond the plantation, and meandered through the deer park. At the back of the Hall the windows looked out on nothing save a dense wood and a portion of the stable-yard, whilst on the side

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nearest the point from whence I had come there were spreading gardens surrounded by thick yew hedges, and kitchen-gardens protected by high walls; and further on a farmyard, where I could perceive cows and oxen, and, further still, luxuriant meadows, and fields glad with waving corn.28

The description of the surrounding environs functions akin to a picturesque landscape painting. Through language, the narrator surveys the landscape, curating its topographical features which, in turn, guide the reader’s ‘gaze’ to perceive a specific image of the landscape in their imagination. After dimensionalizing the exterior of the home, the narrator moves to the interior. The iconic ‘chamber scene’ of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction was swiftly adopted as the most common space of supernatural encounter in the ghost story. By confining the supernatural to a single room, the writer invites the reader to step into the textual space. Many stories rendered these textual spaces in precise detail. Edyld narrates that the ‘good-sized room’, measured twenty by twenty, and confirms, ‘I knew because I paced it afterwards’.29 Yet, not all authors implemented such matter-of-fact methods of description to detail domestic spaces. Some authors relied on the imaginative labour of the readers to supplement the nuances and subtleties of the scene. In the anonymously published story ‘Mabel’ (1849), for example, the resonant apartment is vividly constructed in this manner. On a Christmas visit with his with friend at Hazelwood manor, the narrator is put up in a room that is very seldom used. The room was behind an ‘arched door, studded thickly with nails’, opened by an iron ring and latch.30 Behind the imposing door was ‘a large irregular bed-room’, its dreariness relieved by a cheering wood fire in an old-fashioned chimney beneath a heavy mantelpiece, ‘where the arms of the original proprietor of the mansion had been rudely carved’. ‘Whitewash was the cold covering of the walls’, and in many places had peeled off the mouldings on door-joints and window frames. On the large square bed were yellow merino hangings, ‘a chilling colour, with plain, moth-eaten valences, cut into many a curve and scallop’, and elevated with decorative lace trimmings. ‘An old fashioned toilet hung round with point lace, a more modern washing-stand, and some carved oak chairs with high upright cane backs, completed the furniture of the room’.31 Through an arched doorway on the far side of the room, our narrator finds himself in a small turret chamber, ‘greatly dilapidated, with a narrow arched window, through the broken panes of which the clustering ivy had intruded, and now crept along the interior wall, giving it an air of strange desolation’.32 Although the mental map of ‘Mabel’ is not as precise as ‘The Open Door’, it is not any less evocative. In both cases, but to varying degrees, the gothic imagination modifies objects observed by the narrator according to its own set of spatial assumptions. Essentially, spatial imaginaries are the product of this entanglement of text and the reader’s intertextual contribution to generate a cohesive image of the story space. The gothic narrator’s observations not only contour the material conditions of the story space but evoke the ambience of the space through their sensory and emotive assessment of the room. For instance, the narrator’s portrayal of the room as ‘dreary’ or its furnishings, like the bed hangings, as being a ‘chilling colour’ of merino yellow attributes affective qualities to cue the reader to make specific inferences. The chamber can resonate as a gothic space because of the narrator’s

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perceptions of his environment; he too is conscious of the intertextual associations elicited by the room. Even before he encounters the ghost, the narrator was swept with a fear of gothic possibility in the dark recesses beyond the bed, feeling ‘an undefined apprehension of seeing spectral and appalling forms start forth from the gloom’.33 This effect is identified by critic Anthony Vidler as the ‘architectural uncanny’, a state of projection that elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal and presents a slippage between waking and dreaming.34 For Vidler, the sense of foreboding gloom is not solely a marker of the material conditions but potentially an attribution of the narrator’s fantasies.35 The ‘novelty and Gothic gloom’ apprehended by the narrator is the consequence of a codified literary response to the story space that the reader simultaneously is being tutored to replicate.36 Although the stories above provide us with an initial consideration of the spatial writing style of the ghost story, the role of the narrator as ‘eye’/I—the gothic lens for the reader—can be fleshed out further. The spatiality of the ghost story is not just delivered by means of a resonant static image but can also take on an ambulatory narrative style, a common feature in nineteenth-century writing.37 Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852) is an example par excellence of how readers are drawn into the text as participants in a literary tour of gothic space. Hester, the old nurse, recounts her explorations of Furnivall Manor: When we drove up to the great front entrance, and went into the hall I thought we should be lost—it was so large, and vast, and grand. There was a chandelier all of bronze, hung down from the middle of the ceiling…Then, at one end of the hall, was a great fire-place….and by it were heavy, old-fashioned sofas. At the opposite end of the hall, to the left as you went in—on the western side—was an organ built into the wall….Beyond it, on the same side, was a door; and opposite, on each side of the fire-place, were also doors leading to the east front; but those I never went through as long as I stayed in the house, so I can’t tell you what lay beyond.38

If a tour can be defined as ‘a description of space from the point of view of a moving, embodied observer who visits locations in a temporal sequence’, Hester takes on a dual role of storyteller and tour guide in the preceding passage.39 Nicola Watson, in her study of literary tourism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, foregrounds how as tourism models literary texts, texts can model tourism.40 The reader accompanies Hester as she walks ‘out of that great drawing-room, and into another sitting-room, and out of that, and then up a great flight of stairs, and along a broad gallery’.41 In effect, Hester takes the reader on an immersive tour. The ambulatory nature of Gaskell’s writing offers readers the opportunity to perform ‘arm-chair tourism’, whereby, from the comforts of their armchair, the reader participates in the dual act of reading and travelling through the textual spaces.42 Language serves as the extended, curated, sensory limb of the eye and body of the narrator to conceptualize Furnivall Manor. Just as Bachelard can imaginatively visit the medieval towers through reading, we too enter and tour Furnivall Manor. Thus, we have the preliminary stages of gothic tourism: textually traversing immersive textual gothic spaces. The ghost story’s enduring status as a source of delectable horror and terror is predicated on its ability to adapt to modern edifices and mould itself to the

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affairs of the epoch. From the 1850s to the 1870s, for example, supernatural short stories formulating a subgenre of urban haunted house tales flooded the literary market.43 Ghosts seamlessly blended into modern life. As ‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’ (1862) boasts, ‘ruined castles have given way to railway stations: trackless forests to the streets of cities; and ghosts in armour are as much out of fashion as mail coaches’.44 The new ghostly scenarios founded in the urban haunted house tale were those of the city, to borrow from Robert Mighall, ‘its terrors derive from situations peculiar to, and firmly located within, the urban experience’.45 The adoption of modern urban dwellings as locales for ghost stories required authors to translate or modernise conventions of the isolated ancestral manor. Ultimately, situating the supernatural in urban settings like London required a delicate balance of utilising geographical referents to anchor the story convincingly to the contemporaneous city, whilst maintaining enough ambiguity to evoke the terror conventions inherent to the genre. Writers of urban ghost stories use the same methods to imbue the modern cityscape with gothic layers of signification, suturing scenarios of fear to known geographies. Realism is a hallmark of the Victorian ghost story and authors used many of its conventions. Yet, in lieu of exhaustive descriptions to guide the mental image, authors used proper names and referenced familiar places to further impress a correspondence between the story space and the material city.46 Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novella The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, the House and the Brain (1859) situates the house ‘on the north side of Oxford Street, in a dull but respectable thoroughfare’.47 Notwithstanding the deliberate use of a major London street, other locations in the story are veiled through common realist conventions, when, for example, it is mentioned that the owner of the property lives ‘in G— Street, No. –’, near the haunted house in question.48 A conspicuous geographical name, Oxford Street, marks the general locale and the censored street name with a vague report of its exterior features to conceal the exact location. A mixture of precise detail and ambiguous generality is integral to the narrative style of modern haunted house tales. Mirroring Hester, the narrator of The Haunted methodically recounts his investigation of the house with his fearless servant F— and loyal bull terrier, in search of the supernatural. First, they visit ‘the subterranean apartments, the kitchen and other offices’, and the cellars. Finding no trace of supernatural habitation, they proceed to ‘a gloomy little back-yard, with very high walls’. Then, remounting the stairs, they ‘entered the rooms on the ground floor, a dining parlour, a small back-parlour, and a still smaller third room’, concluding their walkthrough by visiting the drawing-rooms, ‘which seemed fresh and new’.49 Again, the narrator reports a general layout of the story space. Though in contradistinction to Hester’s account, many of its apartments are nondescript; the intricacies of the house remain absent and left open to reader interpretation. The backyard is granted a pithy description that evokes the larger qualities of a Victorian industrial city: damp, covered with dust and smoke-grime, there are no architectural features of this characteristically dismal yard that appear particularly germane to the typical haunted house.50 However, the narrator does deviate from his nondescript observations when remarking on the bedchamber he occupied. The room was

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a large one, with two windows fronting the street. The four-posted bed, which took up no inconsiderable space, was opposite to the fire, which burned clear and bright; a door in the wall to the left, between the bed and the window, communicated with the room which my servant appropriated to himself…On either side of my fireplace was a cupboard, without locks, flushed with the wall, and covered with the same dull-brown paper.51

Much like ‘The Open Door’, the exposition of the bedroom produces a floorplan of the room, with no mention of aesthetic or affective qualities. Bulwer-Lytton’s limited description tasks the reader to imaginatively furnish the room using this criterion of features to structure their mental image. Architectural features such as doors, windows, and fireplaces are made clear but décor, scents, lighting, and overall affective impressions are determined by imaginative interpretation. This is an underpinning principle that defines gothic spaces; those spaces of unease and anxiety constructed through rich intertextual assumptions and associations. It is this exchange between story space and the repository of readers’ intertextual associations that is the basis of literary tours through any space, lived or fictional. In the nineteenth-century, ghosts even took possession of modern villas and semidetached residences, dwellings lamented as ‘antagonistic to the supernatural’ in ‘The Ghost of Laburnum Villa’ (1870).52 Instead of drawing heavily on assumptions and preconceptions of haunted spaces supplied by the Gothic, the gothic effect is supplied by the architectural uncanny. Such is the case in the anonymously published ‘The Story of Clifford House’ (1878), where the anxieties of antisocial and amoral characters masked by the façade of middle-class respectability is the crux of the story. Clifford House, an opulent, yet uncharacteristically inexpensive, London mansion is rented by a family who tires of their country home. It is ‘a very fine house, both as to exterior and interior appearances’; a ‘large, massively built’ dwelling that is ‘in excellent repair, and the locality all that could be desired’ to spend the season in the city. With its ‘wide, lofty apartments’, handsome dining-room ‘panelled in velvety dark-green “flock” and gold’, an equally handsome drawing-room ‘panelled in pale cream-colour and gold’, along with airy bedchambers.53 First impressions do not connote any insidious features but, instead, detail a home that appeals to refined urban tastes. The narrator’s experience of the interior space is what exposes the threat lurking in Clifford House. As she explores the house, ‘the suites of rooms and long silent corridors, with their doors ajar, as if unseen inhabitants were stealthily crouching behind them’, possess her with a ‘sense of dull desolation’.54 The modern façade of this domestic city dwelling conceals its sinister otherworldly inhabitants. Thus, a new signifier of the haunted house emerged: a chronically untenanted house or a house of aspirant domesticity offered for a pittance. The paucity of information about the house’s exterior in both The Haunted and ‘The Story of Clifford House’ deserves pause. Unlike the graphic accounts of the grand ancestral seats, the narrator of urban haunted house stories reveals little, if any, of the identifying features of the exterior. The material conditions of London may account for this: the expansion and renovation of London brought on the deindividuation of London’s architecture, particularly in its suburbs, and imposed a uniform aesthetic appearance. The expanding cityscape saturated with these ‘prosaic’ houses, as Crowe mentions, meant any house now had gothic possibility. This trait of the

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urban ghost story adds a degree of uncanniness to the everyday world of the reader, especially those curious to the referent house that inspired the haunting or those who inhabit a house closely matching the one depicted in the story. Clearly, descriptions that are malleable by readers’ perceptions of their lived spaces are deliberately used in the ghost story to intensify affect. According to Julia Briggs, the ghost story is a testament to the power of the imagination. Mere words, whether orally transmitted or transcribed on the page, can cause their audience to reproduce the they describe: ‘once we are in the grip of the narrative, the heartbeat speeds up, the skin sweats or prickles, and any unexpected noise will cause the reader to jump’.55 The ghost story, for certain individuals, can impose an affectual imprint, linking fictional events of haunting to the emotion of fear. In the grip of this fear, the reader’s material environment, even for a moment, is subject to dislocation and becomes an extended setting for the textual haunting. Certainly, fear can be amplified when stories mirror, or at least can be perceived to parallel, the environment of the reader. The ghost story’s ability to captivate the imagination and alter readers’ perceptions had real-life ramifications. The omission of recognizable exterior features on the house may be the result of authors circumventing legal consequences. In their study of the supernatural, historians Owen Davies and Karl Bell have brought to light a number of cases where representation blurred with reality. The historical cases documented by both Davies and Bell demonstrate the potential material effects of ghost stories such as devaluing a house’s market-value, as narrated in ‘The Story of Clifford House’. In fact, the apprehension of having a home carry an association of haunting initially became a major obstacle for the Society for Psychical Research which, after its founding in 1882, sought to establish a committee investigating haunted houses. Geoffrey Gilbert notes the committee’s difficulties in acquiring information stemmed from the owners of the homes being reluctant to make the general public aware of any manifestations of the supernatural, as it may impair the value of the property.56 There are, of course, some exceptions. Not all urban ghost stories omitted exterior detail to obscure, conceal or suppress associations with existing buildings in the city, nor did all urban ghost stories take place in modern apartments. Authors who set their stories in London’s former ancestral homes had greater liberties to textually construct their haunted houses. The ghostly events in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘The Haunted House of Westminster’, later retitled ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’ (1872), for example, takes place in a lodging house that was once an old family mansion in Westminster built in the reign of James I. In his story, the narrator describes a house which ‘receded some feet from the line of the other houses’, ‘built of dark red brick’, with its door and windows ‘faced with stone that had turned yellow by time’. The distinctive accents include ‘a florid and fanciful rail of iron about the broad steps’ and ‘two immense “extinguishers”, like the canonical caps of fairies’ fixed under ‘a file of lamps among scrolls and twisted leaves’.57 While the minimal description may not match the evocative writing in the stories of the country estates discussed earlier, it still conveys several characteristics and features to define the exterior appearance of the house commonly omitted in urban haunted house tales. In such cases, allusion triggers the gothic imagination: by telling the reader the historical period in which

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the house was constructed, or the colour of the building, or the position of the house in relation to others on the street, or even its distinctive accents, an evocative mental map is generated. It is, therefore, significant that the story consciously acknowledges the curtailment of discussing haunted houses. The narrator expresses that it had been in excess of thirty years since his last visit to the house, and during the years that have since past, he notes, ‘I hear that improvement, with its preliminary demolitions, has been doing wonders for the quarter of Westminster’ where the house reportedly stood. If he was certain the house too was subject to demolition, he would have no misgivings in naming the street in which it stood. Still, he continues, ‘As what I have to tell, however, is not likely to improve its letting value, and as I should not care to get into trouble, I prefer being silent on that particular point’.58 Surely, the ‘trouble’ inferred here gestures to the anxiety of liability if found culpable for engendering a house with a haunted reputation. Despite the authors’ best efforts, some haunted house tales served as the inspiration for ‘real-life’ haunted houses. In this period, touring haunted houses as the ‘arm-chair tourist’ developed into a burgeoning tourist industry when readers sought out these Gothic abodes in situ. John Ingram, in the preface to his popular proto-haunted guidebook The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1884) states: ‘Many historic tales of apparitions and supernaturally disturbed dwellings are imbedded in British literature’ and are frequently alluded to in periodicals and other publications.59 But, the relationship between historic haunted houses and British literature was reciprocal. Literature was not only the inspiration for haunted houses but, in certain cases, the was cause of ‘disturbed dwellings’. Julian Wolfreys suggests that the haunted house is a site of structural dislocation.60 I argue, instead, that it is a site of ‘imaginative’ dislocation: to marry the material and textual worlds is an interpretive act of reading. Undeniably, the architectural imaginary is a spatial text, but all space is inherently supplementary, a text to be read. Ghost stories and associated literatures supply readers with a set of criteria by which they may ‘read’ and, subsequently, perform their spatial environments. An exploration of an exemplary haunted house case study, the infamous London haunted house, 50 Berkeley Square, will evidence the extent to which literary haunting has extraliterary repercussions. Tucked away in the affluent area of London’s West End is Berkeley Square wherein stands a series of beautiful townhouses. A prestigious area, housing some of the city’s most famous political and literary figures in the eighteenth century, the West End accumulated its share supernatural enquiry the following century. The mystery of 50 Berkeley Square captivated the Victorian imagination during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In fact, the enigmatic 50 Berkeley Square sparked extensive debates in Notes and Queries, inspired poetry and prose, and became a site of gothic tourism that ‘was long one of those things that no country cousin come up from the provinces to London on sight-seeing bent ever willingly missed’.61 The perception of the house as an edifice of supernatural spectacle is wholly indebted to the potency of the haunted house tale in the popular imagination. Public curiosity was instigated by a correspondence first published on 9 November 1872 in Notes and Queries, by a person with the initials H.A.B. In their enquiry on haunted houses, they ask: ‘Is there a house in Berkley[sic] Square (London) with

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this [haunted] repute, as I have been informed?’62 A week later, a guarded response by Lord Lyttelton confirmed that the house was vacant and very much haunted, ominously concluding ‘there are strange stories about it, into which this deponent cannot enter’.63 The intended purpose of his cryptic message remains unknown, but from 1872 until 1881, Notes and Queries was thronged with speculations, research findings, polemics and plausible explanations to dissuade further fancies. For a few years, communication on the matter ceased, leaving several unanswered questions to the source of its haunted reputation. Then, in August 1879, a cutting from Mayfair magazine, 10 May 1879, submitted by W. E. Howlett offered an explanation. The anonymously authored snippet discloses a convoluted story with three central facets: a haunted room in ‘which the atmosphere is supernaturally fatal to the body and the mind’; the walls of the house, when touched, are saturated with ‘electric horror’, whose outside shows to have been ‘given up to the ghost and decay’; and third, the mysterious behaviour of its occupants that involves an unknown person bi-annually visiting the home, seeking solitude in the haunted room.64 Additionally, and most crucially to our concerns here, the haunted room is the reported setting where a girl went mad ‘and never recovered sanity enough to tell how or why’, and a gentleman who disbelieved in ghosts, ‘dared to sleep in it, and was found a corpse in the middle of the floor, after frantically ringing for help in vain’.65 There are multiple reasons as to how and why No.50 was primed for supernatural association, namely its dilapidated condition and the rumoured eccentricities of its owner, gothic possibilities that were commandeered by the literary imagination. In December 1880, a correspondent in Notes and Queries noted marked similarities with Rhoda Broughton’s ‘The Truth the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth’, first published in Temple Bar in 1868, and anthologized in Tales for Christmas Eve (1872), later Twilight Stories (1873).66 The epistolary ghost story is comprised of correspondence between two friends, Cecilia Montresor and Elizabeth de Wynt. In the letters, amid trivial exchanges and effusions of friendship, is an elated declaration at the procurement of, ‘a compartment of Heaven’, 32—Street, Mayfair, an ideal dwelling furnished to the highest standard of taste and comfort on the market, leasing for an absurdly affordable price, to be tenanted by Cecilia.67 Broughton’s tale corresponds with the events raised in the Mayfair excerpt. In the literary tale, a young housemaid falls victim to the unknown terror and is ‘plagued by a state of violent madness’. Then, a gentleman named Ralph Gordon suffers greatly for his scepticism after volunteering to stay the night in the room; he drops down dead after exclaiming, ‘Oh, my God! I have seen it!’.68 Subtle nuances occur between the two versions, but Broughton’s piece appears to be the source material. The association between Broughton’s narrative and 50 Berkeley Square was so prolific that the author intervened to rectify the confusion. The following letter was published in Notes and Queries in February 1881: Dear Sir, – You are mistaken in supposing that my story has anything to do with the socalled Berkeley Square Mystery. Its incidents happened, as I was told by my informant, in the country, and I clothed it in fictitious characters and transposed it to London, which I have since regretted, as so many people have thence assumed that it must refer to the house in Berkeley Square. The slip you enclose is clearly my story mistakenly applied to a wrong

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house. I am sorry to be unable to assist you in your search, but I can at least divert you from the wrong track. Yours faithfully, R.BROUGHTON.69

Broughton’s words summarise the entire concern of this chapter. The literary techniques used to imbue verisimilitude tactically elide the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ostensibly fictitious. Moreover, the highly spatial form of the ghost tale effectively tutors the masses to collectively conceptualise and, therefore, perceive the gothic possibilities of the haunted house in their quotidian lives. This intertextual performance—this gothic reverie inspired by literature—of the architectural uncanny is at the heart of Victorian ghost tourism. The haunted house tale is what Dean MacCannell terms a ‘marker’, a cultural product that makes tourist sites recognizable.70 Ghost stories are a series of spatial events which are vulnerable to transmutation, interpretation, and appropriation. The misinterpretation of the referent site goes to prove the instability of the haunted house tale as a concrete geographical marker but speaks volumes to its role as an imaginative one. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and Madness in the Crowd (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1869), 217. Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 67. John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourism Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011), 4. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 162. Emma McEvoy, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5, 201. Catherine Spooner, Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of ‘Happy Gothic’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 166. Kevin Corstophine, ‘“The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die”: Masculinity, Power and Control in The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House’ in Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing eds., Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016), 111–126, 111. Anthony Vidler, Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (London: MIT Press, 1992), 17. ‘House’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, https://www-oed-com.mmu.idm. oclc.org/view/Entry/87869#eid1481896 [accessed July 23, 2019]. Dale Townshend, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2019), 51. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 5. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 25. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 102.

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17. Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, The National (1865), 593–594, 594. 18. Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.), 95. 19. Charles Dickens, ‘A Christmas Tree’ in Alastair Gunn, The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 2 (UK: Wimbourne Books, 2018), 18–33, 29. 20. Albert Smith, ‘A Real Country Ghost Story’ in Alan Grove ed., The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Vol. 2 (Richmond: Valancourt Books, 2017), 17–25, 17. 21. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1996), 2. 22. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 97. 23. Crowe, Night Side, 7. 24. Ibid., 96. 25. Ibid., 96. 26. Charlotte Riddell, ‘The Open Door’ in E. F. Bleiler ed., The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J.H. Riddell (New York: Dover, 1977), 38–67, 50. 27. Ibid., 51. 28. Ibid., 52. 29. Ibid., 53. 30. Anonymous, ‘Mabel’ in Alastair Gunn, The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 3 (UK: Wimbourne Books, 2018), 49–63, 50. 31. Ibid., 51. 32. Ibid., 52. 33. Ibid., 51. 34. Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 11. 35. Ibid., 17. 36. Anonymous, ‘Mabel’, 52. 37. Lynda Nead, Victortian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 57. 38. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ in Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert eds., The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–18, 3–4. 39. Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz-Axaryahu, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 8–9. 40. Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4–5,12. 41. Gaskell, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, 4. 42. Watson, The Literary Tourist, 170. 43. Sharon Marcus, ‘The Haunted London House, 1840–1880’, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 83–132, 116. 44. Anonymous, ‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’, The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May, 1862), 3.

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45. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 30. 46. Marcus, Apartment Stories, 121. 47. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters; or the House and the Brain (Chicago: Rajput Press, 1911), 5. 48. Ibid., 6. 49. Ibid., 16–18. 50. Ibid., 17. 51. Ibid., 20–21. 52. Anonymous, ‘The Ghost at Laburnum Villa’ in Alastair Gunn ed., The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 3 (UK: Wimbourne Books, 2018), 145–157, 145. 53. Anonymous, ‘The Story of Clifford House’ in Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 218–238, 218. 54. Ibid., 219. 55. Julia Briggs, ‘The Ghost Story’ in David Punter ed., A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 122–131, 124. 56. Geoffrey Gilbert, ‘The Origins of Modernism in the Haunted Properties of Literature’ in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell eds., The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239–257, 239. 57. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’ in Robert Tracy ed., In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83–118, 87. 58. Ibid., 86–87. 59. John Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Britain (London: Gibbings & Company Ltd., 1897), v. 60. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 7. 61. George Harper, Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural; With Some Account of Hereditary Curses and Family Legends (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907), 94. 62. H.A.B., ‘Haunted Houses’, 4.10, Notes and Queries (9 November 1872), 372– 373. 63. Lyttelton, ‘Haunted Houses’, 4.10, Notes and Queries (16 November 1872), 399. 64. W.E. Howlett, ‘The Mystery of Berkeley Square’, 5.12, Notes and Queries (2 August 1879), 87–88. 65. Ibid., 87. 66. Clarry, ‘The Mystery of Berkeley Square’, 6.2, Notes and Queries (4 December 1880), 452. 67. Rhoda Broughton, ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth’ in Twilight Stories (Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited, 2009), 1–12, 2. 68. Ibid., 7–12.

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69. Rhoda Broughton, ‘Dear Sir’ quoted in Charles F.S. Warren, ‘The Mystery of Berkeley Square’, 6.3, Notes and Queries, 151–152, 151. 70. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (London: University of California Press, 1999), 110.

Bibliography Anonymous, ‘Mabel’ in Alastair Gunn, The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 3 (UK: Wimbourne Books, 2018), 49–63. Anonymous, ‘The Ghost at Laburnum Villa’ in Alastair Gunn ed., The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 3 (UK: Wimbourne Books, 2018), 145–157. ———, ‘The Latest Thing in Ghosts’, The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1862). ———, ‘The Story of Clifford House’ in Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 218–238. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Bell, Karl, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Brewster, Scott and Luke Thurston eds., The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (New York: Routledge, 2018). Briggs, Julia, ‘The Ghost Story’ in David Punter ed., A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 122–131. ———, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977). Botting, Fred, Gothic: A New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2013). Broughton, Rhoda, ‘Dear Sir’ quoted in Charles F.S. Warren, ‘The Mystery of Berkeley Square’, 6.3, Notes and Queries, 151–152. ———, ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth’, Twilight Stories (Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited, 2009),1–12. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, The Haunted and the Haunters; or the House and the Brain (Chicago: Rajput Press, 1911). Clarry, ‘The Mystery of Berkeley Square’, 6.2, Notes and Queries (4 December 1880), 452. Crowe, Catherine, The Night Side of Nature or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.). Corstophine, Kevin, ‘“The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die”: Masculinity, Power and Control in The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House” in Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing eds., Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment (London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016), 111–126. Curtis, Barry, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). Davies, Owen, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Dickens, Charles, ‘A Christmas Tree’ in Alastair Gunn, The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 2 (UK: Wimbourne Books, 2018),18–33. Freeman, Nick, ‘The Victorian Ghost Story’ in Andrew Smith and William Hughes eds., The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 93–107. Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Gaskell, Elizabeth, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ in Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert eds., The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–18. Gilbert, Geoffrey, ‘The Origins of Modernism in the Haunted Properties of Literature’ in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell eds., The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239–257. H.A.B., ‘Haunted Houses’, 4.10, Notes and Queries (9 November 1872), 372–373.

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Hanks, Michele, Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past (London: Routledge, 2015). Harper, George, Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural; With Some Account of Hereditary Curses and Family Legends (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907). Hood, Thomas, The Haunted House (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896). Howlett, W.E., ‘The Mystery of Berkeley Square’, 5.12, Notes and Queries (2 August 1879), 87–88. Inglis, David and Mary Holmes, ‘Highland and Other Haunts: Ghosts in Scottish Tourism’, 30.1, Annals of Tourism Research, (2003), 50–63. Ingram, John, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Britain (London: Gibbings & Company Ltd., 1897). James, Henry, ‘Miss Braddon’, The National (1865), 593–594. Le Fanu, Sheridan, ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’ in Robert Tracy ed., In A Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83–118. Liggins, Emma, The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lyttelton, ‘Haunted Houses’, 4.10, Notes and Queries (16 November 1872), 399. MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (London: University of California Press, 1999). Mackay, Charles, Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and Madness in the Crowd (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1869). Marcus, Sharon, ‘The Haunted London House, 1840–1880’ in Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 83–132. McEvoy, Emma, Gothic Tourism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). ———, ‘Gothic Tourism’ in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend eds., The Gothic World (London: Routledge, 2013), 476–486. ———, ‘“West End Ghosts and Southwark Horrors”: London’s Gothic Tourism’ in Anne Witchard and Lawrence Philips eds., London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (New York: Continuum), 140–152. Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Nead, Lynda, Victortian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (London: Yale University Press, 2000). Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘house’, https://www-oed-com.mmu.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/ 87869#eid1481896. Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1996). Riddell, Charlotte, ‘The Open Door’ in E.F. Bleiler ed., The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J.H. Riddell (New York: Dover, 1977). Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz-Axaryahu, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016). Scott, Walter, ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ in Tara Moore ed., The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories (Richmond: Valancourt Books, 2016), 13–27. Smith, Albert, ‘A Real Country Ghost Story’ in Alan Grove ed., The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Vol. 2 (Richmond: Valancourt Books, 2017), 17–25. Smith, Andrew, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A cultural history (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Spooner, Catherine, Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of ‘Happy Gothic’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Townshend, Dale, Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760– 1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Tuan, Yi-Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Urry, John and Jonas Larsen, The Tourism Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011).

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Vidler, Anthony, Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (London: MIT Press, 1992). Watson, Nicola, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

Gothic Spaces

Haunted Space and Gender Performance in the Ghost Stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon Emma Liggins

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ghost story, ‘At Chrighton Abbey’, stories of the past and shadowy presences are as essential to the country house as its fixtures and fittings. The possible ghost is described as ‘that spectral visitant without which the state and splendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete’ (68).1 MidVictorian ghost stories by women often used the haunted house narrative to explore and interrogate female uneasiness within the domestic sphere. There has been a tendency to emphasise women writers’ uses of the genre to explore either financial concerns, or women’s invisibility in a patriarchal society. Expressing ‘woman’s inbetweenness’, her tendency to be ‘seen but unseen’, supernatural fictions by women in the nineteenth century, according to Vanessa Dickerson, should be read in relation to concerns about money, property and the disturbing materialism of the age.2 Melissa Edmundson Makala concurs that ‘spectral trouble is a direct result of monetary trouble’ in female-authored narratives.3 More recently, Kate Krueger has explored ghost stories by Braddon and her contemporary Rhoda Broughton in terms of the instability of the domestic household, arguing that ‘spectral invasions call into stark relief the violability of the domestic, when it is so erratically maintained by inherently flawed gendered performances’.4 Reconsidering the complex relationship between performance, gendered space and haunting in the Victorian ghost story is important for analysing representations of female servants, guests and mistresses who encounter the ghosts of male ancestors. At a time when ideologies of home meshed with expectations about gendered behaviour, and rules and rituals governed the ways in which women occupied domestic space, ghost stories exposed the darker side of the gendering of the home. If one of the defining strands of Victorian Gothic is a focus on the domestic uncanny, as Alexandra Warwick has argued,5 then the working through of anxieties about rooms, household objects, furniture and spatial boundaries is particularly E. Liggins (B) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_9

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prominent in narratives of spectralisation. Spectralisation is bound up not only with inheritance but with domestic practices such as visiting and entertainment, which were often overseen by the women of the house. Ghosts operate as uninvited guests, or intruders, or return from the dead to stake their claim to the properties they have lost. According to Nicola Bown et al., for the Victorians the supernatural was ‘both fearful and terrible and ardently desired; it was a spooky sense that there was more to the world than the everyday, and an intimation that reality might be transfigured by something above and beyond’.6 In many Victorian ghost stories by women the everyday becomes spooky, and the banalities of social customs and daily occupation of domestic spaces are exposed as ghostly and discomforting. First published in popular mid-Victorian journals, ghost stories appeared side by side with articles on the supernatural and pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism at a time when the rise of spiritualism became headline news in Britain and the United States. Acknowledging the possibilities of communication with the dead, not only at organised séances but also within the home, became part of the Victorian mind-set. This chapter considers the gendered dynamics of the mid-Victorian household and the operation of mistress-servant intimacy as one way of understanding the preoccupation with space and restricted movement in women’s ghost stories. Using the writing of Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a case study, I show how her stories of the 1860s and 1870s, particularly ‘Eveline’s Visitant’, ‘Chrighton Abbey’ and ‘The Shadow in the Corner’, examine the uneasiness of mistresses and servants oppressed by the operation of a domestic economy which holds them responsible for men’s downfall. Positioned in gloomy attic-rooms, unused quarters of the house or gardens open to surveillance, both mistresses and servants are vulnerable to spectral encounters which drain their vitality. All three stories focus on the return of the male ancestor, whose ghostly appearance, although sometimes initially welcomed, oppresses and often proves fatal to women. These apparitions function to draw attention to the difficulties experienced by Victorian women in playing their domestic roles, or what Judith Butler has called the performance of ‘coherent gendered subjects’.7 Drawing on notions of performance and ritual, also examined in Braddon’s haunted theatre story, ‘Her Last Appearance’, I address the ways in which these spectral encounters play on the difficulties of upholding the façade of domestic harmony and highlight women’s relative powerlessness within the home. The appearance of ghost stories in popular mid-Victorian journals, such as All the Year Round edited by Charles Dickens and Belgravia, edited by Braddon herself, provides an important context for reassessing their representations of the supernatural at a time when seeing ghosts was often interpreted as a delusion or sign of hysteria. Belgravia (1866–1899) was an illustrated shilling monthly, with an average circulation of 15,000.8 Edited by Braddon between 1866 and 1876, it contained poems, serialised fiction, stories and theatre reviews, as well as articles on art, London locations, fashion, literature and society. By 1866 Braddon was already well known for her best-selling sensation novels, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), which captured the popular imagination with their compelling narratives of female passion, bigamy, fake identities and suspected murder. The successful placing of her ghost stories and serialised novels in Belgravia depended on her reputation as

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a sensation novelist and she clearly continued to use sensationalist techniques across her writing of the 1860s and 1870s, the heyday of sensation. According to Alberto Gabriele, the magazine deconstructed the dominant views of the ruling class, partly by its ‘uncanny revelations’, with its narratives ‘ultimately show[ing] the efforts at preserving decorum by a class that parades its exterior distinction through social mannerism and glamorous, polished glitter’.9 Beth Palmer notes that Braddon’s experiences in the theatre as a touring actress made her ‘attracted to performance’ and adept at fashioning the ‘performative and fractured identities’ of sensation fiction, which also featured in her Belgravia narratives.10 Early numbers included articles on balls and private theatricals, emphasising the love of home entertainment and the performativity of the age. The journal’s engagement with the supernatural, which both Palmer and Gabriele barely mention, has not yet received enough scholarly attention. Particularly in the Christmas annuals but also regularly throughout the year, it published stories about ghosts, séances and haunted houses including Sheridan le Fanu’s, ‘Haunted Baronet’ (October 1870), Florence Marryat’s ‘An Utter Impossibility’ (September 1871) and Mrs Hartley’s ‘Chantry Manor House’ (January 1876), as well as ghost poetry by Edwin Coller and James Mew. At a time when audiences were divided on the possibilities of communication with the dead, ghost stories were read alongside accounts of spiritualist activities and supposedly ‘real’ hauntings. An 1871 edition of the Belgravia annual, which opens with ‘John Granger’, a ghost story by Braddon, with an illustration of a terrified woman encountering a ghost in a garden, also included a ‘true account’ of ‘Three Ghosts’ by the popular novelist Florence Marryat, a known advocate of spiritualism. The article opens, I have never seen a ghost, although I have always entertained a great respect for them … the supernatural has always held great charms for me; and I have never presumed to disbelieve what I have no power to disprove … That I firmly believe the inhabitants of another world are permitted to revisit this, I will not say, because I have never had ocular proof of such a circumstance; but at the same time I have received such unanswerable testimony of the fact from the lips of others.11

Her three anecdotes of two dead husbands becoming visible to their wives and an Elizabethan lady haunting a recently renovated country house are described as ‘circumstances which happened in this modern nineteenth century to actors of the present generation, and in the very midst of the rapid march of civilisation and enlightenment which has, in most cases, scattered superstition to the winds’.12 Marryat’s uses of the words ‘proof’ and ‘testimony’ alongside ‘disbelieve’ and ‘disprove’ indicate cultural uncertainties about life after death even in the face of the ‘charm’ of the supernatural. As in the provocative title of Mrs Henry Wood’s 1867 ghost story, ‘Reality or Delusion?’, the customary disclaimers of disbelief which punctuated Victorian supernatural fiction raised the possibility that ghost-seers might be suffering from delusions or hallucinations, that the supernatural might be violently at odds with the civilised nineteenth century. Like other women writers of the era, Braddon also placed stories in journals edited by Charles Dickens, who helped to promote the work of both new and established authors. Household Words and its successor All the Year Round published ghost

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stories and poems by Elizabeth Gaskell, Adelaide Proctor, Rhoda Broughton and Harriet Martineau, as well as male writers such as Wilkie Collins. As Louise Henson has argued, All the Year Round included articles on clairvoyance, spectral ‘delusions’, premonitions and haunted houses alongside ghost fiction, as Dickens ‘participated in wide-ranging and sometimes fierce debates about the nature and authenticity of ghostly phenomena’.13 Braddon’s ‘The Shadow in the Corner’ appeared alongside Rosa Mulholland’s ghost story, ‘The Mystery of Ora’, set on the remote west coast of Ireland. This inexplicable narrative centres around the terror of its wild, restrained heroine Ora, who seems like ‘some poor maniac’ haunting the scene of a tragic shipwreck (59).14 Her gloomy chambers in the ‘vault-like’ weather-beaten old building on the cliffs seem an apt gothic residence, for in this ‘strange household’ (61) she is under the spell of an evil impostor who has imprisoned her father on a nearby island. The unexplained element of the narrative is the apparition of the narrator himself, seen by Ora’s father before his imprisonment, which had appeared to ask him to conceal a coffer rescued from a shipwreck until he returned. The lost fortune within the coffer is returned to its rightful owner at the end of the story, though the strangeness of the spectral vision remains: ‘the incident of the apparition I do not attempt to account for’ (72). An article on ‘Some Reminiscences of Walking Tours’ includes an account of the ‘laying’ of a ghost in a French churchyard. Whilst the author mocks the appearance of a phantom and ‘loudly expressed my complete disbelief in the supernatural’ (251), he also notes that the stillness and solemnity of the moonlit churchyard made ‘a very fitting scene for the earthly walks of an uneasy spirit’ (251).15 The figure waving its arms in ‘intense despair and grief’ is an escaped woman from the Maison de Santé, who ‘peacefully suffered herself to be led away’ by the governor of the asylum (252). The governor attributes the woman’s descent into madness to a ‘love disappointment’, rendering her ‘a poor abject creature’ (252). Women operating as ‘uneasy spirits’ motivated by ‘intense despair’ recur in mid-Victorian ghost stories which anatomise the causes and diagnosis of female madness. In this way, they borrow from and rework motifs from sensation novels such as Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’ narrative The Woman in White (1859), which spectralise female occupants of the Victorian asylum. Later in her career Braddon also published supernatural stories in other periodicals such as the Strand Magazine, renowned for its short fiction, and Mistletoe Bough, a Christmas annual which she edited in the 1880s. Both called for sensational, shocking stories and trod a fine line between scepticism and fascination with the unseen. Female servants function as story-tellers, holders of family secrets and figures of mystery and impenetrability in the mid-Victorian ghost story. Their occupation of domestic space is always balanced against that of the mistress of the house. Margaret Beetham has written about ‘the webs of power and resistance which characterised domestic authority’ in the nineteenth century, an authority often under threat from servants who challenged expectations about service and servitude.16 The Servant Problem, a Victorian dilemma which ostensibly referred to the difficulties of finding and retaining efficient and respectable domestic staff, could also be more broadly interpreted as the problem with servants, or servants as problems, within conceptualisations of the home. In the domestic sphere, according to Beetham, it was in ‘the

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relationship of mistress to servant that class relations were worked out at the most intimate and inescapable level’.17 Mistress-servant intimacy was a key concern at a time when woman’s place within the home was both taken for granted and seen as in need of fixing. The servant was a contradictory figure, on the visibility/invisibility border. Whilst acquiring more visibility and agency within particular genres, such as ghost stories and sensation fiction, in servant manuals domestic staff were encouraged to remain silent and keep out of the way of the family. Elizabeth Steere points out that in the era of sensation, ‘there was a prevalent anxiety in England over what domestic servants would see and say’.18 Female servants, often glimpsed in corridors and passageways in ghost fiction, might seem to be peripheral and ghostlike, but they were not only essential to the maintenance of class relations and domestic harmony, but potentially threatening to the mistress and her regulatory scheme. In the mid-Victorian period, the mistress of the house and her servants were both bound by the regulatory economy of the household and the rules of space. In her influential Book of Household Management (1861), the famous Victorian cookbook writer Isabella Beeton wrote: As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.19

Managing a country house was certainly a ‘performance’, setting an example for the lower orders (though the use of the word ‘spirit’ here also suggests the mistress’s ghostly presence throughout the home). Female servants were also described in similarly theatrical terms: ‘The daily duties of a housekeeper are regulated, in a great measure, by the extent of the establishment she superintends. She should, however, rise early, and see that all the domestics are duly performing their work’.20 As a double of her mistress, sharing her intimate knowledge of the household, the female servant was a potentially powerful and unsettling figure. In some gothic narratives, servants challenge the power of their masters and mistresses, or bring the threat of criminality into the home. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Lucy Audley’s pale-faced lady’s maid, Phoebe, has an uncanny resemblance to her and acts as a conduit for the criminal desires of her violent husband, Luke. Advice about servants was very much couched in terms of performance, duty and surveillance: Beeton’s view that the housekeeper should be an on-looker, ‘constantly on the watch’ for ‘wrong-doing’, seems to extend beyond the servant population to the household as a whole.21 Wrong-doing could sour or even destroy domestic relations. Cooks, maids and housekeepers were ostensibly confined to particular zones of the building, in a system of spatial segregation designed to ensure the privacy of the family. As the architect Robert Kerr advised in 1864, ‘let the family have free passageway without encountering the servants unexpectedly; and let the servants have access to all their duties without coming unexpectedly upon the family and visitors’.22 In Braddon’s stories, maids are often associated with movement, either the endless trudging up and down stairs, or the exhausting navigation of corridors, guaranteeing the smooth operation of the domestic economy. Steere has noted that, in sensation fiction, it

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is female, rather than male, servants who are ‘most able to cross social, familial and class boundaries’.23 This crossing of boundaries in the ghost story is particularly important in terms of the rooms and passageways occupied by maids, which function as places where they encounter the families of both the present and the past. The uncanny in Braddon’s ghost fiction is often figured through, or associated with performativity, appearance and the tarnished ‘glitter’ of the exhausting social whirl. Judith Butler has identified connections between social rituals and the repeated performances of gendered acts. She argues that, ‘the illusion of an abiding gendered self’ is created and sustained through performance.24 Acting out a gendered self seems to offer women power and adulation but usually has dire consequences in Braddon’s writing. The world of the theatre is used to expose the hollowness and sham of playing the role of the ‘ill-used’ wife in Braddon’s ‘Her Last Appearance’, a lesser-known story published in Belgravia in 1876. For the actress, the half-empty Covent Garden Theatre is like a tomb, ‘shrouded in linen wrappings’ with a ‘ghostly look’ (127). During her performance, the dense fog ‘crept in’ and ‘hung like a pall’, exacerbating the eeriness of the dark, cold space, displaying only ‘blankness’ (138) and shadows. The dying actress playing the Duchess of Malfi is described as ‘fitter for her coffin than for the stage’ (141), as if the confines of the coffin are the ultimate space for women struggling with their lines. This echoes the melodramatic sentiment from the opening dialogue with her lover, ‘I shall escape him – in my coffin’ (123). Performing the role of the tragic heroine, Barbara Stowell, worn down by her violent husband, becomes ‘pale and shadowy as a spirit, a creature already escaped from earthly bondage, for whom death could have no terrors’ (139). A vampiric figure of the shadows, ‘the town had never seen her by daylight’ (124). The new lover Philip who ‘devoured her pale loveliness with his eyes’ (138) and lay in wait outside the theatre appears little better than her drunken husband, trapping her into ‘accumulated horrors’ (139) like the predatory men who bear down on Webster’s doomed Duchess. Barbara’s last appearance is as a silent ghost who resists Philip’s embrace, wearing a ‘shroud-like’ costume and shivering, ‘shadow-like, in the shadow of the doorway’ (139). Whilst the predatory male, not registering her ghostly status, ‘took this gentle silence to mean consent’ (140) to his demand to accompany her home, the heroine embraces death rather than servitude. Her ghostly appearance functions as a telling rebuke to the men who have ‘ill-used’ her and an escape into another realm. The shadowliness of the woman close to death, an unearthly figure drained of vitality, will become a familiar motif in Braddon’s supernatural fiction. In the more well known ‘The Shadow in the Corner’ (1879), the haunted house, with its echoing passages and secluded locale, preserves the secrets of a previous master Anthony Bascom, who has hanged himself in an attic-room. Wildheath Grange, ‘a lonely house on a lonely road’ (143), with ‘long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners’ (143), fosters remoteness and melancholy. The story foregrounds the experiences of the shadowy new maid-of-all-work, Maria, whose ignorance of the house’s haunted history grants her access to the lost story of the attic. On a floor traditionally reserved for domestic staff, the attic is associated with decay, mould and the oppression of the lower classes. Victorian gothic narratives, including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

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(1891), fashioned the attic into a place of secrecy and shame, a repository of sexual oppression. In the upstairs/downstairs division of the Victorian house, the servants’ quarters were an additional upstairs, perhaps the site of illicit visits by amorous masters (why would Anthony Bascom hang himself in a servant’s bedroom?) Both master and servant take turns to sleep in the haunted attic-room, which is more disturbing for the new maid. Although Bascom’s descendant, Michael, cautions her against ‘foolish fancies about empty rooms’ (151), it is precisely the loneliness and emptiness of disused spaces and the servant’s lack of choice about her room which seems to call up the ghosts in the Victorian ghost story. Sleeplessness and anxiety are symptoms of the hauntedness of home for servants: Michael predicts that if he moves Maria to a different room, away from the ‘something dreadful in the room’ (152) which she complains of, she would ‘discover another shadow in another corner’ (153), as if the shadows emanate from the female experience of dwelling itself. Servants’ lack of control over their occupation of space and spatial segregation is frequently figured in the story. Restless movement is everywhere evident: Michael justifies putting Maria on a separate floor by remarking, ‘I don’t want a strange young woman tramping up and down the passages outside my room’ (148) and the cook Mrs Skegg’s protest against ‘trotting up and down these everlasting passages’ can be set alongside Maria’s tearful account of her sleeplessness in her uncanny bedchamber. The older servant in her ‘gloomy region’ at the north end of the house is said to rarely come ‘in contact’ (146) with Bascom, in keeping with mid-Victorian guidance about household zones, ‘minister[ing] diligently to her master’s wants’ (147) in accordance with patriarchal law. She refrains from dusting the library, so she does not ‘interfere with the master’s ways’ (149). Like sensation fiction, ghost stories allowed servants to interrupt their masters’ narratives and to tell stories of their own. The master’s surprised exclamation about the new maid’s haggard appearance, ‘the girl is full of secrets and mysteries’ (150), is revealing of this attention towards marginalised characters whose experiences of the domestic are often ignored in realist fiction. Female servants may be more in tune with the buried secrets of the Victorian home and open to interpreting warnings about death because of their investment in the endurance of the family name. The Skeggs had made up their minds ‘that the character of the house should be upheld … to [Maria], as a foreigner, the Grange should be maintained to be an immaculate dwelling, tainted by no sulphurous blast from the underworld’ (153). The house’s need for a ‘willing, biddable girl’ (153) and the servants’ fears that the new maid will usurp their place in the master’s affections gesture to key aspects of the Servant Problem; the docility of biddable girls can threaten household hierarchies and ideals of the ‘immaculate dwelling’. The spectral encounters of both maid and master force them to confront the unforgotten past and ‘wasted life’ of the house’s former owner. Accessed through a black and uncanny passage, the attic is an ‘old-fashioned room, full of old-fashioned furniture – big, ponderous, clumsy – associated with a day that was gone and people that were dead’ (160), including a ‘diabolical wardrobe’ and a ‘misshapen’, ‘deformed’ four-post bedstead, as well as leftover objects for washing, ‘the odds and ends of past years’ (161). The ghost in the attic is little more than a shadow underneath a rusty hook, making the room into a memory-site for the family’s despair and loss. Maria

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feels ‘weighed down in my sleep as if there were some heavy burden laid upon my chest’ (152), the shapelessness of the phantom exacerbating the mourning for her ‘lost home of her past’ (159). Despite the master’s dismissive belief that the girl’s ‘supernatural terror’ (158) could be conquered by ‘rational treatment’, she can only find a lost home in suicide. Sleeping in the same room to disprove these irrational terrors, Michael feels ‘this sense of all-pervading trouble’, ‘this icy horror of some terrible crisis in life’ (161), ‘the stings of humiliation and disgrace, shame, ruin; a hideous death’ (162). ‘That troubled mind [which] had haunted the room ever since’ (162) is then shown to trouble later generations. The male ancestor’s former dissipation, resulting in loss of his estate and a runaway wife, directly affects the female servant who mimics his suffering by hanging herself in the same place (perhaps gesturing to the abuse of a previous female servant in the past). It is significant that Daniel Skegg is worried about ‘fine carryings-on’ between master and servant, a concern linked to what is ‘strange’ or ‘queer’ in the room (165): he fears that Maria is a ‘gentle clinging thing that might creep into an elderly bachelor’s heart unawares’ (165). In the attic space the dark shadow can impart a ‘sudden access of terror’, attributed to ‘temporary insanity’ by the jury and a possible ‘slow torture of nervous apprehension’ by the doctor (167), though medico-legal explanations of suicide empty the story of its class and gender resonances. As a ‘foreigner’ within the home, ignorant of both its haunted history and the dynamics of master–servant relations, Maria feels compelled to accept a room that terrifies her and in so doing mediates the story of the Bascoms’ shame. The acknowledging of the fears of a servant dismissed as a ‘silly wench’ (158) stands instead of an explanation at the end of the narrative. The ‘shadows’ of the haunted house now encompass ‘the memory of Maria’s sad face, and sadder death’ (168), as the master bears the guilt for the mistreatment of the female servant. Victorian ghost stories reflected the nineteenth-century fascination with the haunted house. In The Night-Side of Nature or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1848), a popular compendium of strange dreams, warnings and eye-witness accounts of ‘troubled spirits’, Catherine Crowe proclaimed, ‘Everybody has heard of haunted houses … there is no one who … has not seen very respectable, good-looking houses shut up and uninhabited, because they had this evil reputation assigned to them’.25 Her narratives of uninhabitability describe tenants scared out of their desirable residences by unexplained apparitions and disembodied voices from the ‘invisible world’, which threaten the domestic harmony and respectability of the rising middle classes. As Nick Freeman has recently argued, the spectral inhabitants of a haunted house are trapped in the past, and, unlike the edifices they occupy, ‘cannot be modernized by rewiring, double-glazing or the addition of a portico’. It is their ‘historical fixedness’ which is a potent cause of horror and distress, as ‘their intrusion upon the present is too abrupt’.26 In the Victorian ghost story the modernisation of the home and the slow transformations in gender roles which attend this is often at odds with the stories of the past. Ghosts are trapped in an older, phantom version of the house, offering a disturbing vision of previous versions of gendered performance. The dead male ancestors who return in Braddon’s stories exhibit a particular fondness for hunting and duelling, questioning the masculinity of the next generation. Male rivalry over women is a recurring theme. As rooms, wings and areas of the garden become shut

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up, disused, empty or forgotten, whilst others are revamped and refashioned to better suit the demands of mid-Victorian hospitality, the clash between old and new frames the intrusion of unquiet ghosts. ‘At Chrighton Abbey’ opens with a description of the remote haunted house, a technique also evident in sensation fiction. As in Lady Audley’s Secret, the opening vision of the decaying family estate is strangely set against the modernisations of the architecture which herald social change and new ways of conceptualising hospitality and home. In his discussion of sensationalism, Gabriele argues that ‘the view of the more or less splendid mansion … anticipates the interest of the characters in the social status of the family … The outlook of the house often might suggest a decaying economic splendour; the composition of the family unit usually includes an inheritor to an estate and title’.27 Architectural details and references to specific rooms hint at the possible locations of the haunting to follow. With its ‘curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation’ (57), Chrighton’s imposing architecture incorporates both the old and the modern, past and present. The often empty rooms on the medieval side of the house are ‘somewhat darksome and gloomy … but, though rarely used, … were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Abbey was crowded with guests’ (57). It is a spatially segregated zone where women watch from the drawing room windows whilst men entertain themselves in the billiard room. This ‘splendid mansion’ (57) locates guest rooms and haunted rooms in its ‘darksome’ more disused areas, suggesting that the domestic space is shadowed by visitors, both live and dead, who disrupt the domestic economy. Spectral encounters always comment on gender and class inequalities in Braddon’s stories. Whilst the apparition with its cold embrace is usually identified as a vengeful male ancestor or a dead lover, the ghost-seer, sometimes resulting in the distraught woman wasting away, is often a female guest, wife or servant. The uncanny moments of ghost-seeing comment on women’s experiences of domestic space and the difficulties of preserving the family name. The governess narrator, Sarah Chrighton, a poor relation both insider and outsider to the family, links her status as guest and old maid to her position as ‘quiet spectator’ (59). Her different outlook to the mistresses and husband-hunters and her vantage point in her secluded room give her access to the supernatural. As Luke Thurston has pointed out, the slippage between ghosts and guests is a generic feature of the ghost story, which often encompasses acts of hospitality and the welcoming of friends and strangers over the threshold.28 It is worth pondering the resonances of hospitality for mid-Victorian women writers at a time when entertaining visitors and accommodating guests was at its height. Catherine Crowe refers to apparitions as ‘troublesome guest[s]’, ‘visitors from the dead’, whose reappearance demands that those who encounter them ‘lend an attentive ear’ to their tales.29 According to Eve M. Lynch, who reads Braddon’s 1860s fiction in terms of possession and dispossession, ‘Supernatural stories turning on ghosts, mesmerism, fantastical occurrences, and inexplicable omens … were readily paired with the dilemmas of those dispossessed members of the household lacking property, education, social standing, and independence’.30 Sarah’s affinity with both the servants and her cousin Fanny, the mistress of the house, gives her a

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unique, in-between vision which allows her to narrate the ghostly warning of the ‘phantom hunt’ which heralds the untimely death of the men of the house. The spectral encounter occurs in the old tapestried chamber, from which the newest guest witnesses the ghastly sound of the phantom huntsman’s horn and the ‘dimly visible’ scene of men and hounds soundlessly hurrying into the disused stables. In the Belgravia illustration, captioned, ‘An Unearthly Sound’, Sarah is pictured with a cross around her neck looking out of the window in horror, the old furniture and a gothic helmet also pictured a visible reminder of the old spaces necessary for visions of the dead.31 Witnessing the ghostly hunting-party returning with their hounds, she remarks: Had I been a stranger in the house, I might have fancied that these figures were real – those stables in full occupation. But I knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could I believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled – the empty stalls tenanted? (78–79)

This unearthly motion and ‘noiselessness’ (78) in the ‘long-deserted quadrangle’ (79) is only interpreted as supernatural because of Sarah’s insider knowledge that the stable-yard has been out of use for more than fifty years. Replaced by modern red-brick buildings, adjacent to the music-room, the weird, ivy-covered yard with its ‘ancient moss-grown look’ (67) is a memory-site for tragedies in the family’s past, for the loss of men which endangers upper-class inheritance. Architecturally akin to the ‘ancient’ chamber, with its old, dark furniture, the disused stable-yard with its haunting emptiness is a warning of the loss of aristocratic power in the drive towards modernisation. Significantly, Sarah goes down the back staircase to the housekeeper’s room, intent on finding someone who knows the secrets of the Abbey, passing the preparations for the servants’ ball, a tradition which recognises the necessary social contract between houseowners and domestic staff. The housekeeper’s room with its ‘capacious cupboards’ experienced as ‘storehouses of inexhaustible treasures’ (79) also encloses the treasure of the Abbey’s ghost story. The phantom hunting-party headed by the old Squire heralds ‘misfortune and sorrow to this house’ as a legacy of a former heir to the estate killed in the hunting-field. Whilst the housekeeper tries to cover up the secret from the family in order to avoid evil, Sarah retorts that she is ‘no believer in visions or omens’ (83), as if to distance herself from servants’ superstitions even as she can entertain no other explanation for her uncanny vision. Braddon’s ghost stories are crowded with invitations, balls, uninvited guests, revelry and sociability, with women often bearing the strain of covering for husbands and sons who are ill, absent, drunk or unavailable. Chrighton Abbey is ‘a house so full of people, all bent on enjoying themselves’ (72), every nook and corner, ‘filled with visitors’ (87), that it can conceal the breach between the heir Edward and his fiancée Julia which leads to his death: the necessary privacy is not preserved. The coldness and limited sociability of the potential new mistress render him vulnerable to death whilst hunting, as if their separation endangers the estate. The ‘unceasing’ talk and laughter at the dinner-table make Fanny’s face grave and strike Sarah with terror as she foresees the danger to the heir in his desire to hunt. Darkness is seen to shadow the frivolity of the upper-class social round: the ‘dark shapeless foreboding’ (88)

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which troubles Sarah intrudes into discussions about fashion, decoration and party plans. Women’s lives are shown to be governed by social conventions which confine them to the domestic space, with preparations for parties necessitating endless negotiations with domestic staff, a flitting to and fro of maids and a ‘tour of inspection’ (89) to ensure the correct functioning of each room. Social events test the household management skills of the mistress of the house: Altogether the organisation of this affair was no small business; and Mrs Chrighton’s mornings were broken by discussions with the housekeeper, messages from the cook, interviews with the head-gardener on the subject of floral decorations, and other details, which all alike demanded the attention of the chatelaine herself. With these duties, and with the claims of her numerous guests, my cousin Fanny’s time was so fully occupied, that she had little leisure to indulge in anxious feelings about her son, whatever secret uneasiness may have been lurking in her maternal heart. (87)

Lacking the time to indulge her anxieties, the ‘secret uneasiness’ of the mistress of the house remains hidden only to surface in the realisation of her darkest fear. This secret uneasiness of women, anxiously watching for absent men or worrying about numerous guests, is a recurring trope of the story. The ball is both ‘a night of splendour and enchantment’ and ‘a wearisome kaleidoscopic procession of form and colour for those … weighed down with the burden of a hidden care’ (90), depending on whether it is experienced as guest or family member. Edward Chrighton’s fears of offering ‘a slight to our guests’ (75) by missing the New Year’s ball are realised when he cannot perform his duties. The ‘non-return’ of the son and heir threatens the power of the mistress, who appears to fail in her capacity as commander of an army. As the flowers droop at the end of the party, and the family are no longer keeping up appearances, Edward’s ‘terrible breach of manners’ (91) can only be explained by his death. The conclusion of the story leaves the mistress of the Abbey smiling and dutiful, ‘the honoured mistress of a great household’ (94) but living under ‘the shadow of a great sorrow’ (94), the loss of the son and heir. Simon Hay has described the story as ‘a narrative in which representatives of a traditional world come into conflict with various representatives of modernity’.32 Like the modernisations of the house which cannot cover up the older traditions of the hunt, women striving to be in control or to shake off superstitions are at odds with the rituals and manners of traditional gender divides. Being ‘at home’ to guests was both a social convention not to be breached and an invitation to the supernatural. ‘Eveline’s Visitant’ (1867) tells of the haunting of a new wife by an unwelcome dead guest at the desolate estate at Puy Verdun, near Paris. Its name repeated like a mantra eleven times during the short narrative, the fetishised estate has been inherited by the taciturn soldier Hector de Brissac after killing his charismatic cousin Andre in a duel. The replacement of one man by the other in the lonely chambers, ‘sitting alone in the solemn midnight by the hearth where he had sat, pacing the corridors that had echoed his footfall’ (27–28), is linked to their rivalry over women. Although supposedly safely buried in the Puy Verdun chapel, ‘in the vault of our ancestors’ (25), the flamboyant Andre, ‘favourite of women’ (24) returns to continue this deadly rivalry. Patriarchal owners in Braddon’s ghost stories spend too much time in the library, neglecting other areas of their residences and

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unaware of the difficulties posed to women in either navigating the house or finding contentment within its walls. After his son’s death, the master of Chrighton retreats to this comforting male space, ‘shut from the outer world, buried almost as completely as a hermit in his cell’ (94). In ‘Eveline’s Visitant’ the library where Hector, a man of ‘studious habits’, ‘spent a good deal of [his] life’ (28) has its ghastly secret, a hidden portrait of a de Brissac ancestor. The phantom visitant is only identified because of his scarred, ‘womanish’ face and the hunting-dress from an earlier era, which he had copied from the portrait for the masked ball attended by both cousins at the beginning of the story. Concealed behind a curtain, like Dorian Gray’s evil image, the picture symbolically hides the male line of descent and the aggressive virility of the male hunter, a recurrent motif in Braddon’s ghost fiction. Attired in his ancestor’s hunting costume, the dead Andre de Brissac appears to the vulnerable and bored Eveline as ‘young and handsome’, an antidote to the desolation of the house whose attractive ‘image haunted me perpetually’ (34). The scar which caused the deadly duel, a ‘foul mark’ (65) on Andre’s fair face, which captivates Eveline, symbolises the damaging effects of male rivalry over women. This perpetual haunting lures the vulnerable young wife away from her neglectful husband. As a ‘horrible intruder’, a mysterious stranger only visible to Eveline, the phantom operates as a malevolent visitor, who cannot be kept away from his rightful ancestral home. The pleasaunce, the feminised space of the pleasure garden, is the chosen spot of the spectral encounter. Walled gardens, according to Krueger, signified privacy, protection and ‘the privilege of exclusivity’, but were also sites of surveillance.33 Identified as a safe space where Eveline will not be approached by the mysterious nobleman from a neighbouring estate: ‘the stranger cannot intrude upon me there’ (30), it is actually a dangerous spot where marriage and inheritance are threatened. Although the restriction of his wife’s walks to the pleasaunce rather than the park is figured as a confinement, safe from intrusion, it is also not entirely under the husband’s observation, exposing Eveline to melancholy and the transferral of her desire to the mysterious visitant. Initially dismissed as a phantasm, conjured up by the reading of romances, the ‘nameless stranger’ who violates the garden’s boundaries poses a more serious threat. In a later story ‘His Oldest Friends’, published in the Christmas annual Mistletoe Bough (1890), Hector Vivien flirts with Lucie, Maxime de St Vallier’s young wife, in her husband’s absence, specifically finding his opportunity ‘in the afternoon solitude of the pleasaunce, screened from the windows of the chateau by ten-foot hedges of ilex and yew, as secure from observation as in a forest labyrinth’ (211). The impenetrability of the pleasaunce becomes overdetermined in the texts; despite its being surrounded by a moat with gates locked day and night, in this space Eveline still seems ‘tormented’ by a shadow. Her husband’s rules about privacy, ‘the chatelaine of a medieval fortress need fear no intruder in her antique garden’ (32) are undermined, as the wife in both stories is at risk from both spectral and material intruders. The drooping health of the wife, rather than the desired bearing of children, not only endangers the estate but reveals the dissatisfactions of a marriage where accompanying his wife on summer walks ‘disturbed the even current’ (30) of the husband’s life. His blind belief that ‘she had no real ground

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for sorrow’ fails to acknowledge boredom and neglect as the cause of her ‘pensive silence’ (31), a silencing which only finds an outlet in ghostly communication. Braddon’s spectralisation of domesticity and the pressures it placed on women continued throughout her career. Lynch argues that ‘it is a mark of her commitment to social critique that Braddon’s ghostly tales often refuse to resolve themselves in easy spectral explanation’.34 Krueger concurs that the social critique offered by the ghost story is more effective than in the more conservative sensation novel, as avenging ghosts cannot be punished or eliminated, so that ‘after these spirits cease to appear, characters who witness such spectres, and by extension readers, remain haunted’.35 The explained supernatural is certainly never a get-out clause in her ghost fiction, which often ends with men who had previously scoffed at the supernatural lost in the shadows and women either dead or brutalised in their own homes. Later stories such as ‘The Ghost’s Name’, published in The Mistletoe Bough (1891), continued to explore the ‘shadow of trouble’ within marriage, as ‘the cold wind of a husband’s indifference blew with deadly breath across the home paradise’ (222). What is most haunting about this story is its revelations of the ill-treatment of women within marriage, not the spectral presence in the supposedly haunted nursery, finally attributed to an ancient cess-pool beneath the floor and the onset of typhoid fever. The transformation of the home paradise into a place of horror with nothing homely about it anticipates the ghost stories of New Woman writers such as E. Nesbit. ‘Mansize in Marble’ (1893), Nesbit’s often anthologised story, shows the modern artist heroine violated in her own home by ancient spectral knights who uncannily double her controlling husband. The importance of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s contribution to the genre of the mid-Victorian ghost story lies in her gendering of the spectral encounter in order to comment on the dangers of unequal power relations within the home and male sexual dominance. In Braddon’s stories men who live lonely existences in old properties which are transformed by a female presence are punished by supernatural interference resulting in the illness, mental disturbance and ultimately death of the women they care for. Women are not only haunted by shadows but become shadowy figures themselves, fading, insubstantial, in the face of male control, cruelty, sexual possession and violence. The Victorian house becomes ‘a place of horrors’ which can be fatal to women, as the ghost story exposes anxieties about occupying domestic space and performing the duties of hostess and servant. If ‘gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody’, as Butler has claimed,36 then the encounters with ghostly ancestors and actresses in Braddon’s stories stage the difficulties of performing gendered roles. Notes 1. 2.

All quotations are taken from Greg Buzwell (ed.), The Face in the Glass: The Gothic Tales of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (London, British Library, 2014). Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 1996), 11.

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013), 97. Kate Krueger, British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 98. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Victorian Gothic’ in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007), 30. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell, ‘Introduction’ in The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York, Routledge, 1990), 140. Beth Palmer, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), 57. Alberto Gabriele, Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009), 29. Palmer, Women’s Authorship, 49, 53. Florence Marryat, ‘Three Ghosts’, Belgravia (1871), 120–128 (120). Marryat, ‘Three Ghosts’, 120. Louise Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts’ in The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44–63 (55, 44). Rosa Mulholland, ‘The Mystery of Ora’, All the Year Round, 1 July 1879, 58–72. ‘Some Reminiscences of Walking Tours’, All the Year Round, 30 August 1879, 247–252. Margaret Beetham, ‘Domestic Servants as Poachers of Print: Reading, Authority and Resistance in late Victorian Britain’ in Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009), 185–203 (185). Beetham, ‘Domestic Servants’, 187. Elizabeth Steere, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: Kitchen Literature (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2013), 19. Mrs Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, ed. Nicola Humble (1861; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 33. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (1864; London, John Murray, 1871), 68. Steere, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction, 4. Butler, Gender Trouble, 140. Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature, or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (London, T.C. Newby, 1848), 273. Nick Freeman, ‘Haunted Houses’ in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (London, Routledge, 2018), 328. Gabriele, Reading Popular Culture, 44. Luke Thurston, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (London and New York, Routledge, 2014), 3.

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29. Crowe, Night Side of Nature, 294, 313. 30. Eve M. Lynch, ‘Spectral Politics: M.E. Braddon and the Spirit of Reform’ in Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert and Aeron Haynie (eds.), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth thBraddon in Context (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000), 238. 31. Belgravia, 367. 32. Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2011), 111. 33. Krueger, British Women Writers, 74. Krueger argues that the walled garden in this story is a space of exposure to threat for Eveline. 34. Lynch, ‘Spectral Politics’, 238. 35. Krueger, British Women Writers, 15. 36. Butler, Gender Trouble, 141.

Bibliography Alberto, Gabriele, Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009). Beetham, Margaret, ‘Domestic Servants as Poachers of Print: Reading, Authority and Resistance in late Victorian Britain’ in Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009), 185–203. Beeton, Mrs, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, ed. Nicola Humble (1860; Oxford, World’s Classics, 2000). Bown, Nicola, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds.), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York, Routledge, 1990). Buzwell, Greg (ed.), The Face in the Glass: The Gothic Stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (London, British Library, 2014). Crowe, Catherine, The Night Side of Nature; or Ghosts and Ghost Seers (London, T.C. Newby, 1848). Dickerson, Vanessa, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 1996). Edmundson Makala, Melissa, Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013). Freeman, Nick, ‘Haunted Houses’ in Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (London, Routledge, 2018). Hay, Simon, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2011). Henson, Louise, ‘Investigations and fictions: Charles Dickens and ghosts’ in The Victorian Supernatural, 44–63. Kerr, Robert, The Gentleman’s House (1864; London, John Murray, 1871). Krueger, Kate, British Women Writers and the Short Story: Reclaiming Social Space (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2014). Lynch, Eve, ‘Spectral Politics: M.E. Braddon and the Spirit of Reform’ in Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert and Aeron Haynie (eds.), Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000). Palmer, Beth, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).

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Steere, Elizabeth, The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: Kitchen Literature (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2013). Thurston, Luke, Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (London, Routledge, 2014). Warwick, Alexandra, ‘Victorian Gothic’ in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007).

Algernon Blackwood’s Storytelling and the Horrors of Space Nicola Bowring

Blackwood holds a curious—one might say a somewhat liminal—place in the gothic tradition. Writing primarily in the early twentieth century, his work falls into that often problematic category of ‘gothic modernity’ or ‘modernist gothic’. Though this term may seem in some respects oxymoronic, as indeed did the older term ‘gothic (/) novel’ in its day, for recent scholars it represents a distinct and significant development in the gothic tradition as a whole,1 one in which Blackwood plays an important, if sometimes under-appreciated, role. His name is one mentioned frequently, yet rarely studied in much depth, even whilst he is seen as a key figure in early twentieth-century Gothic, in particular in the development of the ghost story and ‘weird fiction’. The early twentieth century sees a rise in popularity of the short story, and in particular the ghost story. For Jack Sullivan, writing in the late seventies, ‘[t]he modern ghostly tale is as much a reaction against the Gothic as an outgrowth of it’.2 More recently, of course, with the expansion and development of the term ‘gothic’ in literary studies, it is easier to read Blackwood’s work as not so much an outgrowth of Gothic, but simply a new growth or development, a further phase, of this. These ‘reactions against’ earlier works and styles can be seen in every era of the Gothic, as it is constantly redeveloped to adapt to contemporary concerns and aesthetic preference. This is a genre constantly in conversation with itself, reusing but also revolutionising old myths and motifs to contemporary purpose. In this it relates well to the Modernist movement’s cry to ‘make it new’ whilst at the same time employing and revising older traditions, though key Modernist figures focused more often on the Classical than gothic barbarity.3 Blackwood’s writing is in many respects rooted in this tradition that it develops, and develops for a ‘modern’ era. For Blackwood shares with most gothic writers a preoccupation with the resurgent past, as well as with concerns around space and place. Terry Thompson claims ‘The Listener’ as an excellent example of Christopher Baldick’s definition of the ghost story, in the N. Bowring (B) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_10

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sense that it combines ‘a fearful sense of inheritance […] with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure’,4 highlighting here the importance of the concept of space to a narrative of haunting. The concept of haunting comes down to a suggestion of repetition, revisiting or frequenting. To haunt, of course, therefore suggests a space as well as time—to frequent somewhere, sometime. A strange mapping of space and time, imprinted likewise onto the psyche, pervades Blackwood’s writing. His stories show a concern with the gothic past, but also with ghostliness on a wider scale than this. For ghostliness to Blackwood is perhaps in fact more spatial than timely, hence many of his stories are read as ‘weird fiction’ or ‘supernatural fiction’ rather than straightforwardly as ghost stories, since his ghosts are so very difficult to pin down. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Blackwood is read most often in relation to nature. ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’ are probably his most influential and widely read, and explore concerns about mankind and nature. A keen walker and traveller, he found much inspiration through the natural world, which related to his spiritual and philosophical beliefs, in Theosophy as well as his being a member of the Hermeneutic Order of the Golden Dawn.5 He had a keen understanding of man’s place in a wider natural and spiritual landscape, and recent scholarship has focused on an ecocritical reading of his work, most particularly David Punter’s essay in EcoGothic.6 This is where Blackwood goes further than straightforward ‘ghosts of the past’. As Sullivan notes, ‘Blackwood envisions a world in which everything is alive and anything can be a ghost: trees, bushes, earth, snow, even the wind’.7 His preoccupation with space, and haunting of spaces, goes much further than the natural world. Buildings and the urban hold a significance for Blackwood also; any space, urban, rural or psychic, can be haunted. The interest in a spiritual world, in the spiritual nature of all things, infuses the writing throughout. This chapter focuses primarily—though not exclusively—on Blackwood’s tales of urban hauntings, following his preoccupation with the spatial through these, in terms of ownership, invasion and narrative itself. Some of these stories have been the focus of critical attention specifically, some less so. The stories cover a range of settings, and were published over the course of a decade or so: ‘A Haunted Island’ (1899); ‘The Empty House’ (1906); ‘The Listener’ (1907); ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’ (1907) and ‘The Occupant of the Room’ (1910).8 An interrogation of the hauntings in these stories, which are varied in many respects, brings out the deep concern that Blackwood shows in questions of the spatial within his narratives—in ownership of space, proximity and threat, physical and psychical space and literary space itself. In terms of Blackwood’s own ‘space’ or place in the gothic tradition, we might argue for a reading of him as also both Romantic and Modernist in style—again a seemingly odd combination. The principle distinction between these approaches might be one in which Modernist writing appears more Gothic, in looking back to Hume’s famous definition of Gothic versus Romantic: ‘Romantic writing reconciles the discordant elements it faces, resolving their apparent contradictions imaginatively in the creation of a higher order. Gothic writing, the product of serious fancy, has no such answers and can only leave the “opposites” contradictory and paradoxical’.9 Modernist writing, likewise, has a

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tendency to leave opposites unresolved, pictures fractured, to deny a ‘whole’. Blackwood fuses modernist, gothic and romantic concerns in a creative way, which is centred on the question of space. His ‘location’ in the gothic tradition is both fractured and multilayered in the same way as his stories themselves. For Blackwood seemingly sees a potential for a ‘whole’, for a world beyond ours in which everything is resolved, yet this is presented as a world to which we do not currently have access. As with Le Fanu’s earlier short stories, we are seeing ‘in a glass, darkly’.10 Whilst a higher order is most certainly imagined, it remains inaccessible to us, in ‘different space’,11 mapped onto the physical world and the current time, yet outside of these. Blackwood’s concern is with our relationship with this ‘other world’ as a species, more so than as individuals, and our estrangement from the land is explored in both the nature stories and the tales of urban hauntings. Ownership and occupation of spaces is central to Blackwood’s storytelling. A sense of questioning of mankind’s perceived ownership of the land, of the power of the human over nature, characterises much of Blackwood’s writing, in which nature is powerful in spirit and force, and in stories such as ‘The Wendigo’, ‘The Wood of the Dead’ and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, characters are literally taken into nature or by spirits of nature and swallowed up. David Punter, in his essay on Blackwood for EcoGothic, draws attention to the concept of nature as beyond human comprehension, and therefore mastery, in ‘The Willows’. Here the Danube, he notes, ‘is a region which is uncontaminated, pure; it is also, for that very reason, completely unintelligible; it makes us blind in its absence of location or bearings’.12 This is a space clearly outside of human control, which is reflected in man’s inability to map the space, to locate themselves within it. Punter also notes Blackwood’s comment on rights of man over natural spaces, through the ‘empty land’ concept as a ‘founding myth of settler colonies […] the notion that there is nothing here, that the land is ours to occupy’.13 For Blackwood, land is never ‘empty’; there is always something present. This narrative of ownership, occupation and invasion runs through many of Blackwood’s short stories, and not just in terms of those that revolve around nature. It is also true of his texts revolving around buildings, and an important aspect in which Blackwood draws away from his predecessors in Gothic. The notion of ownership of buildings is a key feature of Gothic from its earliest incarnations: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto revolves around the prophecy of the ‘rightful heir’ versus the ‘current owner’14 ; Radcliffe’s gothic novels almost always centre on the female heroine coming into her rightful inheritance, part of which is a property; Victorian Gothic retains this preoccupation with land and ownership. Blackwood’s buildings, however, are very rarely owned. His tales of hauntings take place almost invariably in ‘borrowed’ spaces. ‘The Listener’ tells of a haunting in rented rooms in the city of London by an earlier occupant. ‘The Empty House’ is precisely this, a house empty because no tenant will remain there for long. As Aunt Julia (to Shorthouse, our protagonist) claims in excitement at the beginning of that story ‘I’ve got the keys’—she has borrowed keys to a space she does not own, to enter a property that is not hers. The woman in ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’ also borrows keys to enter an already haunted location, this time belonging to her uncle. The protagonist of

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‘The Occupant of the Room’ is staying in a room in an inn, and the title of this draws clear attention to the notion of a series of occupants in an un-owned space, of temporary occupiers, which forms the basis of the narrative. This likely as not relates to Blackwood’s own experiences investigating haunted buildings and locations, and though it is not an entirely new concept in Gothic, for example many Victorian ghost stories utilise this motif, here this lack of ownership is drawn attention to specifically in quite a new way as a key feature of the majority of his stories, explored in and for itself. The titles of the stories, for example, seem to intentionally point to this non-ownership of places—‘The Empty House’, ‘A Haunted Island’, ‘The Occupant of the Room’ (all my italics). Property is represented in earlier Romantic and many Victorian Gothic works as a fundamental aspect of identity. This is one respect in which Blackwood uses and develops the gothic motif in a modernist context, and where potentially he might be seen to ‘outgrow’ earlier gothic traditions, in relation to his own era. Here, as in much early twentieth-century writing, identity is much more fluid and unfixed. Man has become dissociated not just from nature, as many would argue in terms of an ecocritical reading of Blackwood’s ‘nature’ stories, but from location and the physical land as a whole. This is a deep concern in the wider literary field during this era—an example being E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End—in terms of what it means to be living in an ever-changing, transient metropolitan environment rather than a fixed (often inherited) abode, where with advances in transport, agriculture and industry people are migrating further and more frequently, and relationship to place has degenerated. The seeds of this degeneration were in fact long sown in the gothic tradition; Blackwood himself highlights that the notion of an urban Gothic and literature of dislocation is by no means a new thing. The protagonist of ‘The Listener’ looks back explicitly to De Quincey, and his haunted meanderings around the city of London during the Romantic era, including the ‘cold tenantless mansion’ where the young waif lives and the rendezvous point with ‘Anne’ which is significantly missed.15 Here time and space meet once more as the narrator imagines de Quincey is ‘still there, haunting the night’ (ibid.). The past is invoked in response to a modern concern which has become yet more prevalent in the metropolitan world of the early twentieth century. The sense of movement and dislocation alienates the human from the land, bringing about another spatial concern in these texts: invasion. This is not merely an anxiety about one’s own space or person being invaded by external forces, but also about its opposite, the sense of being an invader oneself, of alienation of the self through the ‘other’, exterior gothic space. In ‘The Empty House’, Shorthouse and his Aunt Julia are effectively invaders themselves. They act as witness to the haunting that is played out as a narrative around them, but in which they do not participate, are not targets, and to which we only get a part story, a partial narrative. ‘Everything, they felt, resented their intrusion’, as though the narrative of the haunting plays out and desires to do so in peace.16 The sounds within the house are geographically confusing and dislocated: ‘somewhere in the lower regions of the house […] further off than that […] Surely they were not outside the house! […] The sounds were not downstairs at all, they were upstairs’ (p. 120). The visitors in ‘The Woman’s

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Ghost Story’ have been invading the space of the gentleman ghost for some time; it is their presence and fear which makes the space one of terror, for it reflects the haunting itself. At first, this seems to be repeated yet again in the woman’s story, which expresses her sense of being not just in an un-owned space, but an unsafe one: ‘For the first time I realised that darkness was over the city; that dust lay upon the stairs; that the floor above was untenanted and the floor below empty. I was alone in an unoccupied and haunted house, unprotected, and a woman. I chilled’ (p. 85). The sense of terror brings with it a geographical confusion and dislocation. The narrator, on leaving the room of her first encounter with the ghost, proceeds the wrong way up a corridor, locking herself in a different room only to find ‘I had locked myself in with him!’ (p. 86). However, this narrative actually concludes in a very different vein from the others; the woman is the first ‘invader’ to show civility and awareness to her host, allowing this haunting to be, unusually, resolved. The ‘occupant of the room’, Minturn, also feels this strange sense of trespass. The room in which he is staying was occupied previously by a female hiker, who has disappeared. Yet Minturn has a deep sense of awareness of her continuing presence, since she has not ‘officially’ left: ‘He was in someone else’s room. He really had no right to be there’.17 In fact the story is an almost literalisation of the idea of feeling the presence of the previous occupier of a space. Her presence is felt even in an anonymous inn room, and for very good reason. The room is not merely haunted by her, it literally still contains her, in the hidden-space-within-a-space of the mysterious wardrobe. It is about a room precisely not vacated, not ‘free’ for occupation. As Minturn lies trying to banish this sense of imposition, to sleep peacefully, the reverse invasion—this time of her mood into his heart and mind—begins: ‘A spirit of black pessimism […] invaded the secret chambers of his heart’ (p. 57). It is a matter of something communicated, a connection, from the previous occupant, so that the ‘occupant of the room’ becomes both the Englishwoman and Minturn, linked by some psychic force. Some power ‘impelled him to utter words over which he apparently had no control’ (p. 58). Minturn recognises this as a form of communication, in which ‘some force, foreign to his own personality, was using his mind and organs. […] The powerful mood of this vanished woman had somehow momentarily taken possession of him – communicated, possibly, by the atmosphere of things in the room still belonging to her’ (ibid.). The visitor in ‘A Haunted Island’ is staying on the island to retreat from human company, in order to complete some reading. His intention is to have the island to himself, some privacy for this important work. But this island is already haunted; like Shorthouse, Aunt Julia and Minturn, he is a trespasser there. The invasion is presented initially as being and invasion of the island by the Indians. The island itself is ‘a small island of isolated position’ (p. 360).18 The house, within this isolated island, evokes a sense of entrapment—‘the trees gathered in round the cottage so closely that the slightest wind made the branches scrape the roof and tap the wooden walls’ (p. 361). The oppressive atmosphere is heightened upon seeing the canoe, which circles the island, each time coming a little closer to the shore. It begins ‘perhaps a hundred feet from the shore’ (p. 365), and appears closer each time he sights it, when he realises that it is ‘circling the island!’ (p. 366). Immediately the

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narrator is aware of his precarious position ‘in a room so brilliantly lighted, where my every movement could be observed from outside, while I could see nothing but impenetrable darkness at every window’ (pp. 366–367). The invasion of the island then becomes the invasion of the house on the island, and finally goes so far as the bedroom, the ‘space-within-the-space-within-the-space’, to which the narrator had that day experienced an inexplicable ‘marked repugnance’ (p. 352). In that instance, it was the space itself to which the protagonist developed an aversion, rather than to anything specific within it. The room, the house, the island are emphatically not his space, and he feels that, and in fact it is not he himself being hunted—the Native Americans pass by him in that tense moment, where the claustrophobia becomes almost unbearable and the preoccupation with space and movement highlighted: ‘They would have to pass by his side of the table’. Yet they do pass by, almost ‘close enough to [his] nose’ to touch it, but pay him no heed. They are, as with the ghost of ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’, ‘in different space’. The narrator has been present for an invasion, yet is not the target of this, but a mere spectator. When he leaves the island the narrator looks back to see the canoe yet again encircling it, suggesting, as the title does, that this island would be haunted whether or not he was there. Again, there is an indication of a psychic invasion; as the spectral figures pass him by, he sees himself in the figure of the dead man being carried by them—‘I had recognised the body, and the face was my own!’ (p. 374)—and it feels almost like a warning, yet his actual physical body, by virtue of its aversion to the room, has been spared participation in the narrative, doubled instead onto a psychic or spectral version of him. This sense of doubling helps to highlight the dichotomy mentioned earlier, of invasion by external ‘others’ and othering of the self—in which the self becomes invader in an alien space. This doubling is nowhere clearer in Blackwood’s stories than in ‘The Listener’, where the doubling between the young, somewhat misanthropic narrator, and the earlier occupant of the rooms, the leper Blount, has been explored by Terry Thompson.19 The narrator’s early attempts to assert ownership of the space show his liking for privacy and enclosure over connection with the wider community. ‘Here I am in my two rooms’ (p. 17), he states, calling this ‘my own house’ (ibid.), and he is annoyed by what he perceives to be the landlady or maid moving things around in his room. He appears to identify with ‘his’ space: ‘In spite of the curious effect this house certainly exercises upon my nerves, I like it. […] I shall renew the lease from year to year till one of us crumbles to pieces’ (p. 31). In fact, the first ghostly encounter incorporates a knocking on his door, seemingly supporting this. ‘Someone seemed to be moving in the night up and down my room’ (p. 31), he later notes. But of course, Blount was a resident of the house prior to the narrator’s arrival, and the mirroring of them—lonely, isolated individuals—places the narrator also as invader. What is perhaps more truly and invasion of the narrator’s space by Blount is the one that takes place psychically. The narrator notices this first as a feeling. ‘The place does not agree with me, I think […] The utter stillness of this house is beginning to oppress me’ (p. 24). He is dissatisfied with the article he has written whilst in the house. ‘There were strange expressions and ideas in it that I could not explain, and viewed with amazement, not to say alarm. They did not sound

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like my very own, and I could not remember having written them’. (p. 25). ‘Whew! What a ghastly thought! Where in the world did it come from? Such an idea is no more my own than it is the policeman’s. Yet I felt I had to write it. It was like a voice singing in my head, and my pen wouldn’t stop until the last word was finished. What ridiculous nonsense!’ (p. 26). What follows in the short narrative is like a battle for supremacy both of the physical space and the space of the mind. At some points the narrator becomes stronger and is able to write, whilst at others he is overcome with this oppression. The ‘listener’ figure, as with the ‘occupant’ figure, becomes both Blount and the protagonist himself interchangeably, as both listen at each others’ doors. Ghosts in the Gothic have frequently been seen as an incursion, breaking the borders between living and dead, entering the living world with a message to deliver. In Blackwood’s world, however, there are not such borders—living and dead are both spirits, and his ghostly spirits appear to be given the same rights to possession of space as the protagonists. This is true of his spirits of nature, as in ‘The Willows’, where there is a strong sense that the two travellers are trespassing in a spiritual place, in ‘The Wood of the Dead’ where the man wanders into the wood, and even perhaps ‘The Wendigo’, which picks up on similar colonisation themes to ‘A Haunted Island’ (again inspired by Blackwood’s own time in Canada). What is significant, then, about Blackwood’s writing is that, far from asserting an authority over the space, man’s only resolution comes when they accept their lack of ownership. Minturn, in ‘The Occupant of the Room’, for example, cannot explain why he feels the need to knock on the cupboard at the end of the narrative, but it gives the clear impression of this cupboard, at least, as the woman’s space. Those who try to assert an ownership over the space become doubled, as though to remind them of their position and lack of right; they are undermined in the attempt. The exception to this in Blackwood’s oeuvre is the John Silence stories, of a psychic detective who does go in and ‘resolve’ hauntings. Yet the aim is always acceptance over banishment, as in the case of ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’. The ghost is saddened by peoples’ reactions turning his space into one of terror and thus trapping him in it: ‘If only, oh, if only someone would be not terrified, but kind and loving to me! Then, you see, I might be able to change my condition and get away’ (p. 87). The woman, responding with love, is then able to offer him freedom. This woman and Minturn, then, are the only characters offered a sense of resolve, since by the knock and the kiss they acknowledge the spiritual world and its rights over space. Human space and ghostly space have a strange relationship in these tales. As the ghost in notes upon the woman’s confusion at finding him in a different room, ‘I’m in different space, for one thing, and you’d find me in any room you went into; for according to your way of measuring, I’m all over the house. Space is a bodily condition, but I am out of the body, and am not affected by space’ (p. 86). Blackwood explores the multiple spiritual possibilities of space in his work. Spaces are frequently closely measured and mapped out by the human, such as the protagonist of ‘The Listener’ whose room is ’10 by 10’ (p. 20), and mapped clearly in terms of its location within London—a quiet, yet reasonable central cul-de-sac. The house is personified in spatial terms, ‘the top of the door slants away from the ceiling with

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a glorious disregard of what is usual. They must have quarrelled – fifty years ago – and have been going apart ever since’ (p. 18), as indeed have the narrator and his sister, and his whole relationship with human community. Yet at the same time spaces appear to resist such mapping. Direction is frequently confused, undermined. Trying to ‘tell’ a location, to assert dominance over a space through mapping, never really succeeds in Blackwood’s stories. In his work, we must frequently feel our way with our other senses, smell, touch, sight, in order to locate the bodily in the spiritual world. Spaces are haunted by other things precisely because they do not ever really belong to us, or at any rate no more so than they belong to his ghosts. What Blackwood seeks to resolve is a tension between ‘human’ and ‘spirit’, and the underlying paradox of his work is that ultimately, this must be accepted as an unattainable ideal. The technique of storytelling is of key importance to Blackwood, the ‘ghost man’ of the early twentieth century, who was as much known for his telling of stories on radio and early television as for his actual composition of them in a narrative.20 The female storyteller’s attitude in ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’, encapsulates Blackwood’s own; never superfluous with language or narrative, he employs it economically but effectively, in a manner well suited to the short story form. This literary form, significantly popular during the modernist era, is effective precisely for this sense of partial narrative—for the lack of full disclosure or explanation, and the sense of something held back. On one level, we do discover what happened, for example the stable boy who pursued a young maid until she fell from the balcony (‘The Empty House’), but full details, the background behind the story, are never revealed. The stableman ‘was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder; but it all happened a century ago, and I’ve not been able to get more details of the story’ (p. 111). As with all the best stories of hauntings, we are given the bare bones—or the ghost—of a narrative which, held in place in history, remains ultimately inaccessible to us. This is reflective, of course, of the inaccessibility of narrative itself, and of language. It also, significantly, transfers interpretive responsibility, passing it from storyteller to reader, just as the protagonists may concede this ownership over space. For many of Blackwood’s predecessors, the ghost story frequently resembles the detective story, as a form of investigation or a challenge to uncover the history behind something. Ghosts tend to serve a communicative function in gothic story— they are there to show or to tell something, from the earliest Romantic incarnations of Alphonso the Good, Sir Walter Lovell and his wife, or Gaskell’s Victorian spectres.21 The ghost in ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’ is a somewhat exceptional case, since Algernon Blackwood’s ghosts, for the most part, are not particularly interested in telling. There are relatively few examples in his work of ghosts seeking out contact with the human; in a vast majority of the stories they exist independently of and outside of our narrators. Punter has said, of Blackwood’s nature hauntings, that ‘[t]he supernatural forces which he posits are fundamentally indifferent to man’,22 and in many respects this can be said to be true of his ghostly figures too. Their stories tend to function externally to, and independently of, the protagonists, who frequently sit as mere audience to these ghostly dramatisations. For Blackwood, then, it is very much places rather than people which are haunted, though the people may find themselves

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affected, and are often people seemingly particularly susceptible to haunting one way or another. In ‘A Haunted Island’, the indication is that the hauntings of the island continue regardless of who may or may not be occupying it currently; the Indians are seen to be paddling round the island with apparent intention to land after the young law student has left. Unlike the stories of writers such as Henry James, who has frequently been read from a psychoanalytic perspective, Blackwood’s ghosts do not lend themselves to individual psychological interpretation, perhaps precisely because they cannot be ‘decoded’ via the protagonist’s unconscious. For Blackwood’s ghosts do not belong to an individual unconscious, but a collective one. His forces of nature tap clearly into this; in the urban ghosts it is perhaps more subtle. In many instances, there may be a decoding possible on a societal level: The student on the haunted island sees his face projected onto the body of ‘a white man’, as a type, representative of all white men, and their role in Canadian history; male dominance and class relations are highlighted in ‘The Empty House’; the leper of ‘The Listener’ struggles with an isolation through contagiousness. This last is one story which has, in fact, been read through an individual psychological lens, in Thompson’s reading of it as a doubling narrative,23 and it does come closer than the others to an exploration of the psyche of the narrator. However, the question here revolves around community; this is a narrative about the trauma of isolation for the human self, and so focuses on two individual selves. Other narratives of Blackwood, such as ‘The Glamour of the Snow’, engage with these questions also, where the decision the protagonist feels he must make between community and nature is almost fatal, as he strays into the snowy mountains on an icy night in Switzerland.24 Community with nature must go alongside community with the human. Perhaps, in some respects, it should tell us more that we never learn much about Blackwood’s protagonists, that all remain somewhat two-dimensional figures. His most sustained character is Dr John Silence—a somewhat ambiguous figure who hovers between the spiritual and the scientific.25 Protagonists, for Blackwood, are often relatively interchangeable; they are merely ciphers for the exploration of the senses and of supernatural forces in the stories. They are good ciphers—students of the paranormal, psychical doctors, writers—people markedly susceptible to psychological connection, but their presence functions more as a mediator between reader and supernatural sensation than anything. This use of mediators to explore the spiritual is reflected in Blackwood’s use of language, as Sullivan has noted: ‘Lacking James’s irony and sense of the particular, Blackwood attempts to infuse his language with an intensity consistent with the “heightened consciousness” of his narrators’.26 The narrators’ consciousness functions as a connection to the ‘teeming life’ (ibid.) within the spiritual world. This connection, though, is often more of a fleeting glimpse than full face to face encounter. The spiritual world remains close but beyond grasp, it is an element of the mixed fear and desire of the Gothic. It pulls at the human, often away from the community and from the material world, and much of the tension in Blackwood’s work rests on a sense of intangible proximity. The suspense of these stories resides in the spatial and there is a preoccupation with physical closeness. The woman in her

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ghost story feels the danger of the proximity of the ‘man’ in her vulnerable position: ‘The man moved slowly towards me across the empty room. I held out my arm to stop him […] he came to a halt just opposite to me’ (p. 85). While the spiritual world may be inaccessible, it is not for him something removed, distant nor far-off; it is something always present and always close. Immediate, yet not in contact, precisely in ‘different space’. In ‘The Empty House’ Jim Shorthouse and his Aunt Julia hear a man cough ‘close beside them – so close that it seemed that must have been actually by his side in the darkness’ (p. 113). Later, in the drawing room, ‘a face thrust itself forward so close to his own that he could almost have touched it with his lips’ (p. 117). They ‘just had time to flatten themselves against the wall when the jumble of flying steps was upon them, and two persons […] dashed past at full speed’ (p. 122). The same terror from proximity visits the man on the haunted island, when the Native Americans pass immediately by him in the cottage, ‘within twelve inches of my face’ (p. 370) at the very moment the lightning flash lights up the room vividly, yet proceed past him without apparently seeing. There is a moment of dizzying closeness in this story— ‘some force was drawing me forward, and a dizzy terror seized me that I would lose my balance, and topple forward against the Indians just as they were in the act of passing me’ (p. 370), almost as when one stands at a precipice and feels strangely magnetised towards the fall. There is a deep concern with the possibility of touch, of physical contact: ‘There could not have been six inches between us, and yet I was conscious only of a current of cold air that followed them. They had not touched me […] Even the trailing thing on the floor had not touched my feet, as I had dreaded it would’ (ibid.). There is a sense of the abject here, made even more forceful at the ‘trailing thing’ revealed to be a corpse, the ‘utmost of abjection’,27 and not just this but one bearing the face of the narrator, disturbing identity in an abjection of self. When the two worlds do touch, it is always unexpected and jarring in some respect. In ‘The Listener’ the narrator feels the sense of another person stood nearby, upon which, ‘my fingers, feeling along the ledge, came into forcible contact with something that was at once withdrawn. It was cold and moist’ (p. 29). Again there is the appeal to sensation, yet though we have the sense of touch here what we lack again is the rationale behind it; we do not know (and perhaps do not wish to know) exactly what the narrator has touched. Touch is, of course, central to this story, being about a leper and the horrors of contagious disease. Yet the touch remains somewhat beyond comprehension, beyond reason. It is truly abject in this, and an abject which, as Kristeva notes, is ‘edged with the sublime’,28 with that which is beyond reason and explanation. It is almost as though sight, too, is needed to verify the touch, and this is denied us at this point. This creates another form of partial narrative, the dramatic effect arising from the untold, from what is not revealed. This abject concept of touch and contagion recurs in ‘A Haunted Island’, where the narrator’s sense of discomfort in the bedroom is compared to ‘the presence of a dangerous contagious disease’ (p. 363). There is a deep concern, then, with whether something will actually touch, as though upon this something will be broken, a barrier crossed irreversibly. So the physical touch with the spiritual becomes sublime, beyond reason. This is evidenced

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in a sublime yet not abject example in ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’, the only narrative here that does involve a highly personal encounter and a form of embodiment, through movement again. The simple act from the woman of moving across the floor towards the ghost rather than running the other way indicates a willingness on her part and a compassionate move in his eyes. The woman describes ‘his voice plainly thrilling at my approach’ (p. 88). Contrary to the case of ‘The Listener’s creeping leper’, this ghost claims, ‘[y]ou need not be afraid I shall injure you. I can’t touch your body to begin with, for there’s a great gulf fixed, you know’ (p. 87). Her fear goes from being ‘physical’ to being ‘psychical’ (p. 86)—one might expect it to be the other way around. Certainly traditional definitions of horror and terror have tended to have the latter as more related to the psychical, and more distant, than immediate, physical horror. The sensation being described here is sublime in a positive way: [H]ow can I describe to you, all you sceptical men sitting there with pipes in your mouths, the amazing sensation I experienced holding an intangible, impalpable thing so closely to my heart that it touched my body with equal pressure all the way down, and then melted away somewhere into my very being? (p. 90)

The almost oxymoronic ‘sensation’ of an ‘intangible’ being, the ‘impalpable’ thing which yet ‘touched’ with ‘pressure’ defines one of the key tensions in Blackwood’s work. This is something that goes beyond words, the sublime sensation of the kiss, and here it is the feeling and sensation needed by the ghost rather than an explanation in words or founded in reason. It is important for Blackwood that this stay outside of full disclosure or resolve, that it remain not fully explicable. For this tension is what he engages with for dramatic effect. ‘The story was a good one – satisfied me, at any rate, that it was worth investigating; and I won’t weary you with all the details as to the woman’s murder and all the tiresome elaboration as to why the place was alive. Enough that it was’ (p. 83). Blackwood is not so much interested in providing substantial or substantiated narrative for his hauntings as he is in creating tension and atmosphere. The woman noticeably chooses not to confide her experience to Sir Henry, and not completely to those around her in this story. Words can only take us so far in these narratives, though Blackwood demonstrates his clear engagement and fascination with them. An early review in The Bookman notes, ‘[a]long with his passion for life he has a passion for language. For him the spoken or written word is a thing of tremendous and eternal force’.29 This is perhaps why Blackwood does not overstate; this sense that he is engaging with something of tremendous force, something not to be taken lightly nor used carelessly. There is something spiritual about language here, as there is about nature. There is also something of the wild about this force, something untameable. As such, language is never something over which we have complete dominion. It is a tool he or his narrators ‘borrow’ to tell stories, just as his protagonists borrow space. This concept of a more wild, ‘natural’ state to language, familiar in the Romantic era thanks to thinkers such as Rousseau, has come full circle in contemporary Ecocritical ideas, linking Blackwood again to this field of criticism. Again, this may involve

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a reconception of the concept of nature as wild and disorderly, language as manmade and structured. Gary Snyder, for example, notes that language actually mirrors the natural world in being ‘mannerly, shapely, coherent and patterned according to its own devices’, a two-way motion that ‘enables us to have a small window onto an independently existing world, but […] also shapes – via its very structures and vocabulary – how we see that world’.30 For Snyder this shaping is not restrictive, since both nature and language are in constant flux, offering infinite creative possibilities. Blackwood likewise shows this play, or experimentation, in language and expression whereby whilst acknowledging its limits and our lack of ownership over language, is keen to ‘borrow’ and to play with words for expression, and for aesthetic effect in his storytelling. Blackwood’s role in the Modernist development of Gothic is thus in fact a central one. His engagement with questions of modernity, with isolation and dislocation, presents him as a key figure within this noticeable shift in Gothic. Blackwood shows a sense of desire to connect with the spiritual world, at the same time as an anxiety about separation from the human. Nigel Morris notes, of twentieth century Gothic, that it ‘puts less emphasis on setting rational knowledge against spirituality […] but posits individualism and community as threatened by regulation. At stake are psychic integrity and confidence in agency and purpose’.31 This is clear in Blackwood, where confidence in agency is consistently undermined. His faith in language derives not from its comprehensiveness but precisely from the opposite, in its natural incompleteness, which is what allows for play and experimentation. In this he takes a curious kind of delight; there is a strong sense of acceptance in his work of the powerlessness of man in relation to language as well as to nature. In this balance between telling and not telling, the sense of a glimpse of wholeness, always present but never touchable, Blackwood fuses Romantic, Gothic and Modernist concerns and techniques in his writing. Mike Ashley’s biography of the writer, Starlight Man, employs for its back cover a claim from the New York Review of Books for Blackwood as ‘the central figure in the British supernatural literature of the twentieth century’.32 In his updating of romantic and gothic concerns and techniques for his own era, through this manipulation of space and of language, he becomes a key figure in the development of gothic writing during this time. The sense of balance achieved in his work is central to his aesthetic technique and his manipulation of the storytelling mode. Blackwood’s narrators only tell of that over which they have control. At the point at which control must be handed over, they obediently go quiet. It seems fitting to end this analysis with the final image from ‘A Haunted Island’, as the young student leaves the island which is still being circled by the threatening canoe: ‘I turned a corner, and a projecting bluff of rock hid from my view both island and canoe’ (p. 375). We close the story with, rather than a resolve, an image of obscurity and precisely a lack of ability to see the whole. Our protagonist chooses to paddle away, back to human community, yet the residing image is of the canoe, still headed for the island. The spiritual world is

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there, but as ghostly presence to us—always nearby but never fully comprehensible, superimposed on human concerns but ultimately in ‘different space’. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

See for example Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (eds.), Gothic Modernisms (London: Palgrave, 2001); John Paul Riquelme (ed.), Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008); Matthew Foley, Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism (London: Palgrave, 2017). Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978), p. 5. ‘Make it New!’ was specifically the cry of Ezra Pound, but we may also think about writers such as T. S. Eliot and their use of classical literary tradition updated in form for a new era here. Terry Thompson, ‘“He Used to Wear a Veil”: Pursuing the Other in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”’, Papers on Language and Literature 42.1 (2006), 95–110, p. 100. For further details of Blackwood’s life and beliefs, see Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (London: Constable and Robinson, 2001). David Punter, ‘Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 45–57. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares, p. 115. Collected together recently, amongst others, in M. Grant Kellermeyer (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors: The Best Weird Fiction and Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (Fort Wayne, IN: Oldstyle Tales Press, 3rd edn, 2016). Robert Hume, ‘Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel’, PMLA 84.2 (1969), 282–290, p. 290. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also 1 Corinthians 13: 12. Blackwood, ‘The Woman’s Ghost Story’, in The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors: The Best Weird Fiction and Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, pp. 82–92, p. 86. David Punter, ‘Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit’, pp. 48–49. David Punter, ‘Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit’, p. 51. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1764] 2014). Blackwood, ‘The Listener’, in Kellermeyer (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors, pp. 17–43, pp. 26–27. His reference is to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater of 1821.

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16. Blackwood, ‘The Empty House’, in Kellermeyer (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors, pp. 18–123, p. 114. 17. Blackwood, ‘The Occupant of the Room’, in Kellermeyer (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors, pp. 44–53, p. 46. 18. Algernon Blackwood, ‘A Haunted Island’, in Kellermeyer (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors, pp. 360–375, p. 360. 19. See note 4. 20. A limited number of these narratives are available publicly online, through the BFI on Youtube, e.g. ‘Lock Your Door’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wRy4D11qc8I [accessed 15 March 2019]. 21. From Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778) and Elizabeth Gaskell, Gothic Tales (1851–1851; collected in Penguin edition 2000). 22. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, Volume 2: The Modern Gothic (London: Routledge 2013 [Pearson Education Ltd. 1996]), p. 80. 23. Terry Thompson, ‘“He Used to Wear a Veil”: Pursuing the Other in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”’. 24. Blackwood, ‘The Glamour of the Snow’, in Kellermeyer (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors, pp. 300–324. 25. The exception to this might be the John Silence stories, which do lend themselves to a more ‘detective’ style, precisely because John Silence is just this—a psychical detective. I would on this basis separate them somewhat from most of his other ghost stories precisely by virtue of this. Even so, the ghosts in these stories rarely have any personal connection to the victims of the hauntings. 26. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares, p. 121. 27. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 28. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 11. 29. Sir William Robertson Nicholl (ed.), ‘The Unseen World’, The Bookman, 47.280 (January 1915), 130. 30. Gary Snyder, ‘Language Goes Two Ways’, in Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 127–131, pp. 127–128. 31. Nigel Morris, ‘Metropolis and the Modernist Gothic’, in Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (eds.), Gothic Modernisms (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 188–206, p. 188. 32. Michael Dirda, ‘Algernon Blackwood: The Master of the Supernatural’, in The New York Review of Books (2016), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/ 12/22/algernon-blackwood-master-supernatural/ [accessed 18 January 2019], quoted in Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood, rear cover.

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Bibliography Ashley, Mike, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (Eureka, CA: Stark House Press, Rev edn [2001] 2019). Coupe, Laurence (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000). Dirda, Michael, ‘Algernon Blackwood: The Master of the Supernatural’, in The New York Review of Books (2016). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/algernon-blackwood-master-sup ernatural/ [accessed 18 January 2019]. Foley, Matthew, Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism (London: Palgrave, 2017). Hume, Robert, ‘Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel’, PMLA 84.2 (1969), 282–290. Kellermeyer, M. Grant (ed.), The Willows, The Wendigo and Other Horrors: The Best Weird Fiction and Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (Fort Wayne, IN: Oldstyle Tales Press, 3rd edn, 2016). Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1872] 1993). ‘Lock Your Door’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRy4D11qc8I [accessed 15 March 2019]. Riquelme, John Paul (ed.), Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008). Smith, Andrew and Jeff Wallace (eds.), Gothic Modernisms (London: Palgrave, 2001). Smith, Andrew and William Hughes (eds), EcoGothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mvk5r.8 [accessed 20 January 2019]. Sullivan, Jack, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978). Terry Thompson, ‘“He Used to Wear a Veil”: Pursuing the Other in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”’, Papers on Language and Literature 42.1 (2006), 95–110. Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1764] 2014).

National Gothic

The Failed Heroism of Ludwig II of Bavaria Joana Rita Ramalho

A lifelong committed patron of the arts, Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–1886) of the House of Wittelsbach, infamously spent inordinate amounts of money to sponsor music and architecture, leaving the Bavarian state on the verge of bankruptcy. He ascended the throne in 1864 at the age of eighteen and, from the early 1870s, devoted most of his time, energy and imagination to the construction of fairy-tale castles. Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee are architectural reveries inspired by Teutonic legends and the work of the king’s protégé, German composer Richard Wagner. The cult around the life of the Bavarian king, which grew exponentially after his mysterious death in 1886, lives on today and has originated a torrent of literature. In the extensive and ever-growing corpus of literary works either directly about or inspired by Ludwig II, certain names stand out. Paul Verlaine (1886), Guillaume Apollinaire (1913, 1916) and Fernando Pessoa (circa 1930) remember the ill-fated king in their writings, as do German novelists Karl May (1888), Klaus Mann (1937) and Thomas Mann (1947). Salvador Dalí, in turn, made him the centre of his paranoiac ballet Bacchanale (1939) and the king figures in several of his art pieces.1 Aleister Crowley, in his eucharistic ritual Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass (1913), includes Ludovicus Rex Bavariæ as one of the distinguished names to be worthily commemorated.2 The life of the enigmatic sovereign has also captivated the interest of numerous filmmakers, including Ludwig Trautmann (1917–1918), Rolf Raffé (1920), Otto Kreisler (1922), William Dieterle (1930, 1955), Jean Cocteau (1948), Luchino Visconti (1973), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (1972, 1973, 1982), Donatello and Fosco Dubini (1993) and Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr (2012). Ludwig was a man torn between reality and dream, sanity and insanity, cruelty and kindness, religious devotion and queer desire, who grew up at a time when Romanticism and Gothicism coincided and intersected. The king’s place in the history of Germany, Western music and architecture is well known. His relation to the gothic J. R. Ramalho (B) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_11

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tradition, however, has so far eluded scholarly criticism. By singling out this historical personage as my research subject, my aim is to formulate a reading of Ludwig II as a unique romantic gothic figure and failed hero. Scrutinising the king’s friendship with his cousin, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837–1898), or Wagner lies beyond the remit of the present research. Likewise, I am not concerned here with surveying the historical accuracy of works of fiction, a task that could be easily undertaken by Ludwig scholars, historians or enthusiasts. Rather, I will integrate into my approach two distinct dimensions—the real person and the aestheticised legend— which, when combined, allow for a better understanding of Ludwig as Gothic. In so doing, my work offers an innovative, if sometimes uneasy, encounter between historical events, private accounts, literary descriptions and filmic portrayals. While this methodological strategy may seem oddly eclectic, it provides a more complete picture of Ludwig’s Gothicism and suits his liminal status, initially acquired and cultivated during his lifetime and later mythologised. My analysis is guided by the interconnected concepts of gothic hero-villain, as defined by Helen Stoddart, and failure.3 Ludwig’s singular persona as an example of failed gothic heroism and kingship will emerge first through an exploration of wilful solitude and then through an investigation of the relation between madness and creativity. Ludwig’s death frames the final pages, which examine the monarch’s life as representative of queer failure and offer further examples of his continued gothicisation. This, for instance, as depicted in Helmut Käutner’s film, Mad Emperor: Ludwig II (1955): the distinctive cacophony of an orchestra tuning fills the soundtrack. Framed from behind, we follow a couple as they enter the royal balcony box in the sumptuously ornate theatre of the Munich Residenz. Seemingly happy, the pair heads towards their respective seats. Suddenly, however, the woman comes to a halt and the camera briefly lingers on her astonished face—she is staring at an eerily deserted auditorium. There is a mix of terror and disbelief in her expression. Painfully realising that this will not be a typical night at the opera, she looks at her companion and exclaims: ‘Ludwig…!’4 Ignoring her obvious discomfort and neglecting to make eye contact, Ludwig tells her they are going to hear Wagner’s The Rhinegold (1854). He then signals the conductor and they take their seats. The first chords of the prelude to The Ring of the Nibelung cycle solemnly engulf all ambient noise. The orchestra plays for their ears only. The young woman immediately turns to Ludwig, but when he does not reciprocate her look, she refrains from speaking. In a medium close-up, followed by a subjective point-of-view shot, we watch as she inspects her surroundings. The haunting Wagnerian music and the sight of the majestic rococo theatre, with its crimson velvet furnishings and gold-plated carvings, virtually devoid of spectators, deeply disturbs her. A mere few seconds into the performance, unable to overcome her initial shock, she confesses: ‘I don’t understand; it frightens me’. Much to her dismay, Ludwig remains impervious and calm, staring blankly into the darkness. ‘Why do you do this?’, she asks impatiently. ‘I must show you what our life will be like – if you remain with me. Alone, Sophie, with nobody… nobody’, Ludwig tells her. ‘You see, sometimes I see a light’. ‘What kind of light?’, Sophie interrupts. ‘My light; it’s my guide. When people are near, it disappears and lights away no more. It just disappears. Do you understand?’5 Sobbing, Sophie admits that she cannot do

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it; she cannot live without people and begs him to leave. This fictional exchange between King Ludwig II of Bavaria and his then fiancée and cousin, Duchess Sophie Charlotte (1847–1897), is paradigmatic in its representation of Ludwig as a king who deliberately makes himself a hostage of abandon and solitude. With the twisted gesture of forcing Sophie to make what seems to her an impossible choice, Ludwig succeeds in breaking off the engagement—he is once again free to be alone. Private performances in the Residenz Theatre and the Court Theatre in Munich became a regular feature in the king’s life between 1872 and 1885.6 Adopting a solipsistic stance is one of the defining characteristics of romantic and gothic heroes. The latter are nonetheless substantially darker, more excessive and more dangerous than their purely romantic counterparts; likewise, they are more extreme when it comes to loneliness. Characters such as the eponymous Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) or the more romantic Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and the Beast in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946), alone and ashamed in his immense castle of forlornness, patiently awaiting a much belated death, indicate that gothic heroes are not just lonely, but often live in self-imposed isolation. Towards the end of Käutner’s film, Ludwig’s beloved cousin, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, fondly known as ‘Sisi’, comes to visit him and he shows her around the island palace of Herrenchiemsee, his latest architectural venture. Modelled on Versailles and intended as a tribute to Louis XIV of France, le Roi Soleil, Ludwig takes special pride in its magnificent Hall of Mirrors, whose grandiosity surpasses the one at Versailles. He asks Sisi what she thinks of it. She looks around and replies that it is wonderful. ‘But something’s missing – people, music…’, she remarks. ‘I see the people. I hear the music’, Ludwig explains. ‘The best thing is that the people here don’t have shadows.’ ‘But I mean real people, Ludwig. Will no guests come?’ she asks. ‘Whatever are you thinking, Sisi?’7 Ludwig’s fascination with what Marina Warner calls ‘states of inwardness’ and his utter disbelief at his cousin’s question confirm the voluntary seclusion of the self, foreshadowing the inevitable downfall of a mind that refuses and refutes the real world at all cost.8 In her memoirs, Countess Marie Larisch (1858–1940) attests to Ludwig’s withdrawal from social interactions when she recounts a trip she once took to Berg Castle, on Lake Starnberg, with her aunt Sisi. She recalls that before she was allowed to enter the palace, Elisabeth told her to wait and went in alone, ‘for Ludwig was even then a man of moods and had to be tactfully handled when an uninvited visitor was in question’.9 In the wake of Bavaria’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian War (1866), Ludwig’s power had waned substantially and he had become a constitutional monarch with little independence. In the years that follow, his political impotence grows, as does his detachment from state affairs. After Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and the unification of the German Empire in 1871, Ludwig effectively becomes a king with no kingdom, who reigns but no longer rules. Changes to the Penal Code, introduced by the newly formed German Empire, recriminalise homosexual acts under Paragraph 175, which may have added to Ludwig’s already tumultuous internal struggles regarding his sexuality—intensifying, in turn, his ‘moods’ and his longing for solitude.10

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King Ludwig, I suggest, stands as the epitome of the ‘isolato, or separate one’ who, as William Hughes remarks, consigns himself to ‘liminal spaces beyond human community’.11 Preferring to retreat to his own oneiric delusions rather than accept the morose and petty reality of the dystopian everyday, the Bavarian king commences a progressive severance of ties with the social world by crafting a dream world for himself—one which materialises quietude and seclusion in stone. In his sublime fortresses of abandonment, hidden away amid scenic mountain peaks, dense forests and crystalline alpine lakes, he can become the kind of king he wants to be: one who privileges culture and the arts above all else and is not tied down by politics, menial tasks, financial constraints or an unwavering sense of duty towards his people. As the years go by, Ludwig confines himself to an ever-greater isolation and skilfully invents ways to shield him from the prying looks of others. In the oval dining rooms at Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, he has a peculiar table designed, a ‘Tischgen deck dich’ (‘table, set yourself’), so called after the magical wishing table from a tale by the Brothers Grimm (KHM 36).12 By means of a winch, the table lowers directly to the kitchen through a hole on the floor, allowing the king to dine alone, undisturbed by servants. Still, Ludwig’s almost uninterrupted privacy is not always lonely, as Theodor Hierneis, who apprenticed as a cook in the royal kitchens, explains: [T]he king always ate alone, and in spite of this, every dish had to be prepared for four people. At first I accepted this as one of the many inexplicable prescriptions of court etiquette; but I later learned that the king imagined himself to be entertaining guests, that he thought himself in the world of the French kings who were his models and drank toasts and carried on conversations with La Pompadour, Madame de Maintenon and La Dubarry.13

In his gothic soirées, Ludwig rejoiced in entertaining ghostly guests, such as Marie Antoinette; Mary, Queen of Scots; Catherine the Great; Julius Caesar; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; the Emperor Barbarossa and medieval poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose thirteenth-century work Parzival is represented in the murals of the Singers’ Hall in Neuschwanstein.14 Conversing with dead kings, queens and other distinguished personalities links with the idea of ‘the guests without shadows’, which Käutner’s Ludwig tells Sisi about when she visits Herrenchiemsee. Ludwig’s gothic turn becomes increasingly apparent from the late 1870s. In fact, it is not just his reclusive demeanour and introvert disposition that, because excessive, devolve from Romantic into Gothic. Even in terms of physical appearance, Ludwig loses the aura of Prince Charming and moves away from the romantic ideal. Over the span of just ten years, he undergoes a somewhat Hydesian metamorphosis, going from the proverbial tall, dark and handsome hero, admired widely for his striking beauty, to an overweight adult with rotting teeth.15 These physical changes and resulting health issues parallel and fuel the king’s progressive seclusion, heavily affecting his daily life. In effect, McIntosh attributes Ludwig’s critical decision to acquiesce to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s request and propose the Prussian king as the future Kaiser to a painful toothache, which left him in an ‘uncharacteristically susceptible mood’.16 Visconti’s cinematic portrayal of the king (Ludwig, 1973) depicts this historic moment: Ludwig is adamant about Bavaria remaining independent and not becoming a vassal of Prussia but, tired and unwell, easily caves to pressure and

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signs the Kaiserbrief . Countess Marie Larisch also addresses this regal ailment in an uncanny episode she witnesses when she is at last invited to enter Berg Castle on that day trip with her aunt Elisabeth: I was ushered into a darkened room, and could discern my aunt seated in an arm-chair close to where Ludwig was lying on a chaise longue with his head enveloped in cotton-wool and bandages. The royal sufferer was the victim of a bad toothache, which attacked him periodically, as a result of his over-indulgence in sugar. A little table, covered with bottles of all sizes, stood at his elbow, and, as I approached, Ludwig feebly waved his hand, but said nothing.17

Ludwig’s melodramatic despondency in Larisch’s account and his weakened commitment to crucial royal duties in Visconti’s film, all due to such a prosaic malady, frame him as a poignantly pitiful caricature of a king. Larisch’s careful description is thoroughly cinematic and wittily theatricalises her illustrious cousin’s pain. The reader is treated to a sorry sight, with the taciturn ‘royal sufferer’ silently and ‘feebly’ greeting the Countess. The tragicomic element that subtends this family encounter is not lost on Elisabeth or the Countess. As the latter reports, the Empress taps her arm when she enters the room and tells her not to laugh, adding that the king wishes for her to seat at the piano and sing Elsa’s music from Wagner’s Lohengrin (1850).18 Tired after a two-hour horse ride from Feldafing, the hotel where Elisabeth usually summered, on the other side of Lake Starnberg, young Marie is not overly pleased by this request. Recalling a throat ‘gritty with dust’ from the ride and the absence of a music sheet, she nervously ventures into the music room and performs ‘a Swan Song with a vengeance’.19 Ludwig is nevertheless ‘obsessed by the toothache’, she writes, ‘and only required to be soothed somehow, and as my aunt was not at all musical, it did not signify much, so I attacked Elsa’s score until the King took pity on me and told me I need not play any longer’.20 James D. Wilson’s and Wylie Sypher’s remarks about the corrosion of the heroic ideal by disheartened romantic heroes resonate especially well with Ludwig’s periodical dental predicament as described here. Wilson asserts that the tragic dilemma of romantic characters is that they often pervert the heroic ideal in such a way that it almost shifts into its opposite.21 Sypher, in turn, adds that romantic heroism easily collapses ‘into tedium, ennui, if not despair or cynicism’.22 Stretched out on a chaise longue, waving his hand awkwardly to the unexpected guest, the king is emasculated, his romantic vitality waning under the weight of bandages, medication and cavity-ridden teeth. Dieter Fuchs, in his analysis of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), whose first section is partly inspired by the life of the melancholy king, suggests that Larisch’s narration details the ‘mock-heroic dimension’ of Ludwig’s self-fashioning as a modern-day Lohengrin, the Swan Knight of Arthurian literature and the titular character of Wagner’s eponymous opera. Fuchs, following in the footsteps of Herbert Knust, advances that Ludwig, with his wounded—or failed—masculinity (here referring to his frail health and the fact that he did not produce an heir), functions more accurately as Fisher King Anfortas (who suffers from a chronic sexual injury) than as the saviour knight of the Holy Grail.23 Similarly, Larisch’s cynical reminiscences offer a clear representation of Ludwig not only as a failed king, but as a

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Romantic project gone wrong: his unwavering ambition to embody the heroic myths of Germanic legends fails and is the object of ridicule. The sombre royal setting and the excess of pain in Larisch’s description accentuate the mock-heroic bearing of the sovereign who, with his self-imposed solitude, faulty heroism and decaying teeth, becomes wholly abject. Any vestiges of Romanticism quickly tip over into the realm of the gothic grotesque with the Countess’s playfully sarcastic undermining of Ludwig’s would-be heroic posture, which becomes more acerbic as she continues her retelling of the day’s events. After her subpar performance of Wagner’s work, she walks back into the darkened room, where Aunt Cissi [sic] was saying good-bye to the King, who rose from his chair and kissed her hand. I could hardly refrain from laughing, for Ludwig looked indeed an object for mirth. He was the tallest man in Bavaria, and as the bandages which had been tied round his face were left with long upstanding ends, his head looked somewhat like a large white owl’s. He graciously extended his hand for me to kiss, and as he did so I was nearly overcome by the mingled odours of laudanum, chloroform, cloves, camphor and other toothache cures, which it exhaled.24

Larisch’s difficulty to follow her aunt’s advice and withhold laughter stresses the distinctly parodic gothic atmosphere that envelops this episode. Ludwig, intoxicated with ‘toothache cures’ and Wagner’s music, is reminiscent of a large owl or mummylike creature, far removed from the valiant Swan Knight he aspires to be. Syberberg’s Brechtian production, Ludwig II: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), concurs with this idea of Ludwig as a failed Lohengrin and relishes on theatrics to show how his myth has been damaged and neutralised by the culture industry.25 In succeeding tableaux, Syberberg weaves together Wagnerian arias, dialogue, excerpts from old American radio shows and popular music in a complex ‘fusion of fracture’—a story where facts, dreams and burlesque overlap, resulting in an extravagant mockery of the king.26 There is one particular low-key sequence, nonetheless immediately striking due to the absence of music, which creatively displays a further element of caricature. The king and his associates quietly observe as servants perform the traditional washing of the feet of the twelve poorest people in the kingdom. As Ludwig moves around the room, the scratching sound of his long leather boots is painfully audible each time he bends his knees. He repeatedly tries to muffle the noise, but to no avail. This scene vividly contrasts Ludwig’s deep-seated wish for a Louis XIV-style absolute monarchical rule with his obvious discomfort in his role as king. To Claudio Magris, his monarchy is both a caricature of romantic poetry and a caricatured continuation of it—of the unreasonable want to materialise alternative realities, where dreams, the exotic and the fantastic reign supreme.27 Larisch, Magris and Syberberg reduce Ludwig’s would-be heroism to humorous farce and, from their characterisation of the king, we realise that his passage from romantic to gothic hero proper never fully occurs. The ‘perversion’ and collapse that Wilson and Sypher describe separate, I argue, between a typically romantic Mr Darcy-like figure and a brooding gothic individual, whose rebellious quest (for love, beauty, immortality or freedom) condemns him to everlasting frustration—and often death. Ludwig remains a liminal figure that is no longer entirely romantic, but not wholly representative of gothic heroism either. As a rule, the gothic hero is not only

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flawed but villainous (an anti-hero), having usually ‘fallen’ from good to evil, as Victor Frankenstein or John Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost (1667). The king does ‘fall’ and follows a similar route to those prototypical gothic heroes—a route paved with obsession, transgression and egotism—but his actions are never criminal or hateful, deserving of punishment or in need of repentance. Much like Byron’s Manfred (1817), Ludwig combines both variants: he is the sensitive romantic hero who loves nature and beauty, but also the cruel gothic hero who abhors socialising, punishes his staff and would beg, borrow and steal to build his expensive personal playgrounds. He is the hero-villain who promotes the arts, but does so by readily squandering his family’s fortune, and the king-villain who, despite his ardent antiPrussianism, resigns to revising and signing the Kaiserbrief , thus consenting to the unification of the German states. Referring back to Larisch’s prose, the hint of dignified elegance that Ludwig’s hand gesture retains heightens the pathetic effect and points to another key aspect of Ludwig’s romantic Gothicism: his flair for performance. In an active effort to avoid having anyone encroach on his craving for peaceful solitude, Ludwig does more than shy away from socialising (with the living) and retreat to his castles, far from the hustle and bustle of the capital. From 1875, he lives by night and sleeps during the day, acting as a suitably gothic counterpoint to his adored Sun King.28 Ludwig, the Moon King, starts breakfasting when others dine and takes up the habit of going on high-speed nocturnal rides in a neo-rococo gilt coach which, in wintry weather, turns into an open sleigh pulled by white horses.29 The Puttenschlitten, a state-of-the-art sleigh built in 1872, stands as the first electrically-lit vehicle in Bavaria, if not the world.30 Dashing through the snow-covered mountains, it pierces the surrounding darkness with its electric lights, delighting Bavarian peasants who are sometimes graced with impromptu visits from the king. Ludwig’s nocturnal performances meld kingship, science and fantasy and consolidate the legend of Ludwig II, the fairytale Kini, much beloved by the alpine people. The splendorous nighttime outings transfer well to film. Syberberg’s portrayal of the mystic night travels overlaps image and voice off, reality and fiction, the present and the past, when an old peasant recalls the excitement of seeing and meeting the king during one of his sleigh rides. In a frontal medium shot, we watch Ludwig, in the night and in the snow, rush through the mountains while a hoarse female voice narrates the special moment of unique perfection when her mother carefully poured some water in a porcelain cup with painted roses and served it to the thirsty king. In this mini mockumentary— and, in fact, throughout Syberberg’s unconventional biopic—Ludwig is memory and remembrance; he exists through storytelling and recollection, through the voices and testimonies of others as a curious hand-me-down. The film plays with the ultimate impossibility of Ludwig’s portentous dreams and highlights the gothic nuances of the king’s character by depicting his life as a performance of inescapable ghostliness. The monarch’s unrelenting passion for the arts enacts both his yearning for isolation and his desire to avoid historical effacement. The Wittelsbachs were known for acting as generous benefactors of the arts, but Ludwig’s reign takes this to extreme lengths. ‘I want to – and this will sound absurd – but I’ve always wanted to establish a refuge for artists’. ‘Yes, the mortal was created to guard and preserve the immortal’,

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Bismarck replies to Ludwig in Käutner’s film.31 This interchange equates sponsoring the arts with divine duty. According to Wilson, the relation between art, ephemerality (the mortal) and immortality derives from the idea that the imagination, through artistic endeavours, provides mortals with their only experience of heavenly bliss.32 In the early years of his reign, Ludwig finds in his patronage of the ill-famed composer Richard Wagner a first outlet for his creative impulses. Rich in mythology, Wagner’s music-dramas feed the imagination of the young king, who had spent most of his childhood in Hohenschwangau Castle, whose walls are covered in neo-gothic murals depicting scenes from Tannhäuser, the Holy Grail, Lohengrin and other Germanic legends.33 The use of art forms in gothic works is a common device to expose the natural predisposition of the heroes to engage in peculiar or erratic behaviours. The trend finds its literary exponent in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and continues in films such as The Hands of Orlac (1924), While I Live (1947) or House of Wax (1953). In Raffé’s The Silence at Starnberg Lake (1920), Wagner tries to appease the king by telling him: ‘Let the magic of art transport you to Valhalla’.34 As in Käutner’s film, artistic production and fruition are mysticised and linked to a sense of peace and godhood. The persistent pursuit of beauty that permeates Ludwig’s life would, nonetheless, prove self-destructive. Ludwig’s penchant for creating and erecting ‘monuments to Bavarian art’, as he calls his castles in Raffé’s picture, is from the start deemed borderline pathological by many of his ministers, relatives and aides-de-camp.35 Since his propensity to create does not subsume with time and instead his idiosyncrasies intensify, Ludwig acquires the reputation of ‘mad king’, which would thereafter remain inextricably linked to his image. The connection between genius and madness has for centuries been surrounded by an aura of sublime mystery.36 The ‘pathogenesis of art’, to use Annette Wheeler Carafelli’s expression, attracts particular attention from the last decade of the eighteenth century and becomes even more prominent from the second half of the 1800s, when behavioural and psychological abnormalities are no longer disparaged or deemed the result of demonic possession, but viewed as worthy of scientific inquiry. Following the segregation of the mad by mid-seventeenth and eighteenth-century physicians, what Michel Foucault calls ‘the Great Confinement’, there appear new ways of diagnosing and controlling mental disorders without completely ostracising the patients, whom some physicians start treating more humanely.37 In the nineteenth century, respected neuroanatomist and psychiatrist Bernhard von Gudden (1824–1886), who oversaw the treatment of Ludwig’s brother Otto (1848–1916) and is later assigned to examine and care for the king, introduces a revolutionary no-restraint policy in mental institutions, which some indicate may have contributed to his untimely death.38 A new ‘rhetoric of pathology’ develops from the mid nineteenth century, whereby the furor poeticus (artistic frenzy) of romantic and Victorian novelists, poets and artists, who alternate suddenly—and sometimes violently—between sane and insane patterns of thought, comes under medical scrutiny.39 The aetiology of mental illnesses turns into a key scientific and philosophical preoccupation. Members of the medical community start paying closer attention to the hypothesis that the pathologies of the mind and body could indicate an innate disposition for artistic talent—and madness.

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This results in the romanticising of insanity, which is disseminated in the later nineteenth century and finds resonance in a series of case studies elaborated by the then emergent science of psychiatry. New theories of how the brain functions, fuelled by the psychiatric investigations of Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804–1884), Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–1873), Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907) and von Gudden’s assistant Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), along with studies by criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and physician Max Nordau (1849–1923), analyse the links between biological anomalies of the mind and artistic genius. According to some medical experiments, the ‘artistic vein’ could be physiologically detected in the diseased brain and body. Clara Tschudi touches on the pervasive aestheticisation of madness when she writes that ‘The Bavarian people had accustomed themselves to Ludwig’s peculiarities. Foreign states and peoples still regarded his ways and actions as signs of genius’.40 Creativity and insanity went hand in hand. Ludwig’s ambition to crystallise his artistic visions knew no bounds. Towards the end of his life, the unfortunate king tirelessly tries to secure the sum needed to give tangible form to his chimerical castles and pay off his creditors by any means necessary. At one point, this included commanding a bank robbery— an order which was not carried out, but was later submitted as evidence of the king’s deranged mind.41 Throughout most of his reign, Ludwig oscillates between ‘moodily taciturn’ and ‘violently explosive’, traits that, Stoddart claims, characterise gothic hero-villains.42 Larisch ascribes Ludwig’s gradual gothicisation, from an intelligent ‘romantic being’ into an insane ‘gross feeder’, to heartbreak, suggesting that after calling off his betrothal to Sophie, the king’s usual kindness changes into vicious cruelty towards his servants and he slowly develops into a ‘moody creature, a victim to melancholia’, ‘obsessed’ with a severe dislike for untrustworthy women.43 The Countess here echoes Tschudi who also describes the king as a ‘slave of melancholia’ following his parting from Sophie.44 This romanticised and heteronormalised justification for Ludwig’s altered demeanour (represented as well in Raffé’s film, for which Larisch wrote the script) is highly improbable and such a change is more likely connected to the king’s two failed attempts to form a stronger Bavarian government, his brother’s undeniable mental deterioration, his loss of authority following the war, his failure to exteriorise his non-heteronormative sexuality or homoerotic proclivities (Ludwig was a devout Catholic) and the disintegration of his few remaining friendships, culminating in Wagner’s death in 1883.45 Importantly, however, the terms Larisch uses to characterise her cousin’s behaviour—‘victim’, ‘moody’, ‘obsessed’, ‘melancholia’—intentionally medicalise it. Since antiquity, melancholia has been identified as a disease and, in the nineteenth century, it is characterised as an affective disorder whose pathological symptoms are rooted in emotional life. In the studies of Ludwig Snell, Carl Westphal and Wilhelm Sander, it appears as distinct from primary Verrücktheit or paranoia, an illness of the mind (reason).46 The form of mental alienation designated as ‘paranoia’ is classified in many different ways, but two strains stand out: degenerative (congenital) and psycho-neurotic (understood as a complication of mania and melancholia).47

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Morel, who coined the term démence précoce (replaced, later in the nineteenth century, by Kraepelin’s ‘dementia praecox’ and by Eugen Bleuler’s ‘schizophrenia’ in the early twentieth century), is thought to have commented on the king’s eyes during a trip to Munich in 1868, stating that they ‘showed the presence of madness’.48 Stoddart and Mario Praz consider ‘unforgettable eyes’ and ‘melancholy habits’ to be defining attributes of gothic heroes.49 Morel, it should be noted, was a strong advocate of degeneration theory, based on the concept of heredity. Consanguinity, in particular, is held as a decisive factor in the production of mental aberrations, namely in royal families. Tschudi follows this line of reasoning, claiming that Ludwig’s and Elisabeth’s ‘inherited nervous sufferings were the sorrow-laden undercurrent of their lives’ and that ‘insanity which was inherent in their race was to both of them a threatening spectre, which, sooner or later, would attack them too’.50 The Wittelsbachs were widely known for their eccentricities well before Ludwig’s accession to the throne. His family tree was rife with colourful characters, including his aunt, Princess Alexandra, who believed she had swallowed a glass piano, and his younger brother Otto, who wasted away in an asylum.51 It is therefore unsurprising that alienists at the time were quick to uncover ‘the presence of madness’ in Ludwig’s unorthodox temperament and love of reclusion. In effect, heredity figures as a core argument in the documents that laid the dubious foundation for the king’s diagnosis and subsequent deposition.52 ‘Why do you think I am mentally ill?’, Ludwig asks von Gudden in Raffé’s picture. ‘You are all much sicker than I. You saw me as crazy for consciously standing in opposition to an era that strives to take all that is lovely, noble and joyous out of life. You are the ones that are crazy, not I!’53 As depicted in the film, Ludwig appears as a kind of hangover from romantic Gothicism into the age of psychiatric and psychoanalytic discovery. Scholarly articles about Ludwig’s psychological and psychiatric traits are many and varied. The diagnoses most commonly put forward concern schizophrenia, autism or some type of neurodegenerative disease, although these works are almost invariably based on both the Commission’s report and the coroner’s report, whose accuracy has been repeatedly called into question. A mere six years after the king’s death, Daniel Hack Tuke uses him as an example to introduce the definition of the condition of ‘paranoia’ in his Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892), explaining that it was ‘the term employed by Dr. von Gudden in regard to the mental malady under which Leopold II. [sic] of Bavaria laboured’.54 More recently, Hans Förstl et al. have advanced that Ludwig’s symptoms are consistent with a diagnosis of schizotypal disorder and possible frontotemporal dementia.55 D. v. Zerssen adds ‘imperial madness’ (a syndrome of addiction-like behavioural excesses) and a suspected orbitofrontal brain injury to the schizotypal personality diagnosis.56 Other twenty-first-century accounts of the king’s mental tribulations concur that the monarch showed no signs of mental illness and that psychiatry was machiavellianly politicised. Heinz Häfner and Felix Sommer have compiled and analysed a wealth of primary and secondary sources regarding the king’s purported madness, concluding that there is no reliable information attesting that Ludwig II was mentally ill.57 In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), a novel that explores the troubled relationship between madness and creativity, the narrator writes at length about a heated

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debate he and Rudolf Schwerdtfeger engaged in concerning Ludwig’s insanity. To Rudi’s interpretation of the events—that the king was ‘completely crackers’—the narrator opposes his own view—that Ludwig’s dethronement was ‘unjustifiable, a brutal piece of philistinism’, and a political move facilitated by six compliant professional alienists.58 Insanity, he argues, can be used arbitrarily and the construction of ‘monuments of royal misanthropy’—‘gilded solitudes in chosen sites of glorious natural beauty’—does not justify the verdict of mental derangement.59 Knust writes that the king’s life and death were a sacrifice for art and freedom of mind.60 Whether some of his peculiarities were mere quirks or otherwise symptoms of an underlying psychiatric condition, the high sums invested in his imaginative projects and his cabinet’s decision to depose him are indisputably linked. Whichever the accurate diagnosis might be, four facts remain indisputable: the king fell victim to the vicious machinations of those more powerful, shunned the company of others, loved architecture and the arts and was a visionary in his use of technology. In 1868, he founds the Polytechnic School in Munich, today the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and promotes electrical engineering with his modern projects. Ludwig’s castles used the latest technological advances to bring the king’s innovative ideas to fruition, as Herrenchiemsee castellan, Veronika Endlicher, notes.61 Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee are futuristic anachronisms, built in the Romanesque Revival, neo-Rococo and neo-Baroque styles respectively and equipped with sophisticated technology, including especially commissioned heaters with humidity control, battery-operated bell systems, flushing toilets, food lifts, glass roofs at Herrenchiemsee and the world’s first coloured artificial lighting system in Linderhof’s Venus Grotto—for which physics professor Wilhelm von Beetz, from the Polytechnic School, lent his expertise.62 The use of materials such as iron was relatively new at the time as well. In addition, together with the court engineer, Friedrich Brandt, Ludwig conceived of a peacock-shaped flying machine that would carry him over the Alps. His ‘fondest wish’, the desire to fly, would later be used against him as evidence of his madness, for even though steam-powered airships were actually in existence at the time, flying machines were nothing more than a utopian idea.63 In bringing together fairy tale and high-tech, Ludwig was, in many ways, ahead of his time. In the latter half of 1884, Ludwig severs almost all ties with normalcy, meeting only with a handful of people. ‘Ludwig’, Sisi begs her cousin in Raffé’s film, ‘do not bury yourself in your loneliness, for if you do…’. ‘Elisabeth, there is no way out for me’, he replies.64 In Noelle and Sehr’s Ludwig II (2012), Sisi—whom Maurice Barrès calls ‘an Empress of solitude’—also establishes a causal effect between isolation and death, telling Ludwig that ‘loneliness is a coffin’.65 Leo Alexander writes that it ‘was known that the King tended to react with impulsive threats of suicide whenever he was frustrated’.66 The idea of death as the welcome end of a tormented existence is popular among German Romantics such as Kleist, Novalis and Goethe. As Margaret Higonnet remarks, ‘the captain of this century – bracketed by Goethe’s Werther and Emile Durkheim’s Le Suicide – is death’.67 In his analysis of the Todestrieb in Werther (1774), Wilson links death and artistic creation, arguing that ‘Werther desperately seeks self-annihilation, to become absorbed in transcendence’, stating that only the

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arts can release him from the abhorrent prison of the self, which, however, does not preclude the inexorable return to solipsistic misery.68 Anguished, forlorn and trapped, the self becomes, in Steve Vine’s words, ‘the cemetery of its own hopes, the graveyard of its own ambitions, the sepulchre of its own desires’.69 For this reason, Syberberg’s Ludwig falls to his feet, framed by the décor of Parsifal, to lament: ‘I can’t take it anymore’.70 With this arresting image, which effects the dissolution of the self into pacified beauty, the king symbolically dies, much like a character from the operas he loved in a final act of over-dramatic performance.71 Media in vita in morte sumus (‘In the midst of life, death surrounds us) is the motto of the Guglmänner, a secret society in Bavaria whose main focus is to prove that King Ludwig was murdered.72 In its formulation, this verse (taken from a Gregorian chant) echoes Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa when he writes: ‘Death guides us, death seeks us, death accompanies us. All that we have is death, all that we want is death, and death is all that we care to want’.73 In the first section of ‘Funeral March for Ludwig II, King of Bavaria’, Pessoa imagines a conversation between Ludwig and Death, in which the latter tries to seduce the German prince to surrender to her embrace. Ludwig figures here as a ‘Sein zum Tode’ (being-towards-death), painfully aware of his own mortality, his failings and inevitable demise.74 Death tells Ludwig that he is doomed to being himself, someone who is ‘haunted by phantoms, shadows of things, ghosts of gestures, stillborn desires, the flotsam from the shipwreck of living’—someone who will never find love, attain glory or keep power.75 She entices him with promises of everlasting oblivion and the nocturnal beauty of her castle of darkness. The second section is comprised of a long exaltation to the ‘Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that grandly wanders among the world’s ruins and wastes!’76 Ludwig is praised as the ‘Sovereign King of Despair amid splendours, grieving lord of palaces that don’t satisfy [and] never succeed in blotting out life!’77 Pessoa concludes: ‘Your love for things dreamed was your contempt for things lived. Virgin King who disdained love,/ Shadow King who despised light,/ Dream King who denied life!’78 Ludwig is the ‘King of Death’, who Darkness acclaims Emperor.79 Pessoa’s words throughout the text emphasise the many wants in the life of the lonely king—particularly the inescapable emptiness that nothing and no one could ever fill—and exculpate him from any shortcomings, for, as the author writes, the house he inherited was in ruins, the lands he received had lost their fruits to frost and weeds had covered the paths and walkways where his feet had never trod.80 Pessoa’s Ludwig is predestined to fail, his actions and struggles ultimately useless, his life condemned to outsiderdom and to seeing beauty succumb to circumambient unsightliness. The end of Ludwig’s life unfolds quickly, as it should, for the moment he crossed the threshold that stood in between the fantasy world he had so laboriously created for himself and the crudeness of real life, he was already dead. On 11 June 1886, King Ludwig II of Bavaria is forced out of Neuschwanstein, his own private Monsalvat, and led to Berg Castle—one of his habitual residences and the backdrop of Larisch’s uncanny encounter with the frail and toothache-suffering mock-Lohengrin. The previous day, von Gudden and a Special Commission had declared the king insane

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and unfit to rule. Their diagnosis of ‘primary insanity’, later renamed ‘paranoid psychosis’, is based on hearsay, written accounts and interviews conducted with members of the court.81 None of the medical experts involved actually examined the king in person. On 13 June, two days after being imprisoned at Berg, the castle-turnedasylum, the king is found dead in Lake Starnberg along with his ‘doctor-jailer’, as Mann’s narrator calls von Gudden, having supposedly drowned in shallow waters under circumstances that have remained an entrancing mystery ever since.82 Examining the validity of the wealth of arguments about the death of the king is beyond the scope of this work; specific details, however, deserve to be highlighted, as they promote the continued mythologisation and gothicisation of Ludwig II. For instance, the coroner found no water in the king’s lungs, which would disprove the drowning theory; there are accounts of bullet holes in his overcoat; reports that those who had witnessed the removal of the bodies from the lake and the autopsy had been sworn to secrecy; and the fact that, on that fateful evening, Sisi was staying at Feldafing, just across the lake. Käutner, Dieterle and Raffé portray the king’s death as a failed escape attempt facilitated, in the first film, by Elisabeth (a prevailing theory is that the king might have suffered a heart attack while trying to swim across the lake). Visconti is more tentative in his staging, but appears to concur with the murder theory. When night falls and the prolonged absence of Ludwig and von Gudden becomes worrying, Count Holnstein, Grand Master of the Horse—a former confidant of Ludwig’s and a member of the Commission who strongly advocated that the king be deposed—says he will fire a warning shot when he finds the king and the doctor. Moments later, we hear two shots, just before the lifeless bodies of the two men are dragged out of the lake. Murder-suicide is the interpretative choice of Noelle and Sehr. Marie Larisch’s memoirs, which have not been subjected to thorough scholarly analysis, provide some of the best examples of Ludwig’s gothicisation. Particularly interesting is the episode in which she details the prophetic encounter that supposedly followed her visit to Ludwig at Berg Castle. Shortly after departing, she and Elisabeth are caught in a violent storm, which forces them to seek shelter in an old cottage, where a fisherman’s widow lives. The distressed woman tells the unexpected guests about her son, who perished at Lake Starnberg seven years earlier, but who she is convinced will return to her one day when another—who, she says, is not far from the cottage—takes his place. An experienced storyteller, Larisch describes an appropriately gothic setting for her story of death and omens, confessing that the widow’s ‘uncanny statement’ sounded horrible as the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled and ‘the wind and the rain beat mournfully against the window’.83 After the prophecy is fulfilled with Ludwig’s death, Larisch narrates a conversation with her aunt, in which Elisabeth confesses that she often speaks to Ludwig, whose soul has not found peace, and that he has even appeared to her, his clothes heavy with water.84 ‘Swan King’, ‘kitsch king’, ‘Hamlet-King’, ‘homo mythicus’, ‘architect of dreams’, ‘the last of the patrons’: Ludwig II of Bavaria exists as a haunting romantic gothic figure in contemporary popular culture.85 His image retains a mystical aura that combines not only the oneiric qualities (and the literal and figurative Disneyfication) of his castles, but also loss, suffering and impotence. As a pop culture

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icon, he lives on as a beloved mad king, his life often sanitised (read, heteronormalised) or reduced to pitiful mockery, as in Syberberg’s film. The king represents, in the early years of his reign, the romantic ideal of the seductive sullen hero with a scarred soul and noble intentions, but, over time, his creative merging of science and art, excessive reclusiveness, self-destructive behaviour and peremptory refusal to capitulate to the mediocrity of mundane existence, no matter the cost, demarcate him as a romantic gothic iteration of Promethean anti-heroism. As René-Marill Albérès explains, self-imposed solitude and an audacious refusal to accept proven formulae define the Promethean anti-hero.86 Ludwig’s anti-heroism and enduring myth are predicated on the myriad failures he experiences during his 22-year reign. Guy de Pourtalès highlights the monarch’s failed kingship and failed heroism, citing as evidence his supposed lack of love for his people and the failure to secure both his crown and his friendships.87 As king, he loses the war against Prussia, resulting in the kingdom’s subservience to the Prussian prince, Wilhelm I; he signs over Bavaria’s independence to Bismarck, effectively creating the conditions that would lead to the rise of völkisch nationalism and two world wars; he neglects state affairs; dissolves his engagement; does not produce an heir and, in the end, fails to secure his throne. In perverting the (heteronormative) archetypes of both the romantic and the gothic hero, his journey—his quest—does not lead to the Grail Castle, to heroic marriage or redemption. Pessoa uses the king’s failure against him to persuade him to yield to Death’s proposition. She proceeds to offer him that which he lacks above all: companionship and a throne, assuring him that he will ‘for ever be the undethronable emperor of the Mystery and the Grail’.88 The word ‘undethronable’ is key here. Perhaps the most fulgurating example of Ludwig’s failure—of his inability to rule and transmogrify his dreams of absolutism, independence and queer companionship into reality—is, in fact, the missing throne in Neuschwanstein’s Throne Hall. This conspicuous absence is, as Sean F. Edgecomb explains, a metaphor or microcosm for a world in which Ludwig, through incessant scrutiny, responsibility and positionality, would always be the misunderstood and queer other.89 Like the castles themselves (Herrenchiemsee and Neuschwanstein), which were left unfinished, the Throne Hall remains incomplete, lacking—its void representing Ludwig’s life as a ‘vacant interlude’ and paradoxically materialising, through absence, the infallible impossibility of the king’s dreams.90 As a reflection of Ludwig’s romantic imaginings, Neuschwanstein is, therefore, as Michael Rozendal observes, ‘complete in its incompletion’.91 In turn, one of Linderhof’s more striking singularities is the absence of a Throne Room altogether. Usually the largest and more sumptuous room located at the core of a palace or castle, the place to which all other rooms converge, the fact that the king chose to omit it is telling of his self-fashioning as a failed hero and king. He emerges instead as a hero-worshipper—a worshipper of Wagner with an ‘almost servile’ admiration for Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette and all the other ghostly guests at his dinner parties.92 A ‘fanboy of the ancient regime’ who ‘built castles as a form of fan fiction’, in the words of Rozendal, Ludwig is representative of the fallen aristocracy that Eliot describes, through Marie Larisch, in the opening lines of The Waste Land.93

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A queer man haunted by guilt (‘Never again, never again’, he repeats in his diaries), Ludwig crystallises the frustrating struggles of a queer subject in a society that attaches deviance, sinfulness and depravity to non-normativity.94 J. Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz theorise queer failure as productive; by ‘turn[ing] on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unreachable’, the queer art of failure ‘quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being’.95 Failure becomes to an extent successful, because it offers an alternative to the norm, representing resistance against institutionalised control and a refusal to acquiesce to the ‘dominant order and its systemic violence’.96 Reading Ludwig’s failure through queerness therefore delineates a poignant socio-political critique, even though the ‘kernel of potentiality’ within it is not wholly concretised, for Ludwig never accepts his sexuality.97 Still, Ludwig’s failure as king and queer man directly resists and interrogates (if passively) the treacherous machinations of authority. In this sense, queer failure relates to the figure of the hero-villain, who also ‘serves more to throw social and sexual repression into relief than […] to demonstrate the possibility of legitimate redress or reform’, as Stoddart argues.98 Ludwig’s silent plight is emblematised by the striking image of a tearful child-Ludwig walking hopelessly towards the camera at the end of Syberberg’s film, which reminds us that his tragic end at the hands of ruthless statesmen and disloyal members of the Court signifies the death of innocence. Ultimately, then, Ludwig’s failure is significant because it encapsulates a Germany that could have been, more invested in the arts than in war. In the cumulative picture I have built of Ludwig II as a romantic gothic figure, there are many stories and historical details that I have had to leave out. I will end with a most peculiar episode that unearths a final link between Ludwig and the Gothic, confounding even more Ludwig’s different facets—the real person, the fictional character and the personified metaphor. In November 1886, five months after the king’s death, American journalist and writer Lew Vanderpoole (1855–?) publishes an extensive interview he had allegedly conducted with the monarch in 1882. During the audience, King Ludwig purportedly notices an article about Edgar Allan Poe among the papers scattered on the table, an article that Vanderpoole claims he was writing for Le Figaro. A two-hour conversation ensues, in which the king confesses his admiration for Poe, ‘that most wonderful of all writers’, and expounds on the many similarities between his and Poe’s personality. Ludwig, the hero-worshipper, is reported as stating that he would sacrifice his right to the crown to have Poe on earth for a single hour.99 He also addresses the question of his own madness, observing that ‘much of the phenomenon which is called insanity is really over-sensitiveness’.100 Vanderpoole, it turns out, was notorious for his forgeries in the 1880s and was arrested in September 1887 following the sale of fraudulent manuscripts to Cosmopolitan magazine.101 Until Luc Roger uncovered this likely literary hoax in 2017, Vanderpoole’s piece was studied at length by Ludwig enthusiasts, historians and scholars and relied upon as containing factual information.102 The interview’s historical unreliability notwithstanding, I agree with Alfons Schweiggert (whose 2008 book, Edgar Allan Poe und König Ludwig II, is based on Vanderpoole’s article) that ‘if it is not true, it is at least well invented’.103 In typical gothic fashion, Vanderpoole mixes authenticity

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and counterfeit, and the result is an uncanny study of the king’s romantic Gothicism. As it happens, Vanderpoole was the first person to understand the king as Gothic and his tall tale remains an invaluable curio for scholars. Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

James Thrall Soby, Salvador Dali: Paintings, Drawings, Prints (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1941), 21. Helena Apiryon and Tau Apiryon, ‘Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass (Ecclesiæ Gnostiæ Catholicæ Canon Missæ)’, in The Invisible Basilica of Sabazius (2008), https://sabazius.oto-usa.org/gnostic-mass/ (accessed 4 September 2019). Helen Stoddart, ‘Hero-Villain’, in The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts (New York, New York University Press, 2009), 176–180. Helmut Käutner dir., Mad Emperor: Ludwig II (1955). Ibid. Christopher McIntosh, The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (London, I.B. Tauris, 2012), 215; Kurt Hommel, Die Separatvorstellungen vor König Ludwig II. von Bayern: Schauspiel, Oper, Ballett (Munich, Laokoon, 1963). Käutner dir., Mad Emperor. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), 210. Marie Larisch, My Past: Reminiscences of The Courts of Austria and Bavaria; Together with the True Story of the Events Leading Up to the Tragic Death of Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 65. Robert Beachy, ‘The German Invention of Homosexuality’, The Journal of Modern History, 82:4 (December 2010), 801–838, 807–808. William Hughes, Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Plymouth, The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 127. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Von dem Tischgen deck dich, dem Goldesel und dem Knüppel in dem Sack’, in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Vol. 1 (Berlin, Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812), 161–171. Theodor Hierneis, The Monarch Dines: Reminiscences of Life in the Royal Kitchens at the Court of King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria, translated by Martin Cooper (London, Werner Laurie, 1954), 19–20. Larisch, My Past, 175–176. Werner Bertram, A Royal Recluse: Memories of Ludwig II of Bavaria, translated by Margaret McDonough (Munich, Martin Herpich & Son, 1936), 16, 19, 31 and 57. McIntosh, The Swan King, 173–174. Larisch, My Past, 65. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66.

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

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James D. Wilson, The Romantic Heroic Ideal (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 170. Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, Random House, 1962), 20. Dieter Fuchs, ‘“Myth Today”: The Bavarian-Austrian Subtext of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”’, Poetica, 44:3/4 (2012), 379–393, 385–386; Herbert Knust, The Artist, the King, and ‘The Waste Land’: Richard Wagner, Ludwig II, and T.S. Eliot, doctoral dissertation (1961), 9, 19–20, 39. Larisch, My Past, 65–66. Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London, Continuum, 2005), 343; Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze, 121. Claudio Magris, Journeying, translated by Anne Milano Appel (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2018), 101. Bavarian Palace Administration, ‘King Ludwig II: Short Biography’, https:// www.schlosslinderhof.de/englisch/ludwig/biography.htm (accessed 24 July 2019). McIntosh, The Swan King, 253. Bavarian Palace Administration, ‘Ludwigs Licht leuchtet wieder’ (20 December 2011), https://www.schloesser.bayern.de/deutsch/presse/archiv11/ ny/schlitten.htm (accessed 24 July 2019). Käutner dir., Mad Emperor. Wilson, The Romantic Heroic Ideal, 35. McIntosh, The Swan King, 15. Rolf Raffé dir., The Silence at Starnberg Lake (1920). Raffé dir., The Silence at Starnberg Lake. Annette Wheeler Carafelli, ‘Byron and the Pathology of Genius’, in Rereading Byron: Essays Selected from Hoftra University’s Byron Bicentennial Conference, edited by Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane (Oxon, Routledge, 2016), 205–221, 205. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (Oxon, Routledge, 2005), 36–60; Andrew Harper, ‘A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (1789)’, in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, edited by Allan Ingram (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1998), 175–186. Leo Alexander, ‘The Commitment and Suicide of King Ludwig II of Bavaria’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 111:2 (August 1954), 100–107, 100, 104. E. N. Tigerstedt, ‘Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek Literature before Democritus and Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (April–June 1970), 163–178; Jennifer Lokash, ‘Byron and the Pathology of Creativity; or, the Biogenesis of Poetic Form’, Journal of Literature and Science, 1:1 (2007), 24–39, 26; Dino Franco Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology

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and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005), 106–107. Clara Tschudi, Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria, translated by Ethel Harriet Hearn (London, Swan Sonnenschein & co, 1908), 151. Philipp F¨urst Eulenberg-Hertefeld, Das Ende K¨onig Ludwigs II. und andere Erlebnisse (Leipzig, Grunow, 1934), https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/dasende-konig-ludwigs-ii-und-andere-erlebnisse-2359/4 (accessed 10 September 2019); Hans Rall, ‘The Life and Death of King Ludwig II’, translated by Leslie Owen, in King Ludwig II: Reality and Mystery, edited by Hans Rall, Michael Petzet and Franz Merta (Regensburg, Schnell & Steiner, 2001), 7–66, 43–46. Stoddart, ‘Hero-Villain’, 177. Larisch, My Past, 173. Tschudi, Ludwig the Second, 158. Rall, ‘The Life and Death of King Ludwig II’, 37–43; Frances Gerard, The Romance of King Ludwig II. of Bavaria: His Relations with Wagner and His Bavarian Fairy Places (London, Jarrold & Sons, 1901), 230–231; McIntosh, The Swan King, 155–158. Ludwig Snell, ‘Über Monomanie als primäre Form der Seelenstörung’, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 22 (1865), 368–381; Carl Westphal, ‘Ueber die Verrücktheit’, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 34 (1878), 252–257; Wilhelm Sander, ‘Über eine spezielle Form der primären Verrücktheit’, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 1 (1868–1869), 387–419. Daniel Hack Tuke, ‘Paranoia’, in A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine: Giving the Definition, Etymology and Synonyms of the Terms Used in Medical Psychology With the Symptoms, Treatment, and Pathology of Insanity and the Law of Lunacy in Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2, edited by Daniel Hack Tuke (London, J & A Churchill, 1892), 887–889, 887. Jean Garrabé, ‘Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–1873)’, in Anthology of French Language Psychiatric Texts, edited by François-Régis Cousin, Jean Garrabé and Denis Morozov, translated by John Crisp (Le Plessis-Robinson, Institut Synthélabo, 1999), 173–180, 174. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (London, Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 59. Tschudi, Ludwig the Second, 161. McIntosh, The Swan King, 277. H. Förstl, G. Immler, M. Seitz and R. Hacker, ‘Case report: Ludwig II, King of Bavaria: A Royal Medical History’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 118:6 (2008), 499–502, 501. Raffé dir., The Silence at Starnberg Lake. Tuke, ‘Paranoia’, 887; Förstl et al., ‘Case report’, 499. Förstl et al., ‘Case report’, 502. D. v. Zerssen, ‘Der bayerische “M¨archenk¨onig” Ludwig II.: Seine letzten Jahre aus psychiatrischer Sicht’, Nervenarzt, 81 (October 2010), 1368–1378, 1375– 1376.

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57.

58.

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62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

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Heinz H¨afner and Felix Sommer, ‘The Bavarian Royal Drama of 1886 and the Misuse of Psychiatry: New Results’, History of Psychiatry, 24:3 (2013), 274–291. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959), 430–431. Ibid., 431. Knust, The Artist, the King, and ‘The Waste Land’, 17. ‘Visionär Ludwig II.: der Märchenkönig und die Technik’, Radio Bayrisch (10 August 2018) https://www.radio-bayrisch.de/visionaer-ludwig-ii-der-maerch enkoenig-und-die-technik/ (accessed 23 July 2019). n/a, ‘Alles Gute Polytechnische Schule zu München: Aufbruch ins Zeitalter der Technik’ (2018), https://www.150.tum.de/geschichte/polytechnische-sch ule-zu-muenchen/ (accessed 29 August 2019). Martha Schad, Ludwig II. (Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2006), 29. Raffé dir., The Silence at Starnberg Lake. Maurice Barrès, ‘Une Impératrice de la solitude’, in Amori Et Dolori Sacrum, Maurice Barrès (Paris, Félix Juven, 1903), 159–165; Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr dir., Ludwig II (2012). Alexander, ‘The commitment and suicide of King Ludwig II’, 103. Margaret Higonnet, ‘Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 6:1/2 (1985), 103–118, 103. Wilson, The Romantic Heroic Ideal, 47–48. Steve Vine, ‘Romantic Ghosts: The Refusal of Mourning in Emily Brontë’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry, 37:1 (Spring 1999), 99–117, 106. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg dir., Ludwig II: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972). João Bénard da Costa, ‘Ludwig, Requiem Para Um Rei Virgem’, in Textos Cinemateca Portuguesa (Lisbon, Cinemateca Portuguesa, 2004). n/a, ‘Die Guglm¨anner S.M. König Ludwig II.’, http://www.guglmann.de/deu tsch/index.htm (accessed 29 September 2019). Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith (New York, Penguin Books, 2003), 416. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927). Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 413. Ibid., 415. Ibid. Ibid., 416. Ibid., 500. Ibid., 413. Alexander, ‘The commitment and suicide of King Ludwig II of Bavaria’, 101. Mann, Doctor Faustus, 431. Larisch, My Past, 66–67. Ibid., 198–200. McIntosh, The Swan King, 2012; Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze, 121; Guy de Pourtalès, Louis II de Bavi`ere ou Hamlet-Roi (Paris, Gallimard, 1928);

198

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102.

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Rolf Füllmann, ‘Klaus Manns Vergittertes Fenster: Ludwig II. und die Arbeit am Mythos’, Homo mythicus: mythische Identitätsmuster, edited by Bogdan Trocha and Pawel Wałowski (Berlin, Frank & Timme, 2013), 73–89; Magris, Journeying, 96; n/a, ‘The Last of the Patrons’, The Spectator, 143: 5273 (20 July 1929), 103. Rene-Marill Alb´er`es, La révolte des e´ crivains d’aujourd’hui (Paris, Corrêa, 1949), 125–126. Pourtalès, Louis II, 189. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 414. Sean F. Edgecomb, ‘A Performance Between Wood and the World: Ludwig II of Bavaria’s Queer Swans’, Theatre Survey, 59:2 (May 2018), 221–248, 242. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 333. Michael Rozendal, ‘Remapping Postmodern Exchanges: Theory Avant La Lettre, A Travelogue’, in Landscapes of Postmodernity: Concepts and Paradigms of Critical Theory, edited by Petra Eckhard, Michael Fuchs, Walter W. Hölbling (Vienna, LIT, 2010), 9–20, 9. Gerard, The Romance of King Ludwig II, 227. Rozendal, ‘Remapping Postmodern Exchanges’, 15. Ludwig II of Bavaria, Carnets Secrets: 1869–1886, translated by Jean-Marie Argelès (Paris, Grasset, 1987), 127–128, 139. J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011), 88. Jos´e Esteban Mu˜noz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, New York University Press, 2009), 172. Mu˜noz, Cruising Utopia, 173. Stoddart, ‘Hero-Villain’, 178. Lew Vanderpoole, ‘Ludwig of Bavaria: A Personal Reminiscence’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 38 (July–December 1886), 535–539, 536. Ibid., 538. Charles A. Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 86. Luc Roger, ‘Der Fall “Lew Vanderpoole”: Ist der Bericht der k¨oniglichen Audienz vom amerikanischen Schriftsteller ein literarischer Betrug?’, Munich and Co. (20 October 2017), https://munichandco.blogspot.com/2017/10/derfall-lew-vanderpoole-ist-der.html (accessed 6 July 2019). Alfons Schweiggert, ‘Und ist es nicht wahr, so wenigstens gut erfunden’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (24 October 2017), https://www.sueddeutsche.de/mue nchen/hoechstwahrscheinlich-gefaelschtes-interview-und-ist-es-nicht-wahrso-wenigstens-gut-erfunden-1.3722890 (accessed 5 September 2019).

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Desing, Julius, King Ludwig II, His Life – His End (Lechbruck, Kienberger, 1976). Edgecomb, Sean F., ‘A Performance Between Wood and the World: Ludwig II of Bavaria’s Queer Swans’, Theatre Survey, 59:2 (May 2018), 221–248. Eliot, T. S., The Wasteland (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1922). Eulenberg-Hertefeld, Philipp F¨urst, Das Ende K¨onig Ludwigs II. und andere Erlebnisse (Leipzig, Grunow, 1934). https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/das-ende-konig-ludwigs-ii-und-andere-erlebn isse-2359/4. Accessed 10 September 2019. Felluga, Dino Franco, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005). Förstl, H., G. Immler, M. Seitz and R. Hacker, ‘Case report: Ludwig II, King of Bavaria: A Royal Medical History’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 118:6 (2008), 499–502. Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (Oxon, Routledge, 2005). Fuchs, Dieter, ‘“Myth Today”: The Bavarian-Austrian Subtext of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”’, Poetica, 44:3/4 (2012), 379–393. Füllmann, Rolf, ‘Klaus Manns Vergittertes Fenster: Ludwig II. und die Arbeit am Mythos’, Homo mythicus: mythische Identitätsmuster, edited by Bogdan Trocha and Pawel Wałowski (Berlin, Frank & Timme, 2013), 73–89. Garrabé, Jean, ‘Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–1873)’, in Anthology of French Language Psychiatric Texts, edited by François-Régis Cousin, Jean Garrabé and Denis Morozov, translated by John Crisp (Le Plessis-Robinson, Institut Synthélabo, 1999), 173–180. Gerard, Frances, The Romance of King Ludwig II. of Bavaria: His Relations with Wagner and His Bavarian Fairy Places (London, Jarrold & Sons, 1901). Gramary, Adrian, ‘Luís II de Baviera: Reflex˜oes sobre um Relat´orio Psiqui´atrico-Forense Controverso’, Saúde Mental, 10/5 (September-October 2008), 48–54. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Von dem Tischgen deck dich, dem Goldesel und dem Knüppel in dem Sack’, in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Vol. 1 (Berlin, Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812), 161–171. H¨afner, Heinz and Felix Sommer, ‘The Bavarian Royal Drama of 1886 and the Misuse of Psychiatry: New Results’, History of Psychiatry, 24:3 (2013), 274–291. Halberstam, J., The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, Duke University Press, 2011). Harper, Andrew, ‘A Treatise on the Real Cause and Cure of Insanity (1789)’, in Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, edited by Allan Ingram (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1998), 175–186. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1927). Herre, Franz, Ludwig II., Bayerns Märchenkönig: Wahrheit und Legende (Heyne, M¨unchen, 2001). Hierneis, Theodor, The Monarch Dines: Reminiscences of Life in the Royal Kitchens at the Court of King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria, translated by Martin Cooper (London, Werner Laurie, 1954). Higonnet, Margaret, ‘Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 6:1/2 (1985), 103–118. Hommel, Kurt, Die Separatvorstellungen vor König Ludwig II. von Bayern: Schauspiel, Oper, Ballett (Munich, Laokoon, 1963). Hughes, William, Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Plymouth, The Scarecrow Press, 2013). Johanningsmeier, Charles A., Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002). Knust, Herbert, The Artist, the King, and ‘The Waste Land’: Richard Wagner, Ludwig II, and T.S. Eliot, doctoral dissertation (1961). Larisch, Marie, My Past: Reminiscences of The Courts of Austria and Bavaria; Together with the True Story of the Events Leading Up to the Tragic Death of Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913).

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Lieberman, Lisa, ‘Romanticism and the Culture of Suicide in Nineteenth-Century France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33:3 (July 1991), 611–629. Lokash, Jennifer, ‘Byron and the Pathology of Creativity; or, the Biogenesis of Poetic Form’, Journal of Literature and Science, 1:1 (2007), 24–39. Lombroso, Cesare, Genio e follia (Milan, Gaetano Brigola, 1872). Ludwig II of Bavaria, Carnets Secrets: 1869–1886, translated by Jean-Marie Argelès (Paris, Grasset, 1987). Magris, Claudio, Journeying, translated by Anne Milano Appel (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2018). Mann, Klaus, ‘Vergittertes Fenster: Novelle um den Tod des Königs Ludwig II. von Bayern’, in Speed die Erzählungen aus dem Exil, edited by Uwe Naumann (Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1990), 45–98. Mann, Thomas, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1959). May, Karl, Der Weg zum Glück: Roman aus dem Leben Ludwig des Zweiten (Dresden, Druck und Verlag von H. G. Münchmeyer, 1886–1888). McIntosh, Christopher, The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (London, I.B. Tauris, 2012). Milton, John, Paradise Lost (London, Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873). Möbius, Paul Julius, ‘Ueber die hereditären Nervenkrankheiten’, in Sammlung klinischer Vorträge, edited by Richard von Volkmann (Leipzig, Breitkopf und Härtel, 1879), 1505–1531. Mu˜noz, Jos´e Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, New York University Press, 2009). Pessoa, Fernando, Livro do Desassossego (Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, 2003). Pessoa, Fernando, The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith (New York, Penguin Books, 2003). Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (London, Oxford University Press, 1954). Punter, David and Gennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Rall, Hans, ‘The Life and Death of King Ludwig II’, translated by Leslie Owen, in King Ludwig II: Reality and Mystery, by Hans Rall, Michael Petzet and Franz Merta (Regensburg, Schnell & Steiner, 2001), 7–66. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., The Emergence of Romanticism (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992). Roger, Luc, ‘Der Fall “Lew Vanderpoole”: Ist der Bericht der k¨oniglichen Audienz vom amerikanischen Schriftsteller ein literarischer Betrug?’, Munich and Co. (20 October 2017). https://munich andco.blogspot.com/2017/10/der-fall-lew-vanderpoole-ist-der.html. Accessed 6 July 2019. Rozendal, Michael, ‘Remapping Postmodern Exchanges: Theory Avant La Lettre, A Travelogue’, in Landscapes of Postmodernity: Concepts and Paradigms of Critical Theory, edited by Petra Eckhard, Michael Fuchs, Walter W. Hölbling (Vienna, LIT, 2010), 9–20. Salzberg, Joel, ‘The Gothic Hero in Transcendental Quest: Poe’s “Ligea” and James’ “The Beast in the Jungle”’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 67 (1972), 108–114. Sander, Wilhelm, ‘Über eine spezielle Form der primären Verrücktheit’, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 1 (1868–1869), 387–419. Schad, Martha, Ludwig II. (Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2006). Schlim, Jean Louis, Ludwigs Traum vom Fliegen …und andere bayerische Flugfantasien (Oberhaching, Aviatic, 1995). Schweiggert, Alfons, ‘Und ist es nicht wahr, so wenigstens gut erfunden’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (24 October 2017). https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/hoechstwahrscheinlich-gefaelschtes-int erview-und-ist-es-nicht-wahr-so-wenigstens-gut-erfunden-1.3722890. Accessed 5 September 2019. Schweiggert, Alfons, Edgar Allan Poe und König Ludwig II.: Anatomie einer Geistesfreundschaft (St. Ottilien, EOS, 2008). Snell, Ludwig, ‘Über Monomanie als primäre Form der Seelenstörung’, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 22 (1865), 368–381.

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Soby, James Thrall, Salvador Dali: Paintings, Drawings, Prints (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1941). Stoddart, Helen, ‘Hero-Villain’, in The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts (New York, New York University Press, 2009), 176–180. Sypher, Wylie, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, Random House, 1962). Tigerstedt, E. N., ‘Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek Literature before Democritus and Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (April-June 1970), 163–178. Trilling, Lionel, ‘Art and Neurosis’, in Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by William Phillips (New York, Criterion, 1957), 502–520. Tschudi, Clara, Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria, translated by Ethel Harriet Hearn (London, Swan Sonnenschein & co, 1908). Tuke, Daniel Hack, ‘Paranoia’, in A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine: Giving the Definition, Etymology and Synonyms of the Terms Used in Medical Psychology With the Symptoms, Treatment, and Pathology of Insanity and the Law of Lunacy in Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2, edited by Daniel Hack Tuke (London, J & A Churchill, 1892), 887–889. Vanderpoole, Lew, ‘Ludwig of Bavaria: A Personal Reminiscence’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 38 (July–December 1886), 535–539. Verlaine, Paul, ‘La Mort de S. M. le Roi Louis II de Bavière’, Revue Wagnérienne, 6 (8 July 1886), 177. Vine, Steve, ‘Romantic Ghosts: The Refusal of Mourning in Emily Brontë’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry, 37:1 (Spring 1999), 99–117. Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006). Westphal, Carl, ‘Ueber die Verrücktheit’, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 34 (1878), 252–257. Wilson, James D., The Romantic Heroic Ideal (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Zerssen, D. v., ‘Der bayerische “M¨archenk¨onig” Ludwig II.: Seine letzten Jahre aus psychiatrischer Sicht’, Nervenarzt, 81 (October 2010), 1368–1378.

Filmography Ludwig 1881, dir., Dubini Donatello and Fosco (1993). Ludwig II, dir., Noelle Marie and Sehr Peter (2012). Ludwig II, King of Bavaria (Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern), dir., Dieterle Wilhelm (1930). Ludwig II: Requiem for a Virgin King (Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König), dir., Syberberg Hans-Jürgen (1972). Ludwig, dir., Visconti Luchino (1973). Mad Emperor: Ludwig II (Ludwig II. – Glanz und Ende eines Königs), dir., Käutner Helmut (1955). The Eagle with Two Heads (L’Aigle a` deux tˆetes), dir., Cocteau Jean (1948). The Silence at Starnberg Lake (Das Schweigen am Starnbergersee), dir., Raffé Rolf (1920).

Terror in Colonial Australian Literature Jessica Gildersleeve

From its earliest origins in Europe of the Romantic period, the Gothic has been a genre associated with the outsider, the foreigner, the Other. Perhaps for this reason, it is also a genre which easily lent itself to the concerns and anxieties associated with the colonial experience, as white Europeans sought mastery over new geographical locations and, too, the people who already resided in these places. In these new, dangerous, and even frightening lands, occupied by people the colonists also saw to be strange and Other, the Gothic was resurrected with fresh meaning, brought to bear as a means of understanding and containing these foreign threats. This is true of colonial gothic narratives produced around the world, and includes, of course, Australia, where the gothic discourses of the uncanny and fear of the unknown were, early on, put to work to establish and explain these different landscapes and their inhabitants.1 Indeed, the early naming of the parts of this locale—New South Wales, New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land—indicate the way in which colonists sought to find familiarity where there was little to none. This is a common assertion, as Gerry Turcotte has pointed out, such that the Gothic becomes a way to establish control over a disorienting experience.2 In this sense, he adds, the Gothic can be read as a ‘by-product of colonisation.’3 What is unique to Australia, however, is the way in which the Gothic is later adopted by socially and politically radical writers as a means to explore and subvert prejudices about Australia, its identity and its representation. Such works pick up on the generic tropes and assumptions of the gothic genre and put them to work for the purpose of exposing the gothic discourse inherent in the colonial encounter. Here, then, colonial Australian Gothic becomes primarily associated with realism rather than the supernatural, and with authors of social critique rather than those of fantasy or imagination.4

J. Gildersleeve (B) Centre for Heritage and Culture, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_12

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The origins of such gothic attitudes belonging to colonisers of the Australian ‘New World’ can be understood through the nation’s initial European settlement as a penal colony, what Turcotte calls ‘the dungeon of the world.’5 It was, in its entirety, a prison, a massive place of punishment, violence and horror, encircled not by fences, but by the unknown space of the bush, the desert and wild seas, and each of these inhabited by both human and inhuman dangers. Escape was virtually impossible because of these conditions. Furthermore, as the colony expanded, so too did the boundaries of the prison: the frontiers of south-east Queensland and Tasmania were figured as the extremes of penal expansion, as colonies in Moreton Bay and Port Arthur, for example, were constructed as sites of sadistic cruelty and inescapable violence. St Helena Island, just off the coast of Queensland’s Moreton Bay, was girded by sharp rocks and an ocean of hungry predators. Prisoners there were never freed, leaving only in death: frequently lockjaw (tetanus) or suicide. Indeed, one desperate prisoner committed suicide by plunging into the island’s deep well—from which his peers were still forced to drink. This is the kind of folklore which did and still does circulate around the Australian colonial experience as the nation remains haunted by its gothic past. In contrast to the expectation of civilisation and order imposed by the prison or colony, then, the Gothic is put to work to show how the Australian colonial experience frequently undermines any prospect of (the myth of) European order or, later, the hope associated with the end of a convict sentence or emigration to a ‘New World.’6 The Australian landscape, its unfamiliarity and its dangers—that is, its uncanniness, its unhomeliness in the truest sense—is the primary way in which the emerging nation was articulated as gothic. Marcus Clarke’s famous 1876 description attributes a gothic affect to all aspects of the Australian environment, personifying the land, the weather, the animals to evoke a mythical world in which the supernatural lurks: The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair … In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy. No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains. Hopeless explorers have named them out of their sufferings – Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair.7

Clarke evokes a landscape uncanny in its animation. Its changes are not the recognisable seasonal shifts of the northern hemisphere: here, ‘no leaves fall.’ Animals are either eerily silent or horrifically loud, mocking the human listener with their imitative sounds. Explorers are not intrepid, but ‘hopeless,’ rewarded only with ‘despair’ and ‘misery’ for their efforts. In this otherworldly environment it is entirely possible that a monster might appear—even those ‘native’ to the land agree.

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Katharine Susannah Prichard’s story, ‘The Curse’ (1932) relies similarly on the horror of the landscape, but where Clarke sees this to originate in the ghostly emptiness of the land, Prichard conjures it through a sickly kaleidoscope of colour and relentless noise. Indeed, the first words of the story comprise a list of colours: ‘Azure, magenta, tetratheca, mauve and turquoise.’8 Far from the greens and browns one might ordinarily expect in nature, Prichard’s Australia is vibrant and exotic—not blue, but ‘azure’ and ‘turquoise’; not pink or purple, but ‘magenta,’ ‘tetratheca,’ and ‘mauve.’ The vibrancy of nature is uncannily underscored, since there is ‘[n]o sign or sound of life, but the life of the trees, squirt of a bird’s song, a bird’s body through stirring eaves. Chatter of leaves …. Small green tongues, lisping and clicking together, twisting over and licking each other; whispering, gossiping.’9 As in Clarke’s narrative, inhuman nature is alive, but without any sense of benevolence or even simply the disinterest of the sublime. These descriptions of the landscape dominate the short narrative, and are in direct contrast to the curt dialogue which denotes the presence of so-called civilisation: humans and dogs. In this way, the poisonous and invasive weed, the eponymous Paterson’s Curse, takes over the story, just as it takes over the land, pushing away all human presence. In the colonial scene, horror is to be found in this introduced species as the dominant coloniser, breaking free of the civilising confines of the garden and out of the control of the people. Indeed, its explicitly vampiric destruction of land designated for farming, ‘feeding, ravening on the earth … sucking all the life blood from [the] soil,’ drives one character to poverty, theft and punishment.10 Thus, the leaves ‘chatter,’ an endless series of ‘gossiping’ ‘tongues,’ mercilessly mocking and teasing from beginning to end in a kind of madness as the ‘vague, sly gibberish running through all the hills’ is ultimately figured as the ‘[l]aughter of leaves’ at a starving dog: ‘inhuman, immortal. From time immemorial into eternity, leaves laughing.’11 In some colonial Australian gothic stories, this madness comes to infect the colonising inhabitants of the land. BL Farjeon’s ‘Little Liz’ (1866), for example, describes this in terms of the ‘Victorian gold-fever’ which ‘beat’ the Californian fever ‘hollow’ in the ‘strange sights,’ ‘strange stories,’ and ‘strange mates’ it produced.12 Perhaps more importantly, such madness also corrupts the concept of mateship on which the early structures of Australian national identity depended. The gold-fever brings men into daily contact with hundreds of strangers—and it is those strangers, not a true friend, one calls ‘mate’: ‘One day you did not know the man that the next day you were hob-a-nob with.’13 Friendship and community, then, is made uncanny by the repetition of this term, and it is made clear that ‘[q]ueer things were done on the diggings during the first fit of the fever.’14 No one in this sun-drenched, fevered land can be trusted: even those who work alongside each other as ‘mates’ keep their guns loaded and within reach as they count their gold together. Although, then, moral corruption is readily attributed to the gold-diggers’ former lives in England through the symbol of the envious money-lender who forced a desperate Bill to seek his fortune in Australia, thereby causing the death of his ailing wife, the ‘New World’ offers no respite from such attitudes. The land is named for sites of crime and death— ‘Starvation Point, Choke-m Gully, Dead-horse Gully … Murdering Flat’—and Bill’s land of opportunity on the gold fields only produces an encounter with another

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‘white-faced, white-livered, flat-footed bully.’15 Ultimately, the story suggests that these dangerous attitudes of jealousy and revenge which permeated the old world have simply been transferred to the new. The loss and death of the child, ‘little Liz,’ herself the only symbol of hope and value for all in this tense community, suggests the destruction of any possibility for change. Indeed, her pseudo-rape by a group of bushrangers as well as another ‘mate’ she is forced to kiss suggests their abuse of her symbolic value.16 That the search for the lost child is accompanied by the ‘mocking laughter’ of the birds further indicates, as in ‘The Curse,’ the complicity of this inhospitable land not only in erasing any evidence of goodness, but in destroying any symbol ‘of innocence and European naiveté.’17 Instead, it is laced with reams of gold, provoking such crimes. By the story’s end, only the narrator remains alive: Bill, his old ‘mate,’ Liz and her faithful dog are all dead as a product of these gothic cycles of revenge. Whereas Farjeon’s story locates the gothic horror of a murdered child in the madness of gold-fever, human jealousy and revenge, Rosa Campbell Praed’s ‘The Bunyip’ (1891) investigates the possibility of a supernatural cause for the trope of the lost child. In doing so, her story in part relocates the Gothic from the real tensions of colonial life in Australia to the fantastic, an unusual choice during a period in which discussions about national identity were critical in public life and made prominent in the national magazine, The Bulletin. Supernatural gothic narratives were less popular in colonial Australia, James Doig points out, because ‘for many Australians there were enough real life horrors to cope with – aggressive natives (which often prompted massacres of aborigines), the unforgiving land, and, of course, the horrors of convict life.’18 The bunyip is a mythological figure; however, that it is insisted upon as ‘the one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast’ suggests the unlikelihood or impossibility of other supernatural horrors, already calling into question the verisimilitude of the story to be told.19 This is further underscored by positioning the creature as simply an element of a campfire ghost story, figured only in ‘stockman’s yarns and black’s patters.’20 Even the use of a direct address to the reader in order to create a sense of authenticity is undermined through the uncertainty of ‘perhaps’ as well as the contrast between the ‘spectral’ trees and the ‘cheerful’ horses and the detachment of a story told by an unknown and unreliable figure: Some night, perhaps, when you are sitting over a camp fire brewing quart-pot tea and smoking store tobacco, with the spectral white gums rising like an army of ghosts around you, and the horses’ hobbles clanking cheerfully in the distance, you will ask one of the overlanding hands to tell you what he knows about the Bunyip.21

Even the story’s long introduction incorporating an encyclopaedic explanatory mythology of the bunyip works only to further remove the creature from the immediacy of reader experience. These processes of narrative detachment align with the manifestation of the bunyip itself, a creature which, as Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs point out, ‘is heard rather than seen: this particular ghost only signifies itself aurally, as a sound. The sound works to both spread this haunted site and to confuse its origins.’22 While this confusion might be read as a construction of the uncanny— indeed, ‘among its supernatural attributes is the cold, awesome, uncanny feeling

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which creeps over a company at night when the Bunyip becomes the subject of conversation’—it is also true that this solely aural representation works to undermine the realist possibility of the creature.23 It is, simply, ‘“Debil-debil” in the abstract … a much more indefinite source of danger … a convenient way of accounting, not only for plague, sickness, and disaster, but also for peace, plenty, and good fortune.’24 The supernatural becomes, then, merely superstition, less real than the ‘uncanny and fascinating’ ‘strange noises’ of the bush which ‘[break] the silence and loneliness of the night,’ and which explicitly exclude the bunyip.25 As in ‘Little Liz,’ the lost child in ‘The Bunyip’ is suggested to have died from a real rather than a supernatural encounter—here, with a snake found coiled around her lifeless body, even though those who find her ‘couldn’t believe it was that snake which had bitten her,’ preferring to attribute ‘the cry we heard’ to ‘the Bunyip, or little Nancy’s ghost.’26 Even as it conjures the myth of the bunyip, then, Praed’s story circumvents its possibility and refuses the presence of the fantastic. Belief in the Gothic or in the supernatural has no place in this new world, it seems—to do so is to overlook the real dangers of the bush. Although it might at first appear to be a story engaging with the supernatural, then, Praed’s narrative must ultimately be seen to adopt the tropes of the Gothic for a realist purpose. Such strategies are also adopted in the gothic narratives of realist writers like Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton and Guy Boothby. Indeed, around the middle of the nineteenth century, journalist Frederick Sinnett lamented the impossibility of the Gothic in Australia, observing that There may be plenty of dilapidated buildings, but not one, the dilapidation of which is sufficiently venerable by age, to tempt the wandering footsteps of the most arrant parvenu of a ghost that ever walked by night. It must be admitted that Mrs Radcliffe’s genius would be quite thrown away here; and we must reconcile ourselves to the conviction that the foundations of a second ‘Castle of Otranto’ can hardly be laid in Australia during our time.27

The sentimentalisation of national identity became similarly difficult. As the nation approached and moved beyond Federation in 1901, and entered into battle in the First World War in 1914, the romanticisation of an emerging Australian identity became fraught. Paradoxically, then, the colonial Australian gothic might be seen to refuse the idealisation of both the nation and of the gothic genre. Instead, the Gothic became a way to articulate an alternative national discourse which exposed the power imbalances of race and gender systemic in Australian culture at the turn of the century. It is in this sense that, as Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver argue, ‘the colonial Australian Gothic [can be seen] as a restaging of European and American Gothic tropes, even as it departs from them in order to assert its identity as a unique and popular local genre.’28 Baynton’s narratives exemplify the way in which colonial women’s writing and particularly their ‘perspectives regarding empire … repeatedly complicate the official/canonical narratives’ and ‘call into question the imperial mission and its promises of land, riches and opportunity.’29 More particularly, however, by adopting a gothic discourse to present such critiques Baynton expresses these systems of racial and gendered oppression as functions of terror and horror in which the marginalised are

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made voiceless, prevented from screaming or calling for help, as Melissa Edmundson points out in her discussion of ‘A Dreamer’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (both 1902).30 Most of Baynton’s stories express the terror of women’s vulnerability in the bush. As in Farjeon’s ‘Little Liz,’ for instance, mateship is in ‘Squeaker’s Mate’ (1902) exposed for its dangerous potential, as those working in the bush come to rely utterly on one other ‘mate’ for survival. This dependency can produce a desire for revenge against the betraying mate and those allied with them. Although this is a terror which might be seen to apply to all Australians working in the unfamiliar bush, it was particularly true for women, whether they were fit (as in ‘Squeaker’s Mate’) or unfit (as in ‘The Chosen Vessel’) for rural life, since prejudices about their suitability for it compounded the difficulty of the experience itself. The inhospitality of the Australian environment for women is represented through the landscape in ‘A Dreamer’ and personified by the swagman in ‘The Chosen Vessel.’ In the former story, a young pregnant woman battles the violent landscape of the bush on a stormy night as she attempts to make her way home to her dying mother. As in Prichard’s ‘The Curse,’ while any human presence is minimised—there is ‘no sign of life’ in the small town, besides a late-night labourer in the mortuary—the natural environment is personified, not merely resisting the woman’s progress but actively attacking her: ‘[m]alignantly the wind fought her,’ while branches ‘coiled their stripped fingers’ around her neck.31 Baynton’s story also makes explicit use of tropes of the European Gothic, such that its first sentences appear to situate it in a foreign land: ‘A swirl of wet leaves from the night-hidden trees decorating the little station, beat against the closed doors of the carriages. The porter hurried along holding his blear-eyed lantern to the different windows, and calling the name of the township in language peculiar to porters.’32 Similarly, it recalls Washington Irving’s short story of the American Gothic, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ (1820) in its description of ‘the sleeping town’; a landmark tree notable for its ‘bent, distorted trunk’ where ‘a runaway horse had crushed its drunken rider’; and the violent, spectral horseman the woman imagines galloping towards her.33 The intertext suggests that the threat to the woman does not come from the violence of the natural or supernatural world but, rather, from social forces at work around her. Like Ichabod Crane in Irving’s tale, the young woman may be seen to be naïve in her fear of the spectral landscape, subject not to the dangers of the bush but rather to a wayward imagination. Indeed, that she is ‘near-sighted’ and subject to the ‘horror of the unknown that this infirmity could bring’ suggests that like Ichabod, she is blind to the real horrors at work here.34 It is not, after all, the trees or the storm which actively seek to hurt her: instead, the harm has come from her absence from home, the distance put between she and her mother by the patriarchal expectations of marriage and motherhood. Baynton reminds the reader of this as the trees appear to shift their behaviour, so that by the story’s end they save her from the rushing river and help her on her way, as in a fairy tale. The woman’s failure to correctly read the landscape is similarly figured by her misrecognition of the significance of her mother’s absence from the track to meet her with a lantern, the still-latched gate, the rainwater flooding the garden from a misdirected drainpipe, and the silence of the dog behind the door. All of these signs point to her mother’s death prior to the woman’s arrival home, and the failure of her

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‘atonement’ in the arduous journey.35 Baynton’s point, it seems, is that the Gothic is not to be found in the Australian landscape, in the terrors of a dark and stormy night for the lone woman traveller, but rather in the structural forces which keep her isolated from her family or from a broader female community. It is in this sense that she can be seen as a gothic victim, imprisoned by expectations of women as powerful in the new world as they were in the old. ‘The Chosen Vessel’ also features a young unnamed mother, alone in the bush, as its central character. Both stories figure the Australian bush as not only dangerous, but uncanny, partly as a product of its personification, partly for its isolation of these women, partly for its haunting strangeness, but primarily, as Edmundson notes, because they disrupt the idea of home as a place of safety.36 Far from the domestic space assumed as the nineteenth-century sphere of women, these so-called settlers are made unsettled by the unhomeliness of this unforgiving geographical and social environment. Indeed, like the woman in ‘A Dreamer,’ the vulnerability and eventual death of the female character in ‘The Chosen Vessel’ is less a product of that harsh environment than of the discursive structures which describe expectations of women in colonial Australia. It is in this way that women’s gothic writing of colonial Australia works to expose the myth of hope and opportunity offered up by early settlers. Instead, Edmundson observes: Women’s Gothic written during the height of empire emphasises the colonial subject’s constant struggle between the familiar/unfamiliar, the natural/supernatural worlds, and the tenuous safety of the domestic space that is constantly being invaded – not by the indigenous, racial Other that is such a part of other Gothic narratives but, instead, by disease, destitution, and distrust. In doing so, these narratives memorialise what official history has forgotten.37

The young mother of ‘The Chosen Vessel’ is alone on her isolated property while her husband works as a shearer far from home. The woman in ‘A Dreamer’ was terrified by the alien experience of her own former home after some time away, but the protagonist of ‘The Chosen Vessel’ has this terror compounded, since her childhood was an urban one. Thus, she is ‘afraid’ even of the cow, a fact for which she is mocked by her unsympathetic husband.38 His callous laughter and threats towards her make clear that again, the woman’s fear is misdirected: he, and the patriarchy he comes to represent, are what is to be feared, not the cow. His absence, however, makes her vulnerable to the attack of a passing swagman, cast here, like the husband, as a figure of danger, rather than as a symbol of an idealised Australian identity. In a striking echo of the European trope of the gothic heroine trapped in a dark castle, the young woman barricades herself inside the flimsy shack while the swagman stalks its perimeter, exposing her to be as vulnerable as the tiny baby she clutches to her chest. But Baynton’s point is driven home when the sound of an approaching horseman lures the woman from her hiding place, desperately calling for his help, only for him to ignore her cries as she falls into the clutches of the swagman. The story’s conclusion reveals that the horseman, a devout Catholic, believed the crying woman, ‘a white-robed figure with a babe clasped to her bosom,’ to be a vision of the Virgin Mary: ‘he knew the white figure not for flesh and blood, but for the Virgin and Child of his mother’s prayers.’39 His misrecognition of danger

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thus matches the woman’s, so that just as she fears the cow more than her husband, the horseman sees only his idealisation of woman, rather than a real woman chased by a murderous villain. Even the good man, then, is complicit in the dangers of the colony for his failure to recognise its true dangers. If the lost child in ‘The Bunyip’ and ‘Little Liz’ can be read, then, as the destruction of hope in the new world, or the unsuitability of European settlers for life in the bush, then the orphaned child of ‘The Chosen Vessel,’ left to nurse at the breast of its dead mother, clutched, still, by her petrified hand, suggests the damage to be done to future generations by the loss of an ethic of care in the colonial environment. The comparison of the swagman to a dingo and the mother and child to an unguarded sheep and lamb indicates the reduction of the human to the animal without any expectations of civilisation in the colony.40 It is up to those like the horseman, on his way to vote in an election, Baynton’s story suggests, to use what power they have to protect the vulnerable, rather than simply their own interests. Despite critiques from reviewers who argued that their ‘realist’ work was not true to life, both Baynton and Lawson continued to adopt the gothic genre to articulate their accounts of the dangers and terrors of life in colonial Australia.41 While Baynton had used it to effect a critique of the patriarchal structures of the period and of the gothic dangers of life in the Australian bush for women, in particular, Lawson and Boothby use the genre to go even further in their criticism of colonial life. In Lawson’s ‘The Bush Undertaker’ (1892) and Boothby’s ‘With Three Phantoms’ (1897), gothic tropes are adopted as a mode of describing a fear of reprisal for colonial wrongs. In anticipation of later uses of the Gothic in writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the genre is used by Lawson and Boothby to describe the potential for injustices committed against Indigenous Australians to come back to haunt colonial oppressors. Like Praed’s ‘The Bunyip,’ Lawson’s suggestion of the fantastic in ‘The Bush Undertaker’ is a point of uncertainty. For one, although both stories associate the supernatural with Australia’s indigenous mythologies, Praed does not explicitly link this, as Lawson does, to the greater social threats at work during the period. Whereas Praed’s story actively questions the possibility of the supernatural figure of the bunyip, Lawson introduces the prospect of the supernatural through an ordinary encounter with an animal and the suggestion of an indigenous belief system which might attribute a loaded symbolism to this apparently ordinary creature. ‘The Bush Undertaker’ establishes the uncanniness of the Australian bush also seen in Baynton’s stories through its immediate commentary on the strangeness of the inversion of the seasons in the southern hemisphere and the oddness of celebrating the day alone in the bush: the subtitle of the story is, after all, ‘Christmas in the Far West,’ and the old shepherd, the bush undertaker himself, prepares a solitary meal in ‘the dazzling glow of that broiling Christmas Day.’42 Although isolation had been a prominent element of the uncanniness of the previous stories discussed, Lawson makes a point to note this as producing strange behaviour in the coloniser: the shepherd speaks only, but relentlessly, to himself and to his dog. The bush, the story ultimately concludes, is ‘the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and much that is different from things in other lands.’43

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The gothic narrative is most striking, however, in its treatment of the two corpses the shepherd finds on his Christmas Day walk: one the bones of an Aboriginal person, which he exhumes from their shallow grave; the other the blackened ‘mummy’ of a European he is quick to claim as ‘Brummy,’ an old ‘mate.’44 His comparative treatment of the two bodies in one sense signifies the colonial value system which establishes immediate mateship between two white men and the assumption of a Christian burial for the dead man, while the skeleton of the Aboriginal man is of value only as ‘payable dirt’—to be sold to a European collector, perhaps, as part of a macabre display of colonial violence and power.45 It is true that, as Ian McLean has it, Indigenous Australian people ‘lingered as if ghosts forever haunting the psyche of the nation …. The once dreary featureless bush now teemed with spirits and history, making this new country the most ancient land, and giving its new owners a new indigenous identity.’46 Yet, more than this, the threatening figure of the black goanna which follows the old man as he carries the two bodies back to his hut offers up a haunting symbol of justice, causing even ‘the old shepherd, used, as one living alone in the bush must necessarily be, to all that is weird and dismal’ to feel ‘for once, at least, the icy breath of fear at his heart.’47 ‘Theer’s sothin’ uncanny about them theer gohannas,’ the shepherd observes, implicitly admitting the credence of an unfamiliar belief system which might permit the transformation of a person into an animal familiar.48 The haunting of the bush undertaker by the goanna thus suggests the looming fear of punishment for the terrible treatment of the Australian Indigenous people by its colonisers. Civilisation is not constituted simply by the Christian gesture towards other Europeans, the story suggests, but by the extension of this to all humans. Like ‘The Bush Undertaker’ and Farjeon’s ‘Little Liz’ (originally published in the collection, Shadows on the Snow: A Christmas Story), Boothby’s ‘With Three Phantoms’ takes place at Christmas, inverting the expectations of its civilised celebration, but also, it might be seen, calling up the gestures of Christian kindness and hospitality contained in its origin story. The narrative emphasises the uncanny heat of an Australian Christmas, ‘a sweltering mockery of the day’ as it is celebrated in the northern hemisphere.49 Boothby’s story, however, explicitly casts this as a figuration of hell: the ‘stillness of the night’ is ‘suffocating,’ the rising moon is ‘blood-red,’ the room in which the bushmen sit is ‘an Inferno,’ and finally, their unexpected guest, a ‘living skeleton’ found wandering in the desert, tells them, ‘I’ve been in hell four years.’50 He is, it might be said, the figuration of Clarke’s ‘hopeless’ explorer. His apparent resurrection from this hell, only to die the next day, testifies in one sense to a gothic tale of survival as he followed the guides of a group of ghostly horseman back to civilisation. In one way, then, the explorer’s tale of loss and disorientation in the bush points out the way in which ‘the promise of settlement can never be fully realised.’51 But more than this, Boothby’s story suggests the shared delusion of the celebrating bushmen. The hope implicit in the actions of a frontier explorer is exposed as naïve through the death of his companions and the failure of his expedition, but the lost explorer is not the only one subject to madness and hallucination. For the bushmen to deny the hell of their own making, their irresponsible colonisation, is to ignore the message of the holiday they gather to celebrate. The repetition of Christmas as the temporal location of so many stories of the colonial Australian

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gothic can be seen, then, not simply as an echo of the Christmas ghost story of the European fireside, but as the moral core of their social critique. For the colonisers of the New World, the strange sights and sounds of the Australian frontier, its vast and sublime landscapes, its dangerous animals, and its oppressed human inhabitants, produced many experiences and tales of the uncanny. At the very least, the colonial Australian gothic describes the ‘spatial discomfort’ of the ‘breach of boundaries’ in this new environment, Roger Luckhurst points out.52 But it is precisely because of its anxiety about this proximity to the new and the terrifying, the ‘permeability of borders of nations, race and identities,’ he adds, that ‘it must also always be bound up with the questions of transnational interaction and empire.’53 This chapter has attended to the ways in which the gothic genre is frequently adopted in stories of colonial Australia as a mode of social and political critique, and even ultimately a ‘a potential tool for democratic social development.’54 The popular genre of the Gothic made it an ideal mode to raise questions about this ‘unprecedented frontier experience,’ the attitudes of the colonisers and, too, the potential for Australia to live up to its promise as a land of equality and opportunity: a true site of mateship.55 Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

‘Colonial Australian Gothic stories were in a kind of dialogue with features or tropes of the genre already popularised elsewhere’ (Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, ‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, ed. Gelder and Weaver, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007, 1–9 (2)). ‘It is a commonplace of postcolonial criticism to say that early colonists were disoriented by the new landscape, and that they reacted by attempting to define this “new” landscape through an inappropriate inherited language’ (Gerry Turcotte, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction, Bern: Peter Lang, 2009, 62). Ibid., 17. In another work, Turcotte further explains the mutual use of Gothic and colonial discourses in understanding early Australian literature: ‘The colonist is uprooted, estranged, terrified, on alien territory, and pursued (if sometimes only in the imagination) by a daunting predator: which in Australia was alternatively perceived as the Bush, the convict past, bush rangers or the Aboriginal population. It is this overlapping territory shared by the Gothic and the colonial that makes the one useful to the other’ (‘Footnotes to an Australian Gothic Script’, Antipodes 7.2 [1993], 127–34 [129]). James Doig, ‘Introduction,’ Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction 1867–1939, ed. Doig, Mandurah: Equilibrium, 2007, 5– 8 (5). Although Turcotte takes issue with this perspective, noting that while such authors ‘may have insisted on the realist dimension of their work … their exploration of the anxieties of the convict system, the terrors of isolated stations at the mercy of vagrants and nature, the fear of starvation or of becoming lost in the bush, are distinctly Gothic in effect,’ this chapter argues that authors of

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5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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the colonial Australian experience frequently adopt Gothic tropes precisely in order to explain the horrific and uncanny nature of their real lives (‘Australian Gothic’, The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, New York: New York University Press, 1998, 10–19 [12–13]). Ibid., 10. Andrew McCann, Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014, 186. Christopher Lee, too, notes that ‘[d]reams of a happy wholesome society were troubled by the proximity of monstrous others in the form of primitive natives, Asian hordes, revolutionary masses and the new woman. The triumphant rise of a new civilisation in an ancient continent was haunted by its discontents’ (‘Introduction,’ Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999, xi–xxviii [xii], while Gelder and Weaver assert that the colonial Australian Gothic ‘gives us a range of vivid, unsettling counternarratives to the more familiar tales of colonial promise and optimism we are often asked to take for granted’ (‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ 9). Marcus Clarke, cited in Gelder and Weaver, ‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ 3–4. Katharine Susannah Prichard, ‘The Curse’ (1932), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 261–64 (261). Ibid., 261. Ibid., 262. Ibid., 263, 264. B.L. Farjeon, ‘Little Liz’ (1866), in Doig, Australian Gothic, 41–62 (41). Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 44, 50. Ibid., 47, 49. Ibid., 58; Doig, Australian Gothic, 8. Ibid., 6–7. Rosa Campbell Praed, ‘The Bunyip’ (1891), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 117–25 (117). Ibid., 117. Ibid. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998, 31. Praed, ‘The Bunyip,’ 119. Gelder and Weaver recognise ‘The Bunyip’ as a story which ‘especially relishes the aural effects of the bush’: ‘Talking and storytelling, strange noises, coo-ees and distant cries: these all work to render the bush Gothic and disorient the settlers-to-be who literally lose their way’ (‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ 4). Praed, ‘The Bunyip,’ 118. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 125.

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27. Frederick Sinnett cited in Gelder and Weaver, ‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ 2–3. 28. Ibid, 3. 29. Melissa Edmundson, Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2018, 8. 30. Ibid., 209. 31. Barbara Baynton, ‘A Dreamer’ (1902), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 215–21 (216, 219). 32. Ibid., 215. 33. Ibid., 217. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 218. 36. Edmundson, Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 203, 204, 212. 37. Ibid., 9. 38. Barbara Baynton, ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (1902), in Lee, Turning the Century, 291–97 (291). 39. Ibid., 296. 40. Ibid., 295, 297. 41. Edmundson, Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 200. 42. Henry Lawson, ‘The Bush Undertaker (A Christmas in the Far West)’ (1892), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 139–46 (139). 43. Ibid., 146. 44. Ibid., 141. 45. Ibid. 46. Ian McLean, cited in Lee, Turning the Century, xxii. 47. Lawson, ‘The Bush Undertaker,’ 144. 48. Ibid., 143. 49. Guy Boothby, ‘With Three Phantoms’ (1897), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 193–201 (196). 50. Ibid., 195, 196, 197, 198. 51. Gelder and Weaver, ‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ 5. 52. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Gothic Colonies, 1850–1920,’ The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, New York: Routledge, 2014, 62–71 (62). 53. Ibid., 63. 54. Lee, Turning the Century, xv. 55. Luckhurst, ‘Gothic Colonies,’ 69.

Bibliography Baynton, Barbara, ‘A Dreamer’ (1902), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 215–21. ———, ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (1902), in Lee, Turning the Century, 291–97.

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Boothby, Guy, ‘With Three Phantoms’ (1897), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 193–201. Doig, James, ‘Introduction,’ Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction 1867–1939, Mandurah: Equilibrium, 2007, 5–8. ———, ed., Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction 1867–1939, Mandurah: Equilibrium, 2007. Edmundson, Melissa, Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2018. Farjeon, B.L., ‘Little Liz’ (1866), in Doig, Australian Gothic, 41–62. Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998. Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver, ‘The Colonial Australian Gothic,’ The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, ed. Gelder and Weaver, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007, 1–9. Gelder, Ken, and Rachael Weaver, ed., The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007. Lawson, Henry, ‘The Bush Undertaker (A Christmas in the Far West)’ (1892), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 139–46. Lee, Christopher, ‘Introduction,’ Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s, ed. Lee, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999, xi–xxviii. Lee, Christopher, ed., Turning the Century: Writing of the 1890s, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999. Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Gothic Colonies, 1850–1920,’ The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, New York: Routledge, 2014, 62–71. McCann, Andrew, Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014. Praed, Rosa Campbell, ‘The Bunyip’ (1891), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 117–25. Prichard, Katharine Susannah, ‘The Curse’ (1932), in Gelder and Weaver, The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction, 261–64. Turcotte, Gerry, Footnotes to an Australian Gothic Script’, Antipodes 7.2 (1993), 127–34. ———, Australian Gothic’, The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, New York: New York University Press, 1998, 10–19. ———, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction, Bern: Peter Lang, 2009.

The Short Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien Erin Janosik

On March 19, 1853, an article called, “The Way to Get Buried,” was published in The New York Daily Times, an early name of The New York Times. The writer ruminates on the trappings of death as he explores Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, which was at the time considered a country cemetery that existed far apart from the congestion of lower Manhattan city life. He stresses over the spectacle of mourning that has replaced, as he believes, the once-sincere solemnity of lamentation, then turns to anguish over the corporeal corruption of the grave, and finally criticizes the design and scale of tombstones and mausoleums belonging to the wealthy. Through the reproachful tone employed in his description of lavish funerals and opulent tombs, he asserts that death is not the great equalizer it may be popularly considered— evidenced by the “Fifth-avenues of tombs”1 which visually separate the “habitations of our merchant princes from the hovels at the Five Points.”2 It is with distaste for expense and arrogance that he declares, “Even the City of the Dead has a fashionable quarter.”3 All at once it is clear that the writer understands the political nature of the body in death as well as life, a necropolitics of colonization and a philosophical rumination on disembodiment apparent throughout his writing. Drawing his attention back to the impracticalities of the literal grave and as well as the theater surrounding it, the writer concludes, “…if we want a mode of burial at once sublime, poetic, and free from all those physical objections applicable to other kinds of interment let us adopt cremation,”4 equating shedding one’s physical body to a freedom from its intangible prisons. Fitz-James O’Brien, the writer of the article, might have been unhappy to learn that he was to be buried in the same Green-Wood Cemetery he evaluated in his article. He died only ten years after the article was published. An account of O’Brien’s funeral appears in a tribute section of a novel by his dear friend, William Winter. In Brown Heath and Blue Bells, Winter recalls, “With muffled drums and martial dirges we bore him to Greenwood, and there a guard of honour fired a volley over his tomb, E. Janosik (B) Independent Researcher, New York, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_13

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and, with a few flowers from the loving hand of Matilda Heron, we left him forever.”5 Heron was a stage actress praised by O’Brien; he had even been her press agent at one time.6 Given O’Brien’s opinion on elaborate funerals, the fanfare of his own might have been of some disappointment to him, but the sendoff befitted O’Brien as a fallen soldier, surrounded by the artists, actors, and members of the literary circles he mingled with in life, a sincere group of mourners wishing him farewell. The New York Times followed his death and funeral at the time, they had published his work over the years, as most New York newspapers and periodicals had during O’Brien’s decade in the city. In an article from April 10, 1862 on O’Brien’s funeral, the paper relates his military career, highlighting his literary contributions relating to the war, In a letter, which the readers of the TIMES can scarcely have forgotten, and which the written history of the war will not allow to die, he described the progress of the regiment from Annapolis to Washington. Since then upward of five hundred members of the Seventh have accepted positions in the army, and are now fighting the battle of their country.7

He fought for the Union in the Civil War, volunteering for the Seventh Regiment out of New York. Before departing on the trip where he would die, O’Brien told his friend, Thomas Davis, that he would settle upon his return to write his great work, which he had been thinking over for years.8 O’Brien suffered a severe wound in battle and contracted tetanus, he succumbed days later, in bed, after downing a glass of sherry.9 After his funeral, his body was kept at Green-Wood’s receiving tomb, then removed more than ten years later for burial in November 27, 1874. His grave is in section. 15, lot 17,263, number 1183, an area on the edge of the cemetery on Maple Avenue. For a man concerned with the trimmings of death, it is all the more mysterious that he has had a variety of different tombstones. The first, a beacon to reflect his literary life and his unrecognized genius, likely erected by his friends and his mother, who expressed the intention to publish his works and use the proceeds to erect a monument to him. William Winter edited and published The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien in 1881, including a preface filled with sketches of the man by those who knew him well. The marble tombstone seen at O’Brien’s grave in 1898 by William Sidney Hillyer read, “Fitz-James O’Brien. Here lies the body of that brilliant poet and writer who, whatever his faults may have been, had the saving graces of genius and high principle, as shown by his disinterested devotion to the land of his adoption”.10 The epitaph paints the image of an intelligent but flawed artist as well as a man respected for his contributions in wartime. Francis Wolle visited O’Brien’s grave while working on his dissertation, Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties. The dissertation was later published, in 1944, and became the authority on the life of O’Brien alongside Winter’s preface materials. At the grave on September 12, 1925, Wolle reported seeing a white marble stone with a scroll unrolling down the front and O’BRIEN written toward the top, but the name FITZ-JAMES, which appeared below, was almost completely scratched out.11 I have visited our beloved writer’s grave a couple times over the past few years and have always seen a modern stone that reads, “Fitz-James O’Brien Capt 90 NY INF

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7 NYSM Civil War 1828 1862.” The granite marker was placed as part of GreenWood’s Civil War Project. O’Brien’s tombstones, ranging from recollection of his love of life and literature to a strictly factual listing of his death information and military record, reflect the way the memory of his life has shifted over time. As is the case for many less than famous writers, the popularity and familiarity of the public with his work has waned as years pass by, dotted with attempts at reviving interest in his stories. One such attempt, an article from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1892, “In Greenwood Graves, Two Poets Whose Names Are Virtually Forgotten,” examines McDonald Clarke and our O’Brien. The author compares O’Brien to Poe, “He was nearly as good as Poe in Poe’s own line and his superior in others. Poe had not O’Brien’s sweetness or daintiness of touch, although he had all his fire and virility.”12 The unnamed writer goes on to credit O’Brien with normalizing the practice of giving credit to writers in magazines and periodicals like Harper’s, and standardizing payment upon acceptance of work, as O’Brien demanded both throughout his career. Notably, the writer’s section of the article on O’Brien begins with a vignette of couple of men passing O’Brien’s grave, commenting on the bare headstone that features only a name, “…no age on the stone, guess they didn’t know when he was born and he couldn’t tell em when he died.”13 This is the first recorded instance of a viewing of O’Brien’s headstone, predating the illustrious headstone likely placed by his friends and family sometime in the few years following. Its plainness is thrown into greater relief as author compares O’Brien’s grave, indistinguishable from the hundreds around him, to the nearby iron-fenced grave of the Harper family. He comments, A man of talent has as good a right to sleep his last sleep as has a publisher. But I have often wondered why the writers and the old soldiers of Brooklyn and New York don’t pay a little more attention to Fitz-James O’Brien’s grave in the common ground in Greenwood. He deserves it from his old comrades in those two professions, even if the rest of the world has forgotten him.14

Much written about O’Brien after his passing stresses the loss to the literary world and bemoans the obscurity his writing has been subjected to, and the calls to read and celebrate his work have not changed much from shortly after his sudden death to today. The men passing O’Brien’s grave in 1892 may not have believed it based on his tombstone, but O’Brien’s death is well recorded, and his obituary appeared in many newspapers after his passing. His official death certificate record lists his death date as April 6, 1862 in Baltimore, Maryland; but it also lists his birth very generally, in Ireland in 1832.15 Winter places his birth in “the county of Limerick, Ireland, about the year 1828,”16 but was unsure, and so there has been some disagreement about O’Brien’s birth date since then. There is some difficulty in finding the official record of O’Brien’s birth, but digitization of Church records in Ireland made it possible to find a baptismal record.17 Born Michael O’Brien to James O’Brien and Eliza O’Driscoll, and sponsored by Michael O’Driscoll and Margaret Roche, he was baptized November 26, 1826 in the South Parish parochial area of Cork,

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Ireland. Wolle notes in his dissertation that O’Brien was named Michael at birth, after both his grandfathers, but he was called “Fitz-James,” meaning son of James, almost immediately.18 His baptismal record, a single line in a ledger filled with faded, slanting handwriting, appears as the first entry on page 359, but sadly omits a date of birth and address. If O’Brien was baptized in November of 1826, it is likely that he was born earlier that year. He was probably thirty-six at the time of his death. James O’Brien, Fitz-James’ father, was an attorney and one of four county coroners in Cork, Ireland.19 His mother, Eliza O’Driscoll, could trace her family back to the Kings of Munster and the O’Driscoll Clan of Toberanargid Castle. While O’Brien spent childhood on his grandfather’s scenic Cork estate, called Baltimore House, he would write poems about the nearby lake, Lough Ina, and his rebel chief ancestor, Florence O’Driscoll. Known also as Fineen Dhuv (or, Black Florence), his greatgreat-grandfather lived in a castle on an island in the lake, but was killed in battle by the English. The Irish countryside and waterfront, alongside stories of ancestral clans featuring members of his family, made for a picturesque image of Ireland. O’Brien’s childhood was filled with hunting, riding, and fishing with family, but that idyll did not protect him from an early life interrupted by death at all turns. His youth was spent in Cork and then Limerick after his father died and his mother remarried. These areas were some of the hardest hit during the Great Famine, especially Skibbereen in Cork, which was nearby Baltimore House, the home of O’Brien’s maternal grandfather and Fitz-James’s namesake, Michael O’Brien, who also owned a cottage on Lough Hyne. Despite his privileged upbringing, the destitution of the famine did not escape O’Brien’s attention, and some of his first poems employ images of Irish patriotism under the tyranny of English rule. The Great Famine is a topic he returns to in his writing later in life, and no doubt the images of mass graves of famine victims in Ireland remained seared in his memory. In “The Way to Get Buried,” images of overflowing plots are powerfully employed in his description of methods used to make more space for the dead, When the graves, in which a dozen bodies were lying, became so full that no more could be accommodated, the fiendish officials of the churchyard were absolutely known to have constructed a machine for pounding the coffins and their contents into a smaller compass, and thus gaining a few inches for the reception of the new comer. These facts are not in the least exaggerated.20

While it’s not clear that O’Brien is specifically speaking of the Famine here, nor can it be confirmed that O’Brien saw the famine victims or burial pits personally, the famine burial pits in Skibbereen were infamous, and one mass grave in Abbeystrewry is estimated to hold up to ten thousand unidentified victims of The Great Famine. The area is very close to Lough Hyne and the other areas in which O’Brien grew up and wrote about in poems to Irish newspapers. In his 1861 poem “The Ballad of the Shamrock” O’Brien specifically places a famine victim within Brooklyn’s Green-Wood gates, creating a clear line from the places of his birth and young life, to the spaces of his adulthood, and death. The poem begins, My boy left me just twelve years ago‘Twas the black year of famine, of sickness, and woe,

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When the crops died out, and the people died too, And the land into one great grave-yard grew21 The speaker of the poem, an Irish woman whose son immigrates to America to escape the Famine and make a living, relates her sadness at watching his departure at the Limerick Quay. She only hears from him intermittently over ten years, until her priest gives word that Donal, her son, has sent for her to come to America. She boards the ship with a shamrock plant brought from nearby the farm where she raised her son, only to hear upon her arrival that he is dead. The poem concludes with her visiting his grave in Green-Wood often, hoping to be buried beside him one day, where she has planted the shamrock plant on his plot. O’Brien’s use of Green-Wood here brings his Irish upbringing into contact with his chosen home of New York City, a personal tether to the Irish-American experience of famine emigration that does not often come up in his work. The space O’Brien places the grave in his poem, a hillside with sycamore trees, is similar to the one place in Green-Wood he finds pleasant in “The Way to Get Buried,” called Chestnut Hill. He says of it, “Here, I thought, it would perhaps be pleasant to rest; at the foot of one of those large trees with plenty of moss on the grave, and no tombstone to call a blush upon my mouldering cheeks by challenging the world’s esteem for virtues I never possessed.”22 The cemetery keeper tells him the sum of a plot there, however, and O’Brien seems immediately put off. O’Brien places Donal and his mother on this site at poem’s end, perhaps as an attempt to grant them the peaceful sleep he imagined on the hill years earlier. The final stanza of the poem echoes a stanza in Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” using comparable lines to convey the grief and mourning of the speakers at the graves of their beloveds. Poe’s lines, “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,”23 are undoubtedly influential upon O’Brien’s, “The shamrock sod is growing on Greenwood’s hillside. / It grows above the heart of my darling and my pride;”24 The heavy-handed borrowing of Poe’s rhyme here likely contributes to O’Brien’s reputation as the Celtic Poe,25 a comparison strengthened by the commonality that both of their most well-known works are those of his supernatural, gothic, and detective short stories. In fact, O’Brien even wrote a poem called “Helen Lee”.26 Aside from his being known as the Celtic Poe, O’Brien’s reputation has been undoubtedly bolstered by his association with Walt Whitman, being a member of the bohemians of Pfaff’s beer cellar, though it is not often mentioned in short biographical descriptions. He is best known as a footnote in American Short Story volumes, collections of supernatural, gothic fiction, and fantasy anthologies throughout the twentieth century. His poetic contributions to the literary world and his work as a columnist and theater reviewer are practically forgotten. Much as he is known as the Celtic Poe, O’Brien’s reputation as an Irishman is a large part of how he is characterized, though he spent his late twenties and thirties, much of his adult life and writing career, in New York. The deaths of his maternal grandfather and his father left O’Brien a great sum of money when he came of age in 1849. The exact amount is unknown, but on a few occasions O’Brien claimed that his combined inheritance totaled around £8000. The UK National Archives estimates that £8000 in 1850 would have been worth

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about £641,488.80 ($847,727.44) in 2017.27 It was with this money that he moved to London and continued writing, but by the time he arrived in New York he did not have much left to his name. In searching through immigration records, based on Wolle’s suggestion that O’Brien left England in late 1851 and arrived in New York in early 1852, there is record of a twenty-five-year-old “Michl O’Brien” of Ireland arriving January 1, 1852, in New York on a ship called Londonderry.28 No occupation was listed, and it is difficult to say concretely that the listing refers to our writer, but given the time period and correct age based on the baptismal record, it is possible this is Fitz-James O’Brien. An account from the wife of James T. Fields, a Boston publisher, as related to her by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly (both publications O’Brien appeared in), suggests that O’Brien was forced to leave England quickly with only sixty dollars after the husband of the woman he was having an affair with returned from his work as a British soldier in India. It is said he “concealed himself on board a ship bound for New York”29 to avoid capture. Once here, O’Brien’s life as a New York bohemian and Pfaffian blended with his Irish roots to create a distinct Irish-American voice in his writing. A New York gothic emerges in his short stories as Irish sensitivity to landscape fuses with a preponderance for the bizarre and is then set in the geography of Manhattan. This creates an uncanny world within the logical and detailed true setting of the city. Using real places in supernatural stories was a technique employed by American short story writers to create lend authenticity to tales by rooting them in things that seem likely to be historically accurate. O’Brien references New York’s Dutch origins in “The Diamond Lens,”30 reminiscent of Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, which is told by a fictional Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, in order to make the tales seem more believable. In “The Diamond Lens,” a scientist contacts the inventor of the microscope, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in order to uncover the manner in which he can locate the materials necessary to create the perfect lens. Since Leeuwenhoek had been dead over a hundred years at the time, Dr. Linley succeeds in speaking to the microbiologist through a medium named Madame Vulpes. The use of real scientific names, like the Dutch microbiologist’s, as well as scientific terms lends an authenticity to the story at a time when science fiction was still relatively new as a genre. As far as the supernatural aspect goes, however, O’Brien had a propensity for Dutch spirits, featuring the ghost of an older man from Holland by the name of Mr. Van Koeren in his short story “The Pot of Tulips”.31 This method of lending authenticity is employed in “The Lost Room,” as well, a story that evokes the famine most concretely of all O’Brien’s stories. Our protagonist begins by taking an inventory of his room while lying on his bed in the heat of night, he mentions that one item, a “long haftless dagger that dangles over the mantle-piece”,32 belonged to a character who was an actual relative of O’Brien’s, an “old sea-king— Sir Florence O’Driscoll”.33 He suggests that Queen Elizabeth had an affair with O’Driscoll, who traveled and met with her in order to clear up a misunderstanding, but while he was gone the Englishman who he had entrusted with the responsibility of caring for his property had taken possession of the bulk of it and would not

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give it back. O’Driscoll lives out the rest of his life with the little land he has left, “with his castle by the sea, and the island of Inniskeiran”,34 launching numerous unsuccessful attempts to retrieve it. The loss of Irish land to the colonizing English is a common tale, a true one that has an eight-hundred-year history in Ireland, and this dispossession is typical of the time. The speaker says of this dagger: “I found it when a boy, in a hoary old castle in which one of my maternal ancestors once lived”.35 Whether or not the dagger was a real item of O’Brien’s family, the item has some historical basis in terms of O’Brien’s ancestry, and the speaker establishes a timeline of his own possession of it as well as a familial claim. The level of verifiable detail of the story places the reader within the room visually and conveys the speaker’s deep personal attachment to the items at hand, making the reader feel similarly attached. Warm in the room, the speaker seeks the coolness of the garden below. He descends the stairs, commenting on the nature of the house: “The whole place was gloomy, not so much because it was large, but because an unearthly nakedness seemed to pervade the structure. The stair-cases, corridors, halls, and vestibules all partook of a desert-like desolation.”36 He alludes to Thomas Hood’s “The Haunted House” as a reference point for the house’s dreariness, “It was Hood’s haunted house put in order and newly painted”.37 His reference places the space squarely in the realm of American Gothic, the old dark house where terrible things happen, an analogue of the European dilapidated castle, and so warns the reader of what is to come. The nakedness of the home that the speaker refers to, and the “desert-like desolation”38 suggests an emptiness and an overabundance of space. If one is already considering the connection between O’Brien and the Famine, this may bring to mind the accounts of emptiness of the Irish landscape which followed the famine, a pervading silence in the wake of a third of the population dying and another third emigrating— which the speaker refers to in the house as “extreme quiet”.39 In fact, historians have commented that, “that most immediately noticeable difference about post-Famine rural Ireland was a new silence. Before the Famine, there had been music at every teeming crossroads, much of it provided by beggars singing for their supper. Afterward, the land was quiet.”40 The “ghost-like tenants”41 and “the proprietor I scarcely ever saw”42 add further evidence of an eerie setting where everyone has disappeared. This change in atmosphere is also unsettling in the context of New York, a noisy and bustling place especially in the 1850s as population was booming from an influx of immigrants, many of whom were famine victims who had fled Ireland. The speaker notes, “On the whole, when the bustling, wide-awake spirit of New York is taken into consideration, the somber, half-vivified character of the house in which I lived was an anomaly…”43 It is in this space of gloom and unease that the speaker meets an odd creature who asks him if he knows who lives in the house and what they eat. Our unknowing protagonist learns, “They are enchanters. They are ghouls. They are cannibals”.44 The word “ghoul” is also used in O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery,” in conjunction with the assertion that an invisible being described by the term seemed capable of cannibalism. The Oxford English Dictionary describes a ghoul as “An evil spirit supposed (in Muslim countries) to rob graves and prey on human corpses”45 and the etymology derives from “Arabic ‘gh¯ul’, from a verbal root meaning ‘to seize.’”46 In

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the context of the famine, cannibalism was often rumored to have been a recourse taken in Ireland, where the starving fed on the bodies of those who had already starved to death. The creature names the tenants as ghouls and cannibals, and his description of the tenants’ cannibalistic activities makes them seem more like life choices than desperate acts of self-survival. The tenants live in a home and perhaps serve human parts at the dinner table, then roam the house’s halls to sneak up on our protagonist and trap him for their dinner while he’s sleeping. He suggests a sort of supernatural group of beings who are deliberately evil and ritualistically cannibalistic, unlike the characterization of famine victims as acting out of desperation in eating others to survive. The protagonist asks the creature how he knows all of this, to which he replies, “How I know them? Because I am their enemy. Because they tremble at my whisper. Because I hang upon their track with the perseverance of a blood-hound and the stealthiness of a tiger-because-because-I was of them once!”.47 Taking into consideration O’Brien’s poem “The Famine,”48 which was published in Ireland under the pseudonym “Heremon,” a chieftain of Irish legend, the position of the creature as former-cannibal-turned-cautionary suggests that the deliberate cannibals in this situation are not meant to embody the Famine victims often accused of desperate cannibalism. Instead, the many of power, wealth, and choice who chose to turn their cheek to the suffering are cannibals because of their parasitism. In this situation, the creature is much like an O’Brien figure as author of “The Famine,” a person of a once privileged position who rallies for the assistance of the less fortunate. The speaker then is our victim of famine-era crimes but not hunger in particular, focusing the tale instead on dispossession—England’s theft of O’Driscoll’s Irish land, echoed as our protagonist loses his room to the cannibals. The creature disappears and the protagonist rushes back to his once-dark room, but he quickly observes that the room is full of blinding light, incredible luxuries, and beautiful people. Much of O’Brien’s writing associates luxuries with villainy, as seen in “The Way to Get Buried”.49 His sympathies almost always lie with those who go without. The people appear in his room, settled as though the space is theirs, and they offer him sustenance as though he has no right to it and must to be invited. Their entitlement is immediately evident. The speaker orders them to leave, but his protests only stir laughter. He speaks again, ‘“…leave my room instantly! I will have none of your unnatural orgies here!’ ‘His room!’ shrieked the woman on my right. ‘His room!’ echoed she on my left. ‘His room! He calls it his room!’ shouted the whole party, as they rolled once more into jocular convulsions.”50 It is soon clear that they have decided that the room is not his anymore, they have taken it over and occupied his space. Furthermore, all of the items he took an inventory of at the beginning of the story have been changed. He notes, “In the place of that old haftless dagger, connected with so many historic associations personal to myself, I beheld a Turkish yataghan dangling by its belt of crimson silk”,51 and with that item and all others exchanged so too is our protagonist’s claim on the room Much like the estate of his ancestor O’Driscoll, all that he had was stolen out from under him while he was gone.

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Over a game of dice for ownership of the room, the ghouls offer an alternate option—for our protagonist to join the ranks of their unearthly revelries. He refuses, then leaves. “The power that impelled me concentrated itself into one vigorous impulse that sent me blindly staggering out into the echoing corridor, and, as the door closed swiftly behind me, I caught one glimpse of the apartment I had left forever.”52 The protagonist’s cries mourn the loss of his room and belongings, a dispossession well known to tenant farmers in Ireland as well as the ancient Gaelic families displaced by Cromwellian conquest. The parasitism may be seen as a metaphor for colonialism, intensified by efforts at the time to repeal the Act of Union, as well as general distaste for anything prohibiting the fulfillment of the dream of a unified, independent Ireland. While “The Lost Room” focuses on physical space as analogous to larger political ideas and is placed generally in New York, there are many specific neighborhoods and spaces of the city of New York highlighted in O’Brien’s short stories. “The Wondersmith,” which begins among the labyrinth tangle of downtown Manhattan streets filled with immigrant communities, is set during a wave of immigration that began in the mid-nineteenth century. O’Brien makes his way through winding lanes, painting the picture of worn gutters and working families, commenting on Golosh Street’s many inhabitants before finally bringing us to the shop where the story unfolds.53 Meanwhile, his famous story, “What Was It? A Mystery” takes place on 26th Street between 7th Ave. and 8th Ave., a townhouse operating as a boardinghouse that used to be on Bleecker Street. A description of lovely gardens running into the Hudson where tenants would smoke cigars in the summer dusk forms an image of a New York in stark contrast to the Golash Street of “The Wondersmith,” and if the names of neighborhoods were not enough to set the scene for O’Brien’s readers as coded spaces with their own lore and narrative expectations, his visual imagery is strong. In comparing these two scenes particularly, O’Brien’s supernatural detective fiction “What Was It? A Mystery”54 is set in the middle- to upper-class spacious apartment of a large house that once belonged to a merchant, and is evocative of Manhattan’s Seabury Tredwell House, built in the 1830s and also known as the Merchant House Museum, Manhattan’s first landmark and one of the few remaining nineteenth-century homes that has remained intact, it exists today as museum. Whereas the mix of commercial shops, a gated hospital, and a few residences nearby the streets of “The Wondersmith,” all described as dirty and sodden, are more akin to images of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in O’Brien’s time, particularly images of Orchard Street, where the Lower East Side Tenement Museum exists today. Golosh is not a real street in Manhattan, but the Lower East Side was known as a space where different immigrant communities lived during various waves of immigration into the United States, and living conditions were often treacherous. The area was known for its tenement buildings, spaces adapted to small apartments as populations rose. There was often an absence of light and fresh air, while water taps and bathrooms were communal to the building. Large families would attempt to fit into two or three rooms, and buildings were typically built without much care for safety. O’Brien wrote about tenements specifically, and in his poem “The Tenement House,” a group of millionaires laugh over dinner at the home of Ormolu, who

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happens to own a bunch of ill-kept tenement buildings filled with poor tenants. As a fire alarm sounds nearby, he continues to pour drinks. They burn to the ground among screams from the tenants and their neighbors, but he is comforted by the thought that his buildings are insured. The poem concludes, “Crushed and mangled with beam and girder, / Five corpses lie in those tenement houses; / And Ormolu with his guests carouses, / Guilty, by Heaven, of all that murder!”.55 The poem was published in November of 1861, and in February the year before a fire had broken out in the tenements on Elm Street where over twenty families were living, and many perished after the stairway was burnt away.56 Public outcry in the aftermath eventually led to new safety laws, but movement was slow. O’Brien’s poem echoes protest for better living conditions, and his distaste for the splendors and unconcern of the wealthy appear again in his poem “The Christmas Tree.” He compares the “rich and rare”57 Christmas tree of a millionaire, surrounded by lavish decorations and gifts, to a hungry home of a poor family who have a wreath “That once withered on the grass / of Greenwood’s slopes”.58 The poem attempts a feel-good Christmas cheer ending that celebrates the figurative warmth of a loving home of poverty in comparison to the physical heat and brilliant decorations of a wealthy home without affection. O’Brien’s sense of social injustice is again featured in his poem, “The Sewing Bird,” objecting the treatment of seamstresses and condemning the employment of men in department stores where women might instead sell to women. A sewing bird, made of scissors and fabric, animates in a work room and takes a seamstress on a tour of Manhattan’s Broadway (a main avenue of the city that runs from lower Manhattan through the Bronx), showing her department stores where men were working, assisting women pick out clothes. O’Brien’s sewing bird suggests that men should be working instead in the countryside, in jobs dealing in physical labor like farmers or lumberjacks, a message problematic in its reinforcement of traditional gender roles for men while possibly hoping to offer opportunity to women. In the final line, the seamstress thinks to herself, “she, wherever she turned, must see / Men in the places where women should be!”59 a recognition of the limited jobs available to women at the time, and potentially the message that women can do more than the roles they were contained to, that they deserved opportunity for more than dark sewing rooms. However, the poem should be criticized for its juxtaposition of images of the great outdoors accompanied by the refrain of “See, see, see, see! / THIS is the place where MEN should be!”.60 Specificity of place in New York is especially important in O’Brien’s stories in order to establish expectations. The former Bleecker Street boardinghouse mentioned in “What Was It? A Mystery” figures heavily in “From Hand to Mouth,” as O’Brien describes newly fallen snow on Broadway near Union Square as he walks home only to discover he is locked out of his Bleecker Street boardinghouse. It is in that cold and lonely realization that he meets Count Goloptious, who leads him through the streets until he cannot tell where he is, “It seemed as if I had lost all my old landmarks. The remarkable corners and sign posts of the great thoroughfare seemed to have vanished.”61 He’s brought into a hotel where the exterior is covered in stone mosaics of a repeated pattern of the “four chief organs of the body.”62 It is only here, in the midst of a great urban metropolis, where one may lose their way completely

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and enter into a space that doesn’t play by any rules of neighborhood and may run free of social stereotype or expectation. It is in this space that the surreal takes over, much like in O’Brien’s “The Lost Room,” where unexpected strangers and the loss of one’s space factor into the suspension of logic. Count Goloptious’s Hotel de Coup d’Œil is a curious place where live eyes, hands, mouths, and ears appear on the walls in a surrealist display, operating as staff of the hotel. Although unsettled by the scene, the speaker eventually falls asleep and a chapter ends. When the story resumes it begins, A horrible heat seemed to surround my head. I suffered intolerable agony. Count Goloptious had unscrewed my caput just at the point known to anatomists as the condyles, and deliberately placed it in the centre of a ring of burning brands which he had laid on the floor. The Philanthropic Duellist then drew a volume from his pocket, which, even in my excited condition, I could not help recognizing as Doctor Kitchener’s cookery-book, and commenced deliberately to read aloud the recipe for roasting a goose alive, which is contained in that immortal work. I now perceived with unutterable indignation that he intended to cook my head after Kitchener’s inhuman instructions.63

The book to which the author refers is likely one of many actual cookbooks written by William Kitchiner, well known by many in the nineteenth century. In the story, the account of the cookbook is as follows, “The Count laughed a devilish laugh, and consulted his book. ‘True,’ he said, ‘the worthy doctor says, that when the goose thirsteth let her be fed with water, so that the flesh shall be tender. when cooked. Let us give the poor head a drink.’”64 The speaker’s whiskers shrivel and fall off, and in the heat of the flames he is given a drink of water and brandy, which ignites his entire head in flames and he pleads to be removed from the heat. The Count responds, “Patience, patience, head of a heathen! You are roasting beautifully. A few minutes more, and I will pour some Worcestershire sauce over you.”65 The idea of the sauce being poured over his scalp, “cracking like the skin of a roasted apple…was too much to endure,”66 and the author awakes in the Hotel, realizing it was all just a dream. This anxiety, to be roasted and consumed by a mad man, to be made an exquisite plate of food, is reminiscent of the fear of cannibals and ghouls. In both the protagonist finds himself without a place to call his own, here the author has lost his key and stays in the hotel, both are dispossessed and fearful of being eaten. The various images of body parts, from the eyes, ears, hands, and mouths to the roasting head and later the parts in the basement, all contribute to an unease related to disembodiment. O’Brien’s “The Pot of Tulips” speaks also to a sense of disembodiment, as the narrator, Harry Escott, stays at a Dutch villa on fortieth street in Manhattan with his friend Jaspar Joye for a summer. The house has a particularly sad family history, as it belonged to a recently deceased Dutchman who distrusted his wife and mistreated his son, but left no evidence that the home still belonged to him and could then be passed to his son’s wife and their daughter, Alice, whom Harry loves. The ghost of the Dutchman, Mr. Van Koeren, appears to Harry in his bedroom one night, holding a pot of tulips, unable to speak his unfinished business. Harry, who knows an astonishing amount about ghosts and their ability to use visible objects as symbols for that they cannot verbally relay, watches the ghost and asks Jaspar to stay with him the following night. Then, Jaspar realizes the pot is identical to one on the mantel in

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the dining room. The two move the pot to uncover a writing table with legal papers inside related to the villa, restoring ownership of the home to Mr. Van Koeren’s daughter-in-law and her daughter, Alice, whom Harry marries. Harry explains the appearance of the Dutchman’s ghost, accompanied by the ghost of his wife, as Mr. Van Koeren’s attempt to correct his earthly wrong of accusing his wife of adultery resulting in an illegitimate son and mistreating them for years. He realized his wrong moments before his death, as his wife’s ghost appeared to him, and his meaning in materializing before Harry was to restore the property to the family of his late son, Alain. In this sense the body has been physically separated from its spirit, but so too is there a disconnect in the harmony of nature, a wrong that must be righted to create a oneness, peace. Harry assures, in the final paragraph of the story, “I could overwhelm you with a scientific theory of my own on the subject, reconciling ghosts and natural phenomena. I will spare you, however, for I intend to deliver a lecture on the subject at Hope Chanel this winter…”67 He concludes by inviting those who wish to investigate the topic to write to him, Mr. Escott, at the magazine where the story was published. The supernatural detective, Mr. Escott, also figured in O’Brien’s more famous tale, “What Was It? A Mystery,” where the sense of self and body is again questioned as Harry tells us the tale of living in a haunted boardinghouse and going back to his room after a night of opium consumption with fellow tenant, Dr. Hammond. The doctor wishes Harry goodnight after hours of talking about monsters and terrors, and Harry replies, “To you, gloomy wretch, afreets, ghouls, and enchanters”.68 Entering into his dark bedroom, something drops on Harry from the ceiling, attempting to choke him. The two wrestle, and Harry is able to get the upper hand, but when he turns on the light the creature he has subdued is invisible—though he can feel it breathing and wriggling within his grasp. Dr. Hammond is called to help, and they place the creature on the bed and restrain it, questioning what it is. A physician is called for and a mold is taken of the creature, who has the appearance of a small man with a hideous face, “It was the physiognomy of what I should have fancied a ghoul to be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.”69 Not knowing what to feed it, however, the creature slowly starves and is buried in the garden upon dying. Harry relates, “It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that viewless corpse into the damp hole,”70 reminiscent of the burial pits in Skibereen in O’Brien’s youth. Perhaps here, the invisibility of the creature is part of a larger metaphor for the silence surrounding the suffering of famine victims, suggesting their struggle was not visible to the public. Dropped into a hole without a tombstone and covered like an animal, the erasure of the pain and suffering is incredible. The mold of the creature, the only evidence of it, is taken to the physician’s museum but likely as a curiosity of medical or macabre interest. It is no wonder, given the anxieties O’Brien relates in his work surrounding the body and death, that his conclusion in “The Way to Get Buried” is to be cremated and avoid all manner of corruption of the corporeal as well as concern for popular memory of himself in the living world. Adding my own account of O’Brien’s grave to the list of reports, I recently spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn walking through Green-Wood Cemetery to visit Fitz-James O’Brien. Walking along

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Maple Avenue in the first hint of crisp autumn to come, I passed his grave on the path, shrouded in high grass. I moved to bend the weeds away from the face of the covered grave to ensure nothing of his tombstone had changed since my last visit, and once they were flattened I was surprised to have uncovered a small shamrock plant growing from where the base of the stone met the soil. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

F. J. B. “The Way to Get Buried” (New York Daily Times (1851–1857): 2. March 19 1853. ProQuest. Web. 3 December 2016). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. William Winter, Brown Heath and Blue Bells: Being Sketches of Scotland, with Other Papers (New York, Macmillan Co., 1896), 212. Francis Wolle, Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties (Boulder, Col.; University of Colorado, 1944), 141. “Funeral of Lieut. Fitz-James O’Brien” (The New York Times, 10 April 1862), www.nytimes.com/1862/04/10/archives/funeral-of-lieut-fitzjames-obr ien.html. Thomas E. Davis, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Ed. William Winter (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), xxxiii. Frank Wood, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Ed. William Winter (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), xlv. Wolle, Fitz-James O’Brien, 251. Ibid., 251. B. H. “In Greenwood Graves” (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 February 1892), p. 17, www.newspapers.com/image/50461104/. Ibid. Ibid. “New York Deaths and Burials, 1795–1952,” database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1: 7MG: 10 February 2018), Fitz James O’Brien, 06 April 1862; citing Baltimore, Maryland, reference; FHL microfilm 1,671,686. William Winter, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Ed. William Winter (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), xv. Baptismal record for Michl O’Brien of South Parish, Cork on 26 November 1826. p. 359, line 1. Record Identifier: CR-RC-BA-78009. Image filename: “cork & ross.south parish, cork (st. finbar’s, christ church, st. nicholas of jerusalem).p4778.00753”. Accessed 2 July 2018 on IrishGeneology.i.e. Wolle, Fitz-James O’Brien, 3. Winter, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, 4. F. J. B. “The Way to Get Buried”. Fitz James O’Brien, “The Ballad of the Shamrock” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 22, Issue: 130, March 1861), 433.

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22. 23. 24. 25.

F. J. B. “The Way to Get Buried”. Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee,” Poetry Foundation. O’Brien, “The Ballad of the Shamrock,” 436. Joseph J. Reilly, “A Keltic Poe” (The Catholic World, Volume CX, October 1919), 751–762. Fitz-James O’Brien, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Ed. William Winter (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 111–117. National Archives. “Currency Converter: 1270–2017.” Currency Converter, The National Archives, 28 November 2018. Passenger record for Michl O Brien, male aged 25, of Ireland, arriving in New York on the ship Londonderry on 1 January 1852. Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), 227. Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Diamond Lens” (The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue: 3, January 1858), 354–368. Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Pot of Tulips” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1855), 807–814. Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Lost Room” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 17, Issue: 100, September 1858), 495. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 496. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction (Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky, 2000), 73. O’Brien, “The Lost Room,” 495. Ibid. Ibid., 496. Ibid., 497. “ghoul, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 24 September 2016. Ibid. O’Brien, “The Lost Room,” 497. Heremon. “The Famine”, The Nation (1842–1897), 7 March 1846. F. J. B. “The Way to Get Buried”. O’Brien, “The Lost Room,” 498. Ibid. O’Brien, “The Lost Room,” 500. Fitz-James O’Brien, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Ed. William Winter (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 177–223.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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54. Fitz-James O’Brien, “What Was It? A Mystery” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 18, Issue: 106, March 1859), 504–510. 55. Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Tenement House” (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. 1 November 1861), 735. 56. “CALAMITOUS FIRE.; Tenement House on Elm-Street Destroyed. Thirty Persons Supposed to Have Perished in the Flames” (The New York Times, 3 February 1860), www.nytimes.com/1860/02/03/archives/calamitous-fire-ten ement-house-on-elmstreet-destroyed-thirty.html. 57. Fitz-James O’Brien, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien, Ed. William Winter (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 42. 58. Ibid., 45. 59. Ibid., 99. 60. Ibid., 98. 61. Fitz-James O’Brien, “From Hand to Mouth” (Good Stories, Vol. 4. Ill. Solomon Eytinge Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 8. 62. Ibid., 9. 63. Ibid., 13. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 14. 66. Ibid. 67. O’Brien, “The Pot of Tulips,” 814. 68. O’Brien, “What Was It? A Mystery,” 508. 69. Ibid., 509. 70. Ibid.

Bibliography Anonymous. “Loch Ina.” Ed. Edward Hayes. The Ballads of Ireland, London: A. Fullarton, Volume 1. 1855: 21–22. B., F. J. “The Way to Get Buried.” New York Daily Times (1851–1857): 2. March 19 1853. ProQuest. Web. 3 December 2016. Baptismal record for Michl O’Brien of South Parish, Cork on 26 November 1826. p. 359, line 1. Record Identifier: CR-RC-BA-78009. Image filename: “cork & ross.south parish, cork (st. finbar’s, christ church, st. nicholas of jerusalem).p. 4778.00753”. Accessed on 2 July 2018. B. H. “In Greenwood Graves.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 February 1892, p. 17. www.newspa pers.com/image/50461104/. Browne, Junius Henri. The Great Metropolis, a Mirror of New York: A Complete History of Metropolitan Life and Society, with Sketches of Prominent Places, Persons, And Things in the City, As They Actually Exist. Hartford: American Pub. Co., 1869. “CALAMITOUS FIRE.; Tenement House on Elm-Street Destroyed. Thirty Persons Supposed to Have Perished in the Flames.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 February 1860. www.nytimes.com/1860/02/03/archives/calamitous-fire-tenement-house-on-elmstreet-des troyed-thirty.html. Curtis, L. Perry. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1971. Print.

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Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Print. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky, 2000. Print. Fennell, Jack. Irish Science Fiction: Liverpool University Press, 1 December 2014. Liverpool Scholarship Online. 21 May 2015. Date Accessed 26 July 2016. http://liverpool.universitypressschola rship.com/view/10.5949/liverpool/9781781381199.001.0001/upso-9781781381199. Forsberg, Laura. “Nature’s Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy.” Victorian Studies, Volume 57, Issue 4, 2015: 638–666. Web. Franklin, H. Bruce. “Fitz-James O’Brien and Science Fiction.” In Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. “Funeral of Lieut. Fitz-James O’Brien.” The New York Times, 10 April 1862. www.nytimes.com/ 1862/04/10/archives/funeral-of-lieut-fitzjames-obrien.html. “ghoul, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 24 September 2016. Gibbons, Luke. Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and Irish Culture. Galway, Ireland: Arlen House, 2004. Print. Heremon. “The Famine” The Nation (1842–1897), 7 March 1846. Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 January 2017. Kelleher, Margaret. The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Print. Killeen, Jarlath. The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Web. Kitchiner, William. Apicius Redivivus, Or, The Cook’s Oracle: Wherein Especially the Art of Composing Soups, Sauces, and Flavouring Essences Is Made so Clear and Easy, by the Quantity of Each Article Being Accurately Stated by Weight and Measure, That Every One May Soon Learn to Dress a Dinner, as Well as the Most Experiences Cook: Being Six Hundred Receipts, the Result of Actual Experiments Instituted in the Kitchen of a Physician, for the Purpose of Composing a Culinary Code for the Rational Epicure, and Augmenting the Alimentary Enjoyments of Private Families: Combining Economy with Elegance: And Saving Expense to Housekeepers, and Trouble to Servants. London: Printed for S. Bagster, 1817. Levin, Joanna. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920. Redwood City, USA: Stanford University Press, 2009. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 9 October 2016. Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Ed. Douglas Grant. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Moskowitz, Sam. Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Hyperion, 1974. Print. Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Print. National Archives. “Currency Converter: 1270–2017.” Currency Converter, The National Archives, 28 November 2018. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result. “New York Deaths and Burials, 1795–1952,” database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ ark:/61903/1:1: 7MG : 10 February 2018), Fitz James O’Brien, 6 April 1862; citing Baltimore, Maryland, reference ; FHL microfilm 1,671,686. O.B, F.J. “THE SEVENTH REGIMENT.; How it Got from New-York to Washington--Perils and Privations--The March from Annapolis to the Junction--Doings of the Massachusetts Eighth, & c.” The New York Times. 2 May 1861. Web. 16 October 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/1861/05/02/ news/seventh-regiment-it-got-new-york-washington-perils-privations-march-annapolis.html. O’Brien, Fitz James. “The Ballad of the Shamrock.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 22, Issue: 130, March 1861: 433–437. O’Brien, Fitz-James. “From Hand to Mouth.” Good Stories, Vol. 4. Ill. Solomon Eytinge Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868.

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O’Brien, Fitzjames. “Oh! Give A Desert Life to Me.” The Nation (1842–1897), 15 March 1845, 376. O’Brien, Fitz-James. “The Diamond Lens.” The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue: 3, January 1858: 354–368. O’Brien, Fitz-James. “The Lost Room.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 17, Issue: 100, September 1858: 494–500. O’Brien, Fitz-James. The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien. Ed. William Winter. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881. Print. O’Brien, Fitz-James. “The Pot of Tulips.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1855: 807–814. O’Brien, Fitz-James. “The Tenement House.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1 November 1861: 732–735. O’Brien, Fitz-James. “What Was It? A Mystery.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 18, Issue 106, March 1859: 504–510. O’Brien, Fitz-James. What Was It? With Drawings by Leonard Baskin. Illus. Leonard Baskin. New York: Frank Hallman & Oliphant, 1974. Print. No. 57 of 200 copies printed; signed by the artist. ´ O’Gr´ ada, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 28 September 1995. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-great-irish-famine/9B66AE27C 30F1D80E71DFCDBEA102462. New Studies in Economic and Social History. Orser, Charles E. “An Archaeology of a Famine-Era Eviction.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2005: 45–58. Web. Passenger record for Michl O Brien, male aged 25, of Ireland, arriving in New York on the ship Londonderry on 1 January 1852. Passenger ID 9012004143206, Frame 346, Line number 25. Accessed 2 July 2018 on The Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. at https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/passenger-details/czoxMzoiOTAxMjAwNDE0M zIwNiI7/czo5OiJwYXNzZW5nZXIiOw==. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Annabel Lee.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/44885/annabel-lee. Reilly, Joseph J., PhD. “A Keltic Poe.” The Catholic World, Volume CX, October 1919: 751–762. Google Books. Web. 23 October 2016. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=iwwXAQ AAIAAJ&rdid=book-iwwXAQAAIAAJ&rdot=1. Skibbereen, West Cork, Ireland. “The Great Famine—An Gorta Mór—Skibbereen, West Cork, Ireland.” Skibbereen, West Cork, Ireland. Web. 17 September 2016. http://www.skibbereen.ie/ the-great-famine/. Smith, C. Alphonso. The American Short Story. Boston: Ginn, 1912. Print. Spenser, Edmund. A View of the Present State of Ireland Containing Observations upon the following Subjects, Viz. Its Dependance, Linen Trade, Provision Trade, Woollen Manufactory, Coals, Fishery, Agriculture, of Emigration, Import Trade of the City of Dublin, Effect of the Present Mode of Raising the Revenue, on the Health and Happiness of the People, the Revenue, a National Bank, and an Absentee Tax: Intended for the Consideration of Parliament, on the Approaching Enlargement of the Trade of That Kingdom: To Which Is Added, a Sketch of Some of the Principal Political Characters in the Irish House of Commons. London: Printed for R. Faulder, 1780. Web. 24 September 2016. http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E500000-001/. Winter, William. Brown Heath and Blue Bells: Being Sketches of Scotland, with Other Papers. New York: Macmillan Co., 1896. Wolle, Francis. Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, 1944. Print.

The Oriental World of Egyptian Gothic Naomi Simone Borwein

A recurrent vogue since antiquity, Egyptomania “morphed into other” darker “manias”1 in the Victorian era. As a subset of excess in the Egyptian craze, terms like “Egyptomanical”2 and “Egyptophilic” surfaced as receptive “adaptations of its aesthetics, shapes, themes and symbols”.3 These philic and maniacal qualifiers point to speculative gothic elements with more subversive and libidinous undertones in Victorian culture. Egyptophilia can then be understood as a substrand of Egyptomania, its erotic dark Other, extending far beyond the “negative connotations”4 ascribed to an “inelegant term” that reflects “craze”5 or “compulsion”.6 The difference rests in the distinction between the enthusiasm and rapture of mania and the distilled deviance that thrives in the shadows of the thrall of vogues. This darker vein of Egyptomania still exists within categories that intoxicate: the Egyptian quest for immortality; belief in Egyptian esotericism that fuelled cults and the fringe, for example, Rosicrucians and visions of Atlantis; and “simple escapism” as a speculative category.7 Part of the categorisation espoused by scholars like Carole Jarsaillion differentiates pseudo-commercial “popular imagination”, “orientalism”, and “didactic” Egyptomania as a model or theoretic lens—a “meeting point” of “fascination” between Egyptomania and Egyptology8 in nineteenth-century Britain. In this chapter Egyptophilia is read through the nexus of gothic cult, cultic, and occult fiction, as well as through popular and literary manifestations of the long nineteenth century. At the height of the vogue, an 1879 Exeter article “London and Paris Gossip”, situates Egyptian gothic taste in relation to other forms of orientalism in popular imagination, using the metonymy of the “curiosity shop” where relics of “all epochs are side by side”: “Greek Apollo; Chinese idol; Mexican god; a Gothic crucifix; [and] Egyptian monsters with dogs’ heads…”.9 Described as a “cabinet of curiosities”, it is a collection with twisted, exotic, and paraphilic appeal in effigy. Egyptian objects were generally seen as curiosities, monstrosities, and oddities, but pertinently became part of more deviant aesthetics of curiosity.10 The hypnotic pervasiveness N. S. Borwein (B) Western University, London, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_14

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of Egyptomania was dispersed through mainstream media and fiction, in burlesque and boudoir theology. Informed by “various deviant cults”,11 the arcane, often hedonistic appeal of the deities Isis and Mut, reminiscent of Caligula and Dionysian death and sex cults, has unlikely fantasy precursors to Egyptophilic cult fiction, as will be explored. In 1912, Salomon Reinach explored the global diaspora of mythic cults and ancient Egyptian religion, tracing “ties with the ancient cults sullied … by their long alhance with paganism”.12 Nineteenth-century Britain saw a more extreme branch of Egyptomania spread through canonical and peripheral writers in mainstream and vogue fringe presses, for instance occultist, mesmerist, spiritualist, erotic, and paranormal periodicals. Realistic gothic horror trusses exoticised ancient practices and nineteenth-century fringe religions, which exist even in its disturbing transferability to Aryan occultism, as in “The Doctrine of the Demon-Lover” (1897),13 race theory, and power politics. The transition of vogues that propel this darker aesthetic of Egyptian gothic taste into fin-de-siècle forms of Victorian Gothic rests in distinctions between gothic cults and cult fiction, borrowing from the sensationalism and popularisation of ancient cultic tropes and images. The methodological lens applied in this chapter is historio-sociological. First background context and aesthetics are proffered, followed by definitions. Deviations in representations of aesthetics in peripheral texts and movements expose libidinous or cultic imagery in its excesses and derivations. This analysis draws on a mixture of fictions, newspaper articles, religious texts and doctrines, and nineteenth-century critical reception. The argument rests on two factors. The first factor relates to reception and critical discourse within gothic texts and associated writing, inspecting canonical authors that engage metatextually with Egyptophilic tropes, ranging from the satire of Horace Walpole to the weird tales of Arthur Machen. The second factor relates to investigating the Egyptophilic subset, constituted between cultic, occult, and cult forms with textual analysis of obscure, popular, or peripheral works like Eliza Lynn Linton’s (1847) Azeth: The Egyptian A Novel, Anthony Trollope’s (1860) “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids”, Frank Frankfort Moore’s (1895) The Secret of the Court (with echoes of Guy Boothby), H. G. Wells’s (1898) “The Stolen Body”, and others.14 Finally, this chapter will focus on Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, known by his pseudonym, Sax Rohmer. The occult romance of Rohmer, laced with elements of erotic horror, romantic Gothic, and ancient cult ritual and practice are equally symptomatic of trends in the fin-desiècle. The transmission of Egyptophilic vogues in Victorian taste propels a gothicised Egyptian Other into these speculative texts. Tenebrous threads meet at the nexus between cult, occult, and cultic forms. Texts analysed in this chapter employ Egyptophilic aesthetics, and self-referentially provide commentary on these vogues through examples of macabre ritual, eroticism, and intertextual reference. In Literature of Egypt and the Soudan [sic] from the Earliest Times to 1885 (1886), Prince Ibrahim Hilmy describes how “Egyptian lore in all its branches has always proved to be a magic attraction to the most celebrated authors of every age”15 ; recycled in “consult[ation of] some occult treatise on the hieroglyphic teachings of the book of the dead, or [becoming] a modern statement of a contemporary question of social economy”.16 The critical landscape of mainstream Egyptomania in this

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era points to esoteric, occult, and religious and social cult, intermingling “lewd” elements with frolicking femme fatales.17 It suggests a complex of aesthetics bound to popular reception, influenced by secondary, underground waves of Egyptophiliia on production of fiction and news. Interest in verboten and mysterious Egyptian practices spread across the globe, to Greece, the Ottoman Empire, Rome, France, the United Kingdom, even embedded in elements of Anglophobia within Irish Egyptomania, and reaching to the twenty-first century through the pagan rites of Kemetism tied to “profane” Egyptology,18 as part of controversial Asiatic-African diaspora theory. On the coattails of manias, waves or vogues of Egyptophilia rippled through Victorian popular culture and imagination. As Stephanie Moser notes, “major ‘triggers” ostensibly elicited “waves” and “episodes of … intense interest” catalysed by significant events.19 Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks describe these as “cultural ripples”20 ; what Bob Brier calls “crests in the waves of Egyptomania”.21 Yet, Description de l’Égypte declared in 1735, “The Nile is as familiar to many people as the Seine”.22 Martin Bernal, notes the mid 1700s were “a high point of Egyptophilia” as a generalised mania.23 Often treated as a gothic “history of taste” that fosters the “dark sublimities” of the Gothic, “exoticist, and Orientalizing”24 waves of Egyptophilia in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century have numerous predecessors, with “enthusiasm-beginning in the fifteenth century and picking up momentum”.25 A “constructed” version of “Egypt through the lens of Greco-Roman culture itself” was fetishised and othered in “modern attempts to revive the symbolism or spirituality of ancient Egypt”, for example, “Masonic, Jacobin, or Rosicrucian practices”, which reconceptualised Egypt in Renaissance and neo-Hermetic terms.26 The Greco-Roman wave championed by the decadence and insanity of Caligula, through the cult of Isis and Osiris, was brought to the GrecoRoman world by the conquest of Egypt, and through the Greek historian Herodotus, the “first to suffer egyptomania”—seen as a “mythical antiquity”.27 In this way, a prurient, gothic sect fed by Egyptomania also spread into Pre-Roman Britain. Dobson and Tonks note turning points in the history of reception that “produced significant cultural ripples”28 —for example, Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign, finding the Rosetta Stone, opening of the Suez Canal, British occupation of Egypt in 1882; later, deciphering hieroglyphic artefacts post-Howard Carter, disinterring Tutankhamun’s tomb—with literary aftershocks that permeate extreme reaches of fringe and constitute its philic rise. In nineteenth-century Britain, branches of Egyptomania surfaced in various forms: (a) in Archaeology, in cemeteries, for example sarcophagi tinctured by Egyptian and gothic revival styles; (b) in architecture, housewares, fashion (even in funerary jewellery); and (c) entertainment, which varied from mummy unwrapping to séances that further indulged transgressive subcultures. These forms cross-fertilised. The famous Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, which housed a “life-size replica of the tomb of Seti II”29 inspired by the celebrity inventor Giovanni Belzoni’s ancient treasures,30 billed uncanny spectacles such as “‘a burlesque’ of spiritualism”31 —with performances by John Maskelyne and George Cooke; Maskelyne was critical of Madame Blavatsky’s outlandish religious doctrines of Theosophy, sects that used the most

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extreme aspects of Egyptian ritual.32 To commemorate the arrival of Belzoni’s artefacts The Examiner showcased a friendly writing competition, which resulted in the publication of Percy Shelley’s Egyptian Gothic poem “Ozymandias”, underscoring the link between Egyptian Gothic tradition and popular Egyptomania. However, cocreations of Egyptology and Egyptomania, paraphilia and gothicisation, Egyptian antiquity and fantasy, spurred Egyptophilic imagery that was commandeered as a vehicle for cultural excess. Representations in the press mirror diverse fictions—serialised stories, popular literature, pulp and cult writing. Its eroticisation and fetishisation spreads from canonical texts like Richard Marsh’s (1897) Beetle33 to more peripheral works like Moore’s (1895) The Secret of the Court, as well as periodicals and magazines from The Telegraph and The Idler to Borderland, and on the far spectrum The Oyster. Aspects of cultic imagery and ritual in these diverse texts encompass mesmerism, nudity, séance, polyamorous intercourses, and amatory reincarnation, in the frenzy of xenoglossia. The excesses of nineteenth-century fringe found resonance in the gothic horror of Aryan occultism, which utilises a form of fanatical Egyptophilia (linked to Blavatsky’s Theosophy), Freemasonry (fed by the Rosicrucians), and the Heretic Order of the Golden Dawn. The lore of this excess is associated with authors like Aleister Crowley, William Butler Yeats, Rohmer, and through apocryphal rumours, Bram Stoker. Elsewhere, Arthur Conan Doyle espouses an interest in popular vogues and the unnatural world—for instance, in his infamous Cottingley fairies and in depictions of the curse of Tutankhamen. Doyle examines the history of gothic Egyptian taste in mesmerism, spiritualism, occultism, and later the evangelism of WWI.34 Indeed, Doyle’s (1921) The Wanderings of a Spiritualist reinforced the nature of gothic monstrosity and strangeness, satire and the necrophilic, and necromancing undertones of medical and spiritual ritual as one form of philic excess: in “Egyptian flavour” with “strange”, “grotesquely” “sacred crocodiles and hawk-headed gods of Egypt”, and monstrous “strange conceptions” that are “mutilated in their minds” and parody Western fears.35 Doyle describes “Rigid Tests of the Occult”,36 where “[t]he medium was stripped before the séance” and placed “inside a cage of mosquito curtain”. The ritual involved xenoglossia (speaking in tongues) and the use of ancient Egyptian paraphernalia: “ancient coins”, “live birds” and turtles, “precious stones” “inscribed Babylonia tablets”, and “one Egyptian scarabeus …”.37 The objectification of the naked mosquito curtain encased body of the medium is in parallel to the death throws of the juvenile shark, “tangled with wet seaweed flopped on the table”.38 This scene of veiled sexuality and subjectivity recalls orgiastic rituals of Mut and Isis depicted in early cult fiction; a genre of papyrus written by high priests who presided over ancient Egyptian private and royal cult rituals, both with common semi-private events and writings, much like Victorian unwrappings or séances. Such differences between public and private space still suggest the nature of gothic spectacle. Philic extremes extend aspects of séance and spiritualism in private or on stage, to occult publications, and erotic scenes in canonical texts. Some examples are H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886/1887) and Ayesha (1905)39 to Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903)40 to the Marsh’s Beetle (1897) that depicts “a child of Isis” with “depraved instincts” that sacrificed influence, a polyamorous scarab, and

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exoskeletal sex.41 Doyle’s “Lot No 249” (1892) depicts the ritual death of Lady Statham, and the strange flora that are needed to perform spells.42 Her nephew is a ritual vessel; and, a precursor to Théophile Gautier’s (1856) work or Lousia May Alcott’s (1869) writing, while Jane Loudon’s “The Mummy!” (1827) is reflective of reanimation fantasies that romanticise and horrify through the transformative body of the mummy.43 Nineteenth-century news, perennially eroticises the unwrapping of female remains: “Drops of pure bitumen of extreme brilliancy and some thickness, were found upon the breast, between the thighs, and upon other parts of the body”.44 Conversely, W. Stigand (1868) describes “The Mummy!” with disdain, even disgust. Far from poetic or romanticised, he creates pejorative associations with Zoroastrian reanimation, and the piece is a rejection of this vein of fringe eroticism.45 Such verboten imagery also has literary origins in the obscenity and pornographic ambiguity of fictionalised renderings in John Benjamin Brook’s The Lustful Turk (1828), in Richard F. Burton’s translation of Arabian Nights (1885),46 and as well as nominally real travel writing in John Murray’s (1858) descriptions of Egyptian slave markets as proof of “wild fanaticism”—what Karl Baedeker (1895) calls forbidden “barbarous custom”,47 and even the metafictive popularity and redress of the Kama Sutra.48 They are symptomatic of the aesthetic ritual of sexuality and the gothicisation of Egyptian identity in the Victorian and the Edwardian eras. Myriad authors engaged in metatextual discourse of Egyptophilic and Egyptomaniac tropes, these range from Walpole and his Hieroglyphic Tales (1785) to Machen and his “The Shining Pyramid” (1895) and Hieroglyphics: a note upon ecstasy in literature (1899), and include, Doyle, Rohmer, Marie Corelli, Gautier, and more. Less well-known authors also engaged in this practice—as will be examined—underscoring (a) the topical relevance of, and response to, darker aspects of Egyptomania; (b) the prevalence of satire and parody; and, (c) elements of sexual ritual and sects in these texts, as derivations of Victorian gothic taste and representations of reception in writing. In Brier’s category of “simple escapism”,49 there is a focus on speculative and the cult gothic category of Egyptomania: with well-known associations to Rosicrucians and Atlanteans, and fringe ideology, where “[f]or Occultists and New Agers” ancient Egypt was an “imagined repository” of mysterious, indecipherable knowledge.50 Other scholars express the saturation Brier describes, as part of the commercial and popular, differentiating between pseudo-commercial (popular imagination); art and architectural aesthetics (as orientalism); and, a didactic inter-relational model,51 Jarsaillon defines as a nexus “between Egyptomania and Egyptology”,52 a point where Egyptophilia, much like Egyptomania is in cultural terms essentially “feeding upon itself”.53 As part of this dynamic dualism, forms of cult in Egyptophilic escapism are often stylised or parodied in gothic contexts. Demarcating cult-like fiction from gothic cults, John Whatley describes “the unstable opposition of cult and culture” within gothic studies, so often retrospectively applied to the analysis of a literary past that is punctuated by “disruptive groups, hidden disclosures, supernatural influences and illegitimate social groupings”.54 The idea of gothic cult is part of cabal and banditry, and new discourses of “cult-like formations” that subsume “archaic structures”.55 Consider the “marked

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slippage between cult and culture … as categories of analysis” in the texts in this chapter, which can cause more prurient Egyptian gothic motifs to “mask themselves as cultures and subcultures”.56 Intoxication with Egyptian cult by Victorian acolytes reduces ancient Egyptian “cults, and cult thinking” to fringe decadence and “can lead to alienating” “violent acts, … in their excesses and overreactions” and like Egyptophilia, “engage in dialectical processes of definition and redefinition”.57 At this nexus, Whatley blurs the distinctions between occult, cult as a sociological entity, and cultic. While on the “Appeal of Cult Fiction”, Kelly Fann and Barry Trott note the importance of distinguishing between ‘cult fiction’, the horror genre’s ‘occult’, and fiction that is focused on ideas of ‘cult’ that stem from a “religious or sociological definition”.58 They ally cult fiction with the concept of “cult classic”, which achieves “rogue literary phenomenon status”.59 Here cult fiction is defined through its action and reception. It “tends to be ground breaking literature, either” in style or subject matter, often with “lurid topics”. It can “include criticism of the establishment” and often incorporates “adventurous travel”.60 Cult status in the canon rests largely on what is “deemed” “explicit or controversial content”.61 Clearly criteria used to define cult fiction draws on occult and sociological cult fiction—in the lurid, in the critique, and subversion of social norms. Slippery distinctions between forms of cult are central to the analysis in this chapter. Take an unusual example of a 1900 year old cult fiction on papyrus: orgiastic rituals written about by Egyptian priests refer to extreme practices of the cults of Isis (the female) and Mut (the hermaphroditic goddess) that took place in both public and private cults of antiquity. These early Egyptian cult fictions critically stem from the idea of “cult” in its “religious or sociological definition”,62 but are complicated by the eschatological and erotic context. Popular and scholarly depiction of this precursor cult fiction proffer a clear representation of the philic, gothicisation of the material. Contemporary analysis in peer review describes an “Egyptian literary genre: ‘cult’ fiction”, containing “controversial or contentious matters pertaining to the divine cult [of Mut]”.63 Richard Jasnow and Mark Smith explore the limits of extreme worship in expressions of “contentious” devotional acts through “Egyptian perspectives” in a demotic (or pre-coptic) text, “a subject only rarely treated in ancient Egyptian sources” as an “unrecognised genre of Egyptian literature” with “problematic aspects of ancient Egyptian religious belief and practice”.64 Jasnow and Smith view these writings as an Egyptophilic genre.65 In the popular press, Owen Jarus summarises, “a priest wrote the blushworthy” fictional “tale” of bacchanalia written “to discuss controversial ritual sex acts with other priests”.66 Slippage between cult and erotic content, highlights aesthetic elements visible in nineteenth-century Egyptophilic texts: like other parallel papyri, the demotic text “may have charted the initiate’s involvement in …more extreme, aspects of” “licentious”, “cultic actions” like “eating to excess, drinking until intoxicated, and ritual acts of sexual intercourse”, which induced “ecstatic vision[s]”.67 As Depauw and Smith note, such figures personify “unlimited power”, “potentially dangerous” and “manifesting”—for example, “in the form of erotic energy”.68 Visible in this assessment of early cultic, and indeed gothic image, is the perceived, and at

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times legitimate, esoteric knowledge of priests, as well as the mysticism of interactions of solar and sidereal deities in the excesses of ritual. Popularised, this genre is part of a contemporary view of erotic, gothic Egyptian “cult” fiction—somewhere between the transgresses of the votive “image”, devotional ancient religious practices, cult behaviour, and fetishism, written from an Egyptian perspective, and perhaps understood and analysed from the Egyptophilic Western stance. The Victorian image of Egyptian Gothic Other is far removed from “the Egyptian self” the “ka, ab, khu, ba, khaib, Sah, Khat” fractured into “ego, heart, glory, soul, shade, spiritual pairing”, and in Victorian culture read through the Book of the Dead and the Bible.69 Describing the gothic Egyptian Other in antiquity, Erich S. Gruen points to “[n]egative images, misrepresentations, and stereotypes”, which permitted ancients to invent the ‘Other’, part of the pervasiveness of its eroticism, exoticism, and fetishism.70 On Victorian fantastic fictions, Maria Freischhack notes, “[t]his Self-image” is “disturbed by” Western characterisations, crossings between the Egyptian Self and the Egyptian Other yet still read as gothic Other in both an Egyptian and Western context, where a strong aspect of “supernatural other lies in erotic fantasies”71 of exotic ancient forces; while Egyptology rose concomitant with “wilder and more fantastic theories about Egyptian magic and secret knowledge”,72 aided by media that helped disseminate “secret orders and substitute religions”.73 Indeed, tomes of iconic secret societies use Egyptomania with Egyptophilic elements. And their doctrines are mirrored in a plethora of Victorian literature and news. Well-known writings include The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), the first English translation of Knoor von Rosenroth’s (1684) Kabbalah Denudata; The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians, a rediscovered 1614 manifesto; various writings on Count Cagliostro’s Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry74 ; Blavatsky’s Theosophy (circa 1875) and Isis Unveiled (1877); Thomas Marryat’s “The Philosophy of Masons in Several Epistles from Egypt, to a Nobleman” or “Esoteric Odyssey” (1790); and The Obelisk and Freemasonry (1880) by Kohn A. Weisse.75 Each tome is known to incorporate aspects of ancient Egyptian rite. Gothic texts are saturated by other Victorian cult writing with equally fetishised rituals, and a penchant for profane discourse in doctrine and indoctrination through the scopophiliac gaze as Egyptophilic voyeurism. Extreme cases in periodical form, which fit within literary scholarship and discourse, suggest three mainstream lenses for exploring Egyptophilic tropes: erotica, the fringe, and popular Victorian vogues. They range from pieces on vampire ‘elementals’ by contentious figures like Franz Hartmann to nineteenth-century erotic journals, and spiritual, mesmerist, occult periodicals. Traces that exist in salacious Victorian magazines like The Pearl, The Oyster, The Boudoir, or The Cremorne imply the ubiquity of gothic aesthetics of ancient orgiastic ritual in the periphery of a diffuse orientalism, as part of the cabinet of curiosities. These volumes use textiles, accoutrements, and décor of Egyptian antiquity, oriental carpets, Turkish divans, and invoke that most ancient of orders, with vital spirits, and last rites connected to exotic matters and certain arcana of the East, where by combining iconography from Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra and Ovid,76 they extend the preternatural instincts of the ancients in voluptuous ecstasy and rapture.77 While Victorian anxieties and fringe

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crazes in Borderland are fortified with mimetic images and themes from the popular gothic canon of the day (such as Stoker), some such themes have ties to extremism. For example, the Aryan occultist, Franz Hartmann was a German Theosopher, and a colleague of Blavatsky, with troubling links to early National Socialism. His article “The Doctrine of the Demon-Lover” (1896) published in Borderland Ill, conflates vampire lore and erotic somnambulism found in Egyptian ritual, borrowed by this religious sect—“Is he a vampire, a double, or an elemental?”.78 The editor of the magazine describes this “weird and obscure subject”: “There is no subject in … occult science more mysterious than” that described in the ancient “treaties of the incubus and the succuba”.79 The editor of Borderland critically positioned Hartmann’s analysis in relation to Daniel Defoe and his Political History of the Devil, where Egyptian antiquity is a source of devilry, demonism, and idolatry.80 But for Hartmann, it is eroticised: “fastening all the phenomena of erotic illusion upon the author of Evil”.81 Interestingly, Hartmann describes “occult wedlock” through gothic duality of the Demon as a double lover, and people “obsessed by a vampire”, as being “sensually inclined” or “given to secret vices”.82 His heavy-handed use of gothic motifs, such as “personification”, and elementals aided by ghosts and “shades of the dead”83 are also linked to reincarnation as cult and occult practice that borrows from early Egyptian religions. Hartmann’s “subject” of “vampirism of the grave” described as draining the vitality from the living to feed the “corpse in the grave”84 relates to a “case explored” within the pages of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877).85 These speculative tropes are associated with necromancy and vampirism, and enmeshed with Egyptian vogues buried in cultic ideology of the day. Fringe journals maintain a powerful, liminal relation to these aesthetics, as in Borderland. Elsewhere, the journal Light features psychical, Occult, and mystical research and is “devoted to the highest interests of humanity, both here and hereafter”; and Zoist is “a journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism”, while, The Sphinx is “a monthly magazine for magicians and illusionists”.86 However, gothic engagement with Egyptophilic tropes is equally, though less overtly, visible in mainstream news, for example, Belgravia, Antheneum, Illustrated London News, The Graphic, or The Idler. In each of these nineteenth-century platforms (fringe, mainstream, and erotic), media spread through a combination of gossip, facts and fictions, related to antiquities, theologies, and cultural paranoias. This triggered authorial and audience fantasies that may have enabled “Victorian reader[s]” to “believe” more readily in strange “supernatural occurrences”.87 Speculative fictions examined in this chapter incorporate aspects of standard cult fiction and pulp, saturated with violent excess, gentile titillation, or sadomasochistic degeneracy that traverse stratified literary spheres and, through critical reception, offer a darker, sub-variant of Egyptophilic themes. In each textual example that follows, expository writing, news pieces, and theological works build a pastiche of cult/ic genre fiction,88 where occultism within horror and Gothic, and sociological and religious cult discourses are all utilised. As will be seen, motifs permeate through “prose style” and “subject matter”.89 And the various “lurid topics” in the texts are also part of reception analysis as “criticism” of established norms and infrastructures.90 These are fictions that depict “explicit or controversial content”,91 while examining sociological and eschatological notions,

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and ideology surrounding sexuality, extravagance, and ritual, which become qualifiers for Egyptophilic vogues, tied to self-referential discourse. This discourse is patently visible in works by Walpole, Linton, Moore, Trollope, and Rohmer. While, alternate threads of this discourse are found in the writing of Wells, Machen, and Reverend Richard Harris Barham—and in the post-Carter era, M. E. Morrough or even Freud. Taken in conjunction with nineteenth-century news media (written to amuse, titillate, affront, or indoctrinate), this analysis suggests such expository and creative writing is axiomatic of the pervasiveness of tropes of Victorian dissipation and extravagance and cultural acquisition, where the Egyptian craze, surpasses a mad enthusiasm akin to witchcraft, one which excited the nineteenth-century British imagination. As a precursor, consider Walpole’s iconic representation of this phenomenon in Hieroglyphic Tales (1785), circulated in Victorian England. Walpole lambasts early Egyptomania, seen in “the present wicked generation”, “so trifling an age”, and his criticism of the popular press and guileless public besieged by “temporary politics, personal satire, and idle romances”.92 He alludes to early Egyptomania through popular media associations to “a new Roman history”, used to “ridicule, detect and expose, all ancient virtue”, then inter these “original papers … in the ruins of Carthage”.93 Walpole’s use of politics, satire, and romance underscores his depiction of the “present wicked generation” that had not yet “learnt to detest the favourite heroes of antiquity”.94 In the tale, “The King and his Three Daughters”, Walpole uses gothic parody to explore ancient Egyptian revival and “The religion of the Quifferiquiminians”—as a satire of ancient religion and reanimation. Quifferiquiminians’ pagan rite is juxtaposed to the papists, high-priests trifling with possession.95 Classic gothic markers are embedded in a dialogue of satirical rite: How! thou impious, atheistical bag of drybones, … . dost thou profane our holy religion? … thou three-legged skeleton—Go and be buried and be damned, … for as thou art dead, thou art past repentance: … a reprobate corpse… 96

Indulging his readers in Egyptian sensationalism, the passage speaks to Walpole’s aesthetic sublimation of the Gothic to what would become Victorian Egyptomania. Unlike the acerbity of Walpole, Eliza Lynn Linton uses Egyptophilic traces in the idle romances of Egyptomania, in line with speculative escapism. The daughter of a Reverend, Linton’s “Dedication” to Realities, by the author of “Azeth the Egyptian” (1851), a title that implies the meeting point of Egyptology and Egyptomania in Victorian realities, expresses the verboten nature of this form of fiction: her book as “a species of literary Caliban”, abhorrent and “a monstrous thing of wickedness and deformity”.97 Linton’s work was perceived to contain “condemned sentiments, style and characters”,98 as the controversy emblematic of cult fiction. Early critics tried to censure her publication by warning her of the “dark pictures of evil consequences” to her reputation.99 Thus, Linton alludes both to the gothic stain or pejorative tied to undercurrents of Egyptophilic imagery and narratives. In Realities, her epigraph is from John Keats (1817) “Sleep and Poetry”. The lines Linton cites are indicative of both a gothic lens, in slumber and reverie, deformity, essence, and cowardice. And self-reflexively questions convention and conformity. Deformity and the darker

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recesses of the mind informs her use of Egyptophilic motifs in Azeth: The Egyptian A Novel. It is critically remote from this aesthetic, yet resonates with romanticised Egyptomania and erotic cultism. The novel is redolent of the excesses of sociological cult, tinctured by mainstream religion and paganism, with gothic depictions. These are clearly paralleling the influx of news about Egypt and Imperial Britain, in the land of “monster-worship”, where “mad enthusiasm” is likened to “witchcraft of thy Britain, round whose white cliffs the mariner fears to sail, dreading the storms and tempests of thy magic spells…”.100 Thus, she implies occult and gothic imagery. Linton describes the scaly monsters that live in the river, sacrificed crocodiles and “deadly berries” that eat into the brain.101 Incorporated into this occult-gothic imagery, Linton laces ancient cult religion usurped by Victorian sects. As part of the ritual order, secrecy is “placed in” and “imposed on”, an old and deformed priest. It is also reflective of gothic deformity described in Linton’s dedication. This avaricious priest sacrifices a Hierophant, a neutral figure, for gold. The narrator questions what is “the dreaded monster of Egyptian superstition” and confronts through metatextual commentary on Egyptomania “the pretender to divine aid with many a tale of artful help!”102 Linton’s eroticisation of ritual is exposed through “Mysterious Powers” of the brotherhood and the mystic ravishes of rituals, in madness and ecstasy. Snakes infect people with madness and induce “a very ecstasy of rapture!”.103 Erotic-horror is shown with an extreme ritual known as “the trial of fire”, where “gloomy walls” are a backdrop to “this new torture”.104 Such imagery is visible in other occult romances as the eroticisation of ritual—for example in Rohmer’s works. With the trial of fire Linton evokes categorical intoxication and fascination, where images are distinctly reminiscent of orgiastic cults of Isis and Mut, and the devotees are intoxicated by a vision of deity.105 It is the embodiment of “an impalpable spirit” with the “power to make” the devotee’s “whole frame thrill with ecstasy” and bewitchment.106 This hallucinatory rite is surfeit with fiery visions of winged serpents, “hot blood”, and alluring maidens that vanish when the devotee flings “himself into” the solid mass of fire, and wakes “lying in a narrow, twilight passage”.107 Gothic imagery in the labyrinthine passages of the catacombs is a standard narrative device in period news papers and texts alike. Erotic and dark Egyptophilic rites surface in the tangential and supposedly pious places. Indeed, Reverend Barham engages with some of these aesthetics in The Ingoldsby Legends (compiled and published in the 1840s), for example, “The Leech of Folkestone” parallels wax images of a Pharaoh, magic, and medieval Christendom: “the practice of creating a wax image of Apepi to trample and pierce was consistently compared with magic in medieval Christendom”.108 This misappropriation of the iconography of passion and blood rite from pagan and ancient Egyptian religious practices was common in the period and fed a history of gothic taste. For instance, in The Methodist Quarterly Review (1858), Rev Clark who wrote Israel in Egypt is described as “smitten with the new disease of Egyptomania, and has brought together the materials for his book, and worked them into shape with the ardour of a lover”,109 a new gothic disease of the revival that helps differentiate the philic from mania. In this aesthetic context, variance in forms of romanticisation and passions is one feature of the transition between cult forms.

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Because of its mainstream content, being yet a bold inversion of convention,110 Frank Frankfort Moore’s The Secret of the Court: A Romance of Life and Death (1895) seems to be a largely forgotten popular fiction piece. It is an excellent example of self-referential discourse, where in the text it is stated “I found that he was not a believer in the practicability of adapting ancient magic to Nineteenth Century life”.111 The book abounds with gothic passages steeped in ritual eroticism; and, didactic relations between reception and production, Egyptomania and Egyptology; occult and cult form, and ancient cults as a sociological and religious history of gothic taste. In this context, consider the work of Frankfort Moore. It is noteworthy that Moore and Stoker were friends and brothers-in-law, both marrying Balcolme sisters. Moore was a prolific popular fiction writer and journalist, as well as “deputy editor of the Belfast Newsletter” before migrating to London to pursue his professional writing career.112 His work included literary contributions to The Book of Beauty alongside the likes of Rudyard Kipling, as advertised in The Athenaeum.113 On friendly terms with Stoker, Moore wrote in October 29, 1899 to “My dear Mr Bram Stoker” thanking him for sending a copy of Dracula.114 Indeed, Moore was aware of popular trends of the period, not just through Stoker, but also through his role as a journalist and editor. Stoker and Moore both wrote ghost stories: Moore’s The Other World (1904), and Stoker’s well-known novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903),115 which doubles as Egyptian Gothic, and as such stands alongside Moore’s The Secret of the Court. Both texts exhibit sub-strains of Egyptophilic gothic fetishism—and not specifically occultism. Indeed, there is an underlying connection to both biblical analysis and necrophilia through the term Egyptophilic and a strong subsidiary narrative of monotheist practices within The Secret of the Court. The title of Moore’s novel implies a dichotomy between The Secrets of the Court, and his subtitle Romance of Life and Death, between the Dark romanticism of the Victorian era (in Shelley, Bronte, and others) and the dark underbelly of Egyptomania in the mysterious court—as this the genesis of its philic impulses pushed to extremes in its cultural and literary aftershocks. The novel abounds with stereotypes of Egyptomania, the Egyptologist, Egyptomanics touring the Nile, with an internal commentary on the fanatical and satirical nature of such vogues. However, it develops into a darker story of cult and necro-eroticism. Light becomes a catalyst of gothic tropes, but also a metaphor of enlightenment and indecipherable arcane pagan knowledge, tapping into magic mysticism and occultism as well as topical Victorian interests. The narrative becomes incrementally dark, exposing a systematic breakdown of rationality, into madness and ritual. The characters, observing the tower of horrifying secrets—the internal audience—are increasingly scared, flee or cease work. Rumours get spread about how a man goes mad. The community starts looking for signs of madness, indicative of a metatextual examination of the lunacy in Egyptophilic elements. Aesthetic tension is married to a progression in Egyptomanical themes—occultism, succubi, and sex ritual, redolent with ancient cult practice that mirrors Janslow and Smith’s (2015) assessment of the orgiastic papyri of the cult of Mut.116

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The text functions as part of a generalised web of reception, when read in conjunction with period newspaper articles that showcase a pervasive, culturally engaged vogue. Indeed, taking into account Moore’s Irish roots, editorship of the Belfast News-letter, and migration to London, where on “England, Egypt, and the Powers” in a 1886 issue of The Belfast News-Letter, it is noted that “[s]eldom do a few months pass without an outbreak of Egyptomania, and its accompanying Anglophobia”.117 This diseased representation of the vogue through Anglophobia speaks to sub-strands of a darker undercurrent. Equally Moore’s fiction, like Max Duncker’s “History of Antiquity” (1880), is suggestive of the didactic model of reception that Humbert postulates, where philias and manias spread with the influx of outside influences and people (the gothic Other), who “seemed to have been seized with a veritable Egyptomania”.118 As gothic metafiction, Moore describes the creatures of the Nile and common motifs of an exoticised Egypt. In Chapter VII, Moore employs an archetypical descent into the catacomb, like Linton and others: in the dense claustrophobic darkness, “like that of a crypt”, a tiny spark appears in the remote distance, along a shallow, secret passage, where a slippery staircase leads to a vast “serpentine gallery”, the repository of a monster, an “extinct creature, the megatherium” inhabiting a court likened to a death chamber, where figures are neither asleep nor dead.119 The passage clearly utilises Egyptian gothic and cult imagery: serpentine visions, an inversion of light and dark, allusions to ritual, mysticism, gothic fear, the Other, and cultural fetishism. Similarly, this imagery is fictionalised in early egyptological texts that were reviewed in the news and represented in gothicised terms. For instance, in The Lancaster Gazette, a review called “Interesting Narrative” retains, within its critique, clear markers of Egyptian Gothic fiction. The discussion of tales of Egypt draws equally on Egyptology and a rich gothic lexicon by describing fragments of mummified crocodiles, bats suspended from the ceiling of the chambers, where the intricacies of the chamber are labyrinthine.120 They note that such images in this period satisfy their curiosity.121 Such narratives and images further link to numerous news pieces on the Book of the Dead.122 Indeed, Moore binds narrative imagery to certain passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and “[t]he secret of the references”,123 connecting a fictional Egyptologist to the discourse, he who had offered up “his life to the record of the mysteries of ancient Egypt”.124 The critique of Egyptomania in Moore is paratext to other journalistic crazes seen in reception and metatext. Like with unwrapping, his portrayal of embalmment customs have fictional origins in the “sham renewal of life that the Egyptian priests practiced”; for Moore, these are “ sham miracles in imitation”, not just mummy-mania, but vogues of reincarnation and spiritualism, and pre-eminently fascination with the Book of the Dead, as seen specifically through English enthusiasts.125 Such craze-like behaviour in the novel is depicted through a “vain enthusiast on the border of lunacy”.126 Moore goes so far as to describe enthusiast news media, where an enthusiast published a magazine article describing their discovery of the priests of Hevoth. They are described as “all infernal swindles”: “ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics! Moabitish stones!”, concerning Semitic religion, and “Sharpira manuscripts!”, which are tenth-century fragments of Exodus 1:1–8:5.127 As overt commentary on ancient religion, Egyptology and Egyptomania in mainstream quickly shifts to hyperbolic and quite deviant sexualisation of such

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vogues in popular culture. In the novel, Moore evokes necrophilic sensuality in his description of bodies moving in darkness and light, connoting solar cults: by night … the bones of the armies … slain … lay white beneath the cold stars of heaven; … the sudden moving among those dry bones—… limbs of the dead … moving together—of the flesh coming upon the bodies and the fleshless skulls—of the breath of life being breathed into them until the silent valley became alive ….128

It is represented as a marvellous resurrection bound to esoteric rituals in the crypt. Increasingly, dark scopophilic impulses of scenes in the novel are juxtaposed by Moore to Anglican ecstasy and light. This is expressly parallel to themes visible in “The archaic Solar-Cult of Egypt” advertised in The Pall Mall Gazette (1878) and Anthenaeum (1879),129 with links to spiritualism and alternative theology. In Moore’s novel, the secret cult practices in an arcane temple filled with strange multitudinous echoes, whispers that beset victims of the cult with an “uncontrollable desire to see the daylight”.130 The victims betwixt ecclesiastic and gothic torment exhibit many forms of extremism—of cult, of fad, of ecstasy and worship, of paganism and formal religion. Moore’s text is pulp fiction of the era. But it also clearly offers a warning about the insidious nature of darker sub-strands of vogue that percolate through the fringes of society after their mainstream appeal is secured, for instance, in the final denouement of the novel, when a cataclysmic explosion destroys the origin of the cult. Indeed, in his critique of the consequences, Moore’s engagement with the popular press is a barometer of reception. Like Moore, Boothby, Walpole, and others, Anthony Trollope intertextually references, and satirises Egyptophilic vogues as a cultural disease and a social issue in the presses and elsewhere, for example in The Warden (1855) and in The Bertrams (1859) through disillusionment with Egyptian Alexandria.131 In Trollope’s writing, engagement with Egyptomania is restrained, and can be seen in terms of larger orientalist and imperial motifs through pieces like Tales of all Countries, in particular “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids” (1860)—a tale regarding Mr Dahmer’s “wife … fretful from the result of her little accident”.132 Trollope’s criticism of the exoticism of the Other is part of his reading of Egyptomania. He describes the intoxication of the inhabitants of “New York or London, how ecstatic” “the interest inspired by … How intense … the delight” how “thrilling the awe” of the forbidden other “world!”133 He plays with the notion of temporal-spatial dislocation, and increased proximity to objects of craze, where the subjects “become strangely dim”, and worn at the edges the nearer they are, the affect being that “the ecstasy and keen delight of the Pyramids had vanished forever”.134 Trollope’s critical analysis of this craze is within narrative, broached through gothic uncanny effects. Such fictionalised incidents, as Trollope’s depiction of a female unattended at the pyramids, mirror alarmist pieces, for example in The Idler decades later, “Lord Charles Beresford in Egypt: An Incident”; or, “‘round about Cairo’ Mr. Peasley Goes Into the Pyramid of Cheops and Lives to Tell About It”.135 From Trollope to The Idler, more mainstream accounts showcase a diverse spectrum along which Egyptian Gothic themes and images permeate media forms in more or less hyperbolic and extreme capacities.

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In examining deviations of aesthetics in texts and movements that are associated, yet variously peripheral, this analysis shifts to the weird fiction and exposition of Machen. His short story, “The Secret of the Pyramid” (1895), and expository piece, Hieroglyphics: a note upon ecstasy in literature (1899/1902) highlight metatextual associations to Egyptophilic vogues. Machen’s weird and speculative approach propels the cult imagery of Egyptophilic tropes into still darker recesses of “literature” as “mysterious ecstasy”, and the rational and the mystical become binaries. In Hieroglyphics (1902), he writes that in the Victorian world “all literature … is simple lunacy, and all the world of the arts must go into the region of mania”.136 Through this gothic decadence, “ecstasy” exists “in the conception of … queer, grotesque characters, reminders … of the strangeness of life”, where “there is ecstasy…”.137 Machen finds the strange vein of ecstatic distortion, which is a part of Egyptophilia, in gothic mania. Motifs in his short story, “The Novel of the Black Seal”, incorporate “corrupt cuneiform” and hieroglyphics that were communicated by “gipsies” of “this wild country”138 —recalling a centuries old practice of interchanging the term Egyptian for the darker magic of the term gypsy, which was disambiguated by the rise of Egyptomania in popular literature.139 However, Machen’s use of “gipsies” recalls this more arcane, occult emphasis. In “The Red Hand”, Machen employs an ancient tablet forged by ardent and intense heat and inscribed with “a series of fantastic figures, spirals and” “mystical whorls”.140 They are indecipherable and speculative.141 Like Machen and Doyle, H. G. Wells’s work intersects with popular sects, fringe practice of the period like Séance, images of body snatching, curses, spiritual Theosophy, and the world of the dead. Egyptology and mania that are reimagined in clinical experimentation in Doyle and fictionalised in Wells bolster an aesthetic commentary on the discourse. While in The Outline of History (1920), Wells examines hieroglyphic and ideographic writing,142 his short story “The Stolen Body” (1898) describes a séance through “psychical research” “near Piccadilly”, contrasting the material world and shadow; “experiments” to answer “questions of thought transference”, testing the validity of astral projection143 —aesthetically informed by Egyptian astral practice in spiritualism and Theosophy. The gothic affect on the human subject is madness, possessed by “vague, unaccountable terror of unknown possibilities” from nightmares, where “voiceless shadows” search a “loophole into life”.144 A more fantastical version of Doyle’s medium is rendered in this semi-eroticised medical spectacle: the act of observing the figure caught between material reality and “that strange world that is the shadow of our world” where “the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed”, writhing, cursing, “learning the lesson of pain”.145 Such writing merges ancient Egyptian precepts with occultism and spiritualism, informing the trajectory of fictionalised séance. Wells arguably offers more aesthetic commentary, than self-referentiality, exemplified by the examination of effects on the medium and spectator. A decade later, Sax Rohmer brings together occult discourse, gothic horror, and cult fiction with the erotic and romanticised raptures of Egyptophilic tropes in submanias. His novel The Brood of the Witch Queen (1918) critiques common Egyptian gothic images of the popular craze: “Sometimes I think we are the victims

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of a common madness” and in “blotting out” the Egyptian sun the afflicted have visions of strange hallucinatory objects hidden by a malignant power in a “secret chamber of the pyramid”146 —which recalls Moore’s popular title. Rohmer alludes to such ancient cults and contemporary manias in “nameless instruments”: papyri, mummies, antique texts, and specifically the preserved remains of cats, snakes, “and ibises, … icons of Isis and Osiris”.147 Rohmer’s discourse is connected to the idea of the cult, both as part of his occult lens and English and American reception to socio-religious cult, where awestruck, “Egypt had nothing of novelty to offer” but “a wave of superstition” as a “territory adjoining that of insanity”—part of a gothic geography.148 Rohmer fortifies this assessment with cult and occult practice through the doctrine of elemental spirits, which was reintroduced by Paracelsus,149 as well as Chapter CVIII of the Book of the Dead,150 where it is written “hereby one knoweth the powers of the West”.151 Disparagement of Western knowledge extends to what Rohmer suggests is Egyptologists creative reinvention of mystical religions. He uses overt cult images in both his exposition and fiction. For instance, in the Brood, he depicts a “Witch-Queen” as the “last high priestess of” a bygone cult, who is wedded to an Egyptian high-priest of the temple of Ra. Like the duality of the mode, he is depicted as presiding over a sinister religion, associated with Black Magic at “the Pyramid of Meydum”.152 In criticism, Rohmer’s The Romance of Sorcery (1913/14) explores an ancient Egyptian source of occultism as a degeneration of magic, where the Zodiac was invented by priests of Osiris and Isis, and, for example,153 informed Zoroastrian and Theosophical ritual, with gothic images of mummies or some material substance of astral embodiments,154 which are reminiscent of Wells and others. Rohmer explicates conventional devices and images, classic cult fiction married to Gothic and the occult, at this intersection through sorcery and Egyptian rites. He defines sorcery as “a legacy from Ancient Egypt”155 that can be seen in the popular press and has foundations again in The Book of the Dead. He connects uncanny gothic properties to “certain relics from the Nile land”,156 to Christian imagery of corruption: for example, succubi, “Lilith rejoices in strangling” babies, or “a garden of horror” in Rome and the ritualised use of ancient Egyptian rites and ideology surrounding reincarnation and votive vessels. Rohmer’s highly sexualised phallic images suggest erotic rite as a shadow “key to the labyrinth” and to reanimation of the dead, and he ties these images to vampirism (succubi and sanguivors)—like in Hartmann’s demon lover.157 Drawing on the philosophy of L’Amoureux in The Magical Ritual, Rohmer connects this to popular Victorian occult manifestos like Paschal Randolph’s (1883) Soul!,158 and connects this with Isis, and “the diseases of the soul”,159 as the disease of Egyptophilia seen in Reverend Clark. Indeed, Rohmer’s discursive use of sex ritual positions the ecstasy of Machen and Moore, in “[s]exual love” that “the Magus regards as a physical manifestation” of “repugnance and pain”, a type of intoxication that catalyses a brilliant orgiastic vision.160 In this contradiction, traces of the Victorian and Edwardian disease are linked to nervous hysterias and maladies by Rohmer. Equally this type of ritual is ascribed to Kabbala spirits,161 Rosicrucian “communication with the dead”,162 Egyptian magic, and esoteric iconographic idioms like Atlantis.163 While, the papyrus connotes religious and sociological cult analysis, it’s

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used as an object of occult discourse: where the Harris Papyrus refers to other magical texts, ancient manuscripts that trace “the origin of sorcery”, traditions preserved by Egyptian priests and the Egyptologist’s supposedly imaginative findings.164 In “Egyptian Magic” (2015), David Gange notes that “the reorientation of British occultism” helped philosophically and geographically “subvert the” constructed image of “Egypt” through “Spiritualists, theosophists, and occultisms”.165 But, like Farr, Rohmer’s “occult agenda” is made “venerable by drawing on Egyptology” through the Harris Papyrus.166 Rohmer filters what is ostensibly gothic myth through darker cultic Egyptian manias, utilising similar nomenclature and tropes— the ongoing development of genre, variations based on whether it is a part of spiritualism, occultism, sociological readings of cults, or cultic gothicism, across sci-fi, detective, and weird fiction. Moore, like Trollope and Walpole, satires Egyptomania, undermining it in relation to popular media and culture. Rohmer validates the darker realities of Egyptomania as occult fact, emphasising his philic use of vogue. Latent and overt sexuality of ritual serves a more fetishistic form in Rohmer, while variously romanticised in Moore and Linton. In conclusion, Egyptophilia is a subset of a broader vogue. It is a catchment for the erotic, cultic, underbelly, the gothic Other of Egyptomania, where its didactic relation constitutes fascination and mania pushed to compulsion and paraphilia. Egyptophilia and Egyptomania can be differentiated through the distinction between enthusiastic rapture that surrounds mania and its victims transcendence into the distilled deviance that thrives in the shadows of the thrall of such vogues. Across the period from 1848 to 1918, many waves of Egyptomania gave rise to various intoxications, curiosities, oddities, and fascinations that over time were twisted into the more monstrous excesses of the vogue, paralleling the extremes of orgiastic rite or cult ritual, the disturbing paratextual associations of the Demon-Lover, or the speculative medicalisation of séance into necrophilia. Subsidiary waves of Egyptophilic writing flourished in the post-Carter, Tutankhamun era, in the 1920s, with renewed acceptability of pulp and mainstream genres. Such writing can be found in its peripheral wake in E. R. Morrough’s The Temple Servant and Other Stories (1930)—as gothic Anglo-Egypt horror and supernatural tales—or Freud’s idiosyncratic text, Moses and Monotheism (1939) as an “Egyptophilic novel” of reconceptualised ancient religions.167 These post-Carter events suggest a differentiation between the long British nineteenth century, and its importance to gothic studies, and the episodic vogues of Egyptophilia, as the extreme aftershocks of mad enthusiasm for Egyptian antiquities, both ritual and rite, in various media, extending beyond the fin-de-siècle. Notes 1.

2.

Zahi Hawass, “Introduction,” in Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, ed. Bob Brier (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013), xvi. Bob Brier, “Egyptomania!,” Archaeology 57, no. 1 (January/February 2004): 16.

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

251

Jean-Marcel Humbert, “Egyptomania: A Current Concept from the Renaissance to Postmodernism,” in Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730– 1930, eds. J.-M. Humbert, M. Pantazzi, C. Ziegler (Paris and Ottawa: Musée du Louvre and National Gallery of Canada, 1994), 22; Carole Jarsaillon, “Modern Egyptomania and Early Egyptology,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts An Interdisciplinary Journal 40, no. 4 (2018): 359. Helen Whitehouse, “Egyptomanias!,” American Journal of Archaeology 101, no. 1 (January 1997): 158. Colleen Manassa, Echoes of Egypt. Conjuring the Land of the Pharaohs (New Haven, CT: Yale, Peabody Museum of Natural History, 2013), 22. Alison H. Moore, “Voyage: Dominique-Vivant Denon and the Transference of Images of Egypt,” Art History 25, no. 4 (September 2002): 531; Stephanie Moser, “Reconstructing Ancient Worlds: Reception Studies, Archaeological Representation and the Interpretation of Ancient Egypt,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22, no. 4 (2015): 1263–1308. Brier, “Egyptomania!,” 19, 22, 16. Jarsaillon, “Modern Egyptomania”, 313–314, 359; Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks, “Introduction: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth Century British Culture,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40, no. 4 (2018): 313. “London and Paris Gossip,” The Exeter Flying Post or, Trewman’s Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser (Exeter, Devon, UK), February 24, 1879. Stephanie Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Elliott Colla. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 48. Theodore Zilkowski, The Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 133. Salomon Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religions, trans. Elizabeth FrostKnappman (London: D. Nutt, 1912), 191. Franz Hartmann, “The Doctrine of the Demon-Lover,” in Borderlands: A Quarterly Review and Index, Volume 3, no. 3, ed. W. T. Stead (London: Mowbray House, July 1896), 353–358. Eliza Lynn Linton, Azeth: The Egyptian A Novel in Three volumes. Vol 1 (London: Thomas Cautlery Newby Publisher, 1847); Anthony Trollope, “A Female Unattended at the Pyramids,” in Tales of All Countries, Issue 78 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1867/1860); Frank Frankfort Moore, The Secret of the Court: A Romance of Life and Death, With Numerous illustrations by G. H. Edwards (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1895); H. G. Wells, “The Stolen Body” (1898) in The Stolen Body. Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, ed. with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin (New York, NY and Toronto, ON, Canada: Random House, 2004), 94–108. Prince Ibrahim Hilmy, Literature of Egypt and the Soudan from the Earliest Times (London: Trübner and co., 1886), iv; Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaoh?: Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from

252

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

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Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 207. Hilmy, Literature of Egypt, iv; Reid, Whose Pharaoh?, 207. Reid, Whose Pharaoh?, 207. Paul Harrison, Profane Egyptologists: The Modern Revival of Ancient Egyptian Religion (London: Routledge, 2018), 3. Moser, “Reconstructing Ancient Worlds”, 1288–1289. Dobson and Tonks, “Introduction”, 312. Bob Brier, “Egyptomania, Surveying the Age-Old Fascination with Ancient Egypt,” KMTA Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt 4, no. 1 (1992), 41; Moser, Reconstructing, 1289. François Charles-Roux, Bonaparte et la Tripolitaine (Paris, France: Sociéte d’éditions géographiques, Maritimes et colonials, 1929), 4. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 3 (London: Vintage, 1991), 170. Whitney Davis, “Review: Egyptomania,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996), 809. Ibid., 809. Ibid., 809–810. Brier, “Egyptomania!”, 16. Dobson and Tonks, “Introduction”, 312. Stanley Mayes, The Great Belzoni: Archaeologist Extraordinary (New York, NY: Walker and Company, 1961), 258. “Egyptian Antiquities,” Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin, Ireland), Wednesday, May 2, 1821. M. A. (Oxon.), “Notes By the Way”, Light II, no. 61 (March 4, 1882), 97. John N. Maskelyne, The Fraud of Modern “Theosophy” Exposed (London: George Routledge ND, 1912). Richard Marsh, The Beetle. A Mystery, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Toronto, ON: Broadview Editions, 2004, c1897). Robert Galbreath, “The History of Modern Occultism: A Bibliographical Survey,” The Journal of Popular Culture 5, no. 3 (Winter 1971), 726–754. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (New York, NY: George H. Doran, 1921), 283. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 283. Ibid., 101–102. H. Rider Haggard, “She: A History of Adventure,” The Graphic Magazine, Vol 34–35 (October 1886 to January 1887); H. Rider Haggard, Ayesha (New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905). Bram Stoker, The Jewel of the Seven Stars (London, UK: William Heinemann, 1903). Marsh, The Beetle, 61, 149. Arthur Conan Doyle, “Lot No. 249,” Harper’s Magazine (September 1892).

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43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

253

Theophile Gautier, The Romance of the Mummy 1856 or The Le Roman de la Momie (Paris: L. Hachette, 1858); Louisa May Alcott, Lost in a Pyramid: Or The Mummy’s Curse (San Antonio: Frank Leslie, 1869); Jane W. Loudon, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), reprinted with abridgement by A. Rauch (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). “Examination of the Mummy,” The Standard, Issue 434 (Tuesday, October 7, 1828), 1. W. Stigand, “The Mummy,” Belgravia 6 (London, UK: Robson and Son, Great Northern Printing Works) (September 1868), 361–366. Colette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity From Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 63–64. John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Egypt (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1858), 155; Karl Baedeker, Egypt: Handbook for Travellers, Part 1 (Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1895), ci. Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity, 187. Brier, “Egyptomania!”, 16. Ibid., 19. Humbert, Pantazzi, and Ziegle, eds., Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art 1730– 1930 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1994), 313–314. Jarsaillon, “Modern Egyptomania”, 359. Humbert, “Egyptomania”, 22. John Whatley, “Introduction: Of cult-like and occult undertaking,” Gothic Studies 4, no. 2 (2003), 9. Ibid., 9. John Whatley, “Introduction: Gothic Cults and Gothic Cultures 1 Modern and Postmodern Gothic”, Gothic Studies 4, no. 2 (2003), 92. Ibid., 92. Kelly Fann and Barry Trott, “Tapping the Appeal of Cult Fiction,” Reference & User Services Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2011), 16–32, 15. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. Richard Jasnow and Mark Smith, “‘As for Those Who have Called me Evil, Mut Will Call them Evil’: Orgiastic Cultic Behaviour and Its Critics in Ancient Egypt,” Enchoria, 32 (2010/2011), 9. Jasnow and Smith, “As for Those”, 9; Mark Depauw and Mark Smith, “Visions of Ecstasy: Cultic Revelry before the goddess Ai/ Nehemanit,” in Res severa verum gaudium. Festschrift fur Karl-Theodor Zauzich zum 65 Geburtstag am 8. Juni 2004, eds. F. Hoffmann and H. J. Thissen (Stud. Dem. VI, Leuven et al., 2004), 67–93. Jasnow and Smith, “As for Those”, 9.

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Owen Jarus, “‘Cult Fiction’ Traced to Ancient Egypt Priest,” LiveScience (September 24, 2012). Accessed August 4, 2019, https://www.livescience. com/23401-cult-fiction-ancient-egypt-priest.html. Jasnow and Smith, As for Those, 36, 37, 84–85. Depauw and Smith, “Visions of Ecstasy”, 36. David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 213. Erich S. Gruen, “Introduction,” in Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2. Freischhack, The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Fantastic Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015), 32, 68–69. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 75. Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbalah Unveiled, trans. S. L. Macgregor Mathers (London, George Redway, 1887); Henry R. Evans, Cagliostro and His Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry (Washington, DC: Holmes Publishing Group Lic., 1919). Helena P. Blavatsky. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. 2 vols. (Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1972); Thomas Marryat, The Philosophy of Masons. In Several Epistles from Egypt, to a Nobleman (London: J. Ridgway, 1790); John Adam Weisse, The Obelisk and Freemasonry According to the Discoveries of Belzoni and Commander Gorringe: Also, Egyptian Symbols Compared with Those Discovered in American Mounds (New York: J.W. Bouton, 1880). The Oyster: A Novel from the Victorian Classic Underground Magazine: Printed and Published for the Uninhibited Members of Voluptuous Society (Sevenoaks, Kent: New English Library, 1985). The Pearl: A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading. Vol. 1–18 (London, July 1879 to December 1881). Hartman, “Demon”, 353. W. T. Stead, Introduction to “The Doctrine of the Demon-Lover” by Franz Hartmann, Borderlands: A Quarterly Review and Index III, Issue 3, edited by W. T. Stead (London: Mowbray House, July 1896), 353. Daniel Defoe, Political History of the Devil (London: Joseph Fisher, 1739). Stead, Introduction, 353. Hartmann, “Demon”, 353–358. Ibid., 355–356. Ibid., 358. Ibid., 357. Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research, Volume 2 January to December 1882 (London: Eclectic Publishing Company, Ltd., 1882); Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare Vol. XI March, 1853 to January, 1854 (London:

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

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80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

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87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

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Hippolyte Bailliere, 1854); The Sphinx: A Monthly Magazine for Magicians and Illusionists (Chicago: William J. Hilliar, March 1902). Fleischhack, Narrating, 33. Fann and Trott, “Tapping”, 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. Horace Walpole, “Preface,” in Hieroglyphic Tales (San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1993 c 1775), 3, 11. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Walpole, “The King and His Three Daughters,” in Hieroglyphic Tales (San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1993), 31. Ibid., 32. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Dedication: To Walter Savage Landor” in Realities, by the author of “Azeth the Egyptian” (London: Saunders and Otley, March 1851), iv. Ibid., v. Ibid., iv. Linton, Azeth the Egyptian, 179. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 58. Gange, Dialogues, 213. Christian Union, “Israel in Egypt,” The Methodist Quarterly Review LVI Fourth Series Volume XXVI (New York, NY: Nelson & Phillips; Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1874), 723. Jas. Stanley Little, “Review”, The Academy, no. 1197 (April 13, 1895), 312. Moore, Secret, 253. Patrick Maume, In Belfast by the Sea (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 204. “Messrs. Hutchinson & Co.’s New Books”, The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama, January to June 1897, no. 3611, January 9, 1897 (London: John C. Francis, 1897), 37. Letter from Frank Frankfurt Moore to Bram Stoker, University of Leeds Letter Database, University of Leeds, October 29, 1899. Frank Frankfort Moore, The Other World (London: E. Nash, 1904). Janslow and Smith, As for Those. “England, Egypt, and the Powers,” The Belfast News-Letter, Issue 22253 (Belfast, Ireland), Thursday, October 21, 1886.

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118. Dunker’s “History of Antiquity,” The Pall Mall Gazette, Issue 4662 (London, UK), Saturday, January 31, 1880. 119. Moore, Secret, 64, 67, 68, 69, 75, 76. 120. Bob Newton, “Interesting Narratives,” The Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, for Lancashire, Westmorland, &, c. Issue 811, ed. William Minshull (Lancaster, UK), Saturday, December 28, 1816. 121. Ibid. 122. “England or Egypt,” Northern Echo, Issue 4466 (Darlington, UK), Tuesday, June 10, 1884. 123. Moore, Secret, 76. 124. Ibid., 76. 125. Ibid., 100, 103. 126. Ibid., 106. 127. Ibid., 103, 116. 128. Ibid., 88–89. 129. “The archaic Solar-Cult of Egypt,” in The Athenaeum no. 2671 (London: E. J. Francis & Co., January 4, 1879), 3. 130. Ibid., 78, 89, 79. 131. Anthony Trollope, The Warden (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855); Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1859). 132. Trollope, “A Female”, 150. 133. Ibid., 149. 134. Ibid., 150. 135. Frank Scudamore, “Lord Charles Beresford in Egypt: An Incident,” The Idler 35 (1909): 428–431; George Ade, “‘round about Cairo’ Mr. Peasley Goes Into the Pyramid of Cheops and Lives to Tell About It,” The Idler 30, no. 54 (March 1907): 674–680. 136. Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics (The Floating Press, 2014), 99. 137. Machen, Hieroglyphics, 42. 138. Arthur Machen, The Novel of the Black Seal and other stories (London: Corgi Books, 1965),10, 44. 139. Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 171. 140. Machen, “The Red Hand,” in T he Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, ed. Aaron Worth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 208. 141. Aaron Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012), 215–227, 223. 142. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1921, c1920). 143. Wells, “The Stolen Body”, 94. 144. Ibid., 104. 145. Ibid., 108. 146. Sax Rohmer, The Brood of the Witch Queen (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924 c 1818), 252–255.

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147. Ibid., 39. 148. Ibid., 128. 149. Lewis Spence, An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1920), 342. 150. Rohmer, Brood, 252. 151. Le Page Renouf, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, trans. and commentary by the late Sir P. Le Page Renouf, Knt., completed by Prof. Edouard Naville (London: Private printing for the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1904). 152. Rohmer, Brood, 254. 153. Sax Rohmer, The Romance of Sorcery (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924, c1913), 140. 154. Ibid., 13. 155. Ibid., 13. 156. Ibid., 13. 157. Ibid., 35, 6, 23, 14. 158. Paschal Beverly Randolph, Soul! The Soul World—The Homes of the Dead (Toledo, OH: Randolph Publishing Co., 1883). 159. Rohmer, Romance, 35. 160. Ibid., 34. 161. Ibid., 43, 49, 114, 35, 50. 162. Ibid., 154. 163. Ibid., 51, 230. 164. Ibid., 11–12. 165. Gange, Dialogues, 262–264. 166. Rohmer, Romance, 263. 167. John Docker, “In praise of polytheism,” Semeia 88, 2001, 149–172; E. R. Morrough, The Temple Servant and Other Stories (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930); Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katerine Jones (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939).

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Moore, Frank Frankfort. The Other World. London: E. Nash, 1904. ———. The Secret of the Court: A Romance of Life and Death. With Numerous illustrations by G. H. Edwards. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1895. Morrough, E. R. The Temple Servant and Other Stories. London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930. Moser, Stephanie. “Reconstructing Ancient Worlds: Reception Studies, Archaeological Representation and the Interpretation of Ancient Egypt.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22, no. 4 (2015): 1263–1308. ———. Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Murray, John. A handbook for travellers in Egypt. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1858. Newton, Bob. “Interesting Narratives.” The Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, for Lancashire, Westmorland, & c. Issue 811 (Lancaster, UK), Saturday, December 28, 1816. Randolph, Paschal Beverly. Soul! The Soul World—The homes of the Dead. Toledo, OH: Randolph Publishing Co, 1883. Reid, Donald Malcolm. Whose Pharaoh?: Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Reinach, Salomon. Cults, Myths and Religions. Translated by Elizabeth Frost-Knappman. London: D. Nutt, 1912. Renouf, Le Page. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Translation and commentary, By the late Sir p. Le Page Renouf, Knt. Completed by Prof. Edouard Naville. London: Private printing for the Society of Biblical Archaeology,1904. Rohmer, Sax. The Brood of the Witch Queen. Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1924 c1818. ———. The Romance of Sorcery. New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924, c1913. Rosenroth, Knorr von. Kabbala Denudata: Kabbalah Unveiled. Translated by SL Macgregor Mathers. London: George Redway, 1887. Scudamore, Frank. “Lord Charles Beresford in Egypt: An Incident.” The Idler 35 (1909): 428–431. Spence, Lewis. An Encyclopaedia of Occultism. London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1920. Stead, W. T. Introduction to “The Doctrine of the Demon-Lover: Is He a Vampire, a Double, or an Elemental? by Franz Hartmann.” In Borderlands: A Quarterly Review and Index 3, no. 3, edited by W. T. Stead, 353. London: Mowbray House, July 1896. Stigand, W. “The Mummy.” Belgravia 6 (September 1868): 361–366. Stoker, Bram. The Jewel of the Seven Stars. London, UK: William Heinemann, 1903. The Oyster: A Novel from the Victorian Classic Underground Magazine: Printed and Published for the Uninhibited Members of Voluptuous Society. Sevenoaks, Kent: New English Library, 1985. The Pearl: A Magazine of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading. Vol. 1–18. Oxford: OUP, July 1879 to December 1881. The Sphinx: A Monthly Magazine for Magicians and Illusionists. Chicago: William J. Hilliar, March 1902. Trollope, Anthony. The Bertrams. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1859. ———. “A Female Unattended at the Pyramids.” In Tales of All Countries Issue 78, 140–166. London: Chapman and Hall, 1867. ———. The Warden. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855. Walpole, Horace. Hieroglyphic Tales. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1993, c1785. Weisse, John Adam. The Obelisk and Freemasonry According to the Discoveries of Belzoni and Commander Gorringe: Also, Egyptian Symbols Compared with Those Discovered in American Mounds. New York: J.W. Bouton, 1880. Wells, H. G.. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Macmillan and Co., 1921, c1920. ———. “The Stolen Body.” In Selected Stories of H. G. Wells, edited with an introduction by Ursula K Le Guin, 94–108. New York, NY and Toronto, ON, Canada: Random House, 2004. Whatley, John. “Introduction: Of Cult-Like and Occult Undertaking.” Gothic Studies 4, no. 2 (2003): 1–10.

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———.“Introduction: Gothic Cults and Gothic Cultures 1 Modern and Postmodern Gothic.” Gothic Studies 4, no. 2 (2003): 91–98. Whitehouse, Helen. “Egyptomanias!.” American Journal of Archaeology 101, no. 1 (Jan. 1997), 158. Worth, Aaron. “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History.” Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012): 215–227. Zilkowski, Theodore. The Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013. Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare, Vol. XI, March,1853 to January,1854. London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1854.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Ireland Jarlath Killeen

The place of Ireland in a consideration of the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu remains an issue of serious scholarly debate and disagreement. While Le Fanu spent much of his early career writing fiction set in and about Ireland, including most of the stories posthumously collected as The Purcell Papers (1880), which were situated mainly in and around Limerick where he spent much of his early life, his best-known and most highly regarded work, particularly Uncle Silas (1864), and Carmilla (1871–1872), is set elsewhere, in Derbyshire and Styria, neither particularly renowned as centres of Irish culture. For most of the twentieth century, Irish literary histories treated Le Fanu as a minor figure whose most important work was not about the country in which he lived.1 However, and particularly after the impact of postcolonial theory and criticism began to be felt in the discipline of Irish Studies, however, fiction written by Irish writers which didn’t even mention Ireland began to be probed for what we might call its ‘postcolonial unconscious’, where Ireland could potentially be discovered.2 This approach was given theoretical weight by Frederic Jameson’s controversial essay on ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986), which argued that all literature produced in colonized countries is best understood as national allegory.3 Jameson’s intervention provided a high theoretical imprimatur for readings of literature apparently unconcerned with national, colonial or imperial issues as being in some way or another ‘about’ or at least implicated in these very matters. Jameson’s focus on allegory, for example, where one narrative operates as a coded commentary on another, proved to be immensely attractive to Irish Studies scholars dealing with Irish gothic literature.4 Given that Le Fanu is widely considered one of the most important and successful Irish gothic writers, it is unsurprising that postcolonial critics turned to his best work to produce a series of studies arguing that, for example, while a story like Carmilla may be set in Eastern Europe and lack even one Irish character, this does not stop J. Killeen (B) School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_15

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it being, in some important ways, ‘about’ Ireland.5 Elizabeth Bowen had already, in 1947, in an Introduction to Uncle Silas, described it as ‘an Irish story transposed to an English setting’.6 Her conclusion proved remarkably insightful, since we now know that the Derbyshire-set novel actually grew out of an earlier short story, ‘A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ (1839), which was based in Cork and Galway. As is now well-known, after the appearance of The House by the Churchyard (1863), a historical novel set in eighteenth-century Chapelizod, the publisher Richard Bentley negotiated a contract for Le Fanu which stipulated that the author’s next novel must be ‘the story of an English subject and in modern times’.7 ‘Irish novels’ were clearly out of fashion, and Le Fanu’s later fiction often required the reworking of short stories originally set in Ireland for their reappearance as ‘English novels’. Other examples of this transformation of Irish into English fiction are the reworking of ‘A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family’ (1839), into The Wyvern Mystery (1869), and ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of Richard Marston, of Dunoran’ (1848) into A Lost Name (1868).8 Ireland, then, is quite often buried beneath layers of revision and rewriting in some of Le Fanu’s work, and a thorough application of genetic criticism to his oeuvre may help reveal even more instances of such reworking and repurposing. Whether this sharpened awareness of how Le Fanu worked tells us that even when Ireland is not the actual setting for a text it remains controversial to claim that the buried, original Irish setting suggests that Ireland is also the subject of a particular text—partly because the methodologies of postcolonial critics remain controversial themselves. Prominent critics including Roy Foster, William Hughes, Richard Haslam, James H. Murphy have cautioned against a tendency to reclaim as ‘Irish’ texts which are not actually about Ireland through the critical act of postcolonial decoding.9 Recent studies Irish gothic literature in particular have explored this controversy in some detail, as Irish Gothic is the most prominent body of fiction by Irish writers to have been subject to allegorizing re-readings.10 Rather than uncovering an Irish original, or revealing an Irish ‘subtext’ in Le Fanu’s work, in this chapter I want to examine ways in which Ireland might be considered a ‘field of force’ out of which his fiction emerges, and, particularly, that events in Ireland shaped the theological system that can be detected in much of his work. I will examine two of Le Fanu’s most admired stories, one set firmly in Ireland, ‘The Watcher’ (1847), and one set in England, ‘Green Tea’ (1872), to suggest ways in which the former establishes a cosmic perspective deeply influenced by the author’s experiences of 1840s Ireland, a perspective which remained in place when he came to write his later gothic masterpiece. My argument here is that while it is not absolutely necessary to include Ireland in a critical reading of a Le Fanu text simply because the author happened to be Irish and lived there all his life, a reading sensitive to the national political and social discourses which impinged on this fiction can help to illuminate otherwise quite opaque aspects of his work. However, the critic sensitive to Irish aspects of these texts should also realise that the fiction expands well beyond Ireland and Irish affairs. Ireland is not a limiting factor in the analysis, but awareness of its historical particularities can help to illuminate the usually cosmic perspective of the narratives.

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As the anonymous ‘Bachelor’ narrator of ‘The Watcher’, concludes his first ghostly ‘reminiscence’ in November 1847, he insists that the meaning of his tale is not just beyond his own grasp, but that readers must actually await the end of days before the truth is revealed: ‘Until the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden these transactions must remain shrouded in their original impenetrable obscurity’ (50).11 The story he has just told concerns the fate of Sir James Barton, a former captain in the British navy who, having retired to Dublin ‘somewhere about the year 1894’ (6), is slowly persecuted to his death by a mysterious and possibly (probably?) supernatural stalker. Barton believes that the ‘Watcher’, a name appended to letters sent by his tormentor, closely resembles a dramatically shrunken Sylvester Yelland, a former foremast-man in his ship, the Dolphin. Yelland had been severely punished by Barton for his mistreatment of his daughter, with whom Barton had been illicitly involved, and later died of his injuries, only to apparently return years later to seek post-mortem revenge. By the end of the story, much remains unclear, including whether the Watcher is a supernatural agent or, as another character suspects, really ‘a substantial form of flesh and blood, animated by a spiteful and obstinate resolution’ (35). Perhaps most pressing, however, are questions related to the moral system in which the Watcher appears to operate: is Barton’s extreme suffering ‘deserved’ because of his role in Yelland’s death, and if so what of Yelland’s own moral responsibility for the death of his daughter? Does Barton’s suffering expiate his moral guilt and if so does this mean he is guaranteed salvation? Rather than attempt to provide any convincing interpretation of the events he has just described, the Bachelor eschews explanation, and instead widens his frame of reference to an extraordinary degree. He connects the uncovering of the meaning of Barton’s suffering with a time in the future when the very mysteries of existence itself will be solved, and when ‘the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden’. In these resonant phrases, the narrator suggests a kind of eschatological exposure is necessary to penetrate the true meaning of the story, implicating the life of a captain of the British navy in 1790s Dublin in a proper understanding of ultimate reality, when God will reveal the workings of the moral system in which we all live. The Bachelor’s phrasing resonates with two particularly apposite New Testament passages. In the first place there is an echo of a passage to which Le Fanu seems to have been particularly drawn. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul explains that while ‘now we see through a glass, darkly’, in a future state we will see ‘face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ (Corinthians 13:12).12 Secondly, in the Gospel of Mark, having just told the parable of the sower and the seeds, Jesus informs his disciples that at some point in the future, ‘there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret, but that it should come abroad’ (Mark 4: 22). The Bachelor’s rhetorical endorsement of the New Testament promise of the future disclosure of secrets suggests that ‘The Watcher’ itself can be read as a kind of parable that requires careful deciphering. Jesus’s disciples were notoriously confused by his parabolic pedagogy and having heard the parable of the sower requested an explanation as to why parables were being used as teaching tools. Jesus’s response was sharp:

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Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. (Mark 4: 11–12)

Only those chosen by God can understand these parables; the rest must be left in the outer darkness, their continued ignorance a salvific prophylactic guaranteeing their ultimate reprobation. Le Fanu’s echoing of these New Testament passages, with their emphasis on light and darkness, salvation and reprobation, helps contextualise ‘The Watcher’ in the Calvinist-inflected theology which has been identified by scholars as central to understanding his work.13 As Richard Haslam has argued, Le Fanu’s Huguenot family context may be important in understanding his depiction of human guilt and divine punishment, and the presence of what he terms an ‘aestheticised Calvinism’ in Le Fanu’s ghost stories.14 Interestingly, John Calvin’s commentary on Jesus’s explanation for keeping the meaning of his parables ‘hidden’ from the crowd emphasises that ‘With respect to the Gospel…it is hidden to none but to the reprobate, and to those who are devoted to destruction, whose minds Satan hath blinded… the Lord conceals its mysteries, so that the perception of them may not reach the reprobate’.15 In this eschatological context, the Bachelor’s comments about narrative impenetrability are revelatory in a basic sense, indicating the narratives’ implication in the working out of a divine system in which interpretive capability and salvation are interdependent. ‘The Watcher’ is one of the first of Le Fanu’s great ghost stories, and eventually took its place in a revised version as ‘The Familiar’ in his most famous collection, In a Glass Darkly, in 1872. The title of this collection reinforces the importance for an understanding of the story of Paul’s gesture in his letter to the Corinthians to a future in which everything that is now obscure will be rendered transparent. The Biblical reference is also a strong indication to the reader that the tales collected are not intended simply as spookily entertaining Christmas fare to be repeated around the fireplace, but theological interventions or meditations whose obscure meanings have implications as potentially serious as a Christian parable—even if they cannot understand what they are. The parables of Jesus have, of course, generated centuries of commentary, debate and disagreement, as the son of a clergyman well knew, and while Le Fanu’s elusive stories have not yet attracted an analogous library of criticism, disagreement about their meaning has been a feature of commentary from the start. ‘Impenetrable obscurity’ is a phrase that could easily be applied to the reasons behind the torment endured by the victim of haunting in that most highly regarded (and most interpretively frustrating) of Le Fanu’s ghost stories, which the author placed directly before ‘The Familiar’ in the late collection. In ‘Green Tea’, the mildmannered Reverend Jennings is tormented by a spectral monkey who stalks, badgers and bedevils his victim for no apparent reason until he buckles under the pressure and commits suicide.16 While real world Victorian ghosts were notoriously ‘purposeless’, communicating vacuous ‘messages’ through interminable tapping and furniture moving,17 literary ghosts of this period tended to be menaces with a mission, trying to right wrongs, alert interlocutors to improper burial rights or unsolved murders,

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and resolve family disputes. Prominent ghosts of the Victorian world, such as Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), have things to do and clear reasons to appear, including spiritual information to pass on, and their hauntings, which often initially appear bewildering, are not arbitrary or obscure. ‘Why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?’, Mr. Scrooge reasonably asks his former partner,18 and far from keeping things concealed until the ‘secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden’, Marley simply explains to Scrooge what he is about (and helpfully tells him why there are ghosts at all). Marley’s ghost has theological as well as psychological transformation in mind: he comes to save Scrooge’s soul from an afterlife of purgatorial misery, and he sets the whole scheme out to his friend, and does not communicate in the cryptic style of ‘The Watcher’, who sends tantalisingly elusive letters to his victim, but never even reveals his name, or what reason he has to make Barton suffer. Likewise, Jennings’s monkey never seems to shut up, but fails to inform his victim of what exactly he is being punished for, or what he needs to do to atone for his supposed sins. Le Fanu is famous for leaving his readers, as well as his characters, in a state of befuddlement as to the ‘correct’ explanation for the mysterious spectres who populate his stories—and in some confusion as to whether these spectres are actually spectres at all, and not just projections of a guilty conscience and evidence that the protagonist is suffering a psychological breakdown. There is an intense critical disagreement as to whether these are stories more about psychiatry than theology. In both ‘The Watcher’ and ‘Green Tea’ the protagonists appeal to practitioners of both disciplines for help, and come away profoundly disappointed. Jennings first attends the ‘mere materialist’ (17), the eminent Dr. Harley, who fails to find a cure, before turning to Dr. Martin Hesselius, who has a reputation for taking metaphysics as seriously as he takes medicine. Ironically, Hesselius expresses a certainty that the cause of Jennings’s problem can be found in his body and not his soul: ‘I told him that he must regard his illness strictly as one dependent on physical, though subtle physical, causes’ (33). Jennings is just following in the pattern set by Captain Barton. The Captain first consults with Dr. R—, and questions him closely about whether Continental doctors could so bungle one of their cases as to declare a man dead who was actually still living. The doctor’s responses confirm to Barton that he is dealing with something beyond the natural world since he insists that death by lockjaw cannot be mistaken. Having closed off the natural explanation, Barton consults the Trinity College-based ecclesiastic Dr.—, whose scholarly study of theology appears to have left him with no appetite for a genuine confrontation with the supernatural. Sitting in his study surrounded by ‘works upon his favourite pursuit’ (24), the divine seems so disturbed by what Barton tells him, and then by a mysterious supernatural voice in the wind, that he insists that Barton is his ‘own tormentor’ (29), thus anticipating the psychoanalytically informed responses of critics a hundred years later, who read ghosts as projections of a disturbed mind, with nothing at all to say about ultimate reality.19 In terms of critical history, of course, it is Jennings’s case that has attracted most attention, and Le Fanu scholars and ghost story enthusiasts have long pondered the possible reasons for the poor man’s anguish, and whether the cursing monkey is

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an otherworldly visitor, or an hallucination of a man under too much mental strain. Indeed, so much attention has been paid to this one instance of haunting that, while the ingenious Dr. Hesselius can only come up with a couple of potential explanations, scholars have posited about thirty (and counting), ranging from the Victorian crisis of faith, to colonial guilt, to repressed homoerotic desire.20 So ingenious have been the explanations provided, that others have complained that even in searching for explanation critics have missed the point of the tale, which is to leave us all in the interpretive dark.21 Avoiding an attempt to explain these stories is attractive, in part because it absolves the reader of the interpretive burden, but it bypasses the religious discourses referenced throughout both texts. For example, the Bachelor’s discussion of the apparent obscurity of Barton’s final few months ends with this observation: But however the truth may be, as to the origin and motives of this mysterious persecution, there can be no doubt that, with respect to the agencies by which it was accomplished, absolute and impenetrable mystery is like to prevail until the day of doom. (51)

In these concluding comments, the Bachelor directs the reader towards theological rather than medical avenues of investigation. The Day of Doom was an enormously popular, grimly deterministic, 224-stanza poem about death, judgement, heaven and hell, by the New England Puritan Michael Wigglesworth, first published in 1662, and which became a widely anthologised poem for children in the eighteenth century. The poem dwells on the general depravity of humankind, and concludes with a warning to readers that they hang over the mouth of hell: But if, O man, thou liv’st a Christless creature, And Death surprize thee in a state of nature, (As who can tell but that may be thy case) How wilt thou stand before the Judge’s face? When he shall be revcal’d in flaming fire, And come to pay ungodly men their hire: To execute due vengeance upon those That knew him not, or that have been his foes? What wilt thou answer unto his demands, When he requires a reason at thy hands Of all the things that thou has said, or done, Or left undone, or set thine heart upon?22 Le Fanu’s reference to Wigglesworth’s text, a reference which it is likely his readers would have easily noticed, having been familiar with The Day of Doom since they were children, strongly suggests that Barton’s intense suffering is indeed explicable given the right interpretive context. Interpretive obscurity has, perhaps, been rather overdone. Indeed, medical explanations of the persecutions of Barton and Jennings are undermined by Biblical and theological references to election and reprobation throughout. However, for the most part, where critics have considered religious explanations, radical doubt rather than traditional faith has most often been referenced. For example, Michael Begnal argues

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that Jennings has essentially lost his Christian faith because of his studies of comparative religion, and suffers the consequences from the mental stress such doubt causes, and therefore imagines he is being persecuted by a monkey who ‘appears from within…rather than from without’.23 In some of the best scholarly work on Le Fanu, the kind of doubt Bengal believes infects Jennings is often posited of the author himself. Le Fanu scholars have strongly argued that his work speaks what Victor Sage has called the author’s ‘rhetoric of darkness’.24 According to James Walton, Le Fanu’s interest in the more occult versions of Western knowledge (particularly Swedenborgism), was propelled by an epistemological and theological ‘vacancy’ negating Anglican orthodoxy.25 While preeminent Le Fanu biographer W. J. McCormack pointed to what he termed the ‘formal nihilism’ in evidence in his work,26 Walton takes this claim much further, highlighting what he considers evidence for disbelief lurking in the textual ambiguities and hermeneutical trickeries of Le Fanu’s oeuvre. As Walton explains, for Le Fanu, ‘perception…is illusion and intelligible form a fiction’.27 Indeed, Le Fanu’s 1866 All in the Dark might serve as a description of his writing and his view of the world in general, echoed by the ‘Glass Darkly’ in which his ghost story collection leaves the reader, trapped in a world of perpetual ambiguity or agnostic undecidability. These scholars provide a theological context which supports an argument that readers are not meant to figure out causes, reasons, or provide explanations. Living in a time of increasing religious doubt, Le Fanu in his own life was unable to come to any firm conclusions about ultimate reality, and this inability was channelled into the obscurity of his stories which can’t make their minds up between natural and supernatural ‘causes’. Le Fanu’s stories have been hailed as exemplars of Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘fantastic’. For Todorov, the reader of the fantastic is caught in a kind of nervous hesitation between the uncanny and the marvellous. The fantastic text begins in a recognizable reality, brings the characters through a period of radical uncertainty, and out the other side to a different but still secure reality.28 Le Fanu’s stories, however, refuse to decide between the different explanations for the events of the plot, and leave the reader (and the interpreter) in perpetual uncertainty. Religious doubt as expressed through a kind of radical obscurity fits in well with now conventional treatments of the Victorian period itself as one in which traditional religious believers experienced a ‘crisis of faith’, a crisis often represented as brought on by the scientific discoveries of Charles Darwin and the ‘clash’ of religion and science from the 1830s onwards, and which led to the rise of agnosticism and atheism.29 Much work on the Victorians in the twentieth century was carried out when the ‘secularisation thesis’ still reigned supreme in the social sciences, and the implications of this thesis were rather too easily accepted in studies of the literature of the nineteenth century. Such work tended to focus more attention on ‘honest doubt’ rather than sincere faith, agnosticism rather than reflective belief, and outright atheism rather than religious fundamentalism, and frankly didn’t pay enough attention to religious continuities, or to personal and denominational adaptation to contemporary ideas rather than abandonment of faith. In recent decades, things have, however, changed in Victorian Studies. In particular, there have been enormous shifts in our understanding of the religious history of the period. Misrepresentations of

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the Victorian period are being brilliantly addressed by the work of scholars like James C. Livingston, Timothy Larsen, Boyd Hilton, Melissa Schramm and Giles St Aubyn, who draw attention to neglected areas of religious innovation, transformation, and indeed, even renewed traditionalism.30 God’s death was, it turns out, greatly exaggerated, because his obituarists paid too much attention to an unrepresentative coterie, and not enough to those who resisted the attacks on religious traditions, or who found new and interesting ways of remaining believers during the crisis of faith, which may better be termed a ‘crisis of meaning’. The full implications of these transformations of Victorian history have been slowly making their mark on Gothic and ghost story scholarship. The dominant reading of ghost stories has been materialist or psychoanalytical.31 However, thinking theologically about ghosts and ghost stories makes sense. After all, the ghost does not speak only of the forces or discourses of materialist modernity that were decentring Victorians from confident at-homeness-in-the-universe, but usually speaks another, and rather more disconcerting language entirely. If nineteenth-century geology, physics and biology were in the business of dislodging homo-centrism, the ghost story perturbs, or at least undermines, the very instrument through which some of these new versions of science were articulated—the language of empirical reasoning. After all, ghosts could not exist, according to both Protestant theology and dogmatic naturalism, and if they (actually) did, then even more intellectual and existential adjusting had to be done.32 In a convincing analysis, Zoe Lehmann Imfeld contends that to be fully understood ghost stories need to be resituated in their theological context. Imfeld proposes that the protagonists of ghost stories take a theological ‘journey’ over the course of the text, from what the sociologist Charles Taylor calls the ‘bounded’ or ‘buffered’ secular self of a post-Enlightened world, to a much more complicated and porous self in which ‘man is both immanent and transcendent’.33 More controversial is her proposition that it is not just the protagonists of the stories who are taken along this theological journey, but also the readers, who inhabit the same secular world as the sceptical characters. For Imfeld, these supernatural tales could be considered (in nuanced and qualified ways) as having religious designs on the readers. Indeed, Imfeld not only insists that theology is central to an understanding of the ghost story, but that it is virtually impossible to understand these stories outside the theological context, and that this context includes the reader’s participation in a spiritual ‘journey’ (and metaphors of travel are used throughout the book) leading to a post-secular sensibility. Given the already dense theological resonance of Le Fanu’s stories, the religious turn in ghost story scholarship emphasising renewal of faith and a reconstituted Christianity has potentially useful things to tell us about them. Not everyone is left in complete obscurity in Le Fanu’s stories. Epistemological darkness is punctured, at times, and for the unlucky few, by a vision of an apparently vengeful cosmic system of justice, under the control of an unbending and unambiguous enforcer beyond the appeal of ordinary mortals. In other words, far from not really knowing how the system of cosmic justice works, the protagonists of these tales provide quite a vivid picture, one deeply resonant with that supplied by Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, which details the fate which awaits backsliders, atheists and the (in any way)

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immoral, who are hanging over the pit of hell waiting to be plunged into an eternal lake of fire. This darkness turns out not to be an epistemological one after all, but a metaphysical one, concerned with the state of the protagonists’ souls rather than the extent of their knowledge. While Jennings and Barton get an unfortunate glimpse into how cosmic justice is worked out, these appear to be only local and specific examples of the great system more generally. As Barton memorably complains: I am deeply and horribly convinced: that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world – a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us – a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure, I know…there is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt. In ways the most mysterious and stupendous – by agencies, the most inexplicable and terrific – there is a spiritual system – great Heavens, how frightfully I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned! – yes, sir – yes – the fires and frenzy of hell. (25–6)

By Barton’s reckoning, we are all subjects of this adamantine God and his system of retribution—indeed it is the system by which the spiritual world operates, but most of us are lucky enough to be spared any complete revelation of it before the day of doom. Barton punished Yelland (for being the proximate cause of his daughter’s untimely death), using ‘those terrible and arbitrary severities which the regulations of the navy placed at the command of those who are responsible for its discipline’ (51), and this ‘dreadful God’ operates a ‘spiritual system’ that is even more ‘omnipotent’ and terrifying than the British navy. These stories certainly detail a psychological journey undertaken by these protagonists, but not just a journey from ‘doubt’ to faith, as Imfeld suggests (indeed the textual evidence that Jennings actually doubts Christianity is almost non-existent), but rather from one kind of faith to another. While it is true that Barton is a nonbeliever, Jennings is an Anglican clergyman who presumably possesses a conventional Anglican faith. They are both forced, because of terrible psychological distress, to confront the possibility of a cosmos under the control of an ‘inexorable’ force, which punishes in apparent excess of any possible crimes the sufferer may or may not have committed in his past, and puts the protagonist through immense anguish before eventual death. These are stories of extreme human suffering, and, like much of Le Fanu’s work, detail the slow psychological breakdown of the protagonists under intense and sustained mental pressure brought to bear by the supernatural, and a critical focus on this suffering may help to begin to clear up the apparently ‘impenetrable obscurities’ of the events. It is their suffering that generates the critical concern here. After all, had Jennings been visited by a harmless invisible animal (like, for example, the giant rabbit Harvey who is perceptible only to Elwood P. Dowd),34 he might have been considered an eccentric, but the visitation would not have generated the kinds of questions about ultimate meaning that ‘Green Tea’ has inspired. Likewise, Barton is troubled about cosmic retribution only because he thinks his Watcher is a supernatural force rather than just because he is trapped in an apparent panopticon: ‘it was plain that if Barton could ever be convinced that there was nothing preternatural in the phenomenon which he had hitherto regarded in that light, the affair would lose all its terrors in his eyes, and wholly cease to exercise upon his health and spirits the

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baleful influence which it had hitherto done’ (35). It is precisely because the manifestations of these possibly preternatural creatures are considered by their victims as revelations of an entire metaphysical system based on punishment and the infliction of apparently arbitrary human suffering that the stories themselves are so disturbing. In the attempt to ‘explain’ the stories, it is important that we do not end up ‘explaining away’ the cosmic system of which the protagonists insist they have been granted a terrifying glimpse. These are stories which circulate around the relationship between human suffering and divine power, known in theological circles as theodicy, a discourse which greatly occupied the minds of many Victorians. The philosopher James McCosh summarised the theological problem succinctly in 1850, asking: ‘[c]ould not God have created a world in which there was no suffering to tear the bodily frame, and no grief to cloud and shadow the soul?’35 Recent historians of religion have pointed out that while theodicy, the attempt to reconcile the existence of moral and natural evil in the world with the supposed goodness of an omnipotent God, has been a persistent issue in Christianity, the Victorian period was a particularly fruitful time for the production of multiple responses to the problem. The much exaggerated phenomenon of Victorian doubt was generated far more by a discussion of the apparent failure of a perfectly good Creator to prevent not just the kind of human immorality that inflicted pain on others, but natural evils like earthquakes, floods and famines, than by scientific challenges to traditional Christianity.36 Moreover, far from discussion of theodicy being the preserve of theologians, writers of fiction often addressed theological problems that were troubling the readers—and themselves, particularly after the vexing decade of the 1840s in which human suffering and natural evil was ‘brought home’ to British readers in very powerful ways.37 Prior to the 1840s, much fiction was marked by what the critic Thomas Vargish calls a ‘providential aesthetic’, or a sense that, no matter what the difficulties characters were presented with there was a sense that God would ultimately ensure that all worked out well. This aesthetic expressed the sense that God cared ‘for his creatures…supervis[ed] over them, and…order[ed] … the whole course of things for their good’ with the promise that everything ‘will all turn out cosmically right’.38 Such an optimistic reading of the existence of evil was challenged by an increasing knowledge about the extent of natural disasters, and in particular by the publicity accorded to one particular disaster of the late eighteenth century. The fact that, in ‘The Watcher’, Sylvester Yelland dies in Lisbon may seem to be an unimportant plot detail, but this is a particularly suitable place to perish in a story centrally concerned with divine punishment and human suffering. Lisbon had been, after all, central to the debate about the meaning of suffering since the 1750s. On All Saint’s Day, 1755, when Lisbon was the fourth most populous European city, it was struck by a major earthquake which caused enormous devastation, and killed up to 100,000, including vast numbers who had been in churches, celebrating the holy day and who were crushed by collapsing houses of God. The earthquake sparked a Europeanwide debate about why (and whether) a benevolent God had permitted (perhaps even caused) such horrific destruction. Famously, for Voltaire, the earthquake destroyed his cosmic optimism, the sense that (as argued by Leibniz) we live in the ‘best of

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all possible worlds’. His ‘Poem on the Lisbon Disaster’ (1756) ridiculed claims that such natural disasters actually contributed to the well-being of the world. Others did not share Voltaire’s theodical scepticism, however. The Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida notoriously declared, in his hugely controversial pamphlet An Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake Suffered by the Court of Lisbon on November 1st 1755 (1756), that the earthquake was God’s way of punishing the inhabitants of Lisbon for their sinful ways, and he attacked the reconstruction project of the city’s government as blasphemous, recommending instead a ritual of sackcloth and ashes to beg for divine forgiveness or risk suffering further divine chastisement. Malagrida’s view was echoed by John Wesley who claimed that God had attacked the city to convince everyone to examine their behaviour and turn back to the ways of God.39 Yelland’s death in a Lisbon still recovering from the earthquake sets in relief the suffering of Captain Barton with which the story is mostly concerned. If Barton is suffering excessively by comparison with his crime, then what of the Lisbonians who were attending church on the day of the earthquake and found themselves crushed to death? It is striking that Le Fanu chose to engage with the question of human suffering and a cosmic system of reprobation in 1847, after a relative fictional silence of four years. While the inexorable cosmic system glimpsed by Barton, is, as Haslam points out, also visible in later novels like A Lost Name (1868), and Wylder’s Hand (1864), and especially in ‘Green Tea, and ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’ (1872), it is set out in ‘The Watcher’. For an Irish writer writing about human suffering in 1847, one particular example of natural evil must have been foremost in mind. As Boyd Hilton points out, the extraordinary nature and extent of the suffering by the victims of the Irish Famine, and the widespread discussion of this suffering in the contemporary print media brought ‘views about the Almighty’ fiercely into public debate,40 particularly when some commentators, echoing Malagrida and Wesley on the Lisbon earthquake, insisted that God Himself was ‘sending’ this disaster on the Irish as a punishment for their sins. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, described the Famine in starkly providential terms in October 1845: The sword, the pestilence, and famine are the instruments of [the Almighty’s] displeasure; […] he gives the word: a single crop is blighted; and we see a nation prostrate, stretching out its hands for bread. These are solemn warnings, and they fill me with reverence; they proclaim with a voice not to be mistaken, that ‘doubtless there is a God, who judgeth the Earth’.41

This providential view of Famine suffering was officially sanctioned when a national day of fast and humiliation was declared for 24 March, 1847, just months before ‘The Watcher’ appeared. Indeed, in April of the same year, the Dublin University Magazine published an article on ‘The Famine in the Land’, which Le Fanu almost certainly read, described the blight as one ‘which it has pleased an all-wise God to visit [on] the food of her people’: ‘Never was there an occasion upon which it was more fitting, that our Sovereign and her people should bow in submission to the mysterious will of the great Being who rules us all – and earnestly implore his mercy for a suffering land’.42 This providential view of the Famine was forcefully challenged by Bishop John Hughes of New York in March 1847, when he excoriated those who subscribed to

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it: ‘I may be told that the famine in Ireland is a mysterious visitation of God’s providence, but I do not admit any such plea. I fear there is blasphemy in charging on the Almighty what is the result of man’s own doing’. This speech was published in the Nation later that year, and it is extremely unlikely that Le Fanu was unfamiliar with it. Moreover, in 1846, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel publically cautioned against the providential interpretation of the potato blight as the apparent ‘chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficial purpose - it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy’,43 but his warning did little to stop discussion of the disaster as a ‘visitation of God’. The apparently ‘inscrutable’ God of the Great Famine is matched by the apparently ‘impenetrable’ God of ‘The Watcher’. In the public debate about whether human suffering is sent by God as a warning or a punishment, or whether such an interpretation borders on blasphemous, the November 1847 appearance of ‘The Watcher’ is hardly coincidental. Given the story’s focus on divine punishment and suffering; given that it was written in the middle of the worst year of the Famine, when discussion of theodicy could be found everywhere; published in a periodical which had given explicit endorsement to the Evangelical view of human suffering as a punishment for sin and a warning to others, ‘The Watcher’ is at least partially an intervention into this discourse, and a powerful rearticulation of the view that suffering is merited by basic human sinfulness. Commentators have stressed the impact of the death of Le Fanu’s wife Susanna in 1858 on his providentialist reading of human suffering in ‘Green Tea’. However, given that the cosmic system is clearly present in ‘The Watcher’, written twelve years before her illness and death, it seems more likely that it was the debate about theodicy during the Famine that stimulated Le Fanu’s own ideas about punishment and pain. It seems likely that it was the explosion of explanatory anxiety generated by the Famine, an anxiety that exceeded that in the period after the Lisbon earthquake, that prompted Le Fanu to turn to questions of the cause of intense human suffering. Ireland, then, is central to the development of Le Fanu’s ‘rhetoric of darkness’—but it is important to stress that it is merely the staging post for speculations of a cosmic nature. If Le Fanu’s ghost stories represent humans as totally depraved and deserving of damnation, he was hardly alone. Elizabeth Jay points out that Evangelical thinking was hugely influential in the first half of the nineteenth century. Particularly significant was the Evangelical ‘conviction of total depravity. Sin was not, as those with an optimistic view of humanity were claiming, a matter of voluntary transgression, but since the Fall, endemic to man’s nature, marring every part’.44 Le Fanu’s Bachelor, in fact, sounds very much like an Evangelical at times, especially in his remark that ‘Until the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden these transactions must remain shrouded in their original impenetrable obscurity’ (50). After all, as Evangelicals like Hannah More warned, while it may seem repugnant to many that humans should be punished in such an extraordinary way, ‘God’s ways are not our ways’.45 God’s methods were simply beyond the ability of humans to comprehend—and certainly not within our capacity to judge.46 The Famine intensified discussion of the last days,

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and the imagery of apocalypse and revelation permeated much contemporary writing directly about the Famine itself, so Le Fanu’s turn to the ‘day of doom’ and days when ‘the secrets of the earth shall be no longer hidden’ as the horizon of explanation for human suffering would not have looked particularly unusual in an Irish periodical in 1847. Although Terry Eagleton has complained that there is no ‘major literature’ of the Irish Famine,47 if we reconsider Le Fanu’s great ghost stories as (in part) a theological response to the catastrophe, that complaint could be qualified. Moreover, the importance of Ireland to Le Fanu’s writing, far beyond just that fiction he set explicitly in the country, could be more generally appreciated. Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

See, for example, A. Norman Jeffares, Anglo-Irish literature (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982), 132–4. For a good introduction to the impact of postcolonial theory on Irish Studies, see Joe Cleary, ‘“Misplaced Ideas”? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies’, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork, Cork University Press, 2003), 16–45. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986): 65–88. For a survey of the use of allegory in Irish Gothic Studies, see Richard Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic’, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London and New York, Routledge, 2007), 83– 94; Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, ‘De-Limiting the Irish Gothic’, Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, eds. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (London, Palgrave, 2014), 1–12. For ‘Irish’ readings of Carmilla, see Robert Tracy, ‘Undead, Unburied: AngloIreland and the Predatory Past’, LIT, 10 (1999), 22; Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child-Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 1999), 127– 8; Martin Willis, ‘Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, Ireland, and Diseased Vision”, Essays and Studies 2008: Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2008): 111–30; Jarlath Killeen, ‘An Irish Carmilla?’, Carmilla: An Edition with Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (New York, University of Syracuse Press, 2013), 99–109. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Introduction’, to J. S. Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (London, Cresset Press 1947), 8. Quoted in W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu (Gloucestershire, Sutton, 1997), 140. For an excellent comparison of the different versions of ‘Richard Marston’, see Albert Power, ‘Richard Marston of Dunronan: A Tragedy Across Three Decades’, “Inspiring a Mysterious Terror”: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2016), 47– 67.

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

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Roy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland (London, Allen Lane, 2001), 109; William Hughes, ‘The Origins and Implications of J. S. Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”’, Irish Studies Review 13: 1 (2005), 45; Richard Haslam, ‘Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Fantastic Semantics of GhostColonial Ireland’, That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and its Contexts, ed. Bruce Stewart (Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1998), volume 1, 281; James H. Murphy, Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), 3, 5. See Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic’; Jarlath Killeen, “Irish Gothic Revisited”. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 4 (2008). http://irishgothichorrorjournal. homestead.com/index.html. All quotations from ‘The Watcher’ will be taken from J. S. Le Fanu, Reminiscences of a Bachelor (Dublin, Swan River Press, 2014), which reprints the original text from the Dublin University Magazine. Page numbers are included in parenthesis in the main text. All Biblical quotations are taken from The Bible, King James Version, ed. David Norton (London, Penguin, 2006). For Le Fanu and Huguenot Calvinism, see Alison Milbank, ‘Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Gothic Grotesque and the Huguenot Inheritance’, A Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Julia M. Wright (Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 362– 76; Richard Haslam, ‘Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and Irish Victorian Calvinism’, “Inspiring a Mysterious Terror”: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2016), 117–37. Haslam, ‘Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”’, 114. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. Rev. William Pringle (Edinburgh, Calvin Translation Society, 1845), vol. 2, 102–3. Quotations from ‘Green Tea’ will be taken from Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993), 5–40, and included in parenthesis in the main text. For lively surveys of real world Victorian ghosts, see P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls, and Other Spirits of the Dead (Gloucestershire, Tempus, 2007), 165–204; R. C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (London, Junction Books, 1982), 172–216. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Books, ed. Ruth Glancy (Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 1988), 20. For fascinating discussions of the psychologisation of ghosts, see Luke Gibbons, Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2015), 11–18; Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995), 120–25. For a caustic survey of interpretations of ‘Green Tea’, see Richard Haslam, ‘The Editor’s Amputated Fingers: Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and the “Chasm” Between Inference and Evidence’, Le Fanu Studies, 9: 2 (November 2014), http://www. lefanustudies.com/haslam.html.

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21. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1978), 17. 22. Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom (New York, American News Company, 1867), 94. 23. Michael H. Begnal, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell University Press, 1971), 40. 24. Victor Sage, Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness (London, Palgrave, 2004). 25. James Walton, Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu (Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2007). 26. W. J. McCormack, Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats, and Bowen (Manchester, University of Manchester Press, 1993), 179; Alison Milbank argues strongly against this nihilistic reading in ‘Death and the Maiden: Theology, Gender and the Grotesque in Le Fanu’s Fiction’, “Inspiring a Mysterious Terror”: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli (Oxford, Peter Lang, 2016), 177–96. 27. Walton, Vision, 190. 28. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (London, Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25. 29. See, for example, Raymond L. Brett, Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularization in Literature from Wordsworth to Larkin (Cambridge, James Clarke & Co., 1997); Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977); for a popular treatment, see A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (London, Abacus, 2000). 30. Giles St Aubyn, Souls in Torment: Victorian Faith in Crisis (London, SinclairStevenson, 2011); Timothy Larsen, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, TX, Baylor University Press, 2004); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988); Jan-Melissa Shramm, Atonement and Self -Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012); James Livingstone, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions (New York, Continuum, 2007). 31. Simon Hay, A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (London, Palgrave, 2011), and Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012) are particularly strong materialist readings of the genre. 32. Peter Marshall, ‘The Ghost Story in Post-Reformation England’, The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, eds. Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Stevens (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2010), 16–33. 33. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James (London, Palgrave, 2016), 25. 34. In Mary Chase’s play, Harvey (1944), and the film adaptation, Harvey (dir. Henry Koster; 1950).

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35. James McCosh, The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral (Edinburgh, Sutherland & Knox, 1852), 29. My awareness of the importance of theodicy to the Victorians has been greatly enhanced by the work of my former doctoral student, Paula Keatley, who also helped guide me through the literature on the subject. 36. Howard R. Murphy, ‘The Ethical Revolt Against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England’, The American Historical Review, 60 (1955), 800–17. 37. An 1849 article in the Edinburgh Review observed that ‘during the last few years […] the public attention seemed to be fixing itself upon the miseries and maladies of our population with an almost morbid intensity’. Anon., ‘Unsound Social Philosophy,’ Edinburgh Review (October 1849), 497. 38. Thomas Vargish, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 1985), 18. 33. 39. John Wesley, Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the late Earthquake at Lisbon (London, 1755). 40. Hilton, Age, 114. 41. Quoted in Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin and Portland, OR, Irish Academic Press, 1999), 99. 42. ‘The Famine in the Land’, Dublin University Magazine, 172: 29 (April 1847), 540. 43. ‘Sir Robert Peel’s speech on the Second Reading of the Bill for the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, English Historical Documents 1833–1874, eds. David Charles Douglas, W.D. Handcock & George Malcolm Young (London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970), 471. 44. Elisabeth Jay, ‘Introduction’, The Evangelical and Oxford Movements, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), 16. 45. Hannah More, ‘’Tis all for the Best’, The Works of Hannah More (London, H. Fisher, R. Fisher and P. Jackson, 1834), volume 1, 165. 46. Hannah More, ‘Religion Necessary to the Well-being of States’, The Works of Hannah More (London, H. Fisher, R. Fisher & P. Jackson, 1834), volume 4, 180. 47. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London, Verso, 1995), 12–13.

Bibliography Anonymous, ‘The Famine in the Land’, Dublin University Magazine, 172: 29 (April 1847), 501–540. Backus, Margot Gayle, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child-Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999). Begnal, Michael H., Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1971). Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction’, in Uncle Silas, ed. J. S. Le Fanu (London: Cresset Press, 1947), 7–28. Brett, Raymond L., Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularization in Literature from Wordsworth to Larkin (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1997).

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Calvin, John, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. Rev. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), vol. 2, 102–3. Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Chadwick, Owen, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Cleary, Joe, ‘“Misplaced Ideas”? Colonialism, Location, and Dislocation in Irish Studies’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds., Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), 16–45. Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, in Christmas Books, ed. Ruth Glancy (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1988), 1–90. Eagleton, Terry, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995). Finucane, R. C., Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982). Foster, Roy, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane, 2001). Gibbons, Luke, Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Gray, Peter, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 1999). Haslam, Richard, ‘Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the Fantastic Semantics of Ghost-Colonial Ireland’, in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature and Its Contexts, ed. Bruce Stewart (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), Vol. 1, 268–86. Haslam, Richard, ‘Irish Gothic’, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 83–94. Haslam, Richard, ‘The Editor’s Amputated Fingers: Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and the “Chasm” between Inference and Evidence’, Le Fanu Studies, 9: 2 (November 2014), http://www.lefanustu dies.com/haslam.html. Haslam, Richard, ‘Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and Irish Victorian Calvinism’, in “Inspiring a Mysterious Terror”: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), 117–37. Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Hughes, William, ‘The Origins and Implications of J. S. Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”’, Irish Studies Review 13: 1 (2005), 45–54. Imfeld, Zoë Lehmann, The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James (London: Palgrave, 2016). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986): 65–88. Jay, Elisabeth, ‘Introduction’, in The Evangelical and Oxford Movements, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–30. Jeffares, A. Norman, Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin. Gill and Macmillan, 1982). Killeen, Jarlath, ‘An Irish Carmilla?’, in Carmilla: An Edition with Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (New York: University of Syracuse Press, 2013), 99–109. Killeen, Jarlath, ‘Irish Gothic Revisited’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 4 (2008). http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/index.html. Larsen, Timothy, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004). Le Fanu, J. S., ‘The Watcher’, in Reminiscences of a Bachelor (Dublin: Swan River Press, 2014), 5–51. Le Fanu, Sheridan, In a Glass Darkly, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1993). Livingstone, James, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions (New York: Continuum, 2007).

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Marshall, Peter, ‘The Ghost Story in Post-Reformation England’, in The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, eds. Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Stevens (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 16–33. Maxwell-Stuart, P. G., Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls, and Other Spirits of the Dead (Glousterchesreie: Tempus, 2007). McCormack, W. J., Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats, and Bowen (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1993). McCormack, W. J., Sheridan Le Fanu (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997). McCosh, James, The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral (Edinburgh: Sutherland & Knox, 1852). Milbank, Alison, ‘Death and the Maiden: Theology, Gender and the Grotesque in Le Fanu’s Fiction’, in “Inspiring a Mysterious Terror”: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), 177–96. Milbank, Alison, ‘Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Gothic Grotesque and the Huguenot Inheritance’, in A Companion to Irish Literature, ed. Julia M. Wright (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 362–76. More, Hannah, ‘’Tis all for the Best’, in The Works of Hannah More (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher and P. Jackson, 1834), I, 147–165. More, Hannah, ‘Religion Necessary to the Well-being of States’, in The Works of Hannah More (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher & P. Jackson, 1834), IV, 165–181. Morin, Christina and Niall Gillespie, ‘De-Limiting the Irish Gothic’, in Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, eds. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (London: Palgrave, 2014), 1–12. Murphy, Howard R., ‘The Ethical Revolt Against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England’, The American Historical Review, 60 (1955), 800–17. Murphy, James H., Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Power, Albert, ‘Richard Marston of Dunronan: A Tragedy Across Three Decades’, in “Inspiring a Mysterious Terror”: 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), 47–67. Sage, Victor, Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness (London: Palgrave, 2004). Shramm, Jan-Melissa, Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). ‘Sir Robert Peel’s speech on the Second Reading of the Bill for the Repeal of the Corn Laws,’ in English Historical Documents 1833–1874, eds. David Charles Douglas, W. D. Handcock and George Malcolm Young (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970), 457–71. St. Aubyn, Giles, Souls in Torment: Victorian Faith in Crisis (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 2011). Sullivan, Jack, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978). The Bible, King James Version, ed. David Norton (London: Penguin, 2006). Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (London: Case Western Reserve University, 1973). Tracy, Robert, ‘Undead, Unburied: Anglo-Ireland and the Predatory Past’, LIT, 10 (1999), 13–33. Vargish, Thomas, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1985). Walton, James, Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007). Wesley, John, Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the late Earthquake at Lisbon (London, 1755). Wigglesworth, Michael, The Day of Doom (New York: American News Company, 1867). Willis, Martin, ‘Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, Ireland, and Diseased Vision’, in Essays and Studies 2008: Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 111–30. Wilson, A. N., God’s Funeral (London: Abacus, 2000).

The Rise of Terror in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Generally speaking, the fairy tale is not often considered to be part of the Gothic tradition. Across the board, the conceptual aim of the fairy tale consistently returns to the desire to educate children over appropriate behaviour and conduct. The narrative scenarios of the fairy tale are purposely concerned with real-life dilemmas. Fairy tales are, overall, quite short, and contain a number of moral teachings, including the punishment of evil and the triumph of heroes. Joseph Abbruscato suggests that “the strength of fairy tales lies in their ability to deliver their psychically important lessons, their epiphanies and teaching moments, in as concise package as possible”.1 Equally, Gothic literature—in particular as pertaining to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—is very rarely associated with the narrative set up of the fairy tale, a genre that is too often relegated to the bounds of children’s literature, and whose interactions with dread and fear are frequently overlooked in favour of the educational aims it inevitably carries. Lucie Armitt suggests that, on the surface, “the possibility of an inter-relational reading of fairy tale and Gothic modes may appear anomalous”; instead of “ the sinister ambivalence of the Gothic narrative”, the seemingly “playful fantasies of the formulaic fairy tale appear to refute the possibility of reader disturbance in prioritizing consolation”.2 Indeed, the narrative structure of the fairy tale favours a linear development that highlights the importance of good deeds, joining fanciful elements with representations of the perceived real world, in order to provide the child reader with an approachable mode of storytelling. While elements of fear, otherness, and darkness certainly appear in many of the stories, these are employed with pedagogical aims in mind, and do not appear to be structured with the intent of creating terror and gloomy atmospheres, in the fashion that is perhaps the most recognisable element of Gothic literature. Yet, the Gothic and fairy tales—especially the ones penned by the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob—belong to a shared cultural and historical context, L. Piatti-Farnell (B) Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_16

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providing both literary and folkloristic directions into the practices of storytelling the were proper to the early nineteenth century. Like the Gothic, the fairy tale has been subject to a number of evolutionary processes, which have highlighted its international focus, as well as its broader appeal as a narrative intended for children. Jack Zipes suggests that, although there is no such a thing as a universal fairy tale, during its “long evolution, the literary fairy tale distinguished itself as a genre by appropriating motifs, signs, and drawings from folklore, and embellishing them”.3 Further to Zipes’ suggestion, this chapter will explore how a broader critical approach to the fairy tale sees it as a profoundly intermingled genre, which, at least as far as the Grimms’ work in the nineteenth century is concerned, maintained an awareness of both oral traditions and contemporary literary currents. It is the aim of the discussion to highlight the gothic literary echoes found in fairy tales, and to provide a preliminary direction in identifying the influence that fairy tales themselves actually had on nineteenth-century gothic literature. The contemporary observer will be familiar with the Disney-style incarnation of the fairy tale, where the narrative of the “happy ever after” is central to the development of characters and motivations. Disney based their fairy tale films on well-known stories penned primarily by the Brothers Grimm, but also other prolific authors of the genre, such as Hans Christian Anderson. Even in our twenty-first century, the educational aspect of the tales is undeniable; this is a legacy that fairy tales have maintained, as this particular genre moved towards children as its intended audience. Cinematic interpretations of fairy tales, however, very rarely keep true to the essence and representations of fairy tales from previous centuries. In spite of the conceptions that many may have over this category, literary fairy tales from the early nineteenth century proposed disturbing narratives of alienation, entrapment, and perversions, where both notions of desire and the magical element aptly channelled complicated notions of social difference. Fairy tales maintained a close connection to narratives of fear, in an attempt to contextualise the notion of evil, and the importance of good behaviour and righteous deeds. A re-discovery of terror in the Grimm’s work allows for a critical re-conceptualisation of the “dark side of children’s fairy tales”, as connected to not only Gothic literature, but also to the two genres’ shared significance in broader cultural landscape.4 For the purpose of this chapter, the focus will be placed on what is known as the “Golden Age of fairy tales”, also referred to as “classic” fairy tales, which blossomed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.5 Specifically, the discussion will focus on the works of the Brothers Grimm. This choice is connected to primarily two reasons; firstly, the work of the Grimms encompasses the majority of stories that have now become part of the broader literary repertoire of Western tradition. Secondly, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are the ones carrying the most distinctive connection to the gothic framework, where “terror reverberates”.6 This inclusion was part of conscious systems of revision and re-write, which allowed the Grimms to engage more openly with the motifs found in the Gothic novel The latter had become extremely popular during decades when the Brothers were collating their fairy tales. By establishing an often tacit, but deeply unavoidable connection between the Grimms’ stories and the Gothic, fairy tales emerge as narratives of “interplay

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and influence”.7 Classic fairy tales operate at the cusp of genre and tradition, and incorporate elements of terror in order to achieve their desired effects on the child reader of the nineteenth century. The term fairy tale seems widespread in identifying a specific narrative that relies on the use of fantastical and magical elements in order to entertain and educate children. In actuality, the “fairy tale” is very difficult to define; this is a characteristic that, of course, it shares with the Gothic, a term that famously eludes comprehensive definitions. Indeed, when it comes to actually providing a designation for the term “fairy tale”, there appears to be considerable disagreement. Many facets come into play when attempting to define the fairy tale; these include debates over the nature of storytelling, origin, authorships, content, and, eventually, meaning. While all these elements can be considered singularly as belonging to the fairy tale as a genre, an authoritative definition is difficult to find. Scholars have struggled to agree on what clearly delineates a fairy tale, as the latter has proved to be a category that has mutated significantly over centuries. Proppian definitions are often too constricting, and do not allow for textual and contextual differences, which fairy tales across nations and periods are bound to have gone through.8 In an attempt to provide a starting point for definition, Hilda Davidson, Ellis Roderick, and Anna Chaudhri suggest that one useful way to approach the categorisation of fairy tales could be to draw a “distinction” between “the oral fairy tale, recorded with various degrees of accuracy”, and the “literary fairy tale, the individual creative work of a writer”.9 Although this appears to be a practical way to separate the literary fairy tale from other similar types of oral and folk stories, this approach does not fully take into account both the narrative and cultural negotiations that have taken place, as oral traditions and literary fairy tales have mingled and merged. Whenever fairy tales are considered, one must remain aware of the fact that, within this category, the oral and the literary “constantly overlap”.10 Indeed, a common point of scholarly agreement is that fairy tales originate in oral stories; however, it is also a well-recorded fact that significant changes and alterations were made to these folk stories once they were transported into their literary forms, as it is the case with the tales penned by the Brothers Grimm. This was likely the outcome of a literary “modernisation”, which saw fairy tale compilers adapt old folk stories in order to accord better with the popular taste of their contemporaries. While oral folklore stories were meant to be told “face to face”, and came “directly from common experiences and beliefs”, literary fairy tales encompassed the changing “behaviours of the members of a particular group”, which were salient at the time of recording and collection.11 The fairy tale, in this sense, is a liminal entity: lying somewhere between the literary and the folkloristic. The category also hangs in between readerships and receiverships, and channels desires and objectives that, while intended to be aimed at children, continuously carry very adult preoccupations. Fairy tales, as Marina Warner suggests, “act as an airy suspension bridge, swinging lightly under different breezes of opinion and economy, between the earned, literary, and print culture”.12 Without indulging in generalisations, it is possible to suggest that the shared elements of the fairy tale commonly consist of the use of the setting in far away lands, quests for riches and glory, the use of the magical element, the presence of mythical and

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often monstrous creatures, and the appearance of princes and princesses, as heroes and heroines. The latter are often placed against the figure of a “villain”, who is inevitably set on taking advantage of them, or even killing them for a specific gain. The focus on the dichotomy between good and evil in fairy tales is a very important part of the narrative and its pedagogical purposes. As Karen Coats suggests, fairy tales are important to children’s development because “they provide concrete images of villains and monsters on which to project undirect anxieties and fears, so that they might be contained and dispatched”.13 In the collective imagination, especially for nineteenth-century British and American readers, the impact of the Grimms’ work was unquestioned, so much so, in fact, that all fairy tales were termed as “German”, even if they were not necessarily penned by German authors. The Grimms’ stories had a distinctive darker tone, and this had proved to be a clear selling point for their fairy tales, especially when compared to other German fairy tale examples, such as Ludwig Bechstein’s Deutches Märchenbuk (The Book of German Fairy Tales, 1845). Linda Kraus Worley suggests that “dark, grim tales” became synonymous with German fairy tales, and grew to be “popular on an international scale”.14 It is often generally assumed that the Brothers Grimm collected their oral folktales “mainly from peasants and day laborers”.15 In this context, the brothers would simply be transcribers of the tales, maintaining an objective look over their structure and meaning. This assumption, however, is inherently untrue. There is copious evidence to suggest that the Grimms actually gathered their tales primarily from educated, middle-class people, who were very familiar with the literary world, as well as a variety of philosophical undercurrents. The Grimms were keen on capturing the essence of oral tales, but were also widely attuned to the desires and preferences of middle-class audiences, and both the styles and the messages that might find favour as a result. Narrative and conceptual connections between classic fairy tales and nineteenthcentury gothic literature are difficult to ignore. The starting point for this connection is, of course, the broader historical context that the two narrative forms shared. The Brothers Grimm worked together in collecting a comprehensive volume of folklore stories for children. The large volume of Kind-und Hausmärchen (Children and Household Tales, 1812) quickly transformed into a “hallmark of world folklore”.16 The collection was revised seven times, with just as many editions, finally forming into the “standard edition” in 1858. The work of the Brothers Grimm—later known as The Grimms’ Fairy Tales—was a significant piece of work, not only because it collated so many stories from German and European folklore, but also because it represented the most successful volume in solidifying some of the most prominent narrative elements of the literary fairy tale. Simultaneously—and just as the Grimms were preparing their fairy tale manuscript prior to their first publication—“Gothic fever” was sweeping through Europe. Gothic literature became popular at the end of the eighteenth century, with the canonical works of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe constructing the narrative blueprint for the mode overall. Evoking elements of both Medieval romance and folklore, novels such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) were instrumental in defining the literature of terror, both during their time and in the centuries to follow. The Gothic was shaped

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as a form rich in “atmosphere”, able to render into writing “the sensation that one is in the presence” of something that “suspends and calls into doubt the laws of the universe”, even if this effect is “alter called away”.17 By the time the nineteenth century arrived, the Gothic was a well-established mode in the European mind-set, intersecting with many literary genres and styles, from realistic fiction to children’s speculative stories. The tendency of the Grimm’s fairy tales to slip into Gothic elements is likely a result of both their shared cultural and historical contexts, as well as the literary processes that the stories underwent. Worley aptly points out that both the writing and editing of the Grimms’ fairy tales “did not happen in a cultural vacuum”.18 Indeed, their work took place during the same period and “in the same literary climate” which found other writers of the early nineteenth century “reworking the Gothic tale”.19 The characteristics of the gothic narrative had become well known at this time, and many writers were experimenting with the gothic framework, while shaping and reshaping elements from this newly established literary tradition. From E.T.A Hoffman in Germany to Mary Shelley in England and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States, a number of authors were appropriating in equal measure elements from not only previous Gothic novels—including, of course, the work of Walpole and Radcliffe— but also from old tales of folklore. These writers were keen on emphasising the shift between possible “supernatural elements” and “psychological torment”.20 It was this specific interplay that established those distinctive modes of representation, which we now commonly associate with the nineteenth-century gothic framework. For their part, the Grimms were avid readers of fiction, and well acquainted with literary works from not only the German context, but also from the broader British and American literary world as well. Specifically, they were members of numerous Romantic literary circles, which they often used as a source for gathering their fairy tales. As a result, it is not surprising to see that the Grimms’ fairy tales present a hybridised version of folklore stories, which sit in an in-between space been realistic storytelling, and increasingly more “popular”, and distinctly Gothic, forms of narrative. The first edition of the Fairy Tales was published in 1812, while the final version— often considered to be the standard, if not definitive, edition—was not completed until 1857. During this period, and the many different incarnations of the volume, the stories underwent significant changes. The Brothers, and Wilhelm in particular, spent a lot of time revising the fairy tales, in order to make them more appealing to the sensibilities of a middle-class reading public. By the time the 1857 edition was finished, the Brothers had “embellished and elaborated the tales” in order to “enhance their value as part of an educational primer”.21 This process included not only the systematic removal of any elements that might be seen as too “provocative”—including hints to sex and pregnancy—but also the inclusion of particular narrative tropes and motifs that would be considered popular, and enhance both the literary and entertainment value of the tales. One of the aspects that the Grimms emphasised in their edited fairy tales was, without a doubt, the element of terror. In their processes of revision from the early to mid-nineteenth century onwards, the fairy tales became essentially dark and menacing tales. Mary Ellen Snodgrass

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suggests that the Grimms’ fairy tales were essentially characterised by “incidents of confinement, ostracism and verbal abuse, evil spells [and] other gruesome perils”, which permeate every aspect of the stories as “Germanic fantasies”.22 Narratives of fear were brought into the foreground, and the importance of set ups such as isolated mansions and dark forests was emphasised. By the time the 1859 edition was finalised, “darker” villains had appeared, with even more frightening characteristics; in turn, hero and heroines were made to openly experience fear and dread. One must only think, for instance, of the case of Rapunzel, where the character of Mother Gothel changes from a “fairy” in the 1812 edition to a “sorceress”—with all its inevitably negative connotations—in the 1858 standard edition. The timing for this shift in the representation of fairy tale dynamics should not be perceived as a matter of coincidence, but as a result of the cultural and literary context that was permeating Europe, and which merged storytelling with the broader elements of the Gothic framework. The scenarios of Grimm fairy tales are distinctly Gothic, and pivot on human experiences of suffering, punishment, and isolation. Indeed, it could be argued that the rise and popularity of the Gothic had a noticeable impact on the ways in which the fairy tales were collected, collated, and redacted over a period of time. The Grimms’ volume provides a ready example at hand. There is significant evidence to suggest that, in their multiple revisions, the Grimms made a conscious decision to add elements that would enhance the gothic qualities of their tales. Examples such as “Der Räuberbräutigam” (The Robber Bridegroom) are particularly useful in highlighting the editorial changes that brought into the foreground the tale’s “violent content”, as part of a possibly Gothic structure.23 The Robber Bridegroom is closely related, conceptually speaking, to tales such as Bluebeard, but maintains a distinct independence; this is clearly stated in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther catalogue, an index of folklore that groups fairy tales stories according to their similarities and metaphorical nature.24 In The Robber Bridegroom, a young woman finds herself trapped in her betrothed’s house; while hiding in a secret spot, she discovers him to be an evil man with cannibalistic tendencies. The man’s villainy is exposed as the young woman secretly spies on him, and witnesses him, together with a group of fellow robber companions, killing women and preparing to consume their flesh. On their wedding day, and in front of all the guests, the young bride exposes the bridegroom’s guilt, by producing the chopped off finger of one of his victims. The Bridegroom and his companions are put to death as a result. The Grimms made a number of editorial changes from the 1810 manuscript to the 1812 published version of the tale, adding descriptive elements and details to enrich the storytelling. Specifically, these changes seem to hold the specific function to “increase the suspense and evoke feelings of hidden terror”.25 The Robber Bridegroom received particular attention in this sense. A clear example of these editorial changes can be found right at the beginning of the tale. In the 1810 manuscript version, the young woman is reluctant to visit her betrothed’s house simply “from fear” that she “would lose herself in the forest”.26 However, in the 1812 first published edition, the young woman’s reluctance to visit her fiancé is only initially motivated by the “fear that she would lose her way”: indeed, we are told that “she tried to postpone the trip because she inwardly dreaded it”.27 The addition of feelings of

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“dread” clearly highlights a desire to connect the fairy tales more closely to the structure and motifs of the Gothic, adding a layer of psychological involvement that had been absent from the Grimms’ stories in their first manuscript version. Worley purposefully suggests that considering the differences between the two versions of the fairy tale reveals how the distinct violent elements were not only “retained”, but specifically “amplified”, by the addition of a layer of emotional turmoil.28 In the 1858 standard edition of “The Robber Bridegroom”, the gothic element has become an indivisible part of the narrative. Here, the young woman admits that, whenever she thinks of her fiancé, she feels “a secret horror”. Upon entering the “dark forest” where the man’s house is located, she becomes “very uneasy”, even if she doesn’t “know not exactly why”. A gothic atmosphere also pervades the description of the man’s house, which is described as “solitary”; the young woman takes an immediate dislike to the building, claiming that it looks “dark and dismal”, and surrounded by “the most absolute stillness”.29 Terror colours the characters’ feelings and approach to both surroundings and relationships, and marks fear as a definitive tool in the Grimms‘ storytelling. Indeed, fairy tales and gothic literature appear to belong to the same narrative and cultural imaginarium, tied as they are to representations of darkness, otherness, and fear. There are a number of connections between fairy tales and gothic novels, which overarchingly rely on the building of distinct “similarities” in “tone, motifs, and structure”.30 The similarities are underscored by a shared representational context, where the categories of fairy tale and Gothic are mutually influential. Both genres are concerned, for the most part, with an interest in the dark recesses of the human mind. Indeed, there are identifiable connections between well-known exponents of classic fairy tales, and important novels that belong, at least in part, to the Gothic tradition. Works such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), with its dark and often ominous aesthetics, appear to be particularly indebted to the narrative structure of the fairy tale. Snodgrass suggests that an understanding of Jane as a “Cinderella figure” aids the analysis of Brontë’s novel, where an “underprivileged orphan” is able to overcome social and domestic shackles, and achieve her own form of independence by actualising her talents.31 Allusions to Bluebeard’s castle also underscore Rochester Manor, as well as Edward Rochester himself, the man who hides a secret wife in the attic—even if, unlike Bluebeard’s wives, Bertha Rochester is not yet dead upon being discovered by Jane. Of course, the references to fairy tales are tacit rather than explicit, but they certainly provide a representational backdrop for the structural elements of Brontë’s novel, and, to some extent, also inform its resolution, as the female heroine “escapes” a fate of pain and suffering. The recognition of “folkloric strands”—as Snodgrass terms them32 —in gothic literature highlights a context of collective narrative interdependence, where ideas and concepts inform the prescription of storytelling, even if this is done in a manner that is, on the surface, not openly addressed. While Jane Eyre has often been described as a novel that is “reluctantly Gothic”, one cannot deny its propensity to slide into “Gothic elements”.33 Equally, it is difficult to overlook its conceptual similarity to, and arguably reliance on, the structure of the fairy tale, with its propensity for putting heroines in perilous situations, often in unknown settings.

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Discussing the narrative projections of nineteenth-century narratives of terror, Jason Marc Harris notes that, as both a genre and a mode, the Gothic openly utilises “motifs drawn from folklore” in an effort to provide “a symbolic matrix for tying moral instruction to psychological impressions”.34 The connection between fairy tales and the Gothic, however, is not simply to be found in the former’s influence on the latter. Indeed, the Grimms’ desire to echo elements of the then-popular Gothic genre is clearly noticeable in their widespread efforts to adapt the narrative of their fairy tales to incorporate elements of terror. The 1810 and 1812 edition of the Grimms fairy tales included a tale known as “Blubart”, a re-written version of the Bluebeard narrative. The tale was excluded from several subsequent versions of the volume, as it was deemed too similar to previous incarnations, including the one penned by Charles Perrault. In spite of the similarities that the Grimms saw in the two tales, “Blubart” deviated from Perrault’s version by proposing “explicitly Gothic” elements, with Bluebeard appearing as a king who lives in a castle, complete with a dungeon of horrors.35 In subsequent published versions of Grimms’ fairy tales, elements of “Blubart” appear to be split into the two tales of “Fitchers Vogel” (Fitcher’s Bird) and The Robber Bride. Both tales rely on the use of Gothicised tropes, which emphasise elements of abduction, seduction, and abandonment. Heroines are mistreated and exploited, and inevitably portrayed as “victims of hostile powers”.36 Here, intersecting elements connect fairy tales and the Gothic; these concern not only plot and characterisation, but also the conceptual and emotional reactions on which the narrative pivots. Considering the similarities between the two rubrics, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas suggests that fairy tales often present “a plot revolving around female identity through marriage, thereby recalling prototypical Gothic tales”.37 In similar vein, gothic narratives—especially from the early era— propose “metaphors of entrapment and literal imprisonment”, which, like traditional fairy tales, “frame the heroine’s experience through powerlessness”.38 This conceptual connection between fairy tales and early Gothic narratives speaks highly to the shared narrative expectations between the two categories, as a result of both the same historical context, and most likely, a common readership. Susanne Becker has usefully traced the narrative trajectory of the female space in gothic narratives, claiming that it “always confronted forms of enclosure”, where notions of “ideological containment” characterise the “thematic confinement of the female subject within the house”.39 One should only consider well-known tales such as “Ascheputtel” (Cinderella), “Rothkäppchen” “Little Red Cap”, and “Sneewittchen” (Little Snow White) to notice the prevalence of gothic motifs, which specifically recall clear elements of fear, imprisonment, and torture, both physical and emotional. In addition to narratives of female entrapment, a common feature identifiable across the board of both gothic literature and fairy tales is the discovery of secrets, which often puts the heroine in danger. Or, at least, complicates her relationship with other characters and situations. The discovery of “buried secrets”, whose unearthing inevitably brings to the surface a number of problems, is perhaps one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Gothic narrative. David Punter discusses how, in the Gothic set up, the story pivots on the moment when “secrets are uncovered”.40 Crumbling mansions and decaying stately homes are the ideal setting for the hiding

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of ancestral mysteries. Dread and fear surround the time before the discovery, often suggesting the presence of the supernatural element, which is momentarily taken to be the secret of the house. The evocation of spirits and the supernatural is commonly a useful narrative tool in hiding elements of a material reality that are usually much more frightening. Old family secrets, from inopportune inheritances to problematic marriages and illegitimate births, are staples of the Gothic narrative, especially as they appear in novels from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In examples from this time, which often belong to the representational category of the “female Gothic”, heroines are placed in peril by discovering the dark deeds and secrets of dissolute men.41 This narrative set up is indeed similar to the presentation of classic fairy tales, especially as relayed by the Grimms. The classic fairy tale certainly makes a virtue of providing two important intersecting elements, on which the narrative pivots: on the one hand, we have the presence of a strange house, shrouded in mystery and inevitably hiding dangerous secrets; on the other hand, the protagonists are often proposed as either young women or children, who inevitably—and often forcefully—enter the mysterious building, only to discover the secrets it was so desperately trying to hide. Examples relying on this set up are abundant, both in the Grimms’ catalogue, and in other examples—previously penned, for instance, by Perrault—which the Grimms themselves were known to have collected and adapted for their volume. Variations on the theme exist, of course, but the primary combination of house and perilous discoveries remains an identifiable constant. For instance, in “Little Red Cap”, the titular character enters her grandmother’s house, only to discover that the Wolf has eaten the old lady and is impersonating her, with the intent of eating the little girl as well. A notably Gothic addition by the Grimms can be found in Little Red Cap’s description of her grandmother’ house as “strange”, as she declares to feel unusually “frightened” by the space.42 Soon after, she discovers the “secret” of the house, as the concealed Wolf’s presence is revealed. The spookiness of the grandmother’s house, while momentarily suggestive of the supernatural, is promptly connected to the very tangible presence of the Wolf, whose greed and uncontrollable hunger are then appropriately punished with death by the heroic Huntsman. A focus on the past, and its resurging secrets, appears to be a common denominator of both gothic literature and fairy tales. Ancestral locations define the narrative set up of both the Grimms’ work and many Gothic novels from the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. Fairy tales purposely locate themselves in both far away lands and divergent historical periods, which inevitably transport the reader—likely, a child—away from the present and into a different narrative timeline. Expressions such as “There was once”, “In old times”, and “Once upon a time” proliferate at the beginning of the Grimms’ fairy tales, immediately setting the context for the narrative as belonging to the past. The choice to begin fairy tales in this fashion is not simply a stylistic one; although, of course, many readers around the world will have come to associate this kind of beginning as one of the definitive storytelling devices for this genre. Indeed, the use of expressions that move the reader into a distant past engage with a spatio-temporal relocation, which inevitably calls for a shift in perspective and what is known to be common and true. Bruno Bettelheim suggests that “the

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deliberate vagueness in the beginning of fairy tales symbolises that we are leaving the concrete world of ordinary reality”.43 The old castles, dark forests and locked rooms of fairy tales, all belonging to a past long ago, suggest that “something hidden will be revealed”, simultaneously implying that we are going to be learning about “archaic events”.44 The fairy tale’s location in the past provides a useful exploration of logic and reason for the child reader, tacitly engaging with both anxiety and hope, while also providing an unconscious escape into an unknown set up. The fairy tale is not bound to any specific time or place, just as it is not directed at the experience of one particular child reader. Bettelheim further argues that “the strange, most ancient, most distant, and at the same time most familiar locations”, which the fairy tales proposes, “suggest a voyage” into the “interior […] realms of unawareness”.45 Bettelheim’s identification of an existing clash between the familiar and the unfamiliar also points the fairy tales in the direction of the uncanny, as the narrative incorporates locations and actions which, while undoubtedly belonging to the realm of the imagination, also maintain a firm hold in the real world. The “feeling of uncanniness” in fairy tales firmly arises from the experience of “something strange” in an otherwise well-known situation.46 The fairy tale can, to some extent, be applied to a variety of contexts, as the sequence of events it presents can be transported from the past into the subconscious context of readers in the present. The evocation of a historically divergent time brings with it the possibility of a clash between reality and the fantastical, which the fairy tale commonly realises, and employs as part of the generation of both fear and wonder. In a similar vein, the gothic narrative most often relies on both a fascination and engagement with an unknown sense of antiquity. The latter is materialised and evoked by the presence of ancient castles, ruins, manors, and dark forests In this, the clash between the past and the present is at the heart of the Gothic experience, where both terror and awe play an essential part. The play with the unknown is central to the construction of Gothic atmospheres, where a challenged logic and the suggestive presence of the supernatural find fertile ground. A notable nineteenthcentury example here can be found in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), where Castle Dracula is the depository of old secrets and horrors, which easily generate fears in the contemporary character, as well as the reader. The novel, of course, is interspersed with anxieties concerning the cultural changes of late Victorian society, which are embodied in both the Count and his foreign, ancestral home. Here one can see how the Gothic resonates with “the terrors of the past”, just as it uncovers the “anxieties and fears” concerning the present.47 This is, arguably, one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Gothic narrative, where the use of an often-unknown location provides an ideal setting for the discovery of the horrors of antiquity, in a fashion that is evocative of the revulsions of the present. On the surface, Gothic novels present no explicit evocation of the fairy tale narrative, but their manners of both representation and storytelling are inevitably entangled with tropes and motifs that are sited in the realm of the unconscious. These play on the materialisation of cultural anxieties. Whether or not connected to the call of the supernatural and the physical manifestation of the monster, these anxieties leave no doubt to their conceptual debt to examples of early nineteenth-century psycho-social narratives of the fantastic, which the Grimms’ fairy tales embody and represent.

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Fear is, arguably, a presence that runs through both fairy tales and the Gothic. It lies at the centre of constructing relationships between characters, and often frames the heroine’s experience at the hands of a dangerous and scheming older man, who is inevitably relayed as “the villain”. Villains and monsters are an essential part of the fairy tale narrative. According to Carol Coates, fairy tales are important to children’s psychological development because they “provide concrete images of villains and monsters on which to project undirected anxieties and fears”.48 That projection allows the “villains”—as metaphorical counterparts of evil—to be easily dispatched, so that the child can hope for a happy ending whenever trials are overcome. While a number of exceptions can be found, the majority of the Grimms’ fairy tales hold true to the idea that villains are punished and heroes and heroines rewarded. This narrative trajectory is overall in keeping with the pedagogical aims that the fairy tale subscribes to. Indeed, in the fairy tale, anxieties and fears are “transposed” into a fantastical world, where they become abstract elements that a child can then apply to multiple scenarios.49 As they were collected as an educational tool, aimed at middleclass children, fairly tales maintain an overcharging moralistic nature, which often overcomes the presence of horrific events in order to establish the mantra that good should constantly be favoured, and dark deeds will always end in tragedy. In general, the Grimm Brothers show “a predilection” for collecting tales that focus on the cooperation between close family members, as well as humans and animals, in effort to “overcome evil”.50 Of course, the notion of evil is a complicated subject, which is bound to generate a number of critical discussions. Nonetheless, as far as the Grimms’ fairy tales are concerned, evil is a tangible presence, which can be easily found in the actions of the designated villains. Fairy tales are very strict in drawing a line between heroes and villains, and leave no doubt to the virtue of the former, and the wickedness of the latter. The Gothic narrative, on the other hand, is less cemented in its representation of villainy, and often lacks clear and overarching distinctions between good and evil. One must only think of characters such as Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1947), whose tragic life story profoundly clashes with his distinctly wicked actions later in life. The dichotomy of good and evil is evoked, but not reinforced, as the story eventually lacks the strictly defined parameters of hero and villain, which fairy tales would pivot on. Polarisations of good and evil are certainly “rife” in the Gothic tale, but often only so “that their seeming oppositions with each other can be questioned, or broken down”.51 Unlike the majority of Gothic narratives, fairy tales offer a clear resolution, by punishing villainy and restoring order. All the same, one cannot fail to notice the “interrelationship with [the] Gothic”, as cycles of “prohibitions and transgression” colour the experiences of the characters, in a “labyrinth of mistrust and deviousness”.52 The undercurrents of the Gothic are clearly entrenched in the 1857 edition of the Grimms’ tales, as the narrative continues to pivot on the representation of what is both fearful and desirable, and the exploration of transgressive and excessive desires, from the common grounds of monetary greed to the unthinkable inclusion of cannibalism. Terror is an often-unaddressed staple of the narrative in fairy tales, and the Grimms took full advantage of it in their revised narratives. In spite of this, however, it is perhaps in the representation of the dichotomy of good and evil that fairy tale distinctly diverge from the Gothic

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mode and its literary representations. Villains in fairy tales firmly obey the cultural polarisations over behaviour that go hand in hand with imparting lessons of wisdom to children. As far as the Grimms’ classic fairy tales are concerned, the re-discovery and reinclusion of Gothic elements within the interpretative frame allows for the identification of shared aims and cultural echoes as part of the evolving literary context of the nineteenth century. Tracing elements of terror within the Grimms’ fairy tales brings to the surface the impact of the Gothic narrative across the literary board. Incorporating the motifs, tropes, and narrative system of the Gothic, the Grimms’ fairy tales were able to not only capture the expectations of a larger reading public, but also allowed the specific child reader to identify “fearfully but pleasurably with vulnerable interlopers”.53 In turn, and considered in conjunction with the set up of the fairy tale, the Gothic emerges as a profoundly multi-directional mode, which was able to develop and adapt in accord with broader cultural and historical currents. The intersection of the mode with fairy tales contexts exposes how the Gothic “gives form to amorphous fears and impulses”, originating from both the author’s unconscious and “the stuff of myth, folklore, […] and romance”.54 Similarly, and through its interaction with terror, the fairy tale becomes visible as a multi-faceted literary category, which owes its conception and eventual success not only to the enduring appeal of folklore, but also to the transformative impact of popular genres, with which it shared a common historical, social, and cultural context. In the evolving narrative of the Grimms’ stories, the educational aims of the fairy tale are joined with the atmospheres and emotions of Gothic forms, exposing how no category, whether literary or folkloristic, can ever be considered as a stand-alone entity, and is continuously indebted to the cultural currents that informed its creation. The juxtaposition of the Gothic and fairy tales reveals the importance of terror as a storytelling device, and emphasises its creative intersections in a context where folklore, pedagogy, entertainment, and fear collide and merge. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Joseph Abbruscato, “Introduction: The State of Modern Fairy Tales”, in The Gothic Fairy Tale in Young Adult Literature: Essays on Stories from Grimm to Gaiman, edited by Joseph Abbruscato and Tanya Jones (Jefferson, McFarland, 2014), 6. Lucy Armitt, “Gothic Fairy-Tale”, in The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basinsgtoke, Palgrave, 2009), 135. Jack Zipes, “Introduction”, in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, edited by Jack Zipes (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015), xvii. Daniel P. Compora, “Gothic Imaginings: Folkloric Roots”, in The Gothic Tradition in Supernatural: Essays on the Television Series, edited by Melissa Edmundson (Jefferson, McFarland, 2016), 85. See Jack Zipes, The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang (Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 2013). W.G. Kudszus, Terrors of Childhood in Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York, Peter Lang, 2005), 15.

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Hilda Davidson, Ellis Roderick, and Anna Chaudhri, “Introduction”, in A Companion to the Fairy Tale, edited by Hilda Davidson, Ellis Roderick, and Anna Chaudhri (Cambridge, Brewer, 2003), 2. See Vladimir Propp, “The Structure of Russian Fairy Tales”, in International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Davidson, Roderick, and Chaudhri, “Introduction”, 1. Ibid. Christina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 7. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1994), 24. Carol Coats, “Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic”, in The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, edited by Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats (London: Routledge, 2007), 78. Linda Kraus Worley, “The Horror! Gothic Horror Literature and Fairy Tales: The Case of ‘Der Räuberbräutigam’”. Colloquia Germanica, 42.1: 67. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (London, Routledge, 1991), 59. Mary Ellen Snodgrass, “Grimm, Jacob, and Grimm, Wilhelm”, in Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature (New York, InfoBase, 2014), 165. William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desires (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1985), 35. Worley, “The Horror!”, 69. Ibid. Ibid. Jack Zipes, “Introduction: Rediscovering the Brothers Grimm”, The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, edited by Jack Zipes (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014), xii. Snodgrass, “Grimm”, 165. Worley, “The Horror!”, 67. “The Robber Bridegroom” is catalogued as type 955, while “Bluebeard” appears as type 312. Worley, “The Horror!”, p. 75. Oliver Loo, The 1810 Grimm Manuscripts (Scotts Valley, Create Space, 2015), 417. Jack Zipes, ed., The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014), 135. Worley, “The Horror! Gothic Horror Literature and Fairy Tales”, p. 71. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales (London, Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 209. Worley, “The Horror!”, 67. Snodgrass, “Grimm”, p. 165. Ibid.

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33. Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism, and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2009), 114. 34. Jason Marc Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008), 20. 35. Patrick Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2013), 577. 36. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003), 58. 37. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Abingdon, Routledge, 2007), 160. 38. Ibid. 39. Susanne Becker, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999), 19. 40. David Punter, The Gothic Condition: Terror, History, and the Psyche (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2016), 125. 41. See Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Willkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992). 42. Zipes, ed., The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, 86. 43. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London, Penguin, 1991), 62. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 63. 46. Nicolas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003), 1. 47. Fred Botting, “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 14. 48. Carol Coats, “Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic”, 78. 49. Peter Hunt, Children’s Literature (Malden, Blackwell, 2001), 16. 50. Zipes, “Introduction: Rediscovering the Brothers Grimm”, xlii. 51. Laura Hubner, Fairytale and Gothic Horror: Uncanny Transformations in Film (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2018), 1. 52. Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective, 577. 53. Armitt, “Gothic Fairy-Tale”, 135. 54. Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York, Columbia University Press, 1979), 3.

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Bibliography Abbruscato, Joseph. 2014. “Introduction: The State of Modern Fairy Tales”. In The Gothic Fairy Tale in Young Adult Literature: Essays on Stories from Grimm to Gaiman, edited by Joseph Abbruscato and Tanya Jones, 1–10. Jefferson: McFarland. Armitt, Lucy. 2009. “Gothic Fairy-Tale”. In The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie MulveyRoberts, 135.Basinsgtoke: Palgrave. Bacchilega, Christina. 1997. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Becker, Susanne. 1999. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1991. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin. Botting, Fred. 2012. “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture”. In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 11–24. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Bridgwater, Patrick. 2013. The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Coats, Karen. 2007. “Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic”. In The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, edited by Anna Jackson, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats, 77–92. London: Routledge. Compora, Daniel P. 2016. “Gothic Imaginings: Fokloric Roots”. In The Gothic Tradition in Supernatural: Essays on the Television Series, edited by Melissa Edmundson, 75–90. Jefferson: McFarland. Day, William Patrick. 1985. In the Circles of Fear and Desires. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Davidson,Hilda, Roderick Ellis, and Anna Chaudhri. 2003. “Introduction”. In A Companion to the Fairy Tale, edited by Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson, Anna Chaudhri, 1–14. Cambridge: Brewer. Heller, Tamar. 1992. Dead Secrets: Willkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harris, Jason Marc. 2008. Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hubner, Laura. 2018. Fairytale and Gothic Horror: Uncanny Transformations in Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hunt, Peter. 2001. Children’s Literature. Malden: Blackwell. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism, and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kudszus, W.G. 2005. Terrors of Childhood in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. New York: Peter Lang. Loo, Oliver. 2015. The 1810 Grimm Manuscripts. Scotts Valley: Create Space. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. 1979. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press. Punter, David. 2016. The Gothic Condition: Terror, History, and the Psyche. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Propp, Valdimir, 1999. “The Structure of Russian Fairy Tales”. In International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes, 119–130. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. 2014. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York, InfoBase. Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. 2007. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Abingdon: Routledge. Tatar, Maria. 2003. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Warner, Marina. 1994. From the Beast to the Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage. Worley, Linda Kraus. 2009. “The Horror! Gothic Horror Literature and Fairy Tales: The Case of ‘Der Räuberbräutigam’”. Colloquia Germanica, 42.1: 67–80.

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Zipes, Jack. 1991. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. London: Routledge. ———. ed. 2013. The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing. ———. 2015. “Introduction”. In The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, edited by Jack Zipes, xv–xxxv. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Domestic Gothic Chills

Haunted Domesticity in Late-Victorian Women’s Writing Maria Giakaniki

Throughout its rich and complex history of multiple literary transformations, gothic fiction has been more and more acknowledged by contemporary criticism to be a genre closely associated not only with the exploration of the dark, irrational side of the human mind, but also the transgression of socially constructed moral codes.1 In this respect, the Gothic is usually read as a subversive genre that challenges dominant ideologies in its treatment of, say, gender roles, female repression and marginalization. Following the long tradition of proto-feminists Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose pioneering work created not only a feminist literary genealogy, but also a female reading audience of the Gothic,2 women authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed the ghost story, a popular Victorian Gothic subgenre, with the purpose of exploring socially imposed roles and gender limitations. The blooming of the Victorian supernatural tale is often attributed to a cultural conflict between the spiritual and the material world, which prompted writers of the paranormal to challenge dominant Victorian notions such as science, the Christian doctrine, Darwinism and rationalism. While Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is usually considered the most prominent of the Victorian ghost story authors, by far the most representative writers of the genre were middle-class women.3 The manner in which certain contemporary critics tend to explain the preference of Victorian female authors for ghost stories departs from the “mythology of the feminine” as inherently “intuitive and impractical”,4 giving way to more insightful interpretations that attribute women’s preoccupation with the supernatural to a need grown out of their particular social and cultural status. Indeed it seems that the realm of the supernatural offered women a sense of spiritual liberation from the constraints they experienced in real life, thus providing them with wider spaces of self-expression.5 Similarly, Victorian women, being placed in a peripheral social position, thus, not having direct access to the external world, were inevitably attracted by notions of M. Giakaniki (B) Athens, Greece © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_17

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spirituality and internalized visions.6 However, women authors, even when dealing with the supernatural, were connected to real life concerns through the imaginative and flexible qualities of the ghost story. For instance, in mid-Victorian times prominent literary figures like Elizabeth Gaskell in England and Harriet Prescott Spofford in the United States, referred to such social issues as female victimization and prejudice against women in their traditional ghostly tales. Later, in the 1880s, Margaret Oliphant and Vernon Lee created more sophisticated ghost stories, exposing complex psychological issues, and along with the subtle tales of Henry James, enriched the genre with a new perception of the supernatural: the latter, instead of being a frightening entity of the external world, signifies for internalized fears and desires that return to haunt the subject,7 making a close association with Freudian notions of the uncanny. The end of the nineteenth century launched a beyond all measure production of ghost stories, as there was an Edwardian obsession with paranormal themes which did not come to contrast with the ‘serious’ literature of the period.8 This flourishing of psychological ghost stories and weird tales at the turn of the century is usually ascribed to a deep cultural crisis similar to, but even more intense than its midVictorian equivalent: science, industrialization and materialism had reached a peak greater than ever,9 thus creating an even greater need to counterbalance them, through the irrational and the fantastic. In this respect, mainstream literature and supernatural fiction came closer than before: the dark, dreamy motifs of the emergent modernists that fathomed the obscure regions of the unconscious through the severing of rationality and linearity, were the more highly sophisticated versions of the weird stories of the same era.10 Whereas most male authors of the turn of the century Gothic as well as early twentieth century weird tales, like H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James, were regularly absorbed with fantastic realms and worlds ‘beyond’, most women’s unworldly tales approached the real world by plunging into the social and domestic realities of their time. It is mainly American authors like Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Wilkins Freeman and their lesser-known contemporaries, like Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett, who realized this combination of the ghostly and the real, ingenuously commenting upon profound social and psychological issues. Moreover, in the greatest part of the twentieth century, women’s supernatural tales from that period did not virtually exist, yet they were rediscovered in anthologies and short story collections of the last decades of that same century,11 gradually inciting the newer generations of ghost story lovers to appreciate a female or even feminist ghost story tradition; it is true that the latter has been neglected by most anthologies, which tend to include more traditional horror tales usually, though not always, by male writers. This can be attributed to more than one reasons: apart from the fact that the stories were usually written by women whose ideas challenged the dominant patriarchal culture, these were tales difficult to classify: they broke with rules, as they were neither horror nor realism. In this respect, mainstream fiction disregarded them as not serious literature, whereas horror anthologies did not consider them terrifying enough. Yet, these female authors established a new female ghost story subgenre and during the post-millennial years,

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in the context of rediscovery and reevaluation of the works of long-forgotten women authors and artists, there has been an increasing interest in women’s uncanny tales by both scholars and readers through new publications that tend to include female authors of the supernatural much more than in the past. In the late-Victorian period, dominant notions and traditional values like marriage and motherhood were under question, while female emancipation was an issue that gained more and more supporters from both sexes. Much progress had been made in order to improve the status of Victorian women, who in the previous periods were sexually, intellectually, financially and legally undermined, sometimes being considered genetically inferior12 : higher education had become more accessible to them, professions opened, while the legal status of married women had considerably improved.13 In this social context of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, women writers felt they had larger spaces of creativity, thus they could play an important role in spreading the feminist ideology.14 Though writing was considered a male territory and not an appropriate female occupation,15 it was a way for middle-class women, who were not affected by the upper-classes’ strict rules or the lower classes’ financial difficulties,16 to develop an individual identity. Thus, women in both sides of the Atlantic devoted to both realist and supernatural fiction, exploring their disruptive potential. While most feminist literature promoted the female cause on a regular basis and in a direct manner,17 the feminist sub-text of women writers’ supernatural tales is often subtler and more reserved, examining such major social issues as marriage and motherhood, often exposing contradictory values and ideas regarding the status of women of that era. Late Victorian and early twentieth-century supernatural tales by women writers largely focused on the theme of marriage, in particular white middle-class marriage, the institution that was considered indispensable in order to preserve the fabric of nineteenth-century society. As Catherine Lundie observes concerning turn of the century America, “although women had greater lifestyle options than in the previous centuries, they were still socially, economically and sexually vulnerable without husbands”,18 arguing that it was still difficult for a woman to lead a single life that would offer her more opportunities for independence and self-fulfillment. Nevertheless, this was an era that traditional female roles had started to be questioned more radically and regularly. Thus, although the vast majority of women still became wives mostly on patriarchal terms,19 and while even those that were more emancipated, once yielding to marriage, assumed more traditional roles, the institution came under constant criticism, either mild or severe, by feminist writers and activists. In this respect, many supernatural tales, whose authors were often active members of the feminist movement,20 expressed the frustration that women felt because of the distance between the idealized expectations and the actual experience of marital life21 since, in turn of the century American society, “the marriage relationship was considered the primary source of a woman’s identity”.22 Thus, the stories in question delineate the ways in which a late-Victorian woman’s status and happiness were wholly dependent on the state of her marriage and the extent to which her existence was regarded marginal outside the boundaries of marital life. These stories also demonstrate that wives led ‘apparitional lives’: according to Carpenter and Kolmar,

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the ghost is usually a metaphor for the half-restricted existence of Victorian and Edwardian middle-class women, both American and British,23 who often discovered that marital life was a source of disappointment rather than bliss. The stories presented here regarding marriage are divided into three categories that often overlap thematically: the first one refers to wives that return immediately after their death as apparitions in order to stay close to their husbands and claim love, acceptance and a better relationship; the second category includes stories in which second wives are affected by the memory of the first dead wife and the implications of this experience as to their own identity and self-esteem, while the third category refers to tales where wives deal with the prospect of widowhood. In gothic fiction, brides, fiancées and in general, women who are involved in some sort of emotional commitment, are most commonly the ones that return from the grave. They need to approach their beloved partners, usually afraid of having been forgotten, misunderstood or having been abandoned, or of having been thought to have misbehaved or of being deceitful. Some return in order to claim what, often due to misfortune, they feel they were deprived of while being still alive. From such eighteenth-century gothic ballads as “Margaret’s Ghost” by David Mallet and Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” (1797), to Poe’s “Morella” (1835) and “Ligeia” (1838), female ghosts haunt the males they were separated from, usually expecting some sort of response or vindication. In late-Victorian and early twentieth-century ghost stories about marriage, this motif gets a modern twist: the returning ghost of the wife is a metaphor not only for love that transcends boundaries but also for female communicability; moreover it is a symbol of strong emotional attachment and dependence—the wife cannot abandon the bonds of marriage even in death, as real women could not sever them in life. In this respect, Edith Nesbit’s “From the Dead” (1893) is a ghost story that exposes the fragility of nuptial happiness, by depicting the misfortunes of lack of understanding between husband and wife, as well as the disastrous effects of male vanity, narrow-mindedness and cowardice. A young bride, Ida Helmont, is the victim of a misunderstanding that occurred because of her passionate love for her husband, Arthur, who is the narrator. The latter, in a theatrical moment of cruelty and wounded pride, denounces his wife, thus fostering feelings of false self-assertion and vanity: “I was longing for her to weep and fall at my feet”.24 Ida dies slowly out of sorrow but, responding to Arthur’s wish, she returns immediately after her death. Though he is in love with her, Arthur will fail to accept her back, expressing a momentary yet violent reaction of fear which drives the ghostly wife away, thus denouncing her for a second time through his half-heartedness. Although the female is able to transcend the boundaries between life and death, mortality and immortality and return for love, the male, in this case, cannot accomplish the transcendence that is demanded on his part, by failing to overcome his fear of the supernatural. Moreover, the story underlines the despair of the female outside the protective environment of romanticized marital love. The young bride of the story is a victim of her own feminine nature, since after being emotionally wounded she dies in childbirth, away from her family. When her husband vividly expresses his horror and his incapability to accept her back, she ‘dies’ again. The difference between the passionate, romantic days of

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the honeymoon and the endless misery that soon followed, denotes that love and marriage can offer no more than momentary happiness which can be destroyed by equally momentous false actions. As in Edith Nesbit’s tale the heroine responded to her husband’s wish and returned from the grave, motivated by feelings of powerful emotional attachment, similarly, in Mary Austin’s “The Readjustment” (1908) the female ghost lingers close to her husband, looking silently for a last chance to communicate, to demand a more satisfactory marital relationship even posthumously, “seeking a deeper meaning to the emotionally stunted life they had together”.25 Yet, the husband will be incapable of granting this dumb yet persistent request. Emma Jossylin, the dead wife, is special, superior as to personality and character to the average woman, in contrast with her husband’s “insuperable commonness”.26 She seems to have desired more from her marriage but her husband was satisfied with less: he was a good provider, but a man that “sometimes gets so worn out with feelings, he doesn’t have them any more…”.27 The story demonstrates the conventionality of stereotypical male attitude, the weakness, lack of passion and submission into a routine that gradually renders the relationship a simple co-existence. Sim Jossylin is not the man who would dare to escape with Emma from the dull spirit of the place they lived. He admits the failure of their marriage but is not willing to attempt to make up for the lost time. He is not able to bridge the gap of communication: he cannot live up to his wife’s expectations. Yet, as Emma’s “ghost has carried over into death the distress and dissatisfaction that the woman experienced in life”,28 she seems to express a kind of mute despair, continuing to haunt their house until a village woman undertakes the task to ‘exorcise’ her without having satisfied any of her demands. The author underlines that “marriage, even one of such unequal partners, involves a torturous commitment”29 which transcends even death. Nevertheless, this is done only from the wife’s part as her husband, after her having been sent away, will now be in peace and plunge into his daily routine, as “he had eaten his sorrow, and that was the end of it – as it is with men…”.30 Austin’s feminist overtones seem to reach an overgeneralization about male and female behaviour—yet, notwithstanding social progress, this was still an era of female repression and mostly due to socially imposed roles, the two sexes often could not communicate satisfactorily and succumbed to stereotypical behaviour, something which has not been eclipsed even in contemporary western societies. Nesbit’s and Austin’s tales discussed above, provide the reader with two different cases of women who feel they love their husband, and return from the realm of death with certain expectations from them. Nevertheless, the latter are not granted and wives have to adjust to the severing of the marital bond which compromises their heavenly union with their supposed soul mates. Moreover, as Rosemary Jackson insight fully observes, female apparitions in these tales challenge a culture that “metaphorically places women on the side of death and insubstantiality…”.31 In this respect, women’s ghostliness implies the ‘anemic’ existence and marginality of women in real life. During the Victorian and post-Victorian eras, it was very common to be a second wife to a widower due to high female mortality brought about by disease and complications from childbirth.32 The stories in this second category, although referring to

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the influential presence of the dead wife on her successor, lay more emphasis on the second wife’s (threatened) subjectivity and the ways she deals with her dead ‘rival’. Thus, in most of these stories the first wife is portrayed through the new bride’s perspective, while the former often incites the latter’s alternate feelings of competitiveness and admiration. Moreover, there is also a degree of mirroring between the two wives, since the new bride often has similar marital experiences with her predecessor. In this respect, Mary Heaton Vorse’s “The Second Wife” (1912) and Mrs Wilson Woodrow’s “The Secret Chambers” (1909) both depict a kind of ‘reincarnation’ of the first wife through the form of her successor, stressing the mutual experiences of married women. The two tales denote that all wives inevitably subject to certain gender-orientated stereotypes, like ‘the nervous female’ or ‘the mad woman’, constructions of patriarchy, yet reinvented and put under scrutiny by gothic traditions. In Mary Heaton Vorse’s story, the second wife “finds her personality invaded by that of the first wife”.33 Beata, a widower’s new bride, gradually starts to repeat her predecessor’s behaviour by experiencing the same emotions and reactions the latter had before her death, in a way as if “her whole personality had been invaded by an emotion foreign to her own temperament…”.34 Beata’s husband considers her mentally unstable whenever she expresses deep or immoderate emotions, thus Beata, after living through Alène’s emotions, can understand the latter’s suffering for having been misunderstood and considered ill for the same exact reason.35 Yet the truth is different: Alène had got worse not only because of her unconventional temperament but also as she felt her husband was falling in love with her more ordinary friend, Beata. Thus when Beata searches for the guilty secret that will be the answer to the riddle, she finds her own letters in her husband’s drawer. In the end, the message is clear: Beata could be in Alène’s place and vice versa. Despite their differences, they are both physically and emotionally frail females who might lose control, either suffocating in the role of the dependent part, or fearing a husband’s (supposed) betrayal. These are women that are not only prey to the whirlwind of jealousy and suspicion, but also condemned to see their relationship to their husband falling apart, since an “awful something… was crawling upon them like some dark spiritual tide…”.36 Marriage is a ‘haunted’ space itself, where incomplete identities and rational powers are jeopardized even further by women’s own obsessions that take unearthly forms. The story is also a critique for the tendency to consider ill those women that cannot conform to the perfect wife persona, by ascribing to them one more feminine stereotype, that of the female hysteric. Similarly, in “The Secret Chambers” the second wife is portrayed as a serene, moderate character in opposition to the first wife who is very beautiful, endowed with a magnetic personality. The dead Adèle becomes Sylvia’s obsession, making her yearn for “a more thrilling and intense life”,37 while at the same time her artist husband becomes isolated and absorbed into his work, excluding her from the ‘secret chambers’ of his soul. The moment of complete identification with Adèle’s fiery temperament is when Sylvia can no longer play the role of the patient, passive spouse and adapts the first wife’s conduct, who was more demanding, having a very powerful will, a traditionally masculine trait. Sylvia will nearly reenact the

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same scene during which Adèle committed suicide driven by her angry despair due to Arnold’s constant neglect. The latter has the ability to build his own status and identity through his personal vision: he is dedicated to art. Yet Adèle, notwithstanding her beauty and her qualities, lacked personal goals. Her happiness was mainly, if not wholly, dependent on the amount and quality of time her husband devoted to her. Thus, was not Adèle always at the mercy of her own subordinate position as a wife, despite her ‘rebellion’? Her reaction is self-destructive, for the females of the story there is no alternative way of living: either a figurative death, meaning Sylvia’s selfsacrifice—which is glorified by Arnold who ascribes to her the traits of an angel—or madness and suicide. Arnold is determined to channel all his passion to his painting, while “Love” is ironically the title of his best work, the one Adèle tears into pieces. Yet, Sylvia’s describing him as “this stranger with whom she dwelt”38 highlights the lack of real communication between husband and wife, placing the latter in a subordinate role. The wives in the story do not compete so much with each other as with their husband’s one real passion: his art, that clothes his selfishness. The two stories share the double-sided depiction of female sexuality which nevertheless reaches mutuality as the identification between the apparently opposite characters is underlined. The women of the tales discussed above, are “bifurcated into categories of the demonic and the divine”39 —with the demonic traits being attributed to the dead wife. This gothic tradition of presenting the first (dead) wife as fascinating but dangerous, while the second wife is close to an angelic creature, is long enough: from classic nineteenth- century vampire story “Wake Not the Dead” and Poe’s “Ligeia”, to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), it reflects a historical habit of attributing to females contradictory qualities.40 The tales present female rivalry and feminine identities as only half-formed, with women’s happiness and safety being always at stake. Moreover, marriage is presented as the uncanny field of battle and rivalry between different types of females, either real or imaginary, with the male being the precious prize, within the limits of a “culture that recognizes women only in their relationship to men”.41 In this respect, the stories underline the precariousness of female status within the context of marriage and women’s inability to prosper and thrive in any other manner than being closely related to the husband figure. The portrait of the inconsolable Victorian mourning wife as it is imprinted on contemporary minds is reflected in “The Prayer” (1895) by Violet Hunt, a tale in which the possibility of female widowhood is equated with the irreversible loss of love and happiness. Yet, the modern English ghost story seems to strongly challenge this notion42 ; indeed there are tales of this period depicting an alternative version of widowhood, or at least the desire for it, as is Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” (1897). Moreover, in contrast with male widowhood where men seem to recover relatively soon from their first wife’s loss, and, though still haunted to a certain degree by the past, remarry and continue their lives, female widowhood is depicted as a prospect that is very difficult to cope with, since women are totally dependent on their partners either financially or emotionally. In this respect, the two stories also endeavour to articulate a social critique on the consequences of female widowhood, and how they might shape a woman’s life, but also to the fact that women cannot be liberated from

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marriage either in death or in life due to social conventions and different types of dependence to their husbands. The heroine in Hunt’s “The Prayer” wishes for her husband’s return from the dead a few minutes after he passes away, a desire that is fulfilled by some supernatural agency. Nonetheless, Alice’s life will not be the same ever again since her husband, having indeed returned from the other world after just having crossed its threshold, exhibits the behaviour and the emotions of a living-dead person, yearning to return where he feels he really belongs. In this respect, the pledge of eternal love was not realized, demonstrating that one’s own needs surpass the power of romantic bonds. Moreover, due to her husband’s coldness and lack of human feelings, Alice becomes a pale and absent woman, gradually turning into a ‘widow’ spiritually and emotionally. Whereas she had claimed she “can’t stay behind”43 after Edward’s physical death, he, instead, will follow his own course, paying importance to personal needs rather than the marital tie. The male here is not as romantically rebellious as the female. Instead, he ‘conforms’ to natural laws. Moreover, through the supernatural, the husband’s emotional death and alienation become a powerful metaphor for the irreversible erosion of marital feelings of affection. Edward’s saying “There is all the world between us!”44 on a deeper level signifies for the estrangement between husband and wife that is not ‘temporal’: couples often consist of two apparently united parts that, as time goes by, become further and further apart. Indeed, the two of them act as if they had once been in love but that has ended long ago: “at the time I cared for you so much that I should have had to kill myself”45 says Alice. Then she opted to preserve a romantic ideal that was soon to be shuttered, in a tale where the unearthly element is a pretext to explore the disenchanting reality of marital life. Furthermore, the husband’s death also signals for the loss of sexual life: it is not just the female spiritualized love and the maternal impulse that urged the heroine to cling to her partner: Alice feels a strong sensual desire for dead Edward urging him to ‘love’ her if he can. If a future sexual life outside marital boundaries for a widow was seldom feasible in those times, discouraged by the notions of female loyalty and monogamy, women like Alice would most probably follow an asexual life. Whereas in the previous story the loss of the husband is equated with the deprival of everything that was meaningful and taken for granted, in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, which is not a tale of the supernatural yet it is included here due to the motif of false ‘death’ and the appearance of a living ‘ghost’ which causes the actual death of the protagonist, marital loss awakens the overpowering desire for a new life and an alternative way of existence. Louise becomes widow for an hour, during which after the first outburst of sorrow, she experiences a unique sensation of freedom and hope for the future, a “monstrous joy”.46 After years of subtle repression in a civilized co-existence with her husband, since she “would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death”,47 not only does she not deplore her marriage’s violent dissolution but also expresses no desire for a different, possibly more passionate attachment. Instead, she exalts in the idea of cultivating her own individuality, envisioning years that would belong exclusively to her. In her inner thoughts Louise half-heartedly admits that “she had loved him – sometimes”,48 yet that was insignificant compared to “this possession of self-assertion… the strongest

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impulse of her being!”,49 demonstrating the author’s beliefs about the preciousness of individuality which is paralleled to a powerful instinct. The heroine secretly yearned to dissolve the bonds that kept her restricted and confined for years and only for an hour she feels the lost vital energy coming back to her, in a story where the wife does not see her marital life as a refuge but more as a prison, breaking a long tradition of female romanticized views about love and marriage. Kate Chopin makes an unconventional portrait of a married woman, demystifying the emotional, romantic and selfless female stereotype of her era, depicting marriage as a realm where both men and women “impose a private will upon a fellow creature…”50 and widowhood as a woman’s release from the binding ties of domesticity. Kate Chopin’s anti-conformist attitude regarding issues like female submission and independence seems to pervade most of her fiction.51 Louise Mallard had been the ‘ghost’ all along, symbolically killed once again by her husband’s unexpected appearance in the end, in a story that shows late nineteenth-century women’s tendency to shift from familial obligations to individual needs.52 However, Louise’s dream of liberty and independence, sinful in its content, is never realized. This is a tale that not only criticizes female subordination in marriage, but even considers it as an institution that renders the domestic sphere an invisible prison for everybody encircled by it. With these two stories, Hunt and Chopin depict female widowhood by describing two different women’s reactions concerning their husband’s death. In “The Prayer”, the author pictures female vulnerability and emotional exaggeration that derive not only from the pain due to the loss of a beloved husband, but also the loss of a whole identity and role, revealing lack of self-assertion and independence. Yet, there is also another thought-provoking aspect expressed in Chopin’s tale: the ‘death’ of the husband (which signals for the death of marital limitations) becoming a liberating force, thus boldly rendering widowhood, not a disaster as it is often considered by society, but a means to a new life. All the aforementioned stories focusing on marriage, though of gothic origin, are modern in their realization: the heroines are not prey to some relentless and violent patriarchal power like in the early gothic novels, but subject to the disadvantages of their social position and their dependence on their own husbands with whom they usually have a civilized relationship, thus reflecting the middle-class reality of their era. The women of the stories as well as their authors’ attitudes differ: most of the heroines of these tales consciously comply with conventional femininity—and this highlights that even in the twentieth century such Victorian female traits were ever-present. Furthermore, the stories are written by women writers often engaged in the feminist movement of their era; sometimes these authors present things almost exclusively from the ‘female’ point of view, even depicting men as one-sided characters. Nevertheless, the general purpose of these women writers is not to imply that men are inherently flawed but that women should be released from their subordinate position of being dependent parts and become more realistic in their expectations.53 Moreover, the stories, by focusing on the various aspects of the theme of marriage, are often critical of the socially imposed roles to both women and men, at the same time emphasizing on female ghostliness “as a parable of social alienation” where women “occupy a position similar to that of a living dead…”,54 or become rivals in order to

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claim the love of men and the status quo that this is accompanied by. Similarly, death is a means to escape and comes as a kind of redemption for women—there is rarely freedom and individuality in the mortal realm for them, mostly due to “the destructive nature of marriage on patriarchal terms…”55 which was still very prevalent at the turn of the century. Apart from marriage, motherhood is also a recurrent theme of the ghost story genre, almost as much as marriage, being in close linkage with real life concerns of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. The broad use of contraception, in particular among educated middle-class women, at the end of the nineteenth century, had offered wives considerable control over their body, enabling them to express more freely their sexuality. Thus women, giving birth more rarely than in the previous decades, were less vulnerable to the afflictions and the social limitations of motherhood.56 At the same time, education and job opportunities had offered an alternative identity apart from that of the housewife and mother. However, even the late-Victorian feminists’ attitude was often contradictory regarding motherhood: while childbirth filled many of them with horror, others regarded it as a refuge from the misfortunes of patriarchy.57 This confusion is reflected in women’s supernatural stories too. In general, the ideal of the mother as a self-sacrificial figure was still very prominent58 and women, especially when lacking social status and financial means, could be drained from their own life in order to support their children. In this respect, women often encountered the dilemma of either marrying and having children or pursuing personal goals—as it still happens nowadays, yet to a lesser extent. However, they often realized what it means to be a mother when they had already made that choice. The issue of class is important as it defines different circumstances for each social layer and the ways in which a woman perceives the advantages or disadvantages of becoming a mother. However, the stories presented here regarding motherhood demonstrate how women of different classes are torn between maternity and selfhood, by exposing the socially imposed definition of all women as caregivers,59 and by depicting the conflict between the maternal impulse and individual needs, while also certain tales portray women that do not at all conform to the stereotypes of appropriate motherhood. Moreover, the stories present the misfortunes of childhood, as children were very often victims either of their own family or society on the whole, having “even less domestic power than women”60 and how orphanage was a prominent issue that reflected high mortality rates. Several supernatural stories of that period portray wandering ghost-children in search of a (substitute) mother, rendering “childhood, previously thought of as a safe haven, the source of fear and terror”.61 Mary Wilkins Freeman’s little forlorn girls tales are the most representative stories of this type, as they depict the misery of abandoned childhood as well as the female fear but also yearning for maternity, by delineating the bitter experiences of “women who have lost children of their own or childless women with strong maternal feelings”.62 In this respect, “The Wind in the Rose Bush” (1902) is a tale about the regrets of spinsterhood and childlessness unfolded through a lower middle-class woman’s tragic discovery of her orphaned niece being dead when she actually decided she could take care of her as if she had been her own daughter. Rebecca’s maternal instincts “have been repressed but now

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emerge suddenly”63 and are expressed in the way she unconsciously held her shawl “as if it had been a child”,64 while during her short co-habitation with her niece’s stepmother she experiences not only concern about the child but also an antagonistic feeling towards the other woman; the latter will be revealed to be responsible of Agnes’s death due to her neglecting her during an illness that was fatal. The ghost in its actual form remains invisible and only expresses its presence through unexplained phenomena: a passing shadow, a rose in the garden that moves even though there is no wind and the mysterious piano sounds at night are all traditional gothic devices with the purpose of creating a ghostly atmosphere. Yet on an allegorical level they are also echoes of Rebecca’s subconscious desire of a child of her own: Rebecca sees Agnes everywhere as she represents her own fantasy that remained unfulfilled. Her only chance of being a mother, even a surrogate one, is irrevocably lost. In “The Little Maid at the Door” (1892), Freeman describes the case of a woman that has lost her own child, thus she is deeply sympathizing with an abandoned little girl that reminds her of her own deceased daughter. At the beginning of the tale, which is set in Salem during the witch hunt era, a magistrate’s wife named Ann Bayley, while in a journey, perceives the crying little Abigail, who is abandoned in her family house after all its members were arrested for witchcraft. Ann’s attention is drawn to the girl while her husband’s mind is seized by different images. Although Ann Bayley is the wife of a magistrate, thus accomplice to the girl’s fate, her maternal instincts are stimulated by the pitiful state of the frightened child, thus she offers momentary nurturing and solace, yet she is abandoning her again: Ann is a woman in Puritan society65 so the limitations as to what she can do to react are great. At the same time, she is the guilty projection of the adult Freeman who suppressed her maternal feelings to lead what her society considered to be a selfish life.66 Ann’s “delusive final vision of the happy, well-fed child”67 is a way of appeasing her guilty conscience: “The roses are in her cheeks, and they have combed her yellow hair, and put a clean white gown on her”68 she describes to her husband, yet he does not experience the same vision, since the true fate of Abigail was different. Moreover, Freeman being “sensitive to children’s inner worlds”69 describes the lonely traumatic experience of the little girl, by drawing a parallel between her literal starvation and her metaphorical craving for love.70 These tales depict Freeman’s personal anxieties as the figure of the abandoned little girl could be her as well as her sister,71 who had died prematurely. More importantly, the author expresses the dilemma of her own generation’s educated middle-class women concerning the conflict between motherhood and the accomplishment of personal goals, an issue that was not that prominent in earlier Victorian times. In another common type of supernatural stories about motherhood, a woman usually cannot find peace beyond the realm of mortality until she secures her child with somebody that will undertake the responsibility for it. These ghost-mothers are earthbound due to their love and sense of duty towards their living children. In this respect, “the woman is forced by the very fact of her motherhood to return from the beyond in order to protect or make provision for the child…”.72 In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s “The Substitute” (1914), one of the multiple supernatural tales written by women writers that express the double-edged significance of maternity,

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a lower middle-class spinster receives the visit of her dead friend, who urges her to take charge of her two children. In their discussion, they refer to the advantages and disadvantages of different female choices concerning motherhood and each of the two women has her own regrets according her personal experience: While Miss Marston ponders on the significance of her self-conscious choice not to get married ten years before, her ghostly friend keeps coming in her mind, the symbol of a lost opportunity to have a family and children of her own. Yet, the apparition’s feelings are revealing: she is both literally and metaphorically a living-dead, disclosing that she “worked herself to death”,73 in order to support financially her children. “Anything less than the best wouldn’t’ t do”74 she claims reflecting the era’s beliefs about proper motherhood whose basic trait is self-sacrifice, in a society that renders women sources of nurturing and support with no substance of their own, drained of all life forces. The story also stresses mutuality, solidarity and friendship between women, as “one can replace the other”75 in a crucial moment. This is “a sad tale of women’ s limited choices”,76 showing females being torn between marriage and personal freedom, exposing social inequities due to gender. Another ghost story that relates a mother’s return from the grave in order to ensure her child’s well-being is “The Little Gray Ghost” (1912) by Cornelia Comer. In this tale, the person that is asked to take responsibility of the child is a man of Scottish origin named Carruthers. The latter is persecuted by the ghost of a young woman who committed suicide after having murdered her rival in a fight, the woman that had taken her husband and her child away from her. Kitty Dundas’s “life was mortgaged to the child”77 so she was continuously after Carruthers, her Chosen one, haunting him persistently, until he gave into her pleading request to take the child to his wife and raise it as his own. Carruthers “through selfishness, stubbornness and racism, refuses”78 until he becomes fully conscious of the gravity and significance of Kitty’s mission. Motherhood is presented as a tormenting commitment, an everlasting bond, an overwhelming connection that transcends boundaries in a most absolute way: “If you love enough or hate enough it will keep you alive anywhere – even in a world of shades…”,79 claims the ghost-mother. In this respect, a mother returning from the underworld will take no refusal for an answer to her request, as it is usually the case with the return of a wife. For the tie between mother and child is considered more sacred than the one between husband and wife: Kitty has let her traitor husband go, but not her daughter. The story belongs to the narratives that present motherhood as “a woman’s most sacred calling”.80 The stories discussed above manifest how “the mother-child bond exerts a stranglehold from beyond the grave…”81 as the mothers cannot rest in peace until their children find a parental substitute. Over-sentimental and sometimes melodramatic, these tales demonstrate the great necessity for mothers to defy all obstacles in order to fulfill their role, inevitably reproducing gender stereotypes. However, even though these tales celebrate maternity, they also “expose the cultural conventions that transform biology into necessity”82 Yet, the stories are not that critical as to the society’s forcing specific gender-constructed identities upon women: according to turn of the century beliefs, maternity was still considered a mostly sacred vocation by most people.83

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Since maternity was a quasi-sacred idea, it was difficult for women writers to depict females that did not conform to the motherly stereotypes imposed, or women that violated the traditional role of the mother, by exhibiting a conduct that deviated from what was regarded as normal and acceptable. As Catherine Lundie claims, “It was hard to question the sacred duty”,84 since it was considered natural to value the maternal instinct as the strongest element within female mentality, while women whose maternal faculties were overshadowed by other features were often regarded as unnatural. The natural, pure woman, according to some nineteenth-century intellectuals could only embrace attitudes that were not foreign to her nature.85 Nonetheless, some authors of the turn of the century portrayed women that were either not fit to be mothers, could not respond to the role for various reasons, or did not have the socially accepted behaviour of a ‘proper’ motherly figure. May Sinclair, in “The Intercessor” (1911), unfolds the heartbreaking tale of an unresolved mother–child relationship, while also creating a subversive female portrait through the opposition of maternity and female sexuality. The story concerns a lower-class female who is incapable of functioning as a ‘true’ mother, since her desires as a woman exceed her maternal instincts; or, better, she cannot function as a mother while she is sexually frustrated. By rejecting her role as proper nurturer, she is defying the entire ideology of inherent maternal tenderness in women, especially when this is presented as the most prevalent female trait. Mrs Falshaw seems to understand from her personal experience that a woman’s needs cannot be fulfilled by motherhood and that the first is a prerequisite for the second, although her thoughts would be expressed in a more sophisticated manner, if she was an educated middleclass wife: “E thinks child-bearing’s the only cure for all a woman’s suffering…”.86 However, for a woman like her, motherhood cannot cover for different emotional needs. Furthermore it cannot bring happiness by its own. The author portrays Mrs Falshaw as a rough yet unhappy woman, whose apathetic conduct towards her child renders her animalistic, exhibiting a behaviour in which the mother’s tenderness and love are overwhelmed by the mistress’s bitterness and sorrow. She cannot conform to the notion that the child should be enough for her happiness and through her ‘monstrosity’—though the author does not condemn her but her actions—she challenges her environment’s belief that normal women “derive personal fulfillment from care-giving”.87 The short story “An Unnatural Mother” (1895) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is not a tale of the uncanny, yet it is distinguished by certain gothic sensibilities concerning gender and marginalization: its heroine, Esther, orphaned from her mother and raised by her unconventional father, grows up like a boy or, more accurately, as a sexless creature, regarded as a sort of a ‘freak’ from the small society of the village who deemed her a neglected child. Her tale is narrated by a company of women many years later, who portray her as a representative case of ‘unnatural mother’. Esther maintained a communal attitude towards her fellow citizens, which was based on altruism, common concern and solidarity, since during the flood that threatened with disaster the whole village, she preferred to run and warn the villagers than to rash for her own child first. This behaviour was not understood by the women of the village, who claimed that “A mother’s duty is to her own child!”88 even though

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Esther’s reaction which was “against nature”89 saved the entire community. Esther’s conduct reveals a mentality that exceeds the limits of common motherhood—yet the narrow-mindedness of the women of the village does not allow them to perceive what the author presents as Esther’s higher morality. Gilman criticizes the “true woman syndrome”,90 expressing her own philosophy of “socialized motherhood”,91 whose functioning is not limited to the typical nineteenth-century nuclear family. In this respect, women authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century supernatural fiction approached the theme of motherhood in different, often contradictory, ways. Fathers and paternal figures in general, unlike husbands in the stories regarding marriage, are almost excluded in the tales about motherhood, where very few men are involved. In the domestic sphere children and mothers were inevitably closer to one another as the husband/father traditionally spent less time at home. The stories thus reflect the reality of their era, where the almost exclusive world of mothers and children rendered the bond between them particularly strong. The social climate of the turn of the nineteenth century was obsessed with the issue of motherhood,92 yet, mainstream fiction was given to glossing over the harsh reality of it.93 In this respect, women authors of the supernatural attempted to do a little more than reproducing idealized stereotypes regarding maternity, by exposing the darker and less convenient aspects of it, like the inner conflict of the New Woman concerning maternal desire and individual needs, as well as challenging the notion that the maternal instinct is an inherent quality, whereas some of the stories implicitly present it as a socially constructed female trait. In conclusion, the late-Victorian, Edwardian as well as early modernist ghost story, being often an urbanized sophisticated version of the traditional Victorian tale, offered British and American female authors of the turn of the century the opportunity to make an elaborate critique of the particular social and cultural status women had in real life: this enabled them to create a separate female (or even feminist) tradition of the supernatural tale appropriated to particular social anxieties. Since in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, feminist issues were multiple and controversial among intellectuals, who attempted either to improve or preserve the status of Victorian women, the institution of marriage and the notion of motherhood were under constant reevaluation, while women’s bonding together was an indispensable part of their growing rebellion and battle for equality.94 Moreover, the feminist emblem of the era, the ‘New Woman’ model is an altogether multi-faceted and ambivalent figure: In this respect, it is not always easy to tell to what extent the women of the tales presented here are representative cases of New Women, if at all, since that notion is problematic in itself, embracing various types of females of different financial means or education, usually belonging to different middle-class layers. Furthermore, the fact that female authors’ attitudes as to feminist concerns were diverse is reflected altogether within the tales: while in several of the stories examined, the authors reproduce (not always without doubting) socially constructed female roles, others are more radical in their depiction of female subjectivity, while there are also those who celebrate what for the modern reader are usually conventional feminine qualities. Thus, while the heroines of several tales exhibit what could

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be loosely considered as middle-class New Woman traits, others seem to adhere to more traditional Victorian values. In this respect, as equality in late nineteenth-century society was more real in theory than reality,95 the ghost stories of female authors picture women as being always imprisoned in personal relationships and prescribed roles, while few tales of that period present them as being independent from the domestic sphere or follow alternative lifestyles; the latter are usually tormented by their own inner conflicts regarding their life choices. Moreover, the supernatural motifs, providing women authors with more elaborate and subtle means of expression, enabled them to transfer the sense of female insubstantiality and marginalization to the social sphere. Thus, the authors expose the ‘bloodlessness’ of women’s existence,96 while the most unconventional writers examined alternative female identities, by questioning or even deconstructing traditional Victorian gender roles—those of the wife and mother. In this respect, marital disenchantment is depicted in various ways, usually by exposing the female vulnerability (or, more seldom, rebellion) to patriarchal marriage. Furthermore, sexuality is explored through the safe territory of lawful relationships, while female authors also exposed the various ways through which female nature is sublimated through maternity, the sorrows deriving from motherhood and the sentimental values women share in the domestic sphere. Women authors of the supernatural were realist enough in articulating their feminist concerns, as the multiple female portraits they have created reflect the confusion and multiplicity of the late Victorian era concerning identities and gender roles. In this respect, the different heroines of the stories are alternately submissive, rebellious, conventional, unconventional, virtuous, unfaithful, maternal, unnatural, etherealized and fleshly. Similarly, different types of females are portrayed: the dissatisfied spinster, the dependent wife, the animalistic female, the self-sacrificial caregiver and the childless widow, while often contradictory qualities are ascribed to each of them, creating a picture far from homogeneous. Nonetheless, they all have one thing in common: they are subject to the disadvantages society imposes on their sex. Moreover, the intense emotions of frustration render the home a place of domestic horror rather than bliss, where the ghost usually is a symbol of repression than the actual source of threat. Thus, the female apparition is the external projection of collective female fears of the turn of the century. In this respect, women authors questioned, either less or more radically, established beliefs and cultural imperatives about female nature. Supernatural tales by women of both nineteenth and twentieth century have been overlooked for decades, thus the female role in the development of the ghost story is not fully acknowledged97 ; this is mostly due not only to the unconventional role that several of their authors had in the public98 sphere, but also to the subversive content of the stories themselves. Furthermore, the late-Victorian and Edwardian ghost story genre in general was not so much associated with real life concerns, but, endowed with escapist qualities, had the aim to entertain rather than explore social issues. Nonetheless, in recent years a new scholarly interest has been increasing that has shed light on women’s disregarded ghostly tales; this newly founded concern

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continues to flourish even more widely nowadays, by further enlightening the lovers of the Gothic as to women’s neglected literary traditions. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

Botting, Fred, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–6. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, “Introduction”, in Ghost Stories by British and American Women: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography, eds. Lynette Carpenter, Wendy K. Kolmar (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998), xiv–xvi. Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, “Introduction”, in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, eds. Michael Cox, R.A. Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), xii. Moody, Nickianne, “Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story”, in Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century, eds. Sarah Sceats, Gail Cunningham (New York: Longman Publishing, 1996), 88. Cox and Gilbert, The Oxford Book, xiii. Vanessa Dickinson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 4–5. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 52. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1978), 3–4. Ibid. Ibid., 1–3. Rosemary Jackson, “Introduction”, in What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), ix–xiv. Bernard Murstein, Love, Sex and Marriage Through the Ages (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1974), 372. Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (London: Sheldon Press, 1977), 61–69. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 182. Ibid., 1–13. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: The Women’ s Press, 1985), 179. Showalter, A Literature of their Own, 182. Catherine Lundie, “Introduction”, in Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872–1926, ed. Catherine Lundie (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 20. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) 106–107. Jackson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, ix.

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 22. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 4. Carpenter and Kolmar, Ghost Stories by British and American Women, xiv–xvi. Edith Nesbit, The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, ed. David Stuart Davies (Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 36. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 5. Mary Austin, “The Readjustment”, Restless Spirits, 47. Ibid., 49. Jackson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, xxv. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 5. Austin, “The Readjustment”, Restless Spirits, 51. Jackson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, xxi. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 12. Ibid. Mary Heaton Vorse, “The Second Wife”, Restless Spirits, 208. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 16. Vorse, “The Second Wife”, Restless Spirits, 209. Mrs Wilson Woodrow, “The Secret Chamber”, Restless Spirits, 185. Ibid. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 11. Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: Vol I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 170–171. Carpenter and Kolmar, Ghost Stories by British and American Women, xxxi. Moody, “Visible Margins”, Image and Power, 85. Violet Hunt, “The Prayer”, in The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby (London: Virago Press, 1992), 264. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 283. Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”, in The Awakening and Other Stories, ed. Lewis Gaston Leary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc, 1970), 121. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid. Ibid. Lewis Gaston Leary, The Awakening, xi. Murstein, Love, Sex and Marriage, 266–267. Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 110. Jackson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, xxi. Moody, “Visible Margins”, Image and Power, 82. Harrison, The Dark Angel, 67. Showalter, A Room, 190–191. Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 117–118. Ibid., 106. Carpenter and Kolmar, Ghost Stories, xxvii. Moody, “Visible Margins”, Image and Power, 78.

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62. Beth Fisken, “The Faces of Children That Had Never Been’: Ghost Stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman”, in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, eds. Lynette Carpenter, Wendy K. Kolmar (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 43. 63. Mary R. Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman: A Study of the Short Fiction (Woodbridge: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 70. 64. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “The Wind in the Rose Bush” in The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women 1800-World War II, ed. Susan Williams (London: Xanadu Publications Ltd., 1992), 333. 65. Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, 62. 66. Fisken, “The Faces of Children”, Haunting the House of Fiction, 52. 67. Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, 62. 68. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “The Little Maid at the Door”, in Silence and Other Stories (New York: Harper, 1898), 253. 69. Reichardt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, 60. 70. Fisken, “The Faces of Children”, Haunting the House of Fiction, 51–52. 71. Ibid., 44. 72. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 9. 73. Georgia Wood Pangborn, “The Substitute”, in What Did Miss Darrington See?, 156. 74. Ibid., 153. 75. Jackson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, xxvi. 76. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, “Introduction”, in G. Pangborn, The Wind at Midnight, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson (London: Ash-Tree Press, 1999), xvi. 77. Cornelia Comer, “The Little Gray Ghost”, in Restless Spirits, 110. 78. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 9. 79. Comer, “The Little Gray Ghost”, Restless Spirits, 107. 80. Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 117. 81. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 8. 82. Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 131. 83. Ibid., 117. 84. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 8. 85. Murstein, Love, Sex and Marriage, 372. 86. May Sinclair, “The Intercessor”, in Uncanny Stories, ed. Paul March-Russell (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 212. 87. Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 117. 88. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, ed. Robert Shulman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 106. 89. Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 104. 90. Robert Shulman, ed., The Yellow Wallpaper, xxiii. 91. Denise Knight, “Such a Hopeless Task Before Her: Some Observations on the Fiction of Hawthorne and Gilman”, in Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, eds. John L. Jr, Melinda M. Ponder (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 251.

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

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Weinstock, Scare Tactics, 117. Lundie, Restless Spirits, 8. Harrison, The Dark Angel, 118. Murstein, Love, Sex and Marriage, 377–378. Jackson, What Did Miss Darrington See?, xxi. Ibid., xii–xiii. Ibid., xviii.

Bibliography Austin, Mary. “The Readjustment”. In Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872– 1926, edited by Catherine Lundie, 46–51. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar. “Introduction”. In Ghost Stories by British and American Women: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography, edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, xi–xlii. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998. Chopin, Kate.“The Story of an Hour”. In The Awakening and Other Stories, edited by Lewis Gaston Leary, 120–123. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc, 1970. Comer, Cornelia. “The Little Gray Ghost”. In Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872–1926, edited by Catherine Lundie, 99–111. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Cox, Michael and R.A. Gilbert. “Introduction”. In The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert, ix–xvii. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dickinson, Vanessa. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. London: The Women’s Press, 1985. Fisken, Beth. “The Faces of Children That Had Never Been: Ghost Stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman”. In Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost stories by American Women, edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, 41–63. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Freeman, Mary Wilkins. “The Wind in the Rose-Bush”. In The Lifted Veil: The Book of Fantastic Literature by Women 1800-World War II, edited by Susan Williams, 333–349. London: Xanadu Publications Ltd, 1992. ———. “The Little Maid at the Door”. In Silence and Other Stories, 232–253. New York: Harper, 1898. Gay, Peter. Education of the Senses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Gilman, Charlotte. “The Unnatural Mother”. In The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, edited by Robert Shulman, 98–106. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Harrison, Fraser. The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality. London: Sheldon Press, 1977. Hunt, Violet. “The Prayer”. In The Virago Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, edited by Richard Dalby, 264–283. London: Virago Press, 1992. Jackson, Rosemary. “Introduction”. In What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ix–xxvi. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989.

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Knight, Denise. “Such a Hopeless Task Before Her: Some Observations on the Fiction of Hawthorne and Gilman”. In Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, edited by John L. Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder, 250–257. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Leary, Lewis Gaston. “Introduction”. In Chopin, K., The Awakening and Other Stories, edited by Lewis Gaston Leary, xi. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc, 1970. Lundie, Catherine. “Introduction”. In Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872– 1926, edited by Catherine Lundie, 1–26. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Moody, Nickianne. “Visible Margins: Women Writers and the English Ghost Story”. In Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century, edited by Sarah Sceats, Gail Cunningham, 77–90. New York: Longman Publishing, 1996. Murstein, Bernard. Love, Sex and Marriage Through the Ages. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1974. Nesbit, Edith. “From the Dead”. In The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, edited by David Stuart Davies, 33–44. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006. Pangborn, Georgia Wood. “The Substitute”. In What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, 148–157. New York: The Feminist Press, 1989. Reichardt, Mary. Mary Wilkins Freeman: A Study of the Short Fiction. Woodbridge: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. “Introduction”. In G. Pangborn, The Wind at Midnight, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, x–xvi. London: Ash-Tree Press, 1999. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Shulman, Robert. “Introduction”. In Ch. Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, edited by Robert Shulman, vii–xxxii. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Sinclair, May. “The Intercessor”. In Uncanny Stories, edited by Paul March-Russell, 177–222. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006. Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Vorse, Mary Heaton. “The Second Wife”. In Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872–1926, edited by Catherine Lundie, 203–216. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Wilson Woodrow, Mrs. “Secret Chambers”. In Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872–1926, edited by Catherine Lundie, 175–191. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Food, Eating, Appetite and Otherness Carmel Cedro and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

The protean nature of food makes it particularly significant in gothic Victorian texts. Although often used in a supplementary way to show mundanity or in sumptuous terms to enhance the splendour of an environment or a momentous event, descriptions of characters partaking in meals—or not—provide an added layer of meaning and narrative understanding. When something is eaten or shared, cooked or served or is lacking or refused, it contributes deeper insight into characterisation, as well as the geography, social structures, norms and cultural conventions, class markers and gender codes of the larger society. Nineteenth-Century British literature, in particular, maintains a complex relationship with food, where the latter functions as a potent signifier for situations and identities. When it comes to reading and interpreting nineteenth-century British literature, food only superficially seems “familiar and domestic”, while its “sheer mundanity” conceals “deeply embedded power structures”.1 Representations of food and eating in Victorian literature act as textual clues with a cumulative effect, becoming particularly effective if unease is created when the rituals of food and drink are not followed or subverted. Interactions with food take on more significance when gothic motifs are present, as much of gothic literature centres on how things are experienced bodily, and often with intensity. In many narratives, the Gothic is communicated through exchanges with food, eating and appetite, allowing for pensive examination into cultural conceptions of what is edible and what is taboo or abject2 ; what is expected around eating, appetite and dining; and which habits seem strange, “aberrant or atypical” in comparison.3 Taking this notion as a point of departure, this chapter traces the connection between food and representations of the Gothic within nineteenth-century British literature. The discussion C. Cedro (B) · L. Piatti-Farnell Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] L. Piatti-Farnell e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_18

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focuses primarily on notions of hunger and Otherness, highlighting the very practice of eating as a haunted and haunting practice. Explorations of food in Victorian literature have been a dedicated matter in the academic environment of the past few years, with many iconic novels of the era receiving deeper analyses of eating, hospitality and descriptions of dining around the Victorian table to illuminate greater understanding. Michael Lee’s The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2017) discusses how “the materiality of food, eating, and appetite garner narrative attention” to significant moments of “sustained focus on a character’s hunger, dietary worries, or culinary pleasure” in order to give insight into “the scarcity of food [or] its strangeness”.4 These “moments” are often intensely flavoured precisely because a character is marginalised or “Othered” by their consumption. This is further seen in Annette Cozzi’s Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2010), where she discusses how food in the literature of the era was able to signify identity both “inclusively… and exclusively” by confirming and constructing notions of similarity and assimilation, difference and “Otherness” through ideology, beliefs and sentiments about eating, sharing, etiquette, poverty, hunger and excess.5 The threat of the “Other”, Cozzi (2010) explains, both— within or without—reveals itself when consumption is done in wrong—or unfamiliar, strange, excessive—ways.6 Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2009) also seeks to expand links between food and identity, particularly how appetite exposes the “elemental self”, as “the display of appetite or bodily control at table is interpreted as a sign…of the moral character, the true self, of the eater, as the marker of civilization, of an animal nature, of decadence”.7 This configuration of the “physical self” through food—or lack of food—which occurs inside the body as “invisible work” was concerning for the Victorians, and the idea of eating the “Other”, the foreign, or the unknown with transmuting effect on identity would have been profoundly upsetting8 to them. In a similar vein, scholarship that links together the Gothic and food has probed liminality9 and the uncanny aspects present in how something can exist in different forms depending on whether it is cooked/uncooked, ready to be eaten/ingested, and how the process of consumption itself is transformative; “Food penetrates the boundaries of the body, bringing the outside into that putatively contained self and reconstituting the physical being; it refuses to be kept out”.10 Eating is an essential activity and exploring how a character in Nineteenth-Century novels chooses to eat—or not eat—and the behaviour/acts around food can indicate familiarity or incongruity, and function symbolically to emphasis aspects of personality or be used deliberately to unsettle and create anxiety. It is these incongruities, or the anomalies of eating created by “basic social contradictions” that this chapter seeks to show, in relation to how “Othering” occurs when the boundaries between natural/unnatural eating and appetite are crossed or broken.11 The liminality of food creates an “unavoidable otherness about the very process of eating”,12 and thus any interaction can show deeper psychological—as well as social, political and cultural13 —bases for a character becoming “Othered”.

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This chapter will demonstrate how food, eating and appetite can persuasively act as “Othering” devices, through three well-known Nineteenth-Century texts. These works contain recognisably gothic themes and occurrences, as well as quite memorable scenes of eating and dining. Hence, they are useful for examining how interactions with food are effective in conveying character and status, while emphasising difference and unfamiliarity. Discussing the food described and symbolised in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, helps to clarify the social representations in the novels, and how certain characters are purposely positioned in order to direct the reader to see them as outsiders, as strange or improper. It is through subversions, incongruities and contradictions with food, dining and appetite, that we come to see these characters as “Other”. Eating is also used in these texts to show the marginalisation of certain characters. Specifically, the refusal to eat or dine with others shows a rejection of the Victorian values of commensality and dining etiquette, and provides a shortcut to understanding how certain characters become “Othered” in relation to their situation or social scenarios. Exploring the norms of Victorian dining and eating also confirms how moderation of appetite—in all senses of the word—and eating was a favoured mode of behaviour. As Schorn (1998) suggests, “the connections between starvation, moral improvement, discipline, and nationality were familiar ones in Victorian England”,14 and having an appetite that was “out of bounds” was considered unseemly behaviour. An appetite that “demands more”, or is “excessive”, exists as a thematic link that groups together the texts explored in this chapter. In theoretical terms, hunger is closely linked to, yet simultaneously distinct from notions of appetite. There are significant food “moments” in these texts which test the boundaries of—or distinctions between—appetite and hunger, yet for the clarity of the argument presented here, let us suggest that both rest on culturally signified understandings that “appetite is an emotionally flavoured hunger” whereby “desire, for a certain food may exist independently of a feeling for hunger, and hunger may exist without having much of an appetite”.15 Hunger, therefore, implies need, and something that cannot be mediated, but is “primal”, and “is expressed in a much rawer, visceral way”.16 In this way, the metaphorical ideas at the core of unruly Victorian appetites function readily as “Othering” devices which marginalise and create unease, while operating allegorically to “teach” readers a lesson—and reinforce Victorian values—about mastering one’s hunger. There is a breadth of scholarship that exists on Bram Stoker’s seminal novel Dracula which discusses how the otherworldly and unnatural Count epitomises British fears of the time of foreignness and encroaching immigration.17 Descriptions in the novel of Transylvania as a “whirlpool of races” and Jonathan Harker’s record of food consumed during his journey; “paprika hendl” or “chicken done up some way with red pepper”; “mamaliga” or “paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour”; and “impletata” or “egg-plant stuffed with forcemeat”,18 are written with a curious and optimistic manner, yet operate to reinforce the “Otherness” of the surrounds. Harker’s notes describe food in a way that creates uncanny effect, at once “deeply and internally familiar”19 : “I dined on what they called ‘robber steak’ – bits

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of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper”20 ; yet simultaneously “external, repellent and unfamiliar”21 : “strung on sticks, and roasted over the fire, in simple style of the London cat’s meat!”.22 Del Principe (2014) suggests that Harker “eats to negotiate his fear of what is foreign or, more pointedly, not British, and to compensate for the cultural and ethnic threats posed by ‘leaving the West and entering the East’”,23 which fits with descriptions of a “very good but thirsty” meal and wine “which produces a queer sting on the tongue…however, not disagreeable”.24 The unsettling nature of eating unfamiliar food is here compensated for by the use of an adventurous tone—as does the note to “get recipe for Mina”25 —while belying its “wrongness” or the strange challenge posed to what is “normal” or proper. The passages that involve eating become more contextually telling once Harker arrives at Castle Dracula, and become connected to the perception of character and behaviour. Hatlen (1980) discusses how Count Dracula represents “infinite…modes of otherness”.26 The Count embodies a type of physical “other”, “the ‘dark’ unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England denied”, while also being “culturally other”, “a revenant”27 whose Vampiric—and cannibalistic—eating typifies otherworldly strangeness and abject consumption that breaks the “boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the nonhuman”.28 Harker’s descriptions of finding a sated Count in his “wooden box”, demonstrates “Othered” eating, in grotesque terms: I raised the lid, and laid it back against the wall. And then I saw something which filled my very soul with horror. There lay the Count… [his] mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran down over the chin and neck…It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.29

As Halberstam (1993) asserts, Dracula presents a “composite of otherness that manifests itself as the horror essential to dark, foreign and perverse bodies”.30 This is also seen through the taboo eating of Renfield, an asylum patient whose contact with Count Dracula has led him to strange appetites. His behaviour is described by Dr Seward as “peculiar”, with speculation about the need “to invent [a] new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac”, as Renfield readily consumes any living thing, though from his cell that seems to consist of what he can catch—flies, spiders and birds.31 Such descriptions of “Othered” eating exist to inspire horror and fear, and show how the Vampire—and those under his influence—subverts Victorian values and standards of morality.32 Within this subversion, Count Dracula also becomes socially “other”, or as Hatlen (1980) puts it, “the embodiment of all the social forces that lurked just beyond the frontiers of Victorian middle-class consciousness”.33 At various points in the novel, the Count’s interactions—or lack thereof—with food and eating mark his habits as abnormal or unsettling. Blood-drinking and cannibalistic eating aside, moments of dining and etiquette in Dracula reveal “modes of bourgeois anxiety”34 depicted through the contradictory representations of class. Viewed from afar, Count Dracula seems a “Gentleman” and greets Harker in a “courtly way”.35 This extends to his physical descriptions, with “strong…aquiline” features and a “lofty domed forehead”

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and hands that “seemed rather white and fine”.36 However, over the dinner table, Harker’s view shifts and he describes feeling repulsed: As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me.37

The incongruity also extends to descriptions of the splendour of the castle with “the costliest and most beautiful fabrics” and “table service…of gold… so beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value”, yet marked with “odd deficiencies” like the lack of servants to greet Harker’s arrival at the castle—such a lapse in expectation reinforced by the Count hefting his luggage up to the guest room.38 These contradictions in class expectation are intensified when rituals of food and eating are involved, firstly via the Count assuming a servant’s role by laying the table out, and then repeatedly excusing himself at mealtimes, “You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup”.39 This happens a number of times, and is remarked upon in Harker’s notes: When I went into the dining room, breakfast was prepared, but I could not find the Count anywhere. So I breakfasted alone. It is strange that as yet I have not seen the Count eat or drink. He must be a very peculiar man!40

Hyman (2009) describes this contradiction in class representation, or being “high and low at once”, as a type of separation “made monstrous through integration”.41 The unease created by the Count’s refusal to eat and partake the social experience of dining marks him as “Other” and instigates a slow creep of dread and fear as Harker comes to realise what Dracula really “eats”. The strange impact of refusing meals is commented on further by Van Helsing later in the novel, who describes that “he eats not as others. Even friend Jonathan, who lived with him for weeks, did never see him to eat, never!”.42 Food in this case—or refusal to eat a communal meal—is used to show strangeness and discombobulate the reader, alongside, as Del Principe (2014) suggests, Harker’s slow loss of “the pleasure of eating”, replaced by the fear “that he will become like the Count and eat human flesh”.43 The Band of Light—the group that forms around the goal of stopping Dracula’s destructive appetite—has “a sort of perfunctory supper together” which is one of the only instances of social dining in the novel, described by Doctor Seward as providing them a “sense of companionship” to help them feel “less miserable, and [see] the morrow as not altogether without hope”.44 However, as Hyman (2009) suggests, “this is a rare instance of healthy appetite replacing the monstrous appetite of the vampire in the text” and words about the food itself is mostly absent, or “invisible, to the reader – there is no luxuriating over fine fare or gruel here”, and therefore given less significance in relation to eating and appetite.45 This is another instance where the novel shows a type of fragmented or unsettled eating and lacks an experience of commensality that feels natural or familiar. Notably then, the way eating is depicted in Dracula feeds into Victorian anxieties about unnatural—unruly—appetites and consumption, and bolsters notions of the “Other”. Eating behaviours and appetite, as well as their connections to contemplations of class, are themes that have been explored by Dickens many times throughout

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his writing. Although Dicken’s works are not ordinarily classed as belonging to the gothic tradition, his novels contain a plethora of gothic elements and motifs, often in conjunction with depictions of food and eating—or, on some occasions, of not eating. Culturally, the character of Oliver Twist has come to be seen shorthand as a representation of hunger “out of bounds”, and Scrooge’s miserly gruel habits epitomise concepts of avariciousness and being ungenerous. Great Expectations exists alongside these tomes as Dickens’ most “comprehensive integration of eating and drinking”.46 Watt (1974) describes Dickens’ preoccupation with imbuing every character an attitude towards eating—and food—as therefore “diagnostic of [a character’s] moral essence and his social role” in the novel.47 In Great Expectations, reflections on this can be seen in the character of Pip and his access to and denial of food. Lee (2016) suggests that Pip’s “backstory is one of alimentary deprivation and shows that…Pip is criminalised in relation to food”,48 demonstrated through the way Mrs Joe—Pip’s sister and caretaker—makes him endure disciplinary fasts for periods of time and remarks upon his eating as burdensome to her workload, “I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off, since born you were”.49 Pip’s expectation of food is overshadowed by hunger and questions of whether he is entitled to eat. Pip expresses feeling “unwelcome” at the dinner table, and during Christmas dinner, he is relegated to sitting in an uncomfortable position, “squeezed in at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in [his] chest” and only allowed to eat the “the scaly tips of the drumsticks” and “obscure corners of pork” or the scraps and undesirable pieces of food.50 It is not surprising that Pip views the dinner table as a site of alienation and, to some extent, dread. As Joanne Ikeda (1999) suggests, “mealtimes are occasions when social groups are normally together and therefore provide opportunities […] to observe what is acceptable in terms of food-related behaviour”,51 and such places operate under strict cultural rules, which not only designate categories of edible and inedible, but also highlight the status of the diners, in relation to each other as well as the wider social context. Acceptability at the dinner table, as far as diners are concerned, is a matter of inclusion as well as exclusion. In this context, and contrary to common perceptions of familial sociability, the dinner table is anything but a “safe” space. The dinner table is an “Othered” and “Othering” presence, where food conveys the precarious status of the act of eating and the diners themselves. These instances where food is denied in Great Expectations seek to “Other” Pip in terms of status and personhood, and demonstrate how he exists in a liminal space, both inside and outside simultaneously. He is reminded of his space inside the social structure by being constantly told how “lucky” he is to have his position at the table, “be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand”.52 At the same time— and at the same Christmas dinner—Pip is pushed outside of the proper bounds of Victorian values when he is compared to a “gluttonous swine”53 and the conversation around the table ponders his fate in such a form by imagining him sold, butchered and served just like the roast pork at its centre. This dehumanises Pip and emphasises his “Otherness”, as well as extends on his dread of “being eaten”,54 introduced in the novel when he first encounters the escaped convict, Magwitch. Notably, the many instances of cannibalistic threat lead Taylor (1982) to describe how the novel depicts Pip’s “obsess[ion] with the loss of his vital organs”.55 These feelings of being “Other”

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are further bolstered by the sense of guilt—and also fear and anxiety—garnered by stealing food—as well as a bottle of Brandy and a file—for his confrontation with Magwitch and imbues him with feelings of being the unwelcome outsider.56 Magwitch, as a convict, is already coded as “Other” and a figure on the outskirts of society via the environment and state we meet him in—among the graves of Pip’s family—and through his appearance “as man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars”.57 Magwitch’s representation as “Other” is further seen through Pip’s fear and adopts a supernatural element when he describes the convict picking “his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds” almost as “if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in”.58 In addition to this, Magwitch is the embodiment of intense and violent appetite, one that drives him to steal Pip’s food, threaten him with bodily harm and send him off to find him “wittles” to eat, all with cannibalistic connotations, “You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate”.59 His actions depict a desperation that emphasises his place beyond the boundaries of civilised behaviour, and when Pip finally brings him the bundle of food he steals from his sister’s pantry, the descriptions of Magwitch’s frenzied eating are equated to animalistic devouring: He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at once…I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s…every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction of somebody’s coming to take the pie away.60

The eating described here, of unrestrained appetite reveals “a rejection of…sociocultural rules”,61 even more so when Victorian values are concerned. As Lee (2016) discusses, it was common for the nineteenth-century novel to “scapegoat appetite so as to delineate itself as a social space that transcends bodily need”,62 and Dickens exposes such views here with grotesque descriptions. Later in the novel, when Magwitch returns to find Pip in London after serving out his sentence, he is asked about his job skills, and his reply of “‘Eat and drink,’ I says; ‘if you’ll find the materials’”63 functions to reinforce the unruly “Otherness” of his appetite. In this, Magwitch’s hunger becomes frightening, and beyond control, and as PiattiFarnell (2017) suggests, “represent[s] the anxiety surrounding the collapse over our logical and civilised control of the body”.64 Further examples of “uncivilised” and “uncontrolled” appetites are also seen in the novel’s focus on cannibalistic qualities of its characters. Houston (1992) discusses Miss Havisham’s emotional enslavement of both Pip and her adopted daughter Estella,65 exemplified by descriptions of her feasting on Estella “as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared”,66 as well as other instances where she seems to devour their sense of self. Houston (1992) goes on to show how the cycles of production and consumption present in the novel work to reveal core Victorian values whereby “both rich and poor fill the roles of consumer and consumed; as consuming and being consumed

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almost become interchangeable states”.67 The characters of Miss Havisham and Pip are caught in this cycle and therefore find themselves acting simultaneously as “devoured” and “devourer”. Pip’s initial encounters with Miss Havisham seem to have a profound effect on him and provide a haunting—or perhaps haunted—understanding of her. Pip describes her as resembling a skeleton or “ghastly waxwork”,68 dressed in a bride’s dress and veil that “had been white long ago, and had lost [their] lustre, and were faded and yellow”.69 Above all, it is her interactions with food and eating that emphasise her place as “Other” and question her moral character. Early in their encounters she brings Pip to a grand dining room—sealed up from years of lack of use—where at the centre of a long table sits a wedding cake, putrefied and riddled with “black fungus” and “so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable” to the “speckle-legged spiders… running home to it, and running out from it”.70 The cake becomes a type of avatar for her in the novel, the epitome of self-imposed withdrawal from society—both physically and emotionally—to encase herself in the misery of unfulfilled desire and rejected potential. The cake represents a decay of the mind and body, as her appetite is unruly too: She has never allowed herself to be seen doing either…She wanders about in the night, and then lays hands on such food as she takes.71

Her lack of appetite and unsettling pattern of eating marks her as “Other”. This is furthered confirmed by her insistence that the “heap of rottenness…and all the ugly things that sheltered there”72 which are slowly being devoured and decomposed, represents “a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”.73 Her vision of something “great” moves to extend her dissonance from society74 and reinforce her “Otherness”. Miss Havisham’s rejection of food signals a breakdown of those socio-cultural relations seen as foundational within the narrative bounds of the novel. If food is an agent of identity, then the refusal of food also provides a conduit for the exploration of experience. In the case of Miss Havisham, the rotting food represents an apt metaphor of her experience, namely a prolonged and embodied suffering. Food is, in itself, a liminal substance hovering between the outside and inside of our bodies. The presence of rot inevitably evokes the presence of disgust, marking the scene as an abominable setting. Disgust functions purposefully here, and highlights the depiction of Miss Havisham as a liminal subject. The disgust evoked by rotten food exacerbates the tacit presence of abject reactions. These food interactions offer us an opportunity to interpret not only the body but also identities, playing on “our desires and appetites” and uncovering “moments of attraction and revulsion”.75 The rotting feast inspires both fascination and repulsion, and acts as a Gothicised embodiment of the sense of estrangement and disaffection that lie at the heart of Miss Havisham as a character and, to some extent, Great Expectations as a whole. Food and eating take on greater metaphorical significance throughout Jane Eyre, and although the eponymous heroine experiences periods of fasting and lack of food, the act of eating itself seems closely connected to her emotional state and inner struggles. Early moments of eating described in the novel reveal what Jane is “permitted” to consume. When living with the Reeds as a dependent at Gateshead, she is told that she “can’t eat the same meals”76 as the family, which “Others” her in status

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and ability to belong. This is further shown in her experiences at Lowood school, where she exists in a semi-starved and neglected state. Descriptions of ravenous hunger being blunted by the nauseous taste of “burnt porridge…almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it”,77 begin to stitch together thematic notions that in Jane Eyre, food equals generosity, nourishment and bounty; and lack thereof equals cruelty, deprivation and loss.78 Furthermore, appetite in the novel represents a desire to explore other “hungers”, those that are emotionally flavoured. In this context, meals function, Kasson (1990) proposes, as sites of formative ritual, which mediate “between ambiguous and frequently contending realms of value”.79 In her study Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, Elspeth Probyn (2000) remarks that in eating “we experience different parts of our bodies”.80 Eating makes us aware of our bodies, its boundaries and demands; it is in eating that we construct our own perception of the lived experience, both intrinsically and extrinsically. Eating is, therefore, profoundly linked to emotions, and our ability to externalise our thoughts and experiences. Considered within this context, consumption in Jane Eyre takes on darker tones, as denied consumption inevitably renders the experience one of alienation and, perhaps, even fear. Thus, moments of eating—or abstinence—in the novel articulate heightened and suppressed emotions which Jane experiences vividly, or wishes to experience. She describes having “bright visions” of a life “quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence”.81 However, it is through the numerous incidents that surround Jane’s continual refusal to eat which demonstrate how even though it is her story and described in her own words, she remains “Othered” and isolated by her appetite. Jane rarely shares meals with others, and this unwillingness—or perhaps inability—is oft repeated throughout the novel, “I could not eat”82 ; “I had no appetite”83 ; “I did not touch the food”.84 At Thornfield, other characters notice and remark on her refusal: ‘Jane: please God, it is the last meal but one you will eat at Thornfield Hall for a long time.’ I sat down near him, but told him I could not eat.85

Later when she thinks Rochester has feelings for “the beautiful Blanche”, Jane’s lack of appetite prompts Mrs Fairfax to urge, “but you eat nothing: you have scarcely tasted since you began tea”.86 It is only after Rochester’s questioning, “is it the thoughts of going to London that takes away your appetite?”, and Jane’s responding inner dialogue, “everything in life seems unreal”,87 that her motivations around eating become clearer, whereby she seemingly regains her appetite when feeling in control and certain. This links closely to scholarship suggesting that Victorian heroines experience a dissonance of body and mind, often expressed narratively by subduing the needs of the body in order to encourage or prioritise the needs of the mind.88 Writings at the time, like Doctor Milligen’s The Passions or, Mind and Matter in 1848, discussed how a regulation of appetite and bodily control was essential, and was further bolstered by “scientific” and “medical” based support throughout the Nineteenth Century: the passions of the soul survive the body; and it is for this reason that the souls of the dead appeared frequently in burying grounds, and hovered about the places where their bodies were interred, still hankering after their old worldly pleasures, and desiring again to enter

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into the bodies that gave them an opportunity of enjoying them. If corporeal agency is thus powerful in man, its tyrannic [sic] influence will more frequently cause the misery of the gentler sex.89

Both Miss Havisham and Jane Eyre exhibit strict control over their intake of food, seen as directly related to exerting control over their bodies and their agency. The choice to depict Miss Havisham as a liminal and “Othered” figure rather than in control of her bodily identity provides insight into both Dickens’ concerns over feminine autonomy and societal anxieties of the time. Milbank (1992) describes her existing in “Gothic passages” of the novel as “a frozen emblem of in-betweenness” pendulating “between the unmarried and married states of womanhood” which put her outside the boundary of expected conduct.90 Miss Havisham presents a terrifying figure to Pip, and haunts him to envision her with Vampiric qualities, where “the natural light of day would have struck her to dust”.91 Her eating behaviour in the novel, instead of demonstrating a type of embodied feminine identity, becomes just another factor that distinguishes her presence as “Other”, improper, and disturbingly “out of bounds”. In Jane’s case, eating becomes the ultimate metaphor for her unruly passions and “devour[ing]” love for Rochester,92 epitomised by her speech to him after the revelation at her Wedding: Do you think I am an automaton? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart!93

Here, the “morsel of bread” and “drop of living water” represent her love and passion, and her appetite for such strong desires. They exist as a stand-in for actual food and nourishment, and in Jane’s eyes, she is “fed” by being able to embody her emotions, and feel—and express—them fully. However, this appetite seems to haunt her and later lead her to heartbreak and danger. Jane writes of the consequences of her unbridled feelings, caused by “yielding to the cravings of…appetite at first”.94 She reflects on and reassesses her choices, ultimately realising the need to transform her “passion into a more manageable kind of love”.95 This demonstrates how Jane’s “Othering” through the “tyrannic influence” of her emotions and fragmented eating, is shifted in the novel through the mastery of her “appetite”, an act subsequently lauded and rewarded via renewed self-awareness: [W]e need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste.96

Moreover, Jane’s final harmony of “spirit and body”97 sees her gain what she has longed for and finally marry Rochester. It is this final act which definitively reins in her “unseemly” appetite, confirming Lee’s (2017) suggestion that NineteenthCentury novels reveal notions of marriage as the ultimate oppressor/suppressor of appetite. Jane Eyre grants us insight into Victorian eating behaviours and appetites, and conveys how haunting—and haunted—such practices can be. Jane herself treads

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the symbolically narrow divide between embodying appetite and mastering oneself, and demonstrates the unease created around the unchecked “Other”. The three texts explored in this chapter represent iconic and well-drawn examples of how food and eating create a sense of “Otherness” in nineteenth-century fiction. Lisa Heldke (2005) persuasively suggests that, in eating, “we leave the familiar in order to encounter the unusual, unfamiliar, strange, Other”.98 Observing the practice of eating in Victorian literature uncovers food as a Gothicised entity, which communicates, both tacitly and explicitly, experiences of disaffection, alienation and even fear. These examples can surely be found in more subtle descriptions in the wider literary sphere, yet the inclusion of food moments in many gothic Victorian texts ultimately serve to reinforce Victorian values. The “most important desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety” that come from food and eating99 in these texts seek to warn against ignoring proper Victorian sensibilities by highlighting the consequences, as in another popular cautionary tale of the era where Doctor Jekyll unleashes Mr Hyde and “those appetites which I had long secretly indulged” to devastating effect.100 In examining Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, incidents around food, eating and appetite reveal how certain characters in Victorian gothic literature are purposely positioned as “Other”, strange or improper to meaningful effect. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Annette Cozzi, The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 4. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (Vol. 1), translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (Vol. 98) (Princeton: University Presses of California, 1982). Jennifer Park, “Vampires, Alterity, and Strange Eating,” in Food and Literature, edited by Gitanjali G. Shahani (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 271. Michael Parrish Lee, The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London: Palgrave, 2016), 2. Cozzi, The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, 5. Ibid., 147. Gwen Hyman, Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the NineteenthCentury British Novel (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 6. Ibid., 3. Pasi Falk, The Consuming Body (Vol. 30) (London: Sage, 1994). Hyman, Making a Man, 5. See also Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Cameron Dodworth, “Fears of Consumption and Being Consumed: The Gothicization of food in Victorian Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien (New York: Routledge, 2018).

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11.

Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, 4. See Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. Susan Schorn, “Punish Her Body to Save Her Soul: Echoes of the Irish Famine in Jane Eyre,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 28, no. 3 (1998), 350. Deborah Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 34. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, 90-1. See also Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self . David Del Principe, “(M)Eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker’s Novel,” Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014). Bram Stoker, Dracula (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 53; 14; 17. Hogle, Cambridge Companion, 6. Stoker, Dracula, 21. Hogle, Cambridge Companion, 6. Stoker, Dracula, 22. ‘Cat’s meat’ has been defined in various editions as horsemeat sold by street vendors as food for domestic cats. Del Principe, “(M)Eating Dracula”, 28. Stoker, Dracula, 22. Ibid., 22. Burton Hatlen, “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Minnesota Review 15, no. 1 (1980), 131. Ibid., 82. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 75. Stoker, Dracula, 83. Jack Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993), 90. Stoker, Dracula, 111. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Hatlen, “Return of the Repressed/Oppressed”, 82. Ibid., 82. Stoker, Dracula, 35. Ibid., 37; 38. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 49. Hyman, Making a Man, 204. Stoker, Dracula, 322. Del Principe, “(M)Eating Dracula”, 31. Stoker, Dracula, 407. Hyman, Making a Man, 209.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

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Ian Watt, “Oral Dickens,” in Dickens Studies Annual (Vol. 3), edited by Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 170. Watt, “Oral Dickens”, 170. Lee, The Food Plot, 91. Dickens, Great Expectations, 28. Ibid., 44–45. Joanne P. Ikeda, “Culture, Food, and Nutrition in Increasingly Culturally Diverse Societies,” A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite Vol. 2 (1999), 152. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46. James E. Marlow, “English Cannibalism: Dickens After 1859,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 23, no. 4 (1983). Anya Taylor, “Devoured Hearts in Great Expectations,” Dickens Quarterly, 13, no. 3 (1982), 70. Lee, The Food Plot. Dickens, Great Expectations, 20. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 38. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, 90. Lee, The Food Plot, 96. Dickens, Great Expectations, 379. Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic, 91. Gail Turley Houston, “Pip and Property: The (re)production of the Self in Great Expectations,” Studies in the Novel 24, no. 1 (1992). Dickens, Great Expectations, 334. Houston, “Pip and Property”, 21. Dickens, Great Expectations, 107. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 436. Ibid., 107. Alexander L. Barron, “Baked Nectar and Frosted Ambrosia: The Unifying Power of Cake in Great Expectations and Jane Eyre,” The Victorian 2, no. 2 (2014), 8. Lorena Russell, “Queering Consumption and the Production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” in Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, edited by Steffen Hantke (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), 225. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Harper, 1864), 7. Ibid., 44–45. Elizabeth Andrews, “Devouring the Gothic: Food and the Gothic Body” (Ph.D. University of Stirling, 2008), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/40041163.pdf.

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79.

John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 183. 80. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (London: Routledge, 2000), 60. 81. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 114. 82. Ibid., 18. 83. Ibid., 40. 84. Ibid., 43. 85. Ibid., 294. 86. Ibid., 167. 87. Ibid., 295. 88. Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 89. John Gideon Milligen, The Passions, or Mind and Matter (London: John and Daniel A. Darling, 1848), 156–157. 90. Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 128. 91. Dickens, Great Expectations, 81. 92. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 168. 93. Ibid., 267. 94. Ibid., 367. 95. Brenda Walker, Reading by Moonlight (Melbourne: Penguin, 2010), 80. 96. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 384. 97. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830–1980 (Detroit: Pantheon Books, 1985), 113. 98. Lisa Heldke, “But Is It Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for the ‘Genuine Article’,” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 385. 99. Hogle, Cambridge Companion, 4. 100. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 59.

Bibliography Andrews, Elizabeth. “Devouring the Gothic: Food and the Gothic Body.” Ph.D. University of Stirling, 2008. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/40041163.pdf. Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. “Gothic Criticism.” In A New Companion to the Gothic. Edited by David Punter, 267–287. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Barron, Alexander L. “Baked Nectar and Frosted Ambrosia: The Unifying Power of Cake in Great Expectations and Jane Eyre.” The Victorian 2, no. 2 (2014): 1–11. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Harper, 1864. Bruhm, Steven. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

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Cozzi, Annette. The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Del Principe, David. “(M)Eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker’s Novel.” Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014): 24–38. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1881. Dodworth, Cameron. “Fears of Consumption and Being Consumed: The Gothicization of Food in Victorian Literature.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food, Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien, 329–341. New York: Routledge, 2018. Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. London: Sage, 1994. Halberstam, Jack. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993): 333–352. Hatlen, Burton. “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Minnesota Review 15, no. 1 (1980): 80–97. Heldke, Lisa. “But Is It Authentic? Culinary Travel and the Search for the ‘Genuine Article.’” In The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer, 385–394. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Hogle, Jerrold E. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Houston, Gail Turley. “Pip and Property: The (re)production of the Self in Great Expectations.” Studies in the Novel 24, no. 1 (1992): 13–25. Hyman, Gwen. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Ikeda, Joanne P. “Culture, Food, and Nutrition in Increasingly Culturally Diverse Societies.” A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite (Vol. 2, 1999). Kasson, John F. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror (Vol. 98). Princeton: University Presses of California, 1982. Lee, Michael Parrish. The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. London: Palgrave, 2016. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (Vol. 1). Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self . London: Sage, 1996. Marlow, James E. “English Cannibalism: Dickens After 1859.” Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900 23, no. 4 (1983): 647–666. Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992. Milligen, John Gideon. The Passions, or Mind and Matter. London: John and Daniel A. Darling, 1848. Park, Jennifer. “Vampires, Alterity, and Strange Eating.” In Food and Literature. Edited by Gitanjali G. Shahani, 270–286. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London: Routledge, 2000. Russell, Lorena. “Queering Consumption and the Production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” In Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear. Edited by Steffen Hantke, 213–226. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004. Schorn, Susan. “Punish Her Body to Save Her Soul: Echoes of the Irish Famine in Jane Eyre.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 28, no. 3 (1998): 350–365. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830–1980. Michigan: Pantheon Books, 1985. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Stoker, Bram Dracula. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012.

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Taylor, Anya. “Devoured hearts in Great Expectations.” Dickens Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1982): 65–71. Walker, Brenda. Reading by Moonlight. Melbourne: Penguin, 2010. Watt, Ian. “Oral Dickens.” In Dickens Studies Annual (Vol. 3). Edited by Robert B. Partlow, Jr., 165–242. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

The Plant, the Mother and the Other in Ambrose Bierce’s Fiction Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson

It has been said of Ambrose Bierce that his love of shock value and effect was at times detrimental to the quality of his tales.1 Yet, within the admittedly uneven realm of Bierce’s short fiction, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (1891) betrays the author’s potential for brilliance. Writing in Some American Story Tellers (1911), Frederick Tabor Cooper referred to the tale as one possessing “a setting as curiously and poetically unreal as any part of ‘Kubla Kahn’”.2 Of all the tale’s strange aspects, the most memorable is surely its curious and horrifying depiction of a malignant wood splattered with blood and haunted by the soulless body, or lich, of the titular character’s dead mother. Elements of Bierce’s tale effectively illustrate the intersection between gendered anxieties and ecophobia, or fear of the natural world. It has been pointed out that Halpin acts as a receptacle for the Frayser family’s apprehension about the stability of gender roles,3 and while these anxieties are most apparent, Halpin’s “dream” also showcases the ecophobic imagination at work. In the current cultural climate, marked by mounting concern regarding environmental catastrophe, investigating our assumptions about our relationship to the natural world is of the utmost importance. The ecogothic lens is marked by a focus on rhetorical strategies and associations that feed ecophobia. Ecogothic texts are marked by the presence of ecophobia, but more specifically by representations of the natural world as an agent and vengeful consciousness; Simon C. Estok invokes the work of Keetley and Sivils, who write that “the ecoGothic turns to the inevitability of humans intertwined with their natural environments - to humans surrounded, interpenetrated, and sometimes stalked by a non-human with an agentic force that challenges humans’ own vaunted ability to shape their world”.4 In “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, the vengeance wrought on Halpin by his mother’s lich is amplified by the unnatural menace of the forest. As I shall explore in this chapter, the ecophobic imagination’s linkage of the female body, plant life, and the wider natural world reinforces hierarchies A. E. Schoch/Davidson (B) Davis, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_19

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that demonize women and nature equally. As modern humans faced with the consequences of the Anthropocene, we share many of the same anxieties that found their way into nineteenth-century gothic texts; this makes reading “The Death of Halpin Frayser” through the ecogothic lens a fruitful way to engage with our own attitudes and assumptions about our relationship to the natural world. The influence of Bierce’s fiction ranges widely. His writing was impactful for Ernest Hemingway and others, and Bierce is often credited as the predecessor of modern war writing.5 Conversely, others have asserted the importance of Ambrose Bierce’s war stories as primary source material on the much-studied conflict; for some Civil War scholars, Bierce’s tales act as evidence for “many events great and small”.6 Scholar of the Gothic, Charles Crow, has written that “it is difficult to draw the lines between Bierce’s war stories and his horror fiction, because the glory of war was for him illusion, and nightmare its reality”.7 Despite the strong descriptors often applied to Bierce’s fiction, the latent ambiguity of many of his stories has at times led to vastly different interpretations of the same plot points. It is impressive that even Bierce’s war stories are received in vastly different ways across the decades. “What I Saw of Shiloh” (1881) is a short story that begins by professing itself “a simple story of battle”. The tale contains one particularly descriptive (and oft-quoted) passage detailing the death of a Sergeant from a traumatic head wound. Bierce writes that “I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain”. For William McCann, this passage, along with Bierce’s other war stories, are clear signs of Bierce’s “misanthropy”, and “his chilling indifference to ordinary human values”.8 Conversely, Drew Gilpin Faust found Bierce’s description to be deeply sympathetic, if somewhat chilling.9 In his war writing, the author tends to eschew human reactions, which has the effect of intensifying the immediacy inherent in combat situations.10 There is no time for mourning or emotional outbursts during battle if one expects to survive. Bierce displays a willingness to “transgress proprieties of thought and representation”11 ; in other words, he forgoes the pathos expected of depictions of death during the War. Bierce’s writing tends not to direct the reader’s response; when no emotional reaction is presented by the narrator or characters in a story, the effect is often ambiguity. This can lead to a wide variety of interpretations of a story’s meaning. “The Death of Halpin Frayser” is another Bierce story that suffers from interpretive challenges. S. T. Joshi cites careless readers, and their inability to perceive the importance of key passages as the main issue, although Bierce’s plot is certainly complex.12 Widely varying critical opinion regarding the tale’s basic plot led Joshi to write his transparently titled essay “What Happens In Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’”.13 “The Death of Halpin Frayser” has spawned a record-setting number of misconceptions.14 Despite its popularity, and the general consensus that it is one of Bierce’s best tales, there has been relatively little scholarship written on it.15 The difficulty of interpreting its complex storyline is one likely reason for this. Nor has Bierce, who wrote precious little about his fiction in his correspondence, helped illuminate the tale’s plot.16 Due to the narrative complexity of Bierce’s work, I feel it appropriate to briefly outline the tale’s four sections. Section I sees Halpin Frayser awaken in the middle of the night to utter the name “Catherine Larue”, a name whose owner

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and significance are unknown to him. As the section wears on, Halpin walks a dusty and ever-more-horrifying road; continuing to feel increasingly oppressed by evil, Halpin decides he “will not submit unheard”. Finding a small red leather notebook in his things, he dips a twig in one of the bloody pools, but as he begins to write he is interrupted by soulless, horrifying, laughter (Bierce “Death” 3–4). As he scribbles frantically he suddenly finds himself unable to move: staring deep into his eyes are the seemingly lifeless eyes of his mother, who is wearing funerary vestments. Section II outlines some of the basic elements of Halpin’s early life; he is a Southerner from a well-to-do family in Nashville, Tennessee. His father, the classic Southern archetype of manhood, is a blustery politician. Halpin has an artistic temperament, though has never put it to good use. His sensitive and artistic leanings align him with a colonial ancestor, Myron Bayne, as well as with his mother, Catherine. In a scene in Catherine’s boudoir, it quickly becomes apparent that there is perhaps an unusual and unwholesome attachment between mother and son. This attachment is revealed in the way he plays with her hair, in the way he refers to her as “Katy”, and perhaps most damningly in the statement that: “the two were nearly inseparable, and by strangers observing their manner were not infrequently mistaken for lovers”.17 This section also reveals that Halpin plans to visit California without “Katy;” she objects to this plan based on a recent nightmare that she believes to be an omen of his death (by strangulation). The section ends strangely with the quick mention of Halpin’s having been shanghaied in San Francisco; he escapes after six years, resettling in St. Helena, California.18 Section III continues with Halpin’s confrontation with his “mother” in the bleeding forest: we find out she is “the most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood - a body without a soul!”.19 Halpin tries to grapple with the creature, whom he refers to as “a dead intelligence;” he struggles, but as Bierce writes, “what mortal can cope with a creature of his dreams?”.20 Section III ends with the ambiguous phrase “Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead”.21 The final fragment of the story, Section IV, is the longest. It opens upon two men approaching Calistoga, having walked that morning from St. Helena; Holker is a deputy sheriff from Napa, while the other is Jaralson, a San Francisco detective. Both are on a manhunt.22 It is revealed through their dialogue that the man they are looking for—possibly “Branscom”, but there is confusion about the name—is wanted for having slit his wife’s throat. She is buried in a location referred to as “The White Church”; the murderer is said to visit the grave of his wife each night. As they search through the cemetery for the grave of the dead woman, they stumble upon a body in the undergrowth—Halpin’s body. Looking at the body, they notice a cemetery marker inscribed with the name Catherine Larue. The lawmen become animated at the realization that indeed the murderer’s last name was also Larue, and that this is the grave of his wife. The story ends with the sound of a low, soulless laugh emerging from the fog.23 It has been suggested that perhaps the last section of “The Death of Halpin Frayser” is too long, in some ways ruining the mysterious effects achieved by Bierce; yet critics do acknowledge the importance of this section in clarifying aspects of the plot.24 For a long time, most interpreters assumed that the tale’s fragments could not be constructed into a coherent narrative.25 One of the key sources of contention

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between critics is the identity of Halpin Frayser’s murderer at the end of the tale. Robert Maclean’s strange (and singular) interpretation of the narrative is that Halpin Frayser was murdered by his own father, who then disguises himself as private detective Jaralson; however, this does not address the fact that Holker already stated that Catherine was a widow.26 Cathy Davidson and M. E. Grenander, on the other hand, assumed the murderer was a second husband of Catherine’s that was never explicitly mentioned in the plot. To this shadowy character they attribute not only Halpin’s death but Catherine’s; Grenander also assumes the second “phantom husband” is responsible for the “low, deliberate, soulless laugh” at the end of the tale.27 Joshi, writing about these interpretations, makes the argument that the second husband theory may have been conceived in part due to an unwillingness on the part of critics to look to the supernatural; in this case, unfortunate biases against the paranormal as “subliterary” seem to have led to the creation of a seemingly imaginary character.28 I agree with Joshi that this is an interpretive mistake; Joshi points to a single passage in the text as the most important (and telling) in the whole narrative. As Halpin Frayser wakes up he utters the name “Catherine Larue” without knowing why.29 As the section continues, Halpin walks through a bleeding forest and contemplates the reason for his current predicament: “it seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember;” it is written that Halpin “vainly…sought by tracing his life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin”.30 Joshi connects Halpin’s repression of his evil acts and sin with his inability to recall the significance of the name “Catherine Larue”, who we later discover to be Halpin’s mother.31 At the end of the tale, Holker reveals that “Catherine Larue”, before her marriage, had been “Catherine Frayser”.32 While the incestuous marriage of Halpin Frayser and his mother is never explicitly stated, Joshi points to this connection between the sources of amnesia as proof that Bierce is implying it33 ; Halpin’s murder of his mother is more explicit, he having “felt as one who murdered in the dark, not knowing whom or why”.34 The inter-splicing of these plot points in different sections certainly adds to the story’s gothic overtones, but it should also be noted that even from the genre’s beginnings, the gothic tendency to transgress social boundaries and family norms has at times led to publication difficulties.35 This may explain some of the necessity of obscuring the truth behind Halpin and Catherine’s relationship. Yet, there may be other reasons Bierce was especially well-suited to the task of writing a story whose plot needed to be “cobbled” together using a series of hints. In their study of Ambrose Bierce’s incredibly detailed solution to “The Gem Puzzle”, a popular mathematical slide puzzle of the day, Berkove and Berkove highlight Bierce’s love of reasoning; according to their critique, Bierce’s fiction applies a “tragic significance” to human reasoning. The tragic aspect of Reason in Bierce’s tales is its sheer inadequacy in equipping humankind for life’s daily challenges.36 As with the “Gem Puzzle”, piecing together “The Death of Halpin Frayser” requires a kind of cold logic. We must ignore the pull of our assumptions about morality and proper family relations or we, like the early critics, may begin inventing phantom husbands ourselves. In reference to “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, scholars have noted Bierce’s tendency to focus on immediate sensory experience.37 For the most part, the emotional implications of the

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plot’s many transgressions are subsumed in favour of sensory immediacy and the plot pieces necessary to put the puzzle together. Scholarship on “Halpin Frayser”, though scarce, often leans heavily on Freudian theory due to the Oedipal overtones apparent in the Frayser family dynamic.38 It has been written that Bierce anticipates the work of Sigmund Freud, and that it would be difficult to depict a clearer example of an Oedipus complex.39 As I continue to explore the anxieties provoked by the hollow corpse of Catherine Frayser, and ecocritical lens will be relevant due to the character’s close ties to the natural world. The seeds of ecocriticism have often been located within Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a work of popular science that demonstrated the effects of DDT on the avian population. The text relies on pastoral and apocalyptic imagery, on ways of imagining man’s relationship with nature originating with Genesis and Revelations; the title, Silent Spring, a synecdochal allusion to lost birdsong, also indicates a more widespread environmental collapse. Both of these aspects are decidedly literary.40 More recent ecocritical inquiries have revolved around the relationship of humans and nature in the wake of the Anthropocene, the recent bio-genetic and geological age in which the influence of human society has deep and lasting consequences on all of earth’s ecosystems.41 Our recognition of this new age challenges us to consider the “scale effects” of daily decisions that affect the environment, such as the use of non-renewable resources and the production of carbon emissions. This, of course, is difficult, but ecocritics believe in the power of literature to forge “imaginative links” between physically and temporally separate spaces and times; they explore the possibility that literature could facilitate the development of a more ethical and equitable “planetary imagination” that puts the universal first, and can envision the scale effects of seemingly ubiquitous but harmful personal choices.42 The prevalence of epistemologies that separate us from the non-human world have made this imaginative link particularly challenging; modern humans are accustomed to a relationship defined by their consumption of non-human resources, by their “mastery and possession”.43 In the context of American history, the expansion of the American frontier is one example of human “mastery and possession” of natural space. Ambrose Bierce, who was born in 1842, and died (presumably) around 1913, witnessed the end of the frontier,44 a cultural construction that describes the American push westward into wild spaces and the en masse assertion of ownership over land and resources. It has been said that gothic literature during the period of the frontier was dominated by the juxtaposition of “civilization” against wild spaces. After the closing of the frontier, a more subtle gothic sensibility, defined by the haunting presence of the past, takes hold.45 Considering the ecological importance of the time period in which Ambrose Bierce wrote most of his fiction, as well the relevance of his subject matter, it is surprising that there haven’t been more ecocritical readings of Bierce’s stories. Kevin Corstorphine, however, has written an enlightening essay on Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” (1893), a story Bierce published the same year as Frederick Jackson Turner’s official declaration of the frontier’s closure during a meeting of the American Historical Association.46 The tale revolves around a grisly encounter with a creature that can’t be seen by the human eye. Corstorphine reads the beast in relation to “deep

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ecology”, an environmental philosophy that de-privileges human subjectivity. The invisible creature, the “Damned Thing” completely defies anthropocentric attitudes that see the natural world in service of human needs; the animal could not have been created as an object of human consumption or even aesthetic appreciation, since the human eye is incapable of perceiving it.47 While the “Damned Thing” is an extreme example, I would point out that birds can see and reflect colour on the UV spectrum that is invisible to the human eye.48 Humans need reminders that not everything in nature is created for our benefit. Scottish-American naturalist John Muir was attuned to the ridiculous and problematic assumptions made by anthropocentrists; writing in his diary, he railed against the “numerous class of men” who “are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living, or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves”.49 For Muir, the presence of disease, poisons, and large carnivores in the environment would seem proof-positive that in fact the world was not created wholly for our benefit.50 Yet, Muir’s attitude is uncommon in nineteenth-century America. Ecocritical readings, in addition to forging imaginative links between human action and inter-species wellbeing, also work to expose the deeply troubling attitudes that alienate us from the natural world. In Ecocriticism, Greg Garrad cites Scott Slovic who argued that nature writing is either an enthusiastic celebration of nature’s beauty and wild space, or it takes the form of jeremiad; in the latter case, the text’s dark and ominous warnings are meant to spur the reader to some sort of action, be it personal or political.51 As illustrated by a brief summary of Corstorphine’s work with “The Damned Thing”, texts outside the genre of nature writing can be beneficially read through the ecocritical lens. I assert that Slovic’s comments on jeremiad, on the texts which warn and provoke anxiety, are often the realm of the ecoGothic, a lens that combines ecocriticism and gothic literary theory. Often, gothic texts expose the troubling relationship between humans and the natural world. As I shall explore in this chapter, an ecogothic reading of Bierce’s “The Death of Halpin Frayser” exposes a deep sense of ecophobia connected to the “monstrous feminine”, and a generalized anxiety related to otherness. In the second section of “Self-Reliance”, Emerson writes: “my book should smell of the pines”.52 If Bierce were to make a similar statement, I shudder to think what stench would emit from the book containing “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” a story involving natural environments spattered and pooled with blood and associated with physical constraint. Due to the disjointed and non-chronological nature of “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, the first “wild” environment encountered by Halpin after leaving his home in Nashville is not the first encountered by the reader. While in San Francisco, Halpin is “shanghaied” as he walks along the sea: “with a suddenness that surprised and disconcerted him, he became a sailor”.53 After his abduction, his ship crashes and is swept ashore on an island in the South Pacific, where Halpin and the other survivors are not rescued for six years. This incident, and its brevity within the space of Bierce’s narrative, is fascinating; this is the kind of tale that Melville might have fleshed out into a full novel. Gothic scholars have understood that Melville wrote the sea as a space that obtained sublimity through its sheer power; the human inability to command the sea challenges dominant discourses (and epistemologies)

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that assume human mastery over the natural world.54 Central to Moby Dick is Ahab’s megalomaniacal, and ultimately erroneous belief in his ability to tame the oceans.55 Despite the obviously rich source of gothic possibility found in the sea, Bierce devotes a mere paragraph to Halpin’s oceanic misadventures. One critic asserted that the “shanghai incident” was a simple plot device used to keep Halpin away long enough for his mother to have credibly been widowed; the space of time frees her up to engage in the unnatural marriage at the heart of the tale.56 While this necessity may have prompted Bierce’s choice to have Halpin Frayser shanghaied, I still would argue that there are important ecogothic contexts to consider before moving on to the other natural environments of the text. For poets writing about the gothic sea, the oceanic deeps have been viewed as a space of unmooring where traditional (or terrestrial) aspects can be transcended.57 For Halpin, his journey on the sea and subsequent accident represent the complete interruption of his former existence. He is unmoored; he never returns home to his life of indolence or his position as the “loose fish” of the Frayser family.58 Whatever Bierce’s reasoning, sending Halpin to sea was a perfect metaphor for the break with his former life. Beyond that, the act of seafaring has been described in dream-like terms; a late nineteenth-century letter written by one Lt. Col. Henry Hughes, describes the motion of the sea waves by likening it to the vertigo manifested in many nightmares, “the ship…appears on occasions to be falling long distances through hideous space”.59 Packham and Punter evoke the admittedly symbolic relationship between the Gothic and the seas: while the chaotic surface of the ocean’s waves visibly demonstrate the power of unseen forces, gothic literature “is fundamentally concerned with making visible the unrepresentable, unacknowledged, and unthinkable”.60 The revelation of the “unthinkable”, physical and psychological unmooring, the unseen forces of the deep and the anxiety of dreams are all oceanic associations that resonate with “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” These contexts add further significance to Halpin’s short sojourn on the sea. As readers, we learn about Halpin’s past after encountering the horror of his present; knowing what we do, the “shanghai” incident serves as a dark omen delivered after the fact. The first gothicized natural environment in Bierce’s tale is the forest Halpin traverses in Section 1. After having been lost a while in the hills west of Napa Valley, Halpin wakes up and begins to walk a dusty road surrounded on either side by a wood, and little pools. On closer inspection, he finds that the pools are filled with blood, and that the trees are splattered with it.61 Significantly, Halpin’s walk may find precedent in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne; scholars have studied the motif of the “night journey” in Hawthorne’s works, and have noticed that it is almost always related to the past, and often results in the discovery of a secret sin.62 As Halpin continues to walk, he hears whispers on either side of the road, and increasingly comes to believe that the terror he is experiencing must be related to some sin he committed but is unable to remember; even though he can’t remember his crime, it is written that the horrifying spectacle was “the fulfillment of a natural expectation”.63 In some ways Halpin’s assumption of “punishment” in the forest parallels the early Puritan understanding of the natural world as a space that could only be understood as a series of signs requiring interpretation.64 For the Puritans, “typology” was a way of life, and its adherents looked to their environment and every

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other aspect of their lives for religious or biblical symbolism, for the biblical incident or “type” that preceded it.65 The untamed and dangerous wilderness in which they lived constantly reminded the Puritans of their “fallen” status and of their separation from the Garden of Eden, in short, from paradise.66 Writing about the fracture of unified Puritan culture and ideology in the seventeenth century, Hillard quotes Susan Manning’s explanation of its affect on typology: “the Calvinist [was] set adrift… in a terrifying world of meaningless clues”.67 Importantly, Ambrose Bierce grew up with a fiercely Calvinist father.68 The influence of Marcus Aurelius Bierce’s religion on young Ambrose is, of course, speculative; however, it is undeniable that Halpin Frayser is, at the start of Bierce’s tale, no stranger to the “terrifying world of meaningless clues”. His experience is analogous to the horror of typology’s remnants in the Calvinist psyche; he knows the forest is an indication of his sin, but he can’t seem to interpret further to discover that sin. Joshi writes about the interrelation between the rise of weird fiction and the decline of orthodoxy; in Joshi’s figuration, religious feeling and the supernatural are coevals, thus the supernatural content of much of weird fiction provides an ample substitution for the aesthetic needs left unfulfilled in the wake of religion’s decline.69 It is fascinating to ponder the possibility that Bierce may be channelling some of the Calvinist anxiety around nature in his supernatural fiction. Of course, Puritan typology is not the only source of anxiety associated with wilderness. In his study Wilderness and the American Wild (1967) Roderick Frazier Nash looked to the word itself as a way to trace the constructions of the wild as a threatening non-human Other. Nash identifies the link between the earliest form of “wild” and “will”; the term was previously used to signify creatures who could not be controlled by man.70 This, again recalls a flouting of man’s assumed mastery over nature. As I shall explore in the next section of this chapter, the roots of ecophobia, or the fear of nature, proceed from human anxieties around control.71 The assumption of mastery over nature despite humanity’s innate inability to control it becomes a source of apprehension in many gothic texts. In the ecogothic text it is not uncommon to find representations of nature as an instrument or agent of vengeance; Estok invokes Keetley and Sivils and their description of the ecogothic, which “turns to the inevitability of humans intertwined with their natural environments - to humans surrounded, interpenetrated, and sometimes stalked by a non-human with an agentic force that challenges humans’ own vaunted ability to shape their world”.72 This chilling description truly gets to the heart of the ecophobic imagination. It has been argued that Western culture’s compulsive desire to change, and even obliterate, aspects of the natural world may stem from a latent ecophobia.73 Part of this fear may originate in the Calvinist imagination that saw a “demonic hollowness” behind the seemingly impersonal processes of the natural world.74 Of course, “demonic hollowness” is reminiscent of the “monster” of Bierce’s tale. The body of Halpin’s dead mother is a hollow vessel devoid of soul—she never speaks, never expresses a thought. Instead she ejects a “soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh”; this laugh is said to be reminiscent of the solitary call of the loon at midnight.75 This conflation of the loon and the soulless body, or lich, is captivating despite its obviously problematic overtones. In this figuration the call of the loon, though it has a communicative function for other loons, becomes in the eyes of the human one of

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the “impersonal processes” that feed ecophobia. While the natural world of Ambrose Bierce’s tale is largely defined by the forest and plant life, that “demonic hollowness” apparently extends to birds and animals as well. Bierce’s metaphor of the laughing loon illuminates the key anxieties of the ecophobic imagination. If Halpin Frayser’s mother is portrayed as the primary “monster” of the text, Bierce’s description of the plant life in her immediate environment is just as striking. I will turn to a more detailed description of that environment in one of the next sections of this chapter, but for now it is important to ponder the nature of plants. Writing about the anxietyinvoking potential of plants, Simon C. Estok evokes Keetley’s astute observation that the world’s plant life makes up approximately 95% of the planet’s entire biomass; they are ubiquitous, they are everywhere, and yet they are undeniably Other, an “absolute alterity”.76 Many of Ambrose Bierce’s narratives revolve around breakdowns in communication; in his writing Bierce often points out the fallibility of language, that initial filter through which all knowledge must pass.77 Between the human and non-human plant, communication is impossible, and this inscrutability is another source of ecophobic anxiety. Aspects of ecophobia are in some ways analogous to human xenophobia in response to ethnic foreigners, especially where language differences apply; human failure to understand the communications of others leads to a sense of suspicion that progresses to resentment, and finally violence.78 Humans are disturbed by breakdowns in communication and instances in which we are unable to perceive. Earlier in this paper I invoked the reading of Kevin Corstorphine, whose paper examined Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” through an ecocritical lens. Importantly, Bierce’s invisible creature disturbs our sensibilities on two levels. Firstly, it exposes the inherent folly in human assumptions of “mastery”. Secondly, our inability to “perceive” engenders feelings of suspicion similar to those caused by language barriers impeding communication. Plants are an especial affront to human delusions of mastery due to their unique biology: they are not limited by a definite shape or size and, given the right conditions, they are capable of unstoppable growth. In more recent decades this “unstoppable” aspect of plants has informed the vegetal monsters of b-grade horror films.79 The relentless growth of plants (and its associative link to “excess”) is closely related to the processes of decay and rot80 ; excess, unpredictability, and relentless growth are close associates in the ecophobic imagination. The ascription of many of these attributes to female biology is also at the root of many misogynistic assumptions. But before I go into detail about that, I want to take a moment to describe some of the intersections between ecogothic and ecofeminist criticism. Ecofeminism is a branch of ecocritical theory that examines the connections between androcentric and anthropocentric hierarchies. It provides a theoretical framework that illuminates the ways in which misogyny and speciesism are often dovetailed; the oppression of women, animals, and all elements of non-human life on earth are connected by an underlying series of assumptions.81 The ecoGothic looks at the way that the gothicized body- “unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid”—is rhetorically constructed.82 How these bodies are objectified, “othered” and gothicized is of prime interest to the ecoGothic: the mutual oppression of women and nature is often achieved through a conflation, as I will illustrate in my reading

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of “The Death of Halpin Frayser”. The gendering of landscape has been studied by ecocritics, feminists and geographers since at least the 1970s, and while some have welcomed the link, others have railed against it, believing that the equation of women and nature reduces both entities to their biological functions.83 The conflation of land and women is particularly problematic. Envisioning the human relationship to landscape as analagous to man’s relationship to woman legitimizes disturbing power dynamics that oppress both: “land is seen as the inviting concubine, waiting to be despoiled; as the chaste virgin, needing protection from rape; or as the all-forgiving, long-suffering Mother Earth, who patiently tolerates abuse from her human children”.84 While some have tried to argue for a “universal, psychological bias” that warrants this conflation, critics like Nina Baym assert that masculine bias is responsible.85 Other ecofeminist critics have understood the gendering of landscape, the “metaphor [of] land-as-woman”, as a patriarchal construct developed by the male metaphors of “erotic mastery” or “infantile repression”.86 Even in poetic descriptions of “land as woman”, both women and nature are forced from the subject position to that of the object. Nature writing, particularly that of nineteenth-century writers like Clarence King and John Wesley Powell, notoriously exalt the landscape while fixing it in the objectified position of natural spectacle.87 The conflation of women and the natural world is deeply problematic, but in Bierce’s ecogothic narrative the blended vision of woman and nature is wholly terrifying for all involved. Humanity is vulnerable to the unpredictability of nature; recent ecological events have emphasized the extent to which we are dependent on the beneficence of the world around us. The terror caused by the environment’s unpredictability is particularly acute for those living rough in the environment, houseless and exposed to the elements. Writing about King Lear’s period of vagrancy, critics have noted Shakespeare’s depiction of a maligned and hostile world paired with images of exposure, vulnerability, and loss of control; the unpredictability of the elements are a source of horror and such a horror can only result in madness.88 Here, we may once more observe that nature’s frustration of humanity’s desire for control, for mastery, is deeply embedded in the heart of the ecophobic imagination. Even before his encounter with the lich, Halpin Frayser is living a lifestyle marked by vulnerability and limited control; on the first page it is revealed that he, like Lear, is sleeping rough. Bierce writes that: “one who practices sleeping in the woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the damp earth, and nothing over him but the branches from which the leaves have fallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for great longevity, and Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two…however, it is not certain that Halpin Frayser came to his death by exposure”.89 Of course, the reader later finds out that he didn’t technically die of exposure. Yet, the agent of his death—the lich of his own mother—was possessed of the same hollow, soulless, capricious, and impersonal character often assigned to natural spaces. It has been understood by critics that Bierce was no great writer of female characters; Bierce, like many of his age, conflated women with the natural world, with madness and the phases of the moon.90 Catherine Frayser certainly fits that description, but her status as a lich is truly fascinating in the context of a “hollow” natural world defined by capricious and impersonal biological processes. As a lich, Catherine

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is a figure of abjection in the traditional biblical sense; bodies without souls signify one of the most fundamental forms of pollution, an offense to all that is spiritual, and an offense to the religious symbolic.91 Gothic literature often regards the separation of mind and body-with monstrous results; in many cases, the “monster” of the text is some form of villain operating without a conscience or giving into the undeniable pull of some form of lust.92 I would also argue that the lich, a body operating without input from a mind or soul, is a kind of inverse, perverse form of transcendence; the lich makes a mockery out of that religious ideal. It discards all human feeling and familial affection. Bierce writes about “the thing so like, yet so unlike his mother…it stirred no love nor longing in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past- inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear”.93 Catherine’s lich attacks suddenly, after regarding Halpin with “the mindless malevolence of a wild brute.94 The mindlessness of the attack, the unpredictability, is analogous to the seemingly mechanical menace of natural forces that threaten human life and mastery. Importantly, Halpin’s swift and shocking death is common in Ambrose Bierce’s fictions; Biercian death, it has been written, often comes as a surprise, and its swiftness strips human agency from the equation.95 Biercian death, then, acts much like the “hollow” natural world, much like the now-hollow vessel of Catherine Frayser’s departed soul—it comes relentlessly, unpredictably, and there is no possibility of reasoning with it. Significantly, when Catherine’s lich comes for Halpin, it begins by forcing him to endure its gaze. In a key scene at the beginning of Section III, Halpin is constrained, helpless to move: “his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the lusterless orbs of the apparition”.96 This scene recalls the theoretical approach referred to as “gothic optics”. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the Uncanny in “Der Sandmann” (1816), written by E. T. A Hoffmann, is one of the bedrocks of gothic theory; in that essay Freud sees the eye as a form of testicular symbolism.97 If we view the eyes of Catherine’s lich as testicular symbolism, there is also a relation between her and the motif of the “phallic mother” that Joseph Campbell has written on; the most recognizable form of the phallic mother is the classic Halloween witch, whose dominating features are her long nose, long fingers and pointed fingertips.98 Read with testicular associations in mind, the “eye” scene in Bierce’s story further emasculates Halpin Frayser, a character who has already been established as not living up the masculine ideal set down by his family. Halpin’s eyes are held by those of his mother, his manhood is inadequate and he is forced into a prone position. There is danger in a look that is too long or too deep.99 The “too-long look” has been associated with “loathsome sympathy” in other literary works. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” the titular character is constrained and forced to look into the eyes of the dreaded furies, female deities often associated with vengeance; Prometheus is disturbed by the “loathsome sympathy” attendant in their stare, and the phrase evokes a Romantic-era debate about the possibility of sympathetic feeling between two people.100 This scene, like the one from Section III of “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, implies that forced sympathy is primarily delivered through unwanted eye contact. What Halpin discovered through the lich’s

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forced sympathy is unknown to the reader. We may speculate that he simply saw into the hollow depths of horror; conversely, there is the possibility that the lich retains some distant memories of the relationship between Catherine and her son Halpin. The crowning horror at the end of Halpin Frayser’s life may have been the revelation of his own sin reflected back to him in those dead eyes. The emasculation of his forced perception is a continuation of the gender anxieties that are a central theme of Bierce’s text. As I explained in my synopsis of “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, Halpin is looked on as a sort of black sheep who doesn’t live up to the expectations set down for men in his family; Halpin has a sensitive and vaguely artistic temperament that is much more closely aligned with his mother’s and with Myron Bayne, the ancestral poet. Yet, Halpin’s father, as a Southern man after the Civil War, also represents another crisis of gender expression. For many Southern men, the North’s injunction against slave ownership felt like a denial of their manhood and their subsequent failure to defend that right by military action deeply disturbed the men of the region; additionally, the roles taken on by women during the Civil War were a challenge to many of “the most sacred features of male authority”.101 Of course, the compromised economic, moral, and political position of the South during Reconstruction added to the perceived emasculation of the Southern man.102 If Halpin is a receptacle for the Frayser family’s gender anxieties and a testament to the instability of manhood, then Halpin’s father is representative of the entire region’s crisis of identity.103 Tellingly, political cartoons after the war depicted a cross-dressed Jefferson Davis: failure was clearly being gendered as female.104 There is, it has to be said, a troubling tendency towards the feminization of frightening concepts. Gothic fiction such as “The Death of Halpin Frayser” has gendered the fear of death, which is possibly one of humankind’s fundamental truths, as female; in fact it has been written that Ambrose Bierce anticipates an associative link between death and motherhood that Sigmund Freud would later refine.105 Invoking the work of Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed writes about the inherent conflict in the mother– child relationship; there is the attempt of the child to separate itself from mother at the same time that the mother attempts to hold the child close as a way to validate herself.106 More disturbing yet is the tendency of the maternal body to become “a site of conflicting desires”.107 Whether or not this dynamic is applicable to most familial relationships, it certainly applies to the relationship between Halpin Frayser and his mother, “Katy”. Importantly, before Halpin left for San Francisco he was at least disturbed enough about the unnatural attraction between him and “Katy” that he insisted he’d go alone.108 This appears to have been an attempt to separate himself from the smothering relationship, if only for a time. It is easy, Creed notes, for the child to cease struggling and succumb to the comforting relationship with the mother.109 Despite Halpin’s apprehension, it is not surprising that he eventually reconnected with Catherine; what is surprising, however, is how far he took this “connection”. This begs one question—whether Halpin, or the narrative itself, seems to place blame on Catherine for the over-attachment that led to their unnatural marriage. Is Catherine’s lich really a projection of Halpin’s feeling of having been smothered? It is clearly a representation of the “monstrous feminine”; the monstrous feminine is

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a construct present in all human societies, and in each context it describes the aspects of women that terrify, shock, or are sources of abjection.110 The “abject” is a term describing anything that must be excluded in order to maintain our identity or selfhood and its construction often follows religious or historical precedents.111 In “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, the monstrous feminine is most clearly signified by the blood-soaked forest, reminiscent of menstrual blood. The quantity and prominence of the blood has led some critics to liken this scene to a birth, with its attendant separation from the mother; like the moment of birth, death has separated Halpin from that “perfect oneness” with Catherine.112 It is important to note that much work on the “monstrous feminine”, especially that of Barbara Creed and Julia Kristeva, refers back to the socially constructed order of patriarchal societies; the maternal, “natural”, order of early life is juxtaposed against the “symbolic order” represented by the father and the child’s entry into language: Images of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc., are central to our culturally/socially constructed notions of the horrific. They signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father…on the other hand, they also point back to a time when “a fusion between mother and nature” existed; when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as objects of embarrassment and shame.113

What is striking about this description of the mother’s role is just how much it relies on, and is related to, bodily functions, the monthly rhythms of menstruation, the daily evacuation of wastes. Ecofeminist criticisms of the conflation of nature and women, and their concern that the metaphor leads to the reduction of women to biological function, seem to be well-founded.114 In the early modern period the female body was looked on as polluted, as a source of contamination, and its permeability posed a threat to the community.115 The menstrual cycle is a clear example of this permeability, of the inside transgressing the outside. That which is abject, and thus horrific, is that which transgresses socially constructed boundaries.116 Transgression of human-created borders is, importantly, another source of ecophobia—transgression of borders are just another affront to the myth of human “mastery”: whether one is referring to menses, decay, rot, or the unstoppable growth of plant-life, the cycles and processes of nature do not heed our human constructs, nor do they stop to consider human responses. The representation of women in the largely male-written “popular” gothic literary canon has been described as “ambivalent;” Ambrose Bierce’s female characters are rarely exceptional in this regard.117 Interestingly, the lich of Catherine Larue, though “hollow” and seemingly stripped of subjectivity, is one of the most prominent female characters in all of Bierce’s short fiction. While her construction as a monstrous feminine figure is problematic, the story’s focus on Halpin’s weakness echoes a consistently cited theme in Bierce’s canon. “The Death of Halpin Frayser”, like much of his fiction, is a “fable of failure and limitation”.118 Thematically, Bierce’s stories often deal with male fallibility in a way that exposes the cracks in the American myth of individualism and self-mastery.119 Halpin is seemingly unable to “master” himself in his relationship with his mother, and he transgresses one of humanity’s most basic taboos. For many, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” is the story that best demonstrates

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Bierce’s ability to probe the human consciousness; the popularity of the tale and other similar gothic works may suggest that gender anxiety is fundamental to the human condition.120 In Bierce’s tale, anxiety around gender roles and the incest taboo play out in a bleeding forest, a literal projection of Halpin’s mother (signified by menstrual blood) onto the wild, natural realm. In his discussion of gothic fiction and the fear of woods, Tom J. Hillard writes that “nature may be a haunted house, but its ghosts are our own”.121 Hillard’s assertion is only too appropriate in describing the horror of Halpin Frayser. As I mentioned earlier, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” follows the template of Hawthorne’s “night journey”; critics have noted that Hawthorne’s characters engage in these nocturnal roamings, whether consciously or not, in order to confront aspects of themselves that prevent their becoming well-rounded individuals.122 Poignantly, Halpin can’t remember his sin, and can’t engage with his sin; in essence, “The Death of Halpin Frayser” describes a failure to successfully undergo the night journey, and Halpin doesn’t survive. The enormity of his transgression and his repression of that sin lead Halpin to project that evil not only onto Catherine but onto the entirety of the natural world. Ecogothic readings expose assumptions about our relationship to nature. Bierce’s “The Death of Halpin Frayser” indicates that maybe we shouldn’t look to the woods in our search for monsters; they are likely to be lurking much closer than we’d prefer to believe. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

David Mason, “The Dark Delight of Ambrose Bierce.” The Hudson Review 65, no. 1 (2012), 85. S.T. Joshi, “What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” Studies in the Fantastic 2 (2008/2009), 95. Sharon Talley, “Anxious Representations of Uncertain Masculinity: The Failed Journey to Self-Understanding in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” The Journal of Men’s Studies 14, no. 2 (2006), 165. Simon C. Estok, “Theorising the EcoGothic.” Gothic Nature 1 (2019), 41. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, NY, Vintage, 2009), 196. Christopher Kiernan Coleman, “Ambrose Bierce in Civil War Tennessee: Nashville, Shiloh, and the Corinth Campaign.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2009), 250. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, “They Are Legend: The Popular American Gothic of Ambrose Bierce and Richard Matheson,” in Companion to the American Gothic, ed. Charles Crow (Hoboken, NJ, Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 215. William McCann, “Introduction,” in Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War, Ambrose Bierce, ed. William McCann (New York, NY, Gramercy, 1996), iv–v. Faust, This Republic, 197. McCann, “Introduction,” iv. Faust, This Republic, 197. Joshi, “What Happens,” 94. Ibid., 94–123.

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14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

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Ibid., 94. Sharon Talley, “The Failed Journey of Self-Understanding in ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser,’” in Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death, ed. Sharon Talley (Knoxville, TN, University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 18. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, “Introduction,” in A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce, ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, 2003), xix. Ambrose Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” in Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (New York, NY, Dover Publications, 1964), 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 14. Joshi, “What Happens,” 100. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 99–100. Ibid., 99-100. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 1. Ibid., 3. Joshi, “What Happens,” 96. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 14. Joshi, “What Happens,” 96. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 3. Michael Eberle-Sinatra, “Exploring Gothic Sexuality.” Gothic Studies 7, no. 2 (2005), 124. Lawrence I. Berkove and Ethan Berkove, “Logic as a Matrix for Bierce’s Thought: ‘The Gem Puzzle.’” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (2010), 273. Mason, “Dark Delight,” 84. Talley, “Anxious,” 162. Ibid. Greg Garrard, EcoCriticism (New York, NY, Routledge, 2012), 2–3. Sonja Frenzel and Birgit Neumann, “Introduction: Environments in Anglophone Literatures,” in Ecocriticism-Environments in Anglophone Literatures, ed. Sonja Frenzel and Birgit Neumann (Heidelberg, Germany, Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2017), 9. Ibid. Ibid., 11. Kevin Corstorphine, “‘The Blank Darkness Outside’: Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the end of the Frontier,” in EcoGothic, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2013), 127.

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45. 46. 47. 48.

Ibid., 125. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 129. Jay Withgott, “Taking a Bird’s Eye View…in the UV: Recent Studies Reveal a Surprising New Picture of How Birds See the World.” Bioscience 50, no. 10 (2000), 854. Garrard, EcoCriticism, 75. Ibid. Ibid., 89. Brenda Wineapple, “Voices of a Nation: In the 19th Century, American Writers Struggled to Discover Who They Were and Who We Are.” The American Scholar 79, no. 3 (2010), 57. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 7. Emily Alder, “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic.” Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 5. Andrew Smith and Willian Hughes, “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic,” in EcoGothic, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2013), 4. Joshi, “What Happens,” 97. Jimmy Packham and David Punter, “Oceanic Studies and the Gothic Deep.” Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 18. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 5. Alder, “Through Oceans,” 2. Packham and Punter, “Oceanic Studies,” 18. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 1–3. Sarah Cullen, “‘A Stern, a Sad, a Darkly Meditative, a Distrustful, if Not a Desperate Man, Did He Become, from the Night of that Fearful Dream’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Nocturnal Gothic.” Gothic Nature 1 (2019), 113. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 3. Tom J. Hillard, “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature,” in EcoGothic, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2013), 100. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 113. E.F. Bleiler, “Introduction,” in Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (New York, NY, Dover Publications, 1964), v. S.T. Joshi, Varieties of the Weird Tale (New York, NY, Hippocampus Press, 2017), 17. Corstorphine, “Blank Darkness,” 121. Estok, “Theorising,” 45. Ibid., 41. Hillard, “From Salem,” 104–105. Ibid., 111. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 4.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

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Estok, “Theorising,” 43. Monnet, “They Are Legend,” 216–217. Estok, “Theorising,” 42. Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, “From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant, Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology,” in Discourse 34, no. 1 (2012) 32–58, 34. Estok, “Theorising,” 44. David Del Principe, “Introduction: EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014), 1–8, 1. Ibid. Hillard, “From Salem,” 110. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 110–111. David Mazel, “American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia Press, 1996), 141. Estok, “Theorising,” 46–47. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 1. Mason, “Dark Delight,” 85. Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen 27, no. 1 (1986), 47–48. Steven Bruhm, “Introduction: Encrypted Identities.” Gothic Studies 2, no. 1 (2000), 3. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 7. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 8. Faust, This Republic, 199. Bierce, “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” 7. Peter Schwenger, “Gothic Optics.” Gothic Studies 7, no. 1 (2005), 102. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous,” 44. Schwenger, “Gothic Optics,” 102. Ibid. Talley, “Anxious Representations,” 163. Ibid. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 163–164. Talley, “Failed Journey,” 17. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous,” 48. Ibid. Talley, “Anxious Representations,” 162. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous,” 50. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 46. Talley, “Anxious Representations,” 167.

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113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

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Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous,” 51. Hillard, “From Salem,” 110. Estok, “Theorising,” 45. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous,” 45. Monnet, “They Are Legend,” 218. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 216–217. Talley, “Anxious Representations,” 161–162. Hillard, “From Salem,” 115–116. Cullen, “A Stern, a Sad,” 109.

Works Cited Alder, Emily. “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic.” Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 1–15. Berkove, Lawrence I. and Ethan Berkove. “Logic as a Matrix for Bierce’s Thought: ‘The Gem Puzzle.’” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (2010), 267–277. Bierce, Ambrose. “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” In Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (New York, NY, Dover Publications, 1964), 1–14. Bleiler, E.F. “Introduction.” In Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (New York, NY, Dover Publications, 1964), v–xx. Bruhm, Steven. “Introduction: Encrypted Identities.” Gothic Studies 2, no. 1 (2000), 1–7. Coleman, Christopher Kiernan. “Ambrose Bierce in Civil War Tennessee: Nashville, Shiloh, and the Corinth Campaign.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2009), 250–269. Corstorphine, Kevin. “ The Blank Darkness Outside : Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the End of the Frontier.” In EcoGothic. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2013), 120–133. Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen 27, no. 1 (1986), 44–71. Cullen, Sarah. “‘A Stern, a Sad, a Darkly Meditative, a Distrustful, If Not a Desperate Man, Did He Become, from the Night of That Fearful Dream’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Nocturnal Gothic.” Gothic Nature 1 (2019), 102–126. Del Principe, David. “Introduction: EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014), 1–8. Eberle-Sinatra, Michael. “Exploring Gothic Sexuality.” Gothic Studies 7, no. 2 (2005), 123–126. Estok, Simon C. “Theorising the EcoGothic.” Gothic Nature 1 (2019), 34–53. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, NY, Vintage, 2009). Frenzel, Sonja and Birgit Neumann. “Introduction: Environments in Anglophone Literatures.” In Ecocriticism-Environments in Anglophone Literatures. Ed. Sonja Frenzel and Birgit Neumann (Heidelberg, Germany, Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2017), 9–32. Garrard, Greg. EcoCriticism (New York, NY, Routledge, 2012). Hillard, Tom J. “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature.” In EcoGothic. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2013), 103–119. Joshi, S.T. “What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” Studies in the Fantastic 2 (2008/2009), 94–123. ———. Varieties of the Weird Tale (New York, NY, Hippocampus Press, 2017).

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Joshi, S.T. and David E. Schultz. “Introduction.” In A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce. Ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, 2003), xv–xxiv. Mason, David. “The Dark Delight of Ambrose Bierce.” The Hudson Review 65, no. 1 (2012), 81–89. Mazel, David. “American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 1996), 137–146. McCann, William. “Introduction.” In Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War, Ambrose Bierce. Ed. William McCann (New York, NY, Gramercy, 1996), iii–xi. Meeker, Natania and Antónia Szabari. “From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant, Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology.” In Discourse 34, no. 1 (2012), 32–58. Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik. “They Are Legend: The Popular American Gothic of Ambrose Bierce and Richard Matheson.” In Companion to the American Gothic. Ed. Charles Crow (Hoboken, NJ, Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 212–222. Packham, Jimmy and David Punter. “Oceanic Studies and the Gothic Deep.” Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 16–29. Schwenger, Peter. “Gothic Optics.” Gothic Studies 7, no. 1 (2005), 102–109. Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.” In EcoGothic. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2013), 1–14. Talley, Sharon. “Anxious Representations of Uncertain Masculinity: The Failed Journey to SelfUnderstanding in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” The Journal of Men’s Studies 14, no. 2 (2006), 161–172. ———. “The Failed Journey of Self-Understanding in ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser.’” In Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death. Ed. Sharon Talley (Knoxville, TN, University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 17–28. Wineapple, Brenda. “Voices of a Nation: In the 19th Century, American Writers Struggled to Discover Who They Were and Who We Are.” The American Scholar 79, no. 3 (2010), 54–61. Withgott, Jay. “Taking a Bird’s Eye View…in the UV: Recent Studies Reveal a Surprising New Picture of How Birds See the World.” Bioscience 50, no. 10 (2000), 854–859.

An Edwardian Lodging on the Victorian Horror Threshold Robert Shepherd

The premise here is that all the literature we choose to call “gothic” is based on the inner conviction that humans are essentially evil. The insistence in Victorian Horror that the Dark Side may be overcome by an effort of will is undermined by Cosmic Terror, where the influence of an entity from which we might wish to dissociate ourselves becomes pervasive. In Marie Belloc-Lowndes The Lodger, essentially an Edwardian Realist novel yet one which intertextualizes the Horror of Dracula and the Terror of a post-Wellsian world already dehumanized by the mass media, the two stages of gothic writing overlap.

Something sinister was afoot in the last three and a half decades of La Belle Époque,1 in literature as in life. In this chapter we focus upon a period stretching from the late 1870s to 1913 in which the irrevocability of a change for the worse became as clear as the newspaper headlines describing grisly, wanton homicide. Sensationalism was reflected in various manifestations of “the gothic”, and what I am anxious to examine here is the relationship between journalism, several literary genres which tended to blend together during the late Victorian/Edwardian periods and the two stages in post-gothic writing which has been called “Victorian Horror” and “Cosmic Terror”.2 A simplified definition of those terms might go as follows. (Late stage) Victorian Horror denotes works in which the haunted individual is actually partially inhabited as well as simply pursued by a force which is somehow rooted in his/her own psyche. There are still enough monsters to pursue the protagonist(s); yet vampires, werewolves, automata and doppelgängers begin to be treated, however tentatively, as manifestations of (or “familiars” drawn to) the sufferer’s own subconscious desires. Even a vampire cannot fly in through your window unless he/she feels that some form of welcome, however grudging, has been proffered. Jekyll’s chemical did not contain Hyde; it only acted as a catalyst to release what was already present in his psyche. Slowly but surely the horrific idea that man might actually be compounded, partially or wholly, of the beast that haunts him comes into play. “Cosmic Terror” (not simply “horror”, the reaction of the person who is still at least rational enough to be shocked by outré desires and actions, especially his/ her own) R. Shepherd (B) Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_20

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defines a state in which the individual is overwhelmed by a force which he senses to be generated from outside the self. This force may amount to anything from an alien invasion to a sense of evil or of sheer nullity which has become so pervasive in a moral—spiritual “Waste Land” that it is impossible to resist. The Platonic divinely unauthorized state of “unbeing”—“τo μη´ o´ ν”3 —in the form of a government policy, scientific invention, secret weapon run amok—might soon control or destroy us. In extreme cases, outraged Nature/God will reveal that what were previously supposed to have been temporary unnatural interference in divine/world order actually formed part of the original grand master plan, the effects of which are now irreversible. In such a place and time as this, neither Stoker’s Lucy nor Mina would ever consider attempting to combat Dracula’s influence, since he would already have taken over the world as an ordained or self-created scourge. The problem with defining these stages of gothic literature separately is that the first must somehow embody the potential for the second. Fear of an external haunter coupled with the horrific knowledge that the threatening presence and yourself are somehow coeval generates the terrified realization that a higher power, autonomous or created, already regards you as its own. Where is the threshold? Perhaps the most telling depiction of horror and terror operating together, in self-destructive ecstasy, is located outside the specifically “gothic” (though all text is intertext) in the emblematic Realist novel—Zola’s La Bête humaine (1890).4 Jacques Lantier and his fireman Pecqueux—one a congenital homicidal maniac attempting to retain a grip on his demons by driving his “beast” of a train at high speed, the other fuelled by jealousy and alcohol—fight and fall to their deaths from the cab . None of the passengers—drink, fear and patriotism-besotted soldiers on their way to the front in the recently declared Franco-Prussian War—notice. Uncontrollable testosterone levels turn everyone’s beast loose in both cab and carriage in completely different ways (one of Lantier’s reasons for being on the train in the first place is actually the desire to redirect his gynocidal urges). The “lunacy” of machine and man are inseparable. But what produced it in the first place? The heads-of-state in a word, themselves energized by the Bismarckian power-drive as an “entity (which) animates our captive body”. The last phrase comes from Aguirre’s translation of Maupassant’s “La Horla” (1887).5 While the real creator of the manic train ride is very human— ambition for empire—one sees that the relatively faceless powers-that-be and the alien have much in common. Obviously, Zola had read his Stevenson as well as his Morel6 and Lombroso7 ; one need only replace Jekyll’s elixir with Pecqueux’s alcohol intake to see this. One might also say that when Hyde uses one potion to combat the effects of another, he is anticipating in symbolic form Lantier’s attempts to control himself. Yet it does not follow from this that had brutal governmental indifference not created East End squalor, Hyde would never have succumbed to its temptations; he would simply have moved. The sensation of an external compulsion, something apparently alien to the self yet which harasses it, is not yet present at this stage in Victorian Horror, but when the Edwardian (late “Belle Époque”) Realist take on terror and terror-mongering comes into play, this will change.

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We have noted the importance of intertextuality, and during the late Victorian/Edwardian period it had become the professional author’s lifeline. As literacy spread to the lowest classes, an author’s reputation and sales depended upon his/her ability to write, particularly, novels and short stories in multiple genres and to crossfertilize, and gothic usually got into the mix. The reputation of Edith Nesbit (1858– 1924) now rests on the teenage adventure story The Railway Children (1905).8 Yet as well as revamping the tunnel accident scene from Dickens’ 1866 horror story “The Signal-Man”,9 it is based on events surrounding the Dreyfus scandal of 1895–1906, thus in turn connecting the work with the external threat of German espionage in Erskine Childers’ thriller The Riddle of the Sands (1903).10 Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898)11 might be read as an allegory of impending global conflict viewed from the nascent Cosmic Terror perspective. Returning to Nesbit, her best-known novel did not sell well during her lifetime, when she was far better known as the author of two collections of horror/ghost yarns (Grim Tales, 188312 and Fear,13 1910) and the Psammead and Bastables14 series (for the most part 1899–1906) which not only anticipated Enid Blyton’s Famous Five15 stories by around 40 years, but also tinged the “stirring tale of adventure” with parodies of science fiction and fantasy (Wellsian time travel) and even farcical pastiche of a tradition of occult detection begun by Sheridan Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius stories (1872).16 This in turn leads us to other relevant intertextual/cross-genre links. The most famous of her ghost tales is probably “In the Dark”17 which, while it ends as a parodic revision of Poe’s “The Black Cat”,18 begins as a tale of public schoolboy “chums” and even features a knowing butler. This butler, of course, became both Jeeves and, in the hands of Henry James and Marie Belloc-Lowndes, an infinitely more terrifying figure. We should also note that the respectful yet abundantly resourceful gentleman’s valet had already been used as a sharpened tip to the Shavian scourge of aristocratic privilege and incompetence in J. M. Barrie’s 1902 play The Admirable Crichton.19 Having saved the helpless Laseby family from perishing as shipwrecked castaways, his response to the Lady of the House attempting to give him his due (“You are the best man among us”) is as corrosive as it is retrained; “ On an island, my lady, perhaps; but in England, no.”20 The useless aristocrat or social climbing middle-class snob, derived ultimately from the New Comedy of Menander and Plautus (adulescens amator to the proto-Jeevesian servus callidus), had already become a staple of late Victorian literature, and he usually came in Alexandre Dumasian (Père’s) trios with a d’Artagnan-esque fourth added for good measure. We find versions in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889,21 where the fourth party is actually a dog) as well as George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1892).22 Victorian Horror then makes inroads into comedy. In George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894)23 another lackadaisacal trio—this time of Quartier Latin-based British artists -attract a model-cum-love object, Trilby O’Ferrall, but also a sinister numinous figure, Svengali. The affective weakness of the d’Artagnan of the original group—Little Billie—and the malignancy of Svengali will eventually destroy the heroine. This novel, although published three years before Dracula,24 bears a strong Stokerian imprint. The two writers had holidayed together in Whitby in 1892–1893 and fairly obviously compared notes.25 The group of male saviours, the imperilled soul(s) of two women/one woman with a double personality,

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the vampire/mesmerist as polluter of innocence: all these elements are crucial to both works. The ultimate human flesh-as-cloth from which all the pre-Bertie Wooster aristocrat caricatures were cut would seem to be the son of Edward VII, Albert Victor—“Eddy”. This chinless fop was reported in the press as both a silly, innocent visitor at a homosexual brothel and an actual client. The less charitable view gained ground when the press “outed” him as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders (August to November 1888).26 Now just suppose that an aristocratic snob-from Transylvania, say—or a well-connected “Little Billie” artist like (Ripper suspect) Walter Sickert are let loose in London’s East End in late 1888, fangs bared and canvas scrapers at the ready. They might do a dashed sight more than pinch a working girl’s feather boa. The “lightness” of Belle Époque literature had its dark side, as did its emblematic characters. Even in pieces of fiction originally intended as children’s bedside stories there is a numinous black spot; given the sinister origins of so many fairytales, there would be. In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)27 there are actually two such areas—the ominous Wild Wood and, especially, the Wide World; “I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all”,28 Ratty tells Mole. Yet that is precisely where the incorrigible Mr. Toad does go, and a combination of reckless driving, vehicular theft and resisting arrest lands him first in court and then in “The remotest dungeon…in all the length and breadth of Merry England”,29 a place not so far removed from Oscar Wilde’s cell in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1897).30 Then, lest we forget, it was in Wilde’s dramatic comedies that the double life of the happy-go-lucky aristocrat raised all the laughs before the protagonist “ripped” both the artist and his work in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).31 Strip away every last hint of levity from Wilde’s work, fuse the toff with Jack, Drac and Mr. Hyde, add a soupçon of Toad’s (and Mole’s) adventures in Wild Wood and Wide World, and what we are left with is a properly Edwardian hypotext of Stoker’s book in the shape of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Realist novel The Lodger (1913)32 where the gothic collides with Zola head-on. Like Dracula, it contains a group of monster hunters and features two women, one innocent and one who might even be a budding monster herself. There is a butler, a maid and a seemingly aristocratic villain who “hydes” out in rented accommodation. Even more to the point, the novel is pervaded by a sense of widespread terror and terror-mongering in the form of a common yet potentially devastating presence: your daily newspaper. Between 1830 and 1880 it was governmental policy to extend literacy to the underprivileged After the abolition of duty on paper in 1861, skilled workers and artisans could afford the news in physical form.33 The populist influence of William Thomas Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette from the 1880s and that of Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail from the late 1890s ensured that the sensation mongering that formed the main selling point of such ha’penny scandal sheets as The Star, Echo, Sun and Evening News became more widespread. The cheap serialized popular literature of the “penny dreadfuls” such as Prest and Rymer’s Varney the Vampire of 1845– 184734 blurred the boundaries between fact and fantasy still farther. The Ripper was

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conceived of as a vampire, the actor playing Hyde in the London stage production named as a suspect. We return to the more consciously respectable lower wage earners—the butlers, valets, maids of monied households. Certainly there is no real reason to doubt the view of Anna McQueen (2016) that even as late as the mid-twentieth century domestic servants of aristocratic and upper-middle class families set themselves apart from the often violent struggle for workers’ rights.35 Yet it is also true that, during the last half of the nineteenth century, though particularly from around 1880 onwards, the notion that domestic servants might murder their employers, fuelled by press coverage, probably anticipated Mary Roberts Rinehart’s popularizing of “the Butler - and also Maid- did it” crime novel trope.36 The fact that Marie Manning had been a lady’s maid at two stately homes went very much against her when she and her husband were tried for the murder of her wealthy lover Patrick O’Connor (August 9th, 1849): the upper-crust had trusted this harpy.37 Serial killers like Mary Ann Cotton (possibly 21 relatives poisoned)38 and Amelia Dyer (an estimated 400 infanticides between 1866 and her hanging in 1896)39 certainly made the news headlines but did not stay there long: for repeated front page coverage one needed an aristocratic angle. Lady’s maid/companion Ida Cox and coachman George Griffin were suspected of collusion with heiress Florence Campbell when her second husband, Charles Bravo, succumbed to antimony poisoning in April 1876. Nothing was ever proven, but it was this “exactly whodunit” / aristocrat-servant suspect combination that kept the story in the press for years.40 Most telling of all is the case of Irish lady’s maid Kate Webster, who murdered her middle-aged mistress Julia Martha Thomas (March 1879) while the Bravo case was still making news. She had pushed her down a flight of stairs, strangled her, cut up the body, boiled off the flesh and buried the bones in scattered locations. These were acts of desperation as well as cruelty; Webster was drunk when she got into a fight with the lady, who was known for nasty pettishness and even mental cruelty to her staff. In other words were mitigating circumstances, yet even had she not desecrated the body, Kate would still probably have hung. While she was no Amelia Dyer, dispatching 400 pauper babies was one thing, the murder of a well-known Methodist who aspired to upper-middle class status quite another. On top of this, Webster had fooled the respectable neighbours by going out disguised as the dead woman for around two weeks, and such brazenness from a member of “an inferior race” damned her outright. The violent, gruesome methods employed (no poison, considered the weapon-of-choice of the “gentler sex”), her long list of convictions for smuggling, petty theft, prostitution and string of affairs and marriages meant that she was classified not merely as unfeminine but inhuman, a numinous presence in the worst possible sense.41 The press created a monster, and the stigma began to attach itself to servants in general, the bogeyfolk who did not so much hide under your bed as make it for you. It is surely no accident that Henry James’ hypothetical villainous haunters Quint and Jessel (in The Turn of the Screw, 1898)42 were valet and governess (the latter still a Jane Eyre figure in the eyes of late Victorian Blanche Ingrams). The press-and-literature generated figures of the murderous “toff” (George Bernard Shaw helped that one along with a damning satirical letter to The Star

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on September 24, 1888), or of his inverse, the homicidal lower-class criminal with a racial taint, or of the “servant who turned”: all these kept the front pages full. Fear of the underclass in general and of “unnatural” women in particular as represented by variants on the Manning/ Cotton/ Dyer/ Webster combination were spread as quickly as a newspaper on a table. Small wonder, then, that theories that Jack was actually Jill the Ripper were bandied about. Jack disguised himself in woman’s clothing to make his escape; a “mad midwife” would have had enough anatomical knowledge to remove select internal organs before slipping away unsuspected; a lesbian lover (shades of the vampire here-Le Fanu’s Carmilla)43 was responsible for the murder of the last “canonical” victim, Mary Kelly.44 Yes: the late 1888 Ripper killing spree sent unwitnessed fact spinning off into every conceivable species of theory—social, literary, medical/physiological, psychiatric— with the speed of any number of locomotives. Jack might be an embittered and impoverished Jew, like Du Maurier’s Svengali. Allied with or actually composed of fog, smog and steam he used underground and overground railway systems to vanish, as Stoker’s Dracula “morphed” into Jack the Railwayman who punched your ticket (as in John Oxenham’s short story “A Mystery of the Underground” 1897).45 His ability to disappear at will led Inspector Frederick Abberline and Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Sir Melvin Macnaghten to believe that he was either being sheltered by relatives or living a Jekyll/ Hyde existence in the Whitechapel area.46 Such a notion tied in with two leading suspects—Aaron Kosminski, who had been kept at workhouses and asylums for long periods since 1890 and otherwise stayed at his brother’s Whitechapel address, and Seweryn Kłosowski, a.k.a. George Chapman, eventually hanged for administering (again) antimony derivatives to three lovers.47 Then, to return full circle to Jill the Ripper, in October 1890 Mary Pearcey, midwife, was hung for the (unconfessed) murder of a mother and child and associated with a woman rumoured to have been seen walking around Whitechapel in Mary Kelly’s clothes shortly after her estimated time of death. Someone had been studying the Kate Webster case. For a person given her first footing in journalism by W. T. Stead himself, with The Lodger Marie Belloc Lowndes produced a remarkably sensation-free novel. Rather, she examines the effects of sensationalism with a coolly clinical, bemused eye. Mr. Sleuth, the eponymous lodger, announces his first entrance with a trepidation which seems to undermine portentous menace. This should have been the knocking at the gate of Macbeth II.iii, the emergence of Dracula into Lucy Westenra’s or Mina Harker’s bedrooms in the form of a wolf or a pillar of fog. Instead, the knocking, while loud, is “tremulous and uncertain”48 ; Sleuth only says (17–18) that the landlady , Ellen Bunting, will remember his name if she thinks of blood (then commonly called sleuth-)hounds,49 the comment echoing/presaging inept attempts to catch Jack the Ripper with such animals. He is somewhat abrupt when correcting his “social inferior”, but it is only to remind her that she has left the door ajar as an open invitation to intruders as well as fog. This upsets Ellen, since the front door is otherwise invariably locked and bolted for the night to keep out the undesirables (drunks, men with prostitutes) whom she calls “bats”.50 There are, of course, danger signs via

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allusions to other works of gothic horror. Sleuth’s insistence on turning “engravings of early Victorian beauties”51 to the wall is a reworking of Dorian Gray hiding his telltale picture. The need for an isolated upstairs room in which to conduct “experiments” is the vertical adjustment required to fit Hyde’s laboratory into a terraced house. Yet the bulk of intertextual messages are mixed, especially the Stokerian examples, and this is where the importance of the mass media makes itself felt. There are newspapers to be had in Dracula’s London but they do not contain much in the way of information on Bats, Morsus and Undeaths. Mina Harker and Van Helsing have to organize a team of researchers to piece together the Count’s origins, character, likely next moves from any amount of oral, written and recorded sources. In the Buntings’ world, on the other hand, there is an overabundance of news. Paperboys shout out the latest Ripper (here, “Avenger”) headlines on the street. Piqued by the fact that he should not buy a newspaper (the family has fallen on such hard times that they themselves are reduced to paying rent and attempting, unsuccessfully, to sub-let) Mr. Bunting goes out and does so anyway. As a further act of rebellion against his wife’s frugality measures he lights the gas-lamp inside the door, thus illuminating the “Apartments” (i.e. to rent) notice.52 This is the only invitation to enter what, quoting from Psalm 107, Sleuth terms his “desired haven”,53 though it is the law he seeks refuge from, having just murdered his fifth prostitute. The Buntings are ex-butler and maidservant attempting to scrape up a living out of service. The Avenger murders create the same horrified thrill in them as in everyone else, yet Mr. Bunting’s first drowsy thought when he hears the newsboys’ cries of “an old lady {murdered} by her servant-maid”—of the Kate Webster affair, presumably.54 His reaction is not yet one of terror because a certain Harkerian dullness stops him from being affected by evidence of the body count until he literally brushes up against it. In Chapter 23, dodging past Sleuth to open the door for “the gentleman”, he touches blood on his coat. Overanxious to waylay any suspicions, the lodger gives another (unsolicited) canine-related explanation; he has touched a dead dog on Primrose Hill—a careless admission, since when this turns out to be the latest murder scene even Bunting sniffs the criminal out. Up to that point he had not suspected a thing, and his wife had done her level best to hide her own disquiet. Now, however, both fear for their daughter/stepdaughter (Daisy) who is visiting. They are also disturbed by the thought of what the revelation that they have harboured a murderer might do to their reputation, and of how loss of the lodger’s generous payments might affect their recently improved lifestyle. Self-preservation (including the keeping up of social appearances) runs emotional ties a very close second. Ellen is, at first glance, a quaint, straitlaced if hardnosed body who does her level best to hide her (actually highly developed) sensibilities from the rest of the world, loved ones included. She is vehemently abstemious, never refers to those body parts which should remain hidden (this includes the word “stomach”!55 ). She does know a great deal more about the libido of “young folk” than she lets on, and occasionally surprises everyone with hints of the awareness of desires that she herself only experienced in middle age (she married Bunting late in life when he was a widower with a daughter). Usually, however, she will go out of her way to chastise

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Bunting and Daisy for even the slightest breach of etiquette, and they often go in “mortal fear” of her. The senses in which this term is used should be observed rather closely, since what is, in effect, a synonym for “her bark’s worse than her bite” may, without warning, come to denote something much more threatening. On occasion she even has, her husband notes, “a snarling voice”,56 particularly when it rises in defence of something—or someone—she holds dear. Connected with this, and typical of a generation in which “going into service” was still very common, both Bunting and his wife stand in awe of certain representatives of the “upper crust”. In their eyes it is divided into three layers: that of inherited wealth and attendant privilege, of well-mannered gentlefolk in reduced circumstances and, lowest on the list, of the monied middle classes. Ellen only allows the family to joke about the latter. As a female ex- household servant who liked both her job and employers she tends to see herself as privileged to be treated as surrogate parent to aristocratic menfolk, and is ready and all-too willing to make every kind of allowance for her charges. The upshot is that when Sleuth appears on the Buntings’ doorstep, luggageless and appearing more than slightly lost yet quite prepared to exercise aristocratic authority (though with restraint and almost inevitably accompanied by an apology for so doing) Ellen takes to him immediately, and he to her. Lowndes’ canny deployment of an almost-but- not-quite-uniform free indirect style is particularly effective here. It serves a threefold purpose: of making us aware that almost all of the affair is seen through Ellen’s eyes; of pulling us up with a jolt at realization that it is suddenly someone else who is (or appears to be) the observer of events at specific points, and of alerting us to the fact that what is being said—this is very much a dialogue-driven novel too- does not quite chime in with what the character’s silent observations are telling us about a given scene. We come across a case in point—perhaps better, a point in a case—in an incident which develops from Chapters13–16. It is slowly but surely becoming clear to Ellen that the latest police theory—that the Avenger is hiding out between murders in someone’s home—is correct, and that the home is her own. Reportage that the killer may have been seen with a gladstone bag (in which to conceal his knife) has already impelled her to attempt to search the chiffonier in which she believes Sleuth keeps such a case, suspiciously light on his arrival and since disappeared from view. The chiffonier is locked, and upon wobbling it a red liquid seeps out onto the carpet which, now in full Lady Macbeth mode, she does her best to mop up. A bout of outof-season spring cleaning- “Out, out black fingerprints!”-when rumours of a plan for house-to-house searches in the area reach her ears drives home the Shakespearean parallel: “I’d like to see them come into my house”57 is an obvious enough echo of Macbeth I.v.40 and II.iii.89.58 A form of conspiracy is indeed afoot chez Bunting, but between servant and lodger rather than husband and wife. Once we do place this mutual tacit awareness in the context of the master–servant bond, a very complex situation develops. The only instance of Sleuth’s voice appearing to become dominant in the free indirect textual interweave occurs just when his regard for Ellen is at its highest while her reciprocity, at least for a moment, vanishes;

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[A]s his landlady came in, Mr. Sleuth…began staring dreamily out of the window, down at the sordid, hurrying crowd of men and women which now swept along the Marylebone Road. “There seem a great many people out to-day,” he observed, without looking round. “Yes, sir, there do”. Mrs. Bunting .. was seized with a mortal instinctive terror of the man sitting there. At last Mr. Sleuth got up and turned round. She forced herself to look at him. How tired, how worn, he looked, and- how strange!…. “It’s a fine day,” said Mr. Sleuth…“The fog has cleared…I always feel brighter when the sun is shining..” He looked at her inquiringly, but Mrs. Bunter could not speak… However, that did not affect Mr. Sleuth adversely. He had acquired a great liking and respect for this well-balanced, taciturn woman. She was the first woman for whom he had experienced any such feeling for years past.59

In order to appreciate why one has felt it necessary to quote this passage at such length, let us backtrack briefly, and in so doing fill in certain gaps left in our Dracula intertextualizing. It has required neither a Sherlock Holmes nor a Van Helsing to arouse Ellen’s suspicions of Sleuth. Not only does she have her husband’s obsession with press reports to keep her in touch, she also receives information withheld from the public via her prospective son-in-law, rookie detective and Harkerian blabbermouth Joe Chandler. She is therefore the first civilian to know about the bag, the bloody prints left by a pair of galoshes, the theory that the Avenger is blessed with a sympathizer who actually does provide him with that “desired haven”. The haven becomes a bolthole in her mind, the act of harbouring, shorn of its biblical overtones, aiding and abetting. Yet her loyalty to her lodger, as both a favoured servant and Virgin Mary protectress, is well-nigh unbreakable. “In the long history of crime it has very, very seldom happened that a woman has betrayed one who has taken refuge with her” says Belloc-Lowndes, on one of those very rare occasions when she herself breaks authorial cover but to hint at her own Catholic convictions. These considerations are extremely important, particularly to an individual struggling to keep up a respectable front and who, moreover, is too well acquainted with the fates of Mrs. Cox and Kate Webster—social ostracism and ruin at very least, execution for herself and possibly her husband in the worst case scenario. A more immediate worry, though, is that should she simply send Sleuth away, every last hope of gaining financial and social stability will vanish with him. Furthermore, her Shavian loathing of poverty is accompanied by a most unShavian sense of “butlerand-lady’s maid class” superiority from which, unfortunately, her moral sense is inseparable. The rabblement—ironically, the bats—drink, fornicate, swear, shout out in her street morning and night. It is against these that she protects “her” house, together with those privileged few she has allowed to stay within it. Even Joe Chandler is only there on sufferance. He is the law, and even such a dim-witted representative of it might suspect something. Then there is another side to the class-consciousness question. Whether they like it or not, the Buntings both come from poor backgrounds (she was actually abandoned as a baby) and now form part of an East End London community for which suspicion of the law is second nature; they are not immune to this prejudice. Domestic servant snobbery itself involves a distaste for thuggish

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“bobbies” and “plods”, in uniform or out of it. Yet the very fact of Joe’s profession means that the more often he visits, the less open the Buntings are to public scrutiny. One might even say that it is mostly out of regard for her suspicious-looking lodger (and his cash/respectable appearance) that she has allowed the Joe–Daisy affair to get as far as it has. This digression into essentially class-related loyalties and prejudices brings us back to Ellen’s sudden feeling of stark terror. It is hardly physical fear; she has already dismissed that. Is the reason for her dumbstruck silence the sudden horrific realization that he holds her in particular regard? Does the italicized paragraph of the last long quote represent a sudden shared awareness of his respect, as if she were seeing herself through his eyes? Her abstemiousness, her dislike of the rabblement and of her own sex; these are sentiments which both share. Prostitutes and their “johns” are the very “bats” she has turned off the hall light to discourage, while inviting “Jackula” in. When it turns out that the new lodger seems to have a “queer fear and dislike of women” himself, she merely reflects, in her prurient way, that it is “better than-well, than the other thing.”60 Yet perhaps “merely” is not the right adverb to use here. The Avenger’s rampage continues beyond the canonical five Ripper victims. This means that Belloc-Lowndes was either extending the timeline to include Annie Farmer, Rose Millett, “Claypipe Alice” and the Pinchin Street remains61 or, more likely, taking a list of the less well-known suspects, some of whom either went abroad or simply vanished, and imagining a flourishing post-Marylebone career for Sleuth as a composite. We know that the Bunting story is based upon evidence given by eminent psychiatrist L. Forbes Winslow against a Canadian, G. Wentworth Bell- Smith, whose track was lost upon release from police questioning. Yet another suspect, Herbert Percy Edmund Freund, lived for a time in Primrose Hill. There is also Mary Pearcey to consider. Is Ellen herself terrified of finding the Jill the Ripper role attractive? For anyone with a modicum of knowledge of the Ripper affair, it looks very much as though journalist-novelist Belloc-Lowndes is turning a critical gaze on her old fellow employees by showing how the work of one serial killer may be transformed into a pandemic of mutual fear and distrust. One article quoted refers to “crimes which are amazing, and indeed staggering, not only London, but the whole civilized world” and already speculates about the presence of “perpetrators” plural.62 Yet what happens if the fear turns inward and a poor, possessed “body” even begins to distrust herself ? As far as the notion of fear and suspicion as a pre- existentialist nausée or peste is concerned, the longer Sleuth’s nocturnal excursions into the fog and “experiments” at the stoves in the attic and downstairs kitchens continue, the worse Ellen’s health becomes. Pallour, lassitude, episodes of hysteria and petit mal and, but naturally, the shortening of an already hasty temper become the norm with her. The after-effects of Stoker’s vampire attacks begin to resemble symbolic ailments of Sartre and Camus. Not all London is quite physically ill as yet, of course, but the lodger looks as wan and poorly as his landlady, draining himself as he drains her energy and perhaps giving her something of his own in return. The blighted mind is contagious. Sleuth has indeed “bitten” her, but certainly not physically, as Dracula bent to suck Lucy

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and Mina’s blood. She is actually at her worst not when he is with her but on those occasions when he is either away from the house (even on a foggy winter’s day, when he commits his most daring atrocity) or burning his bloodstained clothes upstairs. Is this because she is afraid of what he might be up to when she loses track of him or because she is temporarily “out of the loop”? Ellen Bunting is “pierced” by the horns of a dilemma. Ask him to leave and she will lose the house. Permit him to stay and she may lose much more. Worry and its attendant weariness account for her steadily worsening temperament, but there are times when her moral compass appears to have drifted from “true East (End)” too, the closer to Marylebone and her own street the attacks on prostitutes come. Even the Primrose Hill murder does not set her right, given that it is on precisely this occasion that Mr. Bunting feels the “blood taint” as he crosses his own threshold. Most disturbing is her outburst during a tension-filled “lull” after the night of the equivalent of the Stride/Eddowes double murder (originally September 30, 1888). Enough time has elapsed for the police and general public to concoct new theories on the nature, whereabouts and best ways of apprehending the Avenger, and for the press to publish them. Here (Chapter XI) is where Mr. Bunting, Joe and Daisy read and discuss the theory of the criminal’s being harboured, the use of police dogs and a reward/amnesty for information received. An Avenger letter to the press has been stamped in an Edgeware Road post-office, closer to home than ever. Ellen, painfully aware that she has already given Sleuth an alibi for one piece of butchery (“Those few words marked an epoch in Ellen Bunting’s life. It was the first time she had told a bold and deliberate lie”63 ), stays out of the conversation. It follows that if he is society’s anathema then so is she. It is not simply that her own moral standards are lapsing; a momentous, perhaps irreversible, psychological transformation is underway too. Finally incapable of failing to justify herself to herself any longer, she callously blurts out a (con)fusion of her own opinions on drunken prostitutes with those of Sleuth; “Not but what it’s a good thing if these murders have emptied the publichouses of women for a bit.”64 This is more or less Bernard Shaw’s “Blood Money to Whitechapel” Star letter, but without a trace of irony.65 It is small wonder that, on the morning after yet another murder of one of the “flotsam and jetsam”, of the very bats for whom no lamp is lit, she finds herself incapable of sharing Sleuth’s opinion that “the fog has cleared”. She feels that it and he have clogged and dimmed her own soul. It is not only Sleuth of whom she stands in mortal terror, but of that unbending and callous side of his being she now feels to have lodged in her own heart. Perhaps it had always been there. There does exist a bond between them and it is not completely bereft of affection, but it is at the moment when words fail her that she finally recognizes what they really have in common-a loathing for weakness of the female flesh. Hyde-Sleuth must hold her in regard for some reason; perhaps it is her straitness of habit as opposed to Lucy-Mina’s purity of heart. Is it not actually the case that the monster within that they are both Hyde-ing is diseased morality, atrophied by its own excess? And evidence of the disease is all around them, an overwhelming press-ure exerted by that bastion of supposed decency and moral outrage, the newspaper. If journalism warns the London population of the dangers of wandering abroad at night, it also

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demonizes the Jewish population, the East End poor, members of the medical profession, the royal family, anyone who goes about with, depending on hearsay, a gladstone bag or a brown paper parcel. This is not yet the Horla, given the feeling of dread is of human provenance, open to analysis and criticism. Yet it is also, to use an old joke, “black and white” (in that it sensationalizes everything into extremes of Good and Evil) “and re(a)d all over”: on two occasions (Chapters VII and XV) Ellen either faints away or becomes delirious as the time for the morning paper delivery arrives or is anticipated. It is as if she could not stand the sight of blood even in print. This is horror- terror threshold indeed, when the very organism which fuels a plague of dread makes an individual feel (justifiably in this case) that she is part of the root cause of the epidemic. Give her credit, she attempts to do something about her predicament and eventhough with potentially tragic consequences-succeeds. In order fully to comprehend what happens to Ellen Bunting we return full circle to the Edwardian literary finale of the long nineteenth century. We have already seen that The Lodger intertextualizes Victorian Horror with the genesis of Cosmic Terror in Zola’s realism. A Hyde-Dracula composite materializes into Jack the Avenger, all the more real and horrifying because we never find out why Jack rips, what precisely Sleuth is seeking vengeance for; not (perhaps) until the very last paragraph of the novel, that is. There are no magic concoctions to create transformations, no bloodsucking; merely a high functioning sociopath who recognizes a potentially kindred spirit and knows how to “play” her. His sing-song biblical readings may even hint at the hypnotic powers of George Du Maurier’s Svengali, but with the emphasis shifted to receptiveness of a “victim”—Ellen is hardly even that- and away from mesmerism pure and simple. What we have sidelined in the latter half of this study, however, is the Edwardian propensity for the lightly humorous novel and children’s fiction. The former has actually been “covered”; “shrouded” might be a better word. The memory of Kate Webster, Mrs. Cox/George Griffin and Mary Pearcey cast too long a pall over the novel for Mr. and Mrs. Bunting to do more than hint at the comic touch: he is the butler turned a little doltish and senile, she the efficient servant with more than a touch of the maiden aunt about her. One element of the novel remains unexamined: the trips away from her allimportant home that this neat, deceptively Mole-like, person takes: away from the Wild Woods (of Mr. Sleuth’s room, the up-and-downstairs kitchens, the bed in which she cannot sleep for fear of footfalls) and out into an even more inhospitable Wide World. I have no proof that she ever read The Wind in the Willows although, given its international bestseller status after 1910 and her acquaintance with its chief populariser President Roosevelt, it would be a miracle had she not. Yet the reiterated journeys punctuated by extended stopovers (Mole leaves Mole End for a long riverbank sojourn; Mole gets lost in the Wild Wood, shelters with Mr. Badger; Toad drives out into the Wide World, is imprisoned, takes a train half way home) seem to be reiterated in the “journeys” from Marylebone by the Bunting family (and, of course, Sleuth.) Let us focus upon Ellen’s longest secret excursion into the Wide World. As a combination of Mole (she cuts a small, hesitant figure in the Metropolis outside

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Marylebone) and Toad (but as a first-time Underground commuter so as not to waste time or get lost rather than a motorist) she ends up in court (Toad again). She is not arrested, of course; she goes to the Coroner’s Inquest on the Avenger’s victims which, naturally, she has seen advertised in the newspapers. She is no thrill-seeker, at least consciously, although she finds herself in building full of them—a Chief Coroner who wishes only to make the headlines; a supposed witness out for her five minutes of fame and several others who need not have bothered to come, so inconclusive and contradictory is their evidence. Then she sees a journalist whose picture is used to advertise hair lotion and now models the product in public. She had come here to find proof of Sleuth’s innocence, yet encounters something akin to the opposite. The one reliable witness has indeed, on a midnight walk, happened across a bible/poetry reciting gentleman, obviously mad, carrying a gladstone bag. Luckily for Sleuth (and for her, Ellen reflects) the witness is so fussy and eccentric himself that his evidence is not even recorded. In the end she brings away one positive experience: viewing the witnesses for the first time, all of whom she initially believes to be family and friends of the murdered women, a flood of remorse and pity sweeps over her and this pity extends to the victims, who are no longer “bats”. Toad was never truly remorseful in court, being sorry only for himself. Yet the reader is left unsatisfied by these little moral victories. The woman who first brought Ellen to the verge of tears turns out to be a mere publicity seeker who obviously cared nothing for the victims; Ellen’s pity gives way, if partially, to the generally shared contempt. One is never quite sure how far pride at being a “Somebody”66 in the court outweighs her guilt and empathy. A kindly police inspector gets her a privileged place next to the witnesses, believing—she does nothing to disabuse him—that she is related to one of the victims. Toad will get a twenty-year sentence for reckless driving as a result of which there were no victims; we may allow ourselves to feel a little sorry for him. What of Ellen, though, who might have prevented at least three deaths by reporting Sleuth to the authorities? “If he knew, if he only knew!” she kept saying over and over as she walked lightly by the big burly form of the police inspector”: (italics mine67 ). She practically skips. She feels important and protected. As the analysis of this scene progresses, we are thinking less and less of humble, frightened Mole and more of Toad’s devil-may-care side, and my belief is that Belloc-Lowndes means us to, that the Willows parallelism is thus quite deliberate. Yet one cannot even really blame Ellen. This has been a daunting experience; her reactions are bound to be confused. On her walk home—she is too excited (or overwrought) to catch another train—the feelings of pity resurface, but also idle speculation on how the lodger had been getting along with Mr. Bunting during her absence (171). Like Mole again, she is glad to be getting home, no matter under what circumstances. She is certainly relieved to be out of the Court and its selfseeking travesty of an investigation, and to fuel her contempt news of its “important” findings is already on the street. After reading one headline-“Opening of the Avenger inquest. What is he really like? Full description”—she actually has to enter a bar for a glass of water.68 Perhaps this is only guilt, yet there is also the realization that she now forms part of a system dedicated to gulling the public. It is a system that is actually quite easy to manipulate if one knows how it works, or fails to work,

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and one unconsidered interpretation of the sheer open endedness of the novel’s final paragraph is that Ellen now knows exactly how to make it work for her; Mr. Bunting and his Ellen are now in the service of an old lady, by whom they are feared as well as respected, and whom they make very comfortable.69

Can we really take this at face value? Can we really forget all about Kate Webster and the fact that Mr. Bunting’s first thoughts on hearing of the opening murder of the book were of her? And why on earth should the couple be feared? The answers, I believe, lie in Sleuth’s final words to her. He had insisted upon taking the family on a visit to Madame Tussauds. On the point of entering the Chamber of Horrors they almost run into the party of new Commissioner of Police and hear their conversation. He had once arrested Sleuth, who is now revealed as an escapee from a lunatic asylum. Recognizing his nemesis just in time Sleuth makes his escape, but not before he has “cursed” Ellen for having, he believes, set a trap; “Your end will be bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Your feet shall go down to death, and your steps take hold on hell”.70 This is a misquotation of Proverbs 5:4, which is not a curse but a solomonic prognostication on devious women; (“For the lips of a strange woman drip as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil, but her end is bitter as wormwood…”). In applying it specifically to Ellen, is Sleuth not speaking of how she will end her days rather than of how he will end them for her? One implication of the title of this chapter is that he has lodged not only with but in her. His words thus almost certainly mean that far from killing her (and we find out that he has remained long enough in London to do so if he chose while she, like the faithful servant she is, awaits his visit) he means her to carry on his work. He senses her propensity for callous indifference to certain classes of people. It is controlled—perhaps, after her court experience, even overcome. Yet she also needs cash—else why, even given her maidservant’s version of “Dracula’s Bridehood”, would she have put up with him for so long? Rather conspicuously, he gives away the rest of what turns out to be stolen rent money to the governors of the same kind of institute where she was abandoned as a child—a foundling hospital. She will have to drag herself up by the bootstrings again, and she is rather too old to take anything but a short cut to renewed prosperity. Given her experience of the legal system, she now knows how easy it can be to get away with murder if one is only careful. No Kate Webster-like brutality and overkill for her, no Dwyer-like repetition of the same crime; perhaps she need not even commit a crime as such. All she and her husband have to do is find a rich, silly old lady like one of Daisy’s middle-class aunts, make sure that Daisy and her father are mentioned in the woman’s will and wait for her to die. This is the Realist version, the root, of Terror, Cosmic or otherwise: self-interest and a basic indifference to others, which may be taught to the right kind of person and flourish in the right kind of imbecilically self-righteous system, be it that of Bismarck or Salisbury. One does not need to be a Sleuth to work that out, although his influence (regarding what is “alien” to common humanity) may leave its “print”, as it certainly did on those

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Edwardians who fully expected the outbreak of a greater epidemic of insanity created by those who, like Sleuth, believed that God was on their side. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Conventionally dated from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914. Commonly associated with peace, prosperity, the apex of empire building, advances in technology, science and the arts- but also with the fear that all this was too good to last and increasing decadence. See Manuel Aguirre, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester University Press, 1990), chapters 6 and 7. See Harold North Fowler (ed.), Plato 7: Theatetus/ Sophist (Harvard University Press, 2016). Émile Zola, La Bête humaine (Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 2001). Peter Norton (ed.), Classic Horror Tales (San Diego, Word Cloud Classics, 2017), 236–258. Bénédict Augustin Morel, Traité des dégénérescences (Paris, J.B. Bailliére, 1857). Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente (Torino, Bocca Fr., 1897). Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children (London, Penguin, 2019). Charles Dickens, Ghost Stories (London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2009), 303–320. Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2017). H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London, Pan, 1976). Edith Nesbit, Grim Tales, Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 40321/40321-h/40321-h.htm. Last visited 25 November 2019. Edith Nesbit, Fear, Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/821203931 76840254/?autologin=true. Last visited 25 November 2019. Edith Nesbit, Barstable Series (1899–1928) Retrieved from http://www.gutenb erg.org/files/770/770-h/770-h.htm; Psammiad Series (1902–1906). https://en. wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Edith_Nesbit. Last visited 25 November 2019. The series of 24 titles appeared between 1942 and 1963. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Edith Nesbit, In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (London, HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 158–171. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Vintage Books, 1975), 223–230. J.M. Barrie, The Admirable Crichton, Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg. org/files/3490/3490-h/3490-h.htm. Last visited 25 November 2019. Ibid. Act III. No page/line numbers. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel (Richmond, Alma Classics, 2009). George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2019).

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23. Du Maurier, George. Trilby (Oxford University Press, 1995). 24. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993). 25. See, for example, Catherine Wynn, “The Du Mauriers and Stoker: Gothic Transformations of Whitby and Cornwall.” Retrieved from https://www.resear chgate.net/publication/303442212_The_Du_Mauriers_and_Stoker_Gothic_ Transformations_of_Whitby_and_Cornwall. Last visited 26 November 2019. 26. See especially Steven Knight, New Revised Edition: Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution (London: Chancellor Press, 2002), 23–27; 101–108; 204–205. 27. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (London, Magnet, 1980). 28. Grahame, Willows, 17. 29. Ibid., 125. 30. Oscar Wilde, The Poetry of Oscar Wilde (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2019), 198–222. 31. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 1992). 32. Marie Belloc-Lowndes, The Lodger (New York, Dover Publications Inc., 2014). 33. All information on the press and Ripper reportage taken from L. Perry Curtis Jr., Jack the Ripper and the London Press (Yale University Press, 2001). 34. James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett, Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14833/14833-h/14833h.htm. Last visited 1 August 2019. 35. Anna McQueen, A Class Apart: the Servant Question in English Fiction 1920– 1950 (Stirling, University of Stirling, 2016). 36. She actually wrote the libretto for a musical based on her 1930 novel The Door entitled The Butler Did It Singing. 37. Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder (New York, Thomas Duane Books, 2011), 166–172. 38. Flanders, 2011, 387–394. 39. ‘Amelia Dyer’ Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Dyer. Last visited 4 August 2019. 40. The Dark Histories Podcast, ‘The Balham Mystery: The Death of Charles Bravo’, Retrieved from https://www.darkhistories.com/the-balham-mysterycharles-bravo/. Last visited 6 August 2019. 41. Anne-Marie Kilday, ‘Constructing the Cult of the Criminal: Kate Webster – Victorian Murderess and Media Sensation’, Retrieved from https://radar.bro okes.ac.uk/radar/file/5536ba5a-c8d3-4492-ae2d-2836a0f6cad3/1/Chapter% 206%20Kilday%20%28True%20Crime%20Histories%29.pdf. Last visited 7 August 2019. 42. Peter Norton (ed.), Classic Horror Tales (San Diego, Word Cloud Classics, 2017), 56–144. 43. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 243–319. 44. See note xlix on Mary Pearcey. 45. John Oxenham, A Mystery on the Underground (London, Read Books Ltd., 2013).

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46. See, for example, Stewart P. Evans, ‘Kosminski and the Seaside Home,” Retrieved from https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-koz.html. No page numbers, no date. Last visited 20 September 2019. 47. Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper ( London, Robinson, 2002), 441–466. 48. Belloc-Lowndes, The Lodger, 11–12 49. Ibid., 17–18. 50. Ibid., 12. 51. Ibid., 25. 52. Belloc-Lowndes, The Lodger, 8–13. 53. Ibid., 21. 54. Ibid., 5. 55. Ibid., 115. 56. Ibid., 141. 57. Ibid., 136. 58. William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Cambridge University Press, 1997), I.V.40; II.iii.89 Belloc-Lowndes, The Lodger, 110. 59. Ibid., 161–162. Italics those of this author. 60. Ibid., 36. 61. All information on non-canoical Ripper victims and press reportage taken from L. Perry Curtis Jr., Jack the Ripper and the London Press. 62. Belloc-Lowndes, 52. 63. Ibid., 68. 64. Ibid., 69. 65. The letter began: SIR,—Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question?” Retrieved from https://www.casebook.org/press_reports/star/s880924. html. Last visited 28 November 2019. 66. Belloc-Lowndes, 154. 67. Ibid., 152–153. 68. Ibid., 170–171. 69. Ibid., 231. 70. Ibid., 222.

Bibliography Aguirre, Manuel. The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism (Manchester University Press, 1990). Barrie, J.M. The Admirable Crichton. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3490/3490h/3490-h.htm. Last visited 25 November 2019. Belloc-Lowndes, Marie. The Lodger (New York, Dover Publications Inc., 2014). Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands (London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2017). Dickens, Charles. Ghost Stories (London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2009).

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Du Maurier, George. Trilby (Oxford University Press, 1995). Evans, Stewart P. “Kosminski and the Seaside Home.” Retrieved from https://www.casebook.org/ dissertations/dst-koz.html. No page numbers, no date. Last visited 20 September 2019. Fowler, Harold N. (ed.), Plato 7: Theatetus/Sophist (Harvard University Press, 2016). Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows (London, Magnet, 1980). Grossmith, George and Weedon. The Diary of a Nobody (London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2019). Jasper, Kirsty-Anne. ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Jack The Ripper Murders.’ Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/12062822/The_Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jek yll_and_Mr_Hyde_and_The_Jack_The_Ripper_Murders. Last visited 1 July 2019. Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel (Richmond, Alma Classics, 2009). Kilday, Anne-Marie. ‘Constructing the Cult of the Criminal: Kate Webster – Victorian Murderess and Media Sensation.’ Retrieved from https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/5536ba5a-c8d34492-ae2d-2836a0f6cad3/1/Chapter%206%20Kilday%20%28True%20Crime%20Histories% 29.pdf. Last visited 7 August 2019. Knight, Steven. New Revised Edition: Jack the Ripper, the Final Solution (London: Chancellor Press, 2002). Le Fanu, Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008). Lombroso, Cesare. L’uomo delinquente (Torino, Bocca Fr., 1897). McQueen, Anna. A Class Apart: The Servant Question in English Fiction 1920–1950 (Stirling, University of Stirling, 2016). Morel, Bénédict Augustin. Traité des dégénérescences (Paris, J.B. Bailliére, 1857). Nesbit, Edith. Barstable Series: The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899); The Wouldbegoods (1901), New Treasure Seekers, (1904); Oswald Bastable and Others, (1928). Retrieved from http://www. gutenberg.org/files/770/770-h/770-h.htm. Last visited 25 November 2019. Nesbit, Edith. Fear. Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/82120393176840254/?autolo gin=true. Last visited 25 November 2019. Nesbit, Edith. Grim Tales. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40321/40321-h/40321h.htm. Last visited 25 November 2019. ———. In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (London, HarperCollins Publishers, 2017). ———. The Railway Children (London, Penguin, 2019). Norton, Peter. (ed.), Classic Horror Tales (San Diego, Word Cloud Classics, 2017). Oxenham, John. A Mystery on the Underground (London, Read Books Ltd., 2013). Perry Curtis Jr., L. Jack the Ripper and the London Press (Yale University Press, 2001). Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, Vintage Books, 1975). Rymer, James Malcolm and Peckett, Thomas, Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14833/14833-h/14833-h.htm. Last visited 1 August 2019. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Shaw, George Bernard. ‘Blood Money to Whitechapel,’ letter to the editor of The Star, 24 September 1888. Retrieved from https://www.casebook.org/press_reports/star/s880924.html. Last visited 28 November 2019. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Merrie Men & Other Stories (Ware, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1999). Stoker, Bram. Dracula (London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993). Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper ( London, Robinson, 2002). 441–466. Turner, Ellen. ‘Paper-thin walls: Law and the Domestic in Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Popular Gothic’. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/27272083/Paper_thin_walls_Law_and_the_ domestic_in_Marie_Belloc_Lowndes_popular_gothic. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds (London, Pan, 1976). Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 1992). ———. The Poetry of Oscar Wilde (London: Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2019).

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Wynn, Catherine. ‘The Du Mauriers and Stoker: Gothic Transformations of Whitby and Cornwall.’ Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303442212_The_Du_Mauriers_and_ Stoker_Gothic_Transformations_of_Whitby_and_Cornwall Last visited 26 November 2019. Zola, Émile. La Bête humaine (Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 2001).

Technology and Gothic Fears

Nineteenth-Century Office Chills David A. Ibitson

In Chapter Two of Dracula (1897) the narrator, Jonathan Harker, quite literally forgets himself. Newly arrived at Dracula’s castle, wondering how to enter, he misclassifies himself in a way that alarms him: Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor—for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am now a full-blown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me […].1

This professional regression from solicitor to clerk may seem trivial, but one might see it as a sort of Freudian regression, a defence mechanism against all that is ‘so strange and uncanny’, slipping into a professionally immature state, a more clerkish type (where clerk work is defined by the copying of the writing of others). Harker’s perturbation is telling. It is also perceptive, prefiguring what the novel has in store for him. Harker is kept prisoner by Dracula, who asks him to ‘put all my papers together’, and forces him to write letters, dictating their contents to Harker, who duly writes down what he is told: Last night the Count asked me in the suavest tones to write three letters, one saying that my work here was nearly done, and that I should start for home within a few days, another that I was starting on the next morning from the time of the letter, and the third that I had left the castle and arrived at Bistritz. I would fain have rebelled, but felt that in the present state of things it would be madness to quarrel openly with the Count while I am so absolutely in his power2 ;

Fulfilling the prophecy of his initial fears, Harker is reduced from a solicitor with agency to a copy writer, whose job is not to create but to reproduce. He is essentially trapped in a grotesque simulacrum of office work. It is worth noting that it D. A. Ibitson (B) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_21

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later becomes the job of his wife, Mina, to copy the documents that make up the narrative; yet it is Harker who first inhabits this administrative role, feminising, or at least unmanning, him.3 After his encounter with Dracula, Harker is left ‘thin and pale and weak-looking’.4 In this gothic parody of commercial corruption Harker’s professional degeneration is equated with a physical one. This copying is what I want to focus on. Dracula serves as an indicator of a much larger anxiety about clerk work, and office work generally, that can be traced in diverse forms. And, like Dracula, this concern is global in outlook, finding expression in texts in England, America and Russia. Jonathan Wild has noted the sharp increase in clerk workers and white-collar positions from 1871 to 1911, and, citing Gregory Anderson, that clerical jobs associated with banking, insurance, commerce, and government bureaucracy grew rapidly.5 Nicholas Daly has demonstrated how Dracula needs to be read in the context of Britain’s prosperity being reliant on the financial and service aspects of its economy.6 These changes and opportunities in the white-collar job market need to be viewed in the context of the new degrees and forms of globalisation that arose in the mid-nineteenth century, and the administrative processes that facilitated them.7 My contention is that the nineteenth century saw the tropes and trappings of the Gothic transposed onto ideas of clerk work and bureaucracy, revealing real concerns about the damaging stresses of such an existence, and that this literary mode can be traced globally. With themes of containment and entrapment always having been a part of the gothic genre, what greater imprisonment can there be than one defined by the bureaucratic structures of society and the necessity to submit to these in order to work, earn and survive. We should see this as a particular form which we might term Office Gothic. When it comes to clerks, Wild has established the mocking portrayals of the ‘hopeless clerk’, diminutive clerks, effeminate clerks, throughout the nineteenth century and up to the First World War, as well as how the lower middle classes figured in debates around urban degeneration.8 This is what Harker represents, and it is Gothicised in very specific ways, with recurring themes in texts of the loss of identity and individuality, resulting in manifestations of the vampire, the doppelganger and the ghost. When M. R. James was looking for a protagonist to be haunted in ‘Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance’ (1911), it is noteworthy that he picks a clerk who has inherited a country estate from a distant relative, and ‘whose employment in a Government office for the last four or five years had not gone far to fit him for the life of a country gentleman’.9 Needless to say, the punishment for this unfit clerk leaving his office and moving into an unsuitable social role is a haunting.10 Dracula has long been seen as representing the capitalist circulation of money.11 After all, when attacked by Harker with a Kukri knife, Dracula’s coat is cut, ‘making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold fell out’: he seems to bleed money.12 It is unsurprising that these concerns manifest in such uncontrollable forms at the end of the Victorian period, with its significant developments in the social, and literary, importance of markets, tertiary services and professionalism, all bound up with the necessity of administrative work. And yet, Harker’s office-work hell belies a darkness in this new world of ‘combination and collectivity’ that Daly

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sees as transforming Victorian Britain.13 The office is clearly a problematic site to negotiate. We find Harker’s monstrous ancestors in the works of Charles Dickens, who, as Arlene Young states, is notable for the number and variety of lower middle-class characters in his novels that avoid stereotyping.14 However, even in this sympathetic material, Young notes the ‘grotesques’ in his clerks cannon, which allow the uncanny to creep into the office. While Young judges David Copperfield’s (1850) Uriah Heep to be ‘governed by the conventions of humour or of controlled exaggeration […] an excessively unctuous and sinister version of the insinuating clerk’,15 the state in which he leaves Mr Wickfield, his employer, then partner, then victim, invites us to look at him through a gothic lens: It was not that he had lost his good looks, or his old bearing of a gentleman—for that he had not—but the thing that struck me most, was, that with the evidences of his native superiority still upon him, he should submit himself to that crawling impersonation of meanness, Uriah Heep. The reversal of the two natures, in their relative positions, Uriah’s of power and Mr. Wickfield’s of dependence, was a sight more painful to me than I can express. If I had seen an Ape taking command of a Man, I should hardly have thought it a more degrading spectacle.16

Heep is barely human throughout the narrative. When we first see him he is breathing into a pony’s nostrils and covering them with his hand, ‘as if he were putting some spell upon him’, and Copperfield goes on to describe his ‘clammy hand […] ghostly to the touch’, leaving ‘clammy tracks along the page […] like a snail’.17 Heep, referred to as an ‘atrocious mass’ by Micawber at the revelation of his fraud and forgery, shows the capacity of the office for the bizarre and the unnatural, as well as alluding to its ‘mass’ of workers.18 Young notes that the persistent denigration of the lower middle class in the nineteenth century suggests that this large group, vital to the running of institutions, is a potentially threatening presence to the bourgeois hegemony.19 In Dickens’s texts, this threat adopts a gothic expression. The idea of the predatory office worker returns more explicitly in Bleak House (1853), with the lawyer Vholes and his corruption of Richard Carstone, who, in a manner reminiscent of Wickfield is left ‘thin and languid’, ‘wasting away’, through his involvement in the legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.20 The similarity here to Harker’s fate is clear enough, particularly as we are told of Vholes that ‘there were something of the Vampire in him’.21 With a narrative preoccupation with Vholes’s eating habits, the office becomes a place that consumes life rather than maintaining it: he is likened to a bear making an account of stray travellers, ‘devouring’ and ‘making a lingering meal’ of his ‘morsel’ clients.22 When he informs Mr Jarndyce that ‘my digestion is much impaired, and I am but a poor knife and fork at any time. If I was to partake of solid food at this period of the day, I don’t know what the consequences might be’, the cumulative weight of his monstrous description make it more of a threat than anything else.23 Regardless of the variety of Dickens’s clerks, the office carries with it the threat of becoming an unproductive space, the manipulation of administration to feed off others, and something to be escaped by the protagonists rather than a viable space in which to make one’s life. Both these office workers, more animal than man, feed off their victims, compelling them to fruitless work, and causing them to physically waste

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away like Jonathan Harker. This inhumanity can be seen even earlier, in ‘Automaton Police Officer and Real Offenders’, George Cruikshank’s illustration for Dickens’s ‘Mudfog Papers’, with its depiction of a clock-headed recording clerk, an automaton than signals deskbound paperwork as a space that deconstructs the integrity of the human body.24 Just as Julian Wolfreys notes the interaction of the comic and the Gothic in the works of Dickens, with both disturbing and disrupting a sense of English identity,25 his gothic clerks emerge alongside his sympathetic ones, preventing the office from ever really being a certain or stable place, and certainly one where personal autonomy is not assured. Office work, it seems, makes one vulnerable to predation, notably by vampires. For Anthony Trollope’s Charley Tudor, one of The Three Clerks (1858), a career as a clerk means he must ‘escape from the fangs’ of a dirty-nailed barmaid form the East End of London.26 It is a sexual danger that hampers Charley’s ability to escape a career in an office, much in the same way that Harker is prevented from escaping his paperwork prison by three vampire women who threaten to penetrate him. Again and again, the office worker is vulnerable to exploitation by a vampiric workplace defined by its consumption of its inhabitants. Dracula’s hunger at the end of the century demonstrates the persistence of this earlier gothic form. It is the hunger of commerce and industry, transforming its workers into fodder. Dracula’s is not the only office work to endanger London in the 1890s. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891) we hear about the conning of struggling pawnbroker Jabez Wilson by the villainous John Clay.27 Wilson is tricked into thinking he has been chosen by the fictional Red-Headed League to be the beneficiary of a fund set up by a mysterious millionaire in order to ensure the ‘propagation and spread of red-heads’.28 To earn the promised four pounds per week, Wilson must copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica for four hours a day in an office: ‘there you must stay’, he is told, ‘or you lose your billet’.29 Wilson complies, until, eight weeks later, he arrives to find the office locked, and that no one has heard of the League. The whole thing, Sherlock Holmes deduces, is a ruse to get him out of his pawn shop, so that Clay can dig a tunnel into the cellar of ‘one of the principal London banks’.30 Since clerk work itself consists greatly of copying, we can see this story as being a sideways look at the damaging effects of the office. Here, as in Dracula, enforced copying makes London vulnerable, and the depiction of unproductive office work indicates the extent of these anxieties about dysfunctional financial administration. Although not a gothic text, D. Martin Dakin’s suggestion that the story implies that Clay murders Wilson off-stage allows a gruesome tinge to creep into an otherwise bloodless adventure.31 This clerkish theme is cemented by Conan Doyle’s reworking of the fundamentals of this plot into ‘The Adventures of the Stockbroker’s Clerk’ two years later. Importantly, the red-headed Clay gestures back to the red-headed Uriah Heap who, at the end of David Copperfield, is in jail, awaiting transportation, for also plotting to defraud the Bank of England. The finance industry, and its oppressive offices, are enduring sites of potential deviance. This prompts us to consider what sort of space the office is. Rather than being whole and stable, the office is an intermediate location. It is not home, with its security and control, and it is not the outside world of pleasure and freedom; although the

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money earned there is meant to facilitate and maintain both of these others. One is placed there, compelled to be there, and forced alongside people not of one’s choosing. The worker is removed from the freedom that either the world or the home promises.32 Wolfreys sees hauntings as enacting the destabilising of domestic scenes, or of the places we are meant to feel secure.33 With the office though, these hauntings rather lay bare existing insecurities and instabilities, and the sort of existence it necessitates. This in-betweenness signals the importance of the double in Office Gothic, and it is exemplified by the tale of Smith and Smythe by Jerome K Jerome. The tale of Smith and Smythe is a short vignette from Jerome’s Novel Notes (1892), which records an encounter with a man, ‘two of whose characters were of equal value’.34 Joseph Smythe, member of the Devonshire and ‘the most superior person I have ever met’, is bored by art, all but the most obscure French literature, science, humour and sentiment: ‘nobody liked him, but everybody respected him’.35 However, his condescension is undermined when the narrator encounters him in Yarmouth, transformed as to be almost unrecognisable, as Smith, a stereotype cockney ’Arry, replete with concertina and dropped aitches, ordering ‘two of gin’.36 The figure of the ’Arry, a slang term for a lower-middle-class urban male, who has enough money to spend on flashy clothes and boozy music hall evenings, stands in for the figure of the office worker here: the reason the ’Arry has his drinking money is because of his job as a clerk or shop worker. We find out that he turns from Smythe to Smith and back on a monthly basis, each ashamed and disgusted of the other. The obvious gothic template for the tale is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), with the apparent atavism of Hyde exchanged for the cultural degeneration of Smith, a comically bourgeois reduction of actual crime for cultural crime. Smith/Smyth’s double existence is key to developing the anxieties acknowledged by Dracula. Again, the office worker is subject to degeneration, and enervation. Indeed, within half a page of being found out, Smith bursts into tears: distinctly less than a manly ideal. But it is the revulsion Smythe feels towards his alter-ego which is most suggestive of its degenerative implications: You can have no conception of the misery the whole thing causes me. I cannot understand it. […] the knowledge that I was a ghoul or a vampire, would cause me less nausea than the reflection that I am one and the same with that odious little Whitechapel bounder.37

Along with the gothic connotations of ‘ghoul’, and the association of Whitechapel with recent murders, Jerome’s use of the image of the vampire once again preempts Dracula’s corruption of Harker. Clearly the vampire was a suggestive enough metaphor for Jerome to utilise it for a similar purpose four years earlier. Smith/Smythe represents an uncertainty of personal and cultural stability threatened by an exaggerated ’Arry, or office worker, figure. The tale works as a type of class-conscious Gothic. Jerome’s destabilisation of the self, with its troublesome invasions of ’Arryish anatomy, automatically encompasses contemporary concerns about the fitness of the urban man.38 At the very mention of Smith, Smythe displays ‘a sickly smile’, instilling a disgust with the ’Arry as a type. As with Dracula, the issue is one of self-definition, and the lack of control Smith/Smythe has over his public image.

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Jerome wastes no time in indicating to what end Smythe has been constructed, with the disclosure that ‘he sneered at the Saturday Review as the pet journal of the suburban literary club’.39 This can be read as simply a necessary step in establishing Smythe’s ludicrous pretensions, considering the Saturday Review’s reputation as representing the educated upper middle classes, with prejudices that led it to be nicknamed ‘the Saturday Reviler’.40 In its review of Jerome’s earlier Three Men in a Boat (1889), the Saturday Review criticised its clerkish protagonists for having no other purpose ‘than that of enjoying themselves innocently, vaguely, lazily, ignorantly, like other clerks from banks and lawyer’s offices’.41 It is important to note then the Saturday Review’s review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which exclaimed that ‘we would welcome a spectre, a ghoul, or even a vampire gladly, rather than meet Mr. Edward Hyde’.42 The similarity of this to Smythe’s assessment of Smith as a ghoul or a vampire is so marked as to suggest that the former’s disdain for the Saturday Review is no coincidence. This, and his simultaneous affectation of superiority, allows Smythe to function as a ridiculous parody of the condescension that defined the Saturday Review and its contempt for Jerome’s clerks. The effect of associating the pretentions of Smythe with the Saturday Review is to imply that such upper-middle-class disdain for the ’Arry or the clerk is just as ludicrous as the comically parodic ‘superior’ man. Jerome highlights the absurdity of Smythe’s pretentions and of the idea of the clichéd ’Arry Smith, each as grotesque as the other, by revealing their nameless intermediate identity dressed in a ‘transition blue suit’, at the halfway point of the transformation.43 This third man represents the absence of such positive portrayals of the urban middle class, overlooked in favour of vulgar ’Arries (Smith) and damned for not meeting ambiguous expectations (Smythe). The anonymous middle-man is the reality of Jerome’s middle class. Honest and eloquent, he is compelled by circumstance to degenerate before our eyes into the ‘slouching’ ’Arry.44 At this, in a final reprisal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s gothic tropes, the narrator confesses that ‘a sudden repulsion seized me’45 ; but now the revulsion could just as easily be for the process by which the real clerk is twisted into grotesque fictional constructs. Jerome may be sympathetic to the white-collar worker, but the tale of Smith and Smythe acknowledges that the situation of the clerk is best depicted with gothic tropes; he is compelled to inhabit a liminal space in society and culture, and robbed of a valid selfhood. His identity is forced upon him, a social construction that obscures the real clerk, and, as befits an office worker, he is trapped in a repetitive temporal prison of involuntary timekeeping. The tale of Smith and Smythe first appeared in the Idler magazine, co-edited by Jerome, and it is a fictional magazine of the same name that prompts us across the Atlantic to the USA for another example of the clerkish double. In ‘Thurlow’s Christmas Story’ (1898) (originally published as ‘Thurlow’s Ghost Story’ in 1894), by John Kendrick Bangs, author Henry Thurlow, is commissioned to supply ‘the Idler’ (presumably not Jerome’s) with a story for its Christmas issue. The story is advertised in advance, but Thurlow finds himself unable to write it, partly due to writer’s block, but partly due to something more horrifying, as he confronted by

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A figure in which I recognised my very self in every form and feature. I might describe the chill of terror that struck to the very marrow of my bones […] as I noticed in the face of this confronting figure every indication of all the bad qualities which I know myself to possess, of every evil instinct which by no easy effort I have repressed heretofore […]46

Again and again Thurlow is visited by ‘that thing’, ensuring that he cannot write his story.47 Salvation comes in the form of a fan, a ‘great devourer of books’, who has come to fulfil ‘a great desire, not to say curiosity’, to meet Thurlow and tell him how much he enjoys his work.48 After some literary conversation, Thurlow confesses his current inability write, after which the stranger produces a story he has been working on for ten years, and offers it to Thurlow to print under his own name, before disappearing ‘into the darkness of the street’.49 The story, needless to say, is a masterpiece, and Thurlow wrestles with the decision of whether or not to pass it off as his own: ‘how could I put out as my own another man’s work and retain my selfrespect’.50 Here his ‘uncanny other self’ steps into convince him, stressing that he has ‘a contract which must be filled’, and so he must ‘put together the necessary number of words to fill the space allotted to you’; ‘consider your children’, it suggests.51 Thurlow succumbs, and signs his name to the story, but that is not enough for the leering ‘thing’, who points out that the editor will know that the handwriting is not his: ‘Copy it’, it commands, and Thurlow does, before burning the original.52 What makes this tale suggestive is that Thurlow is subjected to a similar transformation, or regression as Harker’s. He goes from a celebrated author to simply copying the work of others, the very definition of clerk work. He is reduced, he regresses, and it is a transformation from an ideal form into one of abasement. It is, as he says, ‘a career of shame and horror’, and an inversion of the common trope of a literary career being an escape route from clerk work, as noted by Wild.53 A useful theoretical lens here would be Kelly Hurley’s description of the idea of the abhuman, the ‘not-quite-human’, whose unstable state leaves it in danger of becoming something other, moving away from an ideal condition.54 Thurlow’s transformation, like Harker’s and Smith’s, is a social and professional version of this, but the mechanism is the same. It is the imposition of a deadline that seems to do this, the robbing of autonomy and subjection to the will of a ruling figure. The violent etymology of the word ‘deadline’ itself, which comes from the American term for a line in the ground around a prison that would be the point where escapees would be shot, gives us a glimpse into how closely, if unexpectedly, aligned with terror and brutality is the world of administration, paperwork and finance. Thurlow worries about how his uncanny other is ‘practically destroying my usefulness in my profession and my sole financial resource’.55 It is the loss of usefulness that pains him, and it is unproductive work that he is reduced to. Thurlow is not his own man (hence he is confronted with his double) and so he descends into gothic purgatory. The horror of repetition, of copying, is what keeps surfacing in these tales, which has a significant place in cultural history. It calls to mind the repetitive tasks and actions of Sisyphus, Tantalus and the Danaides in Greek myth, casting the fruitless repetition of unproductive work in and of itself as hellish. In this context, Thurlow being robbed of his ability to create, and being forced into an act of hideous

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repetition, is rendered all the more Gothic, with its Classical implications of captivity, torture and death.56 Thurlow’s position is comparable to that of Clare Vawdrey in Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’ (1892). In this tale, the narrator discovers that the celebrated writer Vawdrey is actually two people: one who performs the function the literary celebrity at social gatherings, and one who sits in his room and writes; both exist simultaneously. Once again the figure of the double is invoked to negotiate ideas of deskbound work. When the narrator, in search of a manuscript and, seeing that Vawdrey is outside, lets himself into the author’s room, the sight of a second Vawdrey carries with it the air of the uncanny. Here we find the writer-Vawdrey in darkness, a vague figure bent over his table ‘in the attitude of writing’, unresponsive, as if not wholly there.57 The narrator leaves the room in the utmost confusion, and sleeps badly as a result of these ‘queer occurrences’.58 The act of writing ‘in the dark’ proves especially troubling for him.59 Once again, the ‘double’, as it is called in the tale, announces the tensions of desk-bound work. The language of the story is full of witchcraft and temptation, apparitions and ghosts, insanity and fright, and its setting of the Swiss mountains locates it in a traditional gothic geography. The text finds it hard to reconcile personal freedom with the constrictions of sedentary desk job that is bound by deadlines; authorship, the sort of creativity that should give freedom, is now locked in a darkened back room, a Freudian, or Brontean, suggestion that something shameful or undesirable is being repressed. These American texts need to be situated, though, in a particular social context distinct from the London of Jerome, Conan Doyle and Stoker. Wild notes that the office worker, clerk, or urban businessman has a different status in America than in Britain.60 In America the office worker becomes ‘an American Everyman, epitomising the country’s economic shift towards commercial and financial capitalism’; a positivity that his British counterpart lacks.61 It is odd then, that the same ideas of darkness, doubling and professional abhumanity surface in American literature at the end of the century. Graham Thompson notes the ‘capitalist emphasis upon bodily regularity and control connected to the time-clock’, which makes the idea of the splitting of the self, this doubling, an expression of temporal and financial pressures upon the body.62 We should see this as a further development of Fred Botting’s ‘Homely Gothic’ and the importance of America’s newness in uncoupling the Gothic from its Romantic landscapes and allowing it to creep into the cities and homes.63 It makes sense then, that we should see it developing a particular expression in the office, where one might spend more time than at home, and which comes with its own stresses and controls. Here we find some guidance from the exemplar of troubling American office work: Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). Bartleby sees the unnamed narrator, a Wall Street lawyer, expand his staff by employing another man to copy documents. He hires Bartleby, and initially the new clerk seems to be the perfect worker, doing ‘an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion’.64 It does not last long, however, and Bartleby starts to rebel, refusing to perform jobs, saying ‘I would prefer not to’. Bartleby instead haunts the office, making customers and colleagues alike uneasy,

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until the lawyer is forced to move. The ‘strangest [scrivener] I ever saw, or heard of’, Bartleby’s strangeness is established by an apparent inhumanity that is clearly coded in gothic terms.65 Not only is his imagined hunger rather vampiric, we are also told of his paleness, of his acting ‘cadaverously’ (no less than three times), and his quality of working ‘mechanically’, like some sort of automaton.66 While not featuring doubles, Bartleby moves from copying out texts to, responding to all entreaties to work with ‘ I would prefer not to’, becoming himself the repetitive text. The revulsion that the lawyer feels at the scrivener’s passive rebellion indicates how Bartleby shares characteristics with the other texts we have looked at so far: they have all been about the loss of autonomy, of the imposition of control. Indeed, the loss of identity in a new democratic and capitalist world that Alfred Bendixen sees as a specific preoccupation of American Gothic characterises all of these texts.67 Thompson sees this in Foucauldian terms, noting that in Barlteby’s office we see a preoccupation with surveillance, and capitalist disciplines of ‘supervision, assessment […] normalization, and hierarchies of power’.68 Thompson brings this office surveillance to bear on ideas of ideas of male identity, definition, relationships and sexuality, but notes that surveillance also polices class, labour and production.69 Leo Marx notes how Barlteby’s significance, and uncanniness, lies in his resistance and non-conformity to the office routine, as well as his eventual resistance to all jobs, challenging the social relations and hierarchies cemented and enforced by financial industries.70 Bartleby’s refusal to acquiesce to his dictated role appals his employer, incredulous that he has been ‘repulsed by this lean, penniless wight […] my hired clerk?’.71 This ‘wight’, dead in the eyes of his employer, brings out feelings of ‘melancholy’ which merge into ‘fear’, and ‘pity’ that merge into ‘repulsion’; Bartleby’s mere refusal to act the role that business commands him to makes him a thing to be reviled.72 Rejecting his role, he is no longer a man, but a ‘ghost’, a ‘creature’, and even an ‘incubus’.73 At the end of the tale, Bartleby is deemed a vagrant and taken to ‘the Tombs’, a Manhattan house of detention. One form of incarceration is replaced with another, but for Bartleby it makes no difference, they are equivalent, forcing us to consider the office as merely another form of gothic prison. He rejects his imposed role, and in revenge the machinery of society, and Wall Street, ensures that he is got rid of: Bartleby dies in the Tombs. But, as the text lets us know, the ‘cadaverous’ clerk had died long before, when he rejected to do the job demanded of him by the bureaucratic machinery he was supposed to serve. The final revelation that his previous position was the ‘Dead Letter Office’, with its implied breakdown of paperwork and written communications, cements the presence of the Gothic in the bureaucratic. Doubling, copying and repetition, then, seem to be defining characteristics of Office Gothic, and we can further demonstrate the international reach of these themes by looking at a particularly notable literary example of the gothic clerk, this time in Russia: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double (Dvoinik) (1846). Presaging the doubling we have already discussed, The Double presents us with Golyadkin, a government clerk in St Petersberg, whose attempted social climbing is interrupted by the arrival of his Doppelganger, who proceeds to outshine and harass him both inside and outside of the office. It is implied that this is a result of Golyadkin’s madness, but in true gothic style, this remains ambiguous. The Doppelganger brings to life the restrictive and reductive nature of Golyadkin’s employment. First, he is confronted by the action of

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his profession: the man who copies is faced with his own copy. Indeed, Golyadkin’s situation is explicitly described in such clerical terms: ‘absolutely nobody, would have ventured to determine who was the real Mr Golyadkin and who the fake, who the old and who the new, who the original and who the copy’.74 Golyadkin becomes the object of his work, trapped in a version of the repetitive reproduction of his profession, he is defined by his copying. Bound up in this is Golyadkin’s status, and the status of all clerks, as lacking any individual value, other than the work he provides. He is one of many interchangeable and dispensable clerks, replaceable by identical workers.75 One of the horrors of The Double is that no-one notices the uncanniness of the Doppelganger apart from Golyadkin; or rather, they notice, but do not think that it is remarkable: ‘He’s a clerk like any other’, says Golyadkin’s co-worker Anton Antonovich.76 For Antonovich, there is nothing exceptional about this identikit clerk, but for Golyadkin, confronted with his own lack of exceptionality, the new arrival is his ‘horror’, his ‘shame’, his ‘nightmare’.77 It is worth noting how frequently Golyadkin finds himself compelled to move against his will, pressed, shoved, pushed and carried by others, having a tenuous grasp on his own autonomy. Golyadkin’s situation is laid bare: anxious to socially progress, he is doomed to remain one of a faceless mass of workers, unable to escape the constraints of his job. In the same way that Bartleby swaps the office for The Tombs as if one were equivalent to the other, Golyadkin, it is implied, is taken to an asylum at the end of the tale; one cannot help but feel that the lack of freedom there would be no worse than that of the office. The Double, of course, evokes Nikolai Gogol’s earlier uncanny office workers, government clerks whose work forces them into unnatural and supernatural positions of containment. Golyadkin is a literary descendent of the unnamed St Petersburg civil servant in ‘Diary of a Madman’, whose tale begins with being late to the office, at which he gets his work ‘into such a tangle that Satan himself couldn’t sort it out’, and ends with him in an asylum convinced he is the King of France.78 As his diary entries lose any sense of time, freeing him from the tyranny of the working day, he exclaims ‘to hell with the department! […] you won’t entice me back there, you won’t catch me copying any more of your detestable documents’.79 Again, his escape merely swaps one form of incarceration for another. Then there is the absurd ‘The Nose’, where Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov wakes up one day to find that his nose has left his face, and is making its own way around St Petersburg with a life of its own dressed as a State Councillor, three ranks above him in the civil service. With Kovalyov subjected to a bizarre physical dismantling, forced to watch parts of him reanimated independently while hiding what remains of his face, the idea of control, and of social impotence, once again defines the clerk, even if the end of the tale revels in an ironic meaninglessness. The clerk of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, is notable as a copying clerk who genuinely loves his work: ‘it would be an understatement to say that he served with diligence; nay, he served with love […] Beyond his copying the world seemed not to exist for him’.80 Lured out of his self-contained world by the need for a new overcoat, he saves his money and becomes increasingly obsessed with the garment: ‘he derived spiritual nourishment, feeding on the dream of his new

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coat’.81 The coat promises to open doors in higher areas of society for him, but he is mugged on the way back from a party, his new coat stolen while he wanders through ‘a vast square, a terrible void’.82 Akaky catches a fever and dies, but his ghost haunts St Petersburg, ‘accosting everyone in its path, regardless of rank and title, and rending the coats form their shoulders in order to replace its own’.83 Eventually a General who had failed to help him is attacked by Akaky, whose ‘wretched scrivener’s face was as white as snow, and he looked exactly like a corpse’.84 Even after death he is still a scrivener, and even a clerk happy in his work is forced by financial pressure to become a mere copy of himself, doomed to repeat the same task. Clerks, it seems, remain something less than totally alive. The corresponding themes across these texts, and across continents and oceans, prompts us to consider Office Gothic’s global status. Peter N. Stearns has argued for the 1850s to be seen as the advent of modern globalisation, with new technologies in transport and communication, which contributed towards an increase in levels of international trade and business, including the global expansion of financial services and investments. This growth in business was accompanied by the emergence of new global political institutions.85 It is ironic that during this period of expansion we should find an adjacent concern about the enclosed space of the office, itself so vital for the running of these new institutions. Joseph Conrad draws together these connected threads of globalisation, business, government and the Office Gothic underlying it all. In Heart of Darkness (1899), after arriving in the Africa,86 the protagonist Marlow travels to the ‘Outer Station’ of ‘The Company’ he works for, and there meets its chief accountant. What renders the accountant so uncanny is his surroundings, which seem to Marlow like ‘the gloomy circle of some inferno’87 : black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair […] They were dying slowly – it was very clear.88

Marlow dubs it ‘the grove of death’, but the accountant, with his ‘sedentary desk-life’, acknowledges nothing incongruous in his setting, merely hating the men who are dying outside for providing a distraction when he is trying to make correct entries in his books.89 Here, the disorienting ‘vision’ of the accountant invites the same preoccupation with image and surface as Gogol’s clerks.90 This time, however, the clerk is not the victim, but rather a gothic emissary of the horrors of the bureaucracy of government and industry. In ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ (1823) by Charles Lamb, the narrator Elia tells a story about a scholar who makes a call to a friend’s house. Finding him absent, he enters his name into the visitor’s book, and then carries on his way. Later, returning past the house and forgetting that he has already called in, he again goes to sign the visitor’s book. What he sees there unsettles him: again the book is brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about to print his second name (his re-script)—his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate!—The effect may be conceived.91

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This seemingly trivial tale of administrative error contains many of the themes that Office Gothic would go on to mine throughout the century: the reduction of a man of letters to mere copyist, the horror repetition and of seeing one’s self or one’s double (given Classical weight by referencing Sosia from Plautus’s Amphitruo) and the uncanny experience of having one’s own actions seemingly taken out of one’s control. Lamb’s record of writing about office workers in ‘The South Sea House’ (1823) and ‘The Superannuated Man’ (1825), lends ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ (1823) a particular clerical relevance.92 It reinforces how Office Gothic uses the enforced copying of the self to force its victims to confront the fact that they are merely one of many replaceable workers in an overwhelming and alienating system. As a result, they also resemble the identical products of business, manufacture, or of the spontaneous generation of financial speculation; it evokes the multiplying of good or profits, where workers and products are indistinguishable. Yet, this invites the obvious problem that plenty of other jobs lack autonomy; what is special about white-collar work? The answer here might be the lack of production or tangible effect. David Graeber posits the theological origins to perceptions of work, that in both the Eden and Prometheus stories the punishment of work is also presented as a ‘more modest instantiation of the divine power of Creation itself’.93 A theological idea of production and productivity, and specifically male productive labour, is equivalent to childbirth—an act of creation, hence the labour of work and the labour of childbirth.94 The act of producing is culturally valorised. Enforced unproductive work is, for Graeber, a sort of ‘spiritual violence’.95 While the doctor or the lawyer produce an obvious result, and the factory worker or builder can identify their product, the scrivener, or the clerk, reproducing the work of others, and only part of a vast financial chain intangible and obfuscatory in its whole, is robbed of this certainty. Graeber draws on Carlyle here, who argued that ‘all true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness’.96 The clerk does not have the spiritual cache of the manual worker, of the cultural cache of the professional man. We might approach Office Gothic then not via Freud, like much of the Gothic, but via Lacan and his Symbolic Order and the Name of the Father: roles and rules are imposed, social identities and constraints are inflicted and, in the case of the doppelganger, confronted. Indeed, one might locate this in the use of the American term ‘the Man’ to refer to someone in a position of oppressive authority, be it an employer or a prison warder. I also do not mean to suggest that this is merely a nineteenth-century genre. Office Gothic is as fluid and adaptable as other gothic forms. The ‘abyss’ that E. M. Forster’s paradigmatic hopeless clerk Leonard Bast is in constant danger of falling into in Howard’s End (1910) proves an enduring one, and we find echoes of Jonathan Harker’s fin de siècle fate at the end of the following century as well. In 1999, there is a notable re-emergence of the oppressive office, with the Hollywood movies The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space all released.97 In all four the same themes of office work, constraint and gothic bodily manipulation are again present. The preoccupation of all these gothic imaginings of office work is with personal autonomy. A variation of the classic gothic trope of the captive heroine, the office robs

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its workers of their freedom. Harker is forced to write on behalf of Dracula; Wickfield and Carstone are compelled to work fruitlessly by their coercers; Jabez Wilson cannot leave his mindless copying until he is permitted; Smythe must become Smith with steady regularity; Thurlow must copy by an oppressive deadline; Bartleby’s resistance lands him from one confinement to another until death; Golyadkin has no social or professional mobility, and Gogol’s clerks are buffeted about by forces beyond their control. Conrad’s hellish Company accountant may have the power to leave, but evinces no desire to. The clerk does not produce, he repeats and we can see this in the protagonists of Office Gothic: they are not in control, they are objects of fascination and observation, to be coveted or leered at by other characters, either oddities or commodities. The work of administration is a gothic engine from which these characters cannot escape. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Ontario, Broadview, 1998), 45–46. Ibid., 72–73. Mina here becomes a de facto typist or secretary. Although this chapter focuses on male office workers, Katherine Mullin highlights how Mina embodies contemporary ideas about typists and telegraphists as figures of Modernity who are both a sexual threat and placed in sexual danger. She is a figure of ‘sexual Modernity’. Mullin also notes how the figure of the barmaid in literature is subject to Gothic imagery of incarceration. Jonathan Wild argues that while men and women could both be ‘clerks’, their treatment and experiences of work were different in terms of job opportunities, specific roles, and in pay. He notes that men and women in the office occupied ‘separate occupational spheres’. Wild cites Gregory Anderson as stressing this gendered separation of roles. Rather than arbitrarily separate men and women, my aim is to acknowledge their separate cultural treatment. To conflate these spheres would be to ignore the different social spaces occupied by male and female clerks, and certainly the female workers that Mullin notes are subject to specific pressures and gazes. My reading to date has not seen the same Gothic, supernatural, tropes acting on female office workers as it does the men of this chapter (Mina excepted). See Katherine Mullin, Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016). Stoker, Dracula, 139. Jonathan Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3; 13. Wild cites Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester University Press, 1976), 52. Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 32, via W.D. Rubenstein. Peter N. Stearns, Globalization in World History (London, Routledge, 2010). Wild, Rise, 8; 82. M. R. James, The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London, Penguin, 1987), 185.

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10. See my chapter on ‘M.R. James, Golf and Masculinity’ in this volume for further details. 11. Jennifer Wicke ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH: Journal of English Literary History, 59.2 (1992), 467–493 (490). Wicke cites Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, Signs Taken for Wonders (London, Verso, 1983). 12. Stoker, Dracula, 346. 13. Daly, Modernism, 51. 14. Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999), 95–96. 15. Young, Culture, 72. 16. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Watford, Greycaine, [n.d.]), 451. 17. Ibid., 200; 205; 212. 18. Ibid., 620. 19. Young, Culture, 61. 20. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London, Penguin, 1994), 756; 754. 21. Ibid., 754. 22. Ibid., 797; 505; 797. 23. Ibid., 566. 24. Charles Dickens; George Cruikshank, Mudfog Papers and Other Contributions (London, Richard Bentley, 1837), [no page]. 25. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 27. 26. Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks (London, Richard Bentley, 1860), 328. 27. Originally published in The Strand Magazine in August 1891, and included in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). 28. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard Lancelyn Green (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 57. 29. Ibid., 58. 30. Ibid., 68–69. 31. D. Martin Dakin, A Sherlock Holmes Commentary (1972), 52. Cited by Richard Lancelyn Green, ‘Explanatory Notes’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 324. 32. One might here consider how, now, people use the word ‘escape’ to describe going on holiday from work. 33. Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, 5. 34. Jerome K. Jerome, Novel Notes (London, Leadenhall Press, 1893), 204. 35. Ibid., 204; 205. 36. Ibid., 208. 37. Ibid., 212. 38. Wild, Rise, 82–83. 39. Jerome, Novel Notes, 204. 40. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, British Library, 2009), 558. 41. Anonymous, ‘Three Men in a Boat’, Saturday Review, 5 October 1889, p. 387. 42. Anonymous, ‘Stevenson’s New Story’, Saturday Review, 9 January 1886, pp. 55–56 (p. 55). 43. Jerome, Novel Notes, 224.

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44. Ibid., 226. 45. Ibid., 227. 46. John Kendrick Bangs, Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (New York, Harper, 1898), 110. 47. Ibid., 112. 48. Ibid., 121; 120. 49. Ibid., 128. 50. Ibid., 130. 51. Ibid., 124; 131; 131; 134. 52. Ibid., 131; 135. 53. Ibid., 112; Wild, Rise, 23. 54. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kelly Hurley ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 189–207. 55. Bangs, Ghosts, 122. 56. John Kendrick Bangs’s novel The Enchanted Typewriter (1899) features a typewriter machine being used by the ghost of Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, who takes control of it away from the narrator. I am grateful to Dr Katherine Mullin for bringing this to my attention, and for pointing out how this tale engages with anxieties about the role of female telegraphists and typists. 57. Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet, and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (London, Penguin, 1986), 208. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 212. 60. Wild, Rise, 6. 61. Ibid. 62. Graham Thompson, ‘“Dead letters!…Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, Journal of American Studies, 34.3 (2000), 395–411 (407). 63. Botting, Fred, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1997). 64. Melville, Herman, Billy Bud, Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondswoth, Penguin, 1970), 67. 65. Ibid., 59. 66. Ibid., 67. 67. Alfred Bendixen, ‘Romanticism and the American Gothic’, The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 31–43 (32–33). 68. Thompson, ‘“Dead letters!…Dead Men”’, 398. 69. Ibid., 404. 70. Leo Marx, ‘Melville’s Parable of the Walls’, Sewanee Review, 61:4 (1953), 603–627 (608; 616; 609). 71. Melville, Billy Bud, Sailor and Other Stories, 73. 72. Ibid., 79. 73. Ibid., 90. Thompson addresses the sexual implications of ‘incubus’.

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74. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground and The Double, translated Ronald Wilkes (London, Penguin, 2009), 171–172. 75. Robert Louis Jackson, ‘Introduction: Vision in Darkness’, Notes from Underground and The Double, xix. 76. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground and The Double, 175. 77. Ibid., 171. 78. Nikolai Gogol, Plays and Petersburg Tales, ed. and translated Christopher English (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), 158. 79. Ibid., 172. 80. Ibid., 118. 81. Ibid., 127. 82. Ibid., 133. 83. Ibid., 141. 84. Ibid., 144. 85. Peter N. Stearns, Globalization in World History (London, Routledge, 2010). 86. We presume it is the Belgian Congo, although this it never explicitly named in the text. 87. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London, Penguin, 1994), 24. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 28; 26. 90. Ibid., 25. 91. Charles Lamb, Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987), 13. 92. ‘The South Sea House’ can be found in Essays of Elia. 93. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (Penguin, 2018), 221. 94. Ibid., 222. 95. Graeber, 92; 134. I should note that not all of the jobs of the protagonists of these tales meet Graeber’s definition of Bullshit Jobs. Jabez Wilson’s copying is the most obvious one that does. 96. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London, Chapman and Hall, 1872), 173. 97. I will assume the presence of the Gothic is self-evident in the first three, but I concede that it is less so with the comedic Office Space. I would point to the character of Milton, an archetypal put-upon clerk, whose mutterings of ‘it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire’ and ‘I could set the building on fire’ lend the film an undercurrent of violence and trauma.

Bibliography Anderson, Gregory, Victorian Clerks (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1976). Anon., ‘Stevenson’s New Story,’ Saturday Review (9 January 1886), 55–56. Anon., ‘Three Men in a Boat,’ Saturday Review (5 October 1889), 387. Bangs, John Kendrick, Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (New York, Harper, 1898).

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Bendixen, Alfred, ‘Romanticism and the American Gothic’, The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017), 31–43. Botting, Fred, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1997). Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, eds., Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, British Library, 2009). Carlyle Thomas, Past and Present (London, Chapman and Hall, 1872). Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Richard Lancelyn Green (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London, Penguin, 1994). Daly, Nicholas, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999). Dickens, Charles, The Personal History of David Copperfield (Watford, Greycaine, [n.d.]). ———, Bleak House (London, Penguin, 1994). Dickens, Charles and George Cruikshank, Mudfog Papers and Other Contributions (London, Richard Bentley, 1837). Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground and The Double, translated Ronald Wilkes (London, Penguin, 2009). Forster, E. M., Howards End (London, E. Arnold, 1910). Gogol, Nikolai, Plays and Petersburg Tales, ed. and translated Christopher English (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). Graeber, David, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Penguin, 2019). Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). ———, ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 189–207. James, Henry, The Figure in the Carpet, and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (London, Penguin, 1986). James, M. R., The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London, Penguin, 1987). Jerome, Jerome K., Novel Notes (London, Leadenhall Press, 1893). Lamb, Charles, Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987). Marx, Leo, ‘Melville’s Parable of the Walls’, Sewanee Review, 61:4 (1953), 603–627. Melville, Herman, Billy Bud, Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondswoth, Penguin, 1970). Mullin, Katherine, Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016). Stearns, Peter N., Globalization in World History (London, Routledge, 2010). Stoker, Bram, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Ontario, Broadview, 1998). Thompson, Graham, ‘“Dead Letters!…Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, Journal of American Studies, 34.3 (2000), 395–411. Trollope, Anthony, The Three Clerks (London, Richard Bentley, 1860). Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH: Journal of English Literary History, 59.2 (1992), 467–493. Wild, Jonathan, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture 1880–1939 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings; Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Young, Arlene, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999).

Typewriters, Blood and Media in Dracula Aspasia Stephanou

Paul de Man’s notion of machinic materiality and Friedrich Kittler’s reading of the typewriter are brought together to discuss the materiality of communication and occult media in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The discussion moves away from previous discursive analyses of typewriting in Dracula, and instead, reads Dracula as a text of surfaces, and blood as an occult fluid mediating between the human and the nonhuman. Stoker’s novel is about communication from an inhuman point of view since both biting and typewriting are automatic processes that do not revolve around the human ability to think and produce meaning. Instead what surfaces, is writing, biting and typewriting as inhuman communication technologies. In other words, the use of the typewriter and Dracula’s occult media serve to bring to the fore the inhuman materiality of writing, and by extension the nonhuman and material substrate of all communication. The purpose here is to draw attention to the machinic, automatic and repetitive nature of corporeal inscriptions that destroy idealism, depth and the wholeness of the body, haemorrhaging subjectivity and threatening any sense of selfhood. Dracula’s occult media, like the typewriter, show that the human is not at the centre of communication, but that all forms of communication are essentially machinic, eluding the limits of human perception. The connections of writing to the machine through the ‘typewriter’, as a machine of inscription, might have been the subject of older scholarship, but it is important to dissociate my position from those analyses that have used the typewriter to discuss meaning and textuality. Indeed, a considerable amount of study has been devoted to the analysis of typewriting and writing in Dracula. Most of these readings, however, interpret writing as the production of meaning and understand the idea of the machine as the generator of more knowledge. In Rebecca A. Pope’s ‘Writing and Biting in Dracula’, the focus falls on textuality and the knitting or ‘vamping’ together of different texts.1 More particularly, Pope argues that Dracula is concerned with the mechanics of textual production and presents writing A. Stephanou (B) Independent Scholar, Paphos, Cyprus © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_22

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as ‘a process in which a man or woman marks or inscribes various media: letters are chiselled into stone; script, typewriting, or shorthand symbols mark paper; wax cylinders receive voice impressions. So many ways of marking on so many different surfaces, including marking on human flesh’.2 For Pope, all these inscriptions function ‘as symbols to be read’3 and marking is ‘metaphorical’,4 where marked women are equated with texts. Jennifer Wicke’s ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, while it does not delve into the significance of typewriting itself, it does nonetheless underline the connection between typewriting and vampirism.5 A similarly discursive reading of Dracula and writing, Judith Halberstam’s ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, examines Stoker’s novel as a machinic text which generates meaning and subjectivity. More recent analyses seem to move away from seeing writing as the production of meaning, and towards the idea of the typewriter itself as a machinic technology. In Leanne Page’s ‘Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter’, the typewriter is read as a ‘high-performance technology’6 of the nineteenth century and in Christine Berthin’s ‘Secretions and Secretaries’, the typewriter is the mechanical medium which, along with other sources in the novel, mechanises the novel’s narration.7 Finally, in ‘Giving Birth to a New Nation: Female Mediation and the Spread of Textual Knowledge in Dracula’, Alyssa Straight examines the way knowledge transfer and technology intersect with women’s bodies, and sees Mina as the reproducer of knowledge: a ‘technological, spiritual and literary medium’.8 While insightful, these analyses treat the typewriter as a modern technology and as a medium for transferring human knowledge. The aim here is not to challenge such readings but expand on the notion of the medium and the machine, moving beyond the human production of knowledge and towards what confounds and challenges human understanding. Inscriptions are not mere symbols to be read, but surfaces and material signs that are meaningless and indifferent to the human and its point of view. In this regard, there is a movement away from depth and meaning and towards surfaces. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in ‘The Character of the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic’, argues that critics have ignored surfaces by stressing ‘a psychology of depth’ and the ‘thematics of depth’.9 She focusses on veils and the marking of flesh and veils with blood that serve to draw attention to blood writing and inscription as neither referential nor symbolic but as unintelligible writing that anchors ‘the Gothic conception of fictional character and lends it its most riveting and influential traits’.10 For Kosofsky, writing in blood and writing in flesh ‘represent a special access of the authoritative, inalienable, and immediate; the writing of blood and flesh never lies….The marks traced out in earth, flesh and paper, architecture, and landscape are often not part of any language, but, rather, circles, blots, a cross, a person’s image, furrows, and folds’.11 They point to their materiality rather to a specific meaning, and even when its real words these ‘lack something in discursiveness’.12 As she writes, such ‘imperfect’ writing is what gives the ‘Gothic conception of fictional character and lends it its most riveting and influential traits’.13 Most importantly, in Sedgwick’s reading, the character is ‘impressed’ on the self from the outside and inscription ‘comes from the outside, not the inside, it is not psychological, meaningful, emotional’.14 For Sedgwick, gothic characters are what they are

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because of the use of images of veils, writing in blood and inscription on flesh. Characteristic example of this is Matthew Lewis’ The Monk where Lucifer unveils the true nature of Matilda who is neither a maid nor a monk, but an evil spirit: the man that reveals he is a woman ‘is really something else more glamorous, more sinister, more potent, and even blanker’.15 Behind surfaces, veils, skin, and metaphor there is nothing but death, absence and the horror of the Real. In particular, as Sedgwick points out, in The Monk, the writing in blood is used in magic and rituals to summon the devil. Sedgwick’s reading comes close to my argument that writing in blood and inscriptions on skin are voided of meaning and interiority and always come from the Outside, the place of death and the demonic. Both Sedgwick and Friedrich Kittler, as it will be shown later, turn to the gothic and inhuman inscriptions in order to move away from the privileged psychological world of the subject, laying emphasis on the machinic or what lies outside the human. Sedgwick’s analysis focusses on gothic texts such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, as examples of the gothic’s elusion of depths and its characteristic use of surfaces. I want to expand on this and read blood writing and inscription as inhuman and automatic language that communicates and connects with a world beyond human experience, the inorganic and death, not as passive, but as having their own agency. My analysis wants to emphasise, not only that blood writing comes from the outside, but also that this outside is not dead and inert, but the impersonal force that flows through both the organic and the inorganic. While she uses Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho where Emily follows the ‘written traces’16 of blood to discover a horrible corpse beyond a dark curtain,17 I am more interested in gothic texts where the outside is not passive, but a totally inhuman world permeated by dark and obscene life. Radcliffe’s novel is preoccupied with explaining the supernatural and by imposing human meaning and rationality on what was supposedly a supernatural phenomenon. H. P. Lovecraft makes the distinction between Radcliffe’s novel and Lewis’ The Monk, when he writes that The Monk deals with horror as supernatural and does not attempt to rationalise it like Radcliffe does. As he wrote: ‘One great thing may be said of the author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel’.18 This is why, Dracula is ideal to examine typewriting, surfaces and vampire media as forms of inhuman communication. To return to my first point about the choice of the typewriter, this machine is first and foremost central in Stoker’s novel, and for Stoker himself. It was a novel technological device which Stoker himself might have used, and with which the text of Dracula was transcribed, possibly by a professional typist not familiar with the novel.19 Carol A. Senf argues that Stoker did use a typewriter and that this very fact acts as evidence of his interest in technological gadgetry.20 In addition, Senf points out that Stoker ‘reinforces exactly how modern Mina is by having her learn shorthand and use a typewriter’.21 But it is also Mina’s very determination to understand Dracula that reveals the machinic and automatic nature of communication. The methodical and systematised manner with which Mina organises the material chronologically and compiles all the disparate information through typewriting, shows that

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to understand the Thing itself one needs to transform into a ‘thing’; into a mindless typewriter—in its double meaning as the machine and the person who types indifferently, passionlessly. In terms of the automatism of machines, it is interesting to see how Stoker describes his experience with the phonograph, having heard from a cylinder the recording of Alfred Lord Tennyson reciting The Charge of the Heavy Brigade. In Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker remembers how it was ‘strange to hear the mechanical repetition’ of what was the ‘sound of the real voice’.22 It is this strange repetition that both the phonograph and the typewriter bring to the surface, as meaning recedes to the background. The typewriter as a writing machine is also central in theory where we get the marriage of the two concepts of the machine and writing. In this respect, the article’s title is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ which analyses de Man’s reading of Rousseau in ‘Excuses (Confessions)’, but also, more specifically, to Friedrich Kittler’s reading of the typewriter in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999).23 While Derrida’s text is problematic in the way it misreads de Man’s materiality, it does touch upon what is at stake when referring to materiality. What Derrida finds impossible and even monstrous, is thinking the organic and the inorganic together, since the typewriter as a machine is considered antinomic to living organicity.24 Indeed, the de Man that Derrida seeks to efface is one who is concerned with a ‘radical materiality’ beyond any attachment to the human and living systems.25 De Man’s materiality, like Kittler’s typewriter, is a form of an inhuman mnemotechnics, the utter exteriority to any form of meaning or human control. In this sense, Kittler’s analysis of the typewriter in conjunction with his reading of Dracula and its technologies, a novel whose narrative is partly given through Mina’s typewriting, is closer to de Man’s material inscription and the purposes of this article. Kittler describes how the discourse network26 of the 1900s is defined by a separation of interiority from writing using the typewriter, which mechanises inscription and liberates technology and writing from the metaphysics of origin and the domination of consciousness. While I will return to Kittler later, it will suffice to note here that the typewriter brings together the idea of a machine and writing, stressing the mechanical and automatic nature of the inscription of surfaces and the materiality of the letter amputated from meaning and perception. The typewriter also resembles Kafka’s torture machine in ‘The Penal Colony’ and vampiric biting, because Peter Mitterhofer’s Model 2 typewriter from 1866 was a literal inscription machine: it did not have types and a ribbon but perforated the paper with needle pins.27 Like the ‘vampiric’ typewriter which is an ‘inhuman media engineer’28 that overwrites human agency, de Man finds in language an inhuman materiality, which he demonstrates through his characteristic reading of Rousseau in ‘Excuses (Confessions)’. De Man’s reading focusses on the repetition of a confession regarding the episode of Marion and the ribbon which initially appeared in Rousseau’s first three books of the Confessions and later in the Fourth Rêverie. De Man argues that there can be no use of language which is not mechanical even if this is obscured by aesthetic or formalistic delusions.29 The metaphor of the text as an organic whole, a body, is threatened by a machinic language that severs the head of the author and

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does violence to the body, meaning and language. For example, de Man finds that Rousseau’s narratives of mutilation and beheading are not present for their shock value but as evocations of the machine that caused them.30 The text itself uses the theme of the machine as its own allegory, where the metaphor of the text as body is displaced by the text as machine. There are no hidden meanings, no originary guilt in the case of Rousseau’s text, no personal responsibility or originary subjectivity,31 but the inhuman process of an arbitrary production and reproduction of meaning. The result of any text is then that of a machinic language independent of any human intention, control or interpretation. Like in de Man, where language’s inhuman machine dismembers the authorial subject, in Kittler, ‘so-called man’ is reduced to a mere accessory, where media substitute or extend human capabilities and eventually could replace the human altogether. They both argue, respectively, that the human is an effect of language and media. Here, by examining Kittler’s reading of the typewriter, it is possible to underline the materiality of writing and inscription and the similarities with de Man’s notion of the inhuman and machinic. Kittler sees literature in the 1800s, the typewriter in the 1900s and the computer in the 2000s as structurally similar: they are all forms of data processing that receive, store, process and transmit information. Writing itself and the typewriter are then equally machinic. Kittler connects the development of the typewriter with that of brain physiology which turns to the vocabulary of machines to describe neurological disorders like agraphia or aphasia. As he writes, ‘from the point of view of brain physiology, language works as a feedback loop of mechanical relays’.32 Kittler takes its cue from Adolph Kussmaul,33 who in 1881 would describe language in its early developmental stage as a machine that has nothing to do with the subject, intentionality or thought: ‘pantomime, the spoken word, and the written word are nothing but the products of internal, self-regulating mechanisms that are channelled and coordinated through emotions and conceptions, just as one can operate a sewing, typing, or speaking machine without knowing its mechanism’.34 In the same year, 1881, the Remington II typewriter’s sales would grow exponentially, changing forever the materiality of writing and its medium, mechanising writing and denying authorial narcissism. Nietzsche’s ‘scandalous surmise that humans are perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines’,35 does not sound so scandalous when understood within the framework of the typewriter. As Nandita Biswas Mellamphy writes, ‘in his use of the typewriter, Nietzsche envisioned the human itself as a kind of typewriting, a kind of formative, informational, or better yet, telegraphic technology (or “teletechnic”) beyond human determination’.36 No wonder that the word typewriter would refer to the machine itself but also to the female typist who would increasingly come to replace the quill, the symbol of male intellectual creativity.37 The idea of the machine then should not conjure up glistening electronics, but rather the ways humans and automata, the organic and the inorganic are systems that receive and use information in a feedback loop. This echoes de Man’s notion of the human and language as machinic, inhuman and impersonal systems that cannot be fully controlled or steered by his majesty the Ego. In a similar fashion, the typewriter excludes the human from

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its internal operations, relegating it to the automatic repetition of mechanical text reproduction. Typewriters built before 1897 would also call forth another ‘inhuman media engineer’, Dracula, and ‘a type of writing’ that ‘blindly dismembers body parts and perforates human skin’ by striking on the neck with its two fangs.38 As Kittler shows, the mechanisation of writing and its detachment from subjectivity that the typewriter inaugurates, is dramatised in Stoker’s Dracula where the ‘hand-written diary, as soon as it is hooked up to phonographs and typewriters, autopsies and newspaper reports, will kill the Lord of the East and the Night’.39 The typewriter then is responsible for the emancipation of women, but also, through ‘the mechanical processing of anonymous discourses’, it revolutionises European bureaucracy and democracy.40 Typewriters, mostly used by women, are ‘neutral apparata’ that reproduce meaningless prose, and in Dracula, Mina Harker’s typewriter does exactly this: it ‘copies indifferent paper instead: handwriting and printed matter, declarations of love and land registry entries’.41 If the vampire leaves two bites on the neck, ‘always in the same place like the strikes of a precisely aligned typewriter’,42 then Mina Harker’s typewriter ‘does not copy the bites of a despotic signifier’43 but indifferent words mechanically reproduced. Dracula’s project is the discourse of the master which is shattered by the technology of democracy, Mina Harker’s typewriter. And since vampirism is a ‘chain reaction’, it can only be ‘fought with the techniques of mechanical text reproduction’.44 It is through bureaucratic procedures, by gathering all information and storing it safely through Mina’s typewriting, that the vampire is eventually captured and killed. As Kittler writes, ‘Stoker’s Dracula is no vampire novel, but rather the written account of our bureaucratization. Anyone is free to call this a horror novel as well’.45 Kittler’s analysis of the typewriter is important in the ways it brings into focus surfaces of inscription by sacrificing depth and interiority, as well as the dominant position of the subject itself. Like many other philosophers and writers, from Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, to Kafka, and Grosz, who theorised how meaning is produced by inscribing the body itself, Kittler’s emphasis on subjectivity as the result of machinic inscription exemplifies how inhuman and machinic processes determine and define meaning. It is not accidental that Kittler would turn to the gothic and the text of Dracula to exemplify how the inhuman, whether a typewriter or a vampire, marks surfaces and shapes humans’ thought and their understanding of reality. Kittler’s reading of Dracula touched upon the mechanical inscription of surfaces by focussing on the new technology of the typewriter, but my reading here will focus on the vampire’s occult media and the use of blood as a medium to access knowledge through the inscription of bodies. In both Kittler and my reading, the inhuman is what shapes reality, and the mutilations it performs underscore the material act of inscription. In many ways, Dracula draws inspiration from the myth of Faustus and his pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. Henry Irving’s 1885–6 production of Faust, in which he also played the role of Mephistopheles at the Lyceum

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theatre in London was influential on Dracula. Catherine Wynne draws many connections between Irving’s stage adaptation of Faust and Stoker’s Dracula.46 In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, point out that Stoker, who was the manager of the Lyceum, went to America in 1887 to plan a tour of Faust and is said that Irving’s role was an inspiration to the construction of the character of Dracula. I believe that Stoker’s familiarity with the text of Doctor Faustus is mostly felt in the maniacal obsession of the vampire to consume more knowledge. The fear that undulates beneath the surface, and beyond the apparent monstrosity of the vampire, is that relating to overcoming the limits of human knowledge. The vampire achieves this through violent means, whereas the humans extend their power through the new technology of the typewriter. From Dracula’s perspective, there is a need to accumulate information, and his desire to move to London, is an example of his consuming thirst for access to more knowledge and a dangerous expansion of his power that is seen by the humans as dangerous. From the humans’ perspective, as Kittler points out, the novel is an account of our bureaucratisation. Secretaries, doctors and lawyers write, record and transcribe all possible information. But from Dracula’s point of view, from the Outside looking in, humans are just mere vessels of information. If the typewriter reproduces all information in an indifferent manner that removes all personal experience and affect, then Dracula is similarly seeking to absorb all knowledge through the indifferent and mechanical inscription of matter. Dracula is a Faustian novel in the sense that both the vampire and humans are striving to access knowledge beyond their limits through a process that is inhuman. The inhuman typewriter and new technologies might eventually defeat the atavistic Dracula, but his occult knowledge remains inaccessible to humans. For example, when Dracula was a human, he gained access to forbidden knowledge through his dealings with the devil, like Mephistopheles. As Van Helsing points out, Dracula ‘was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist—which latter was the highest development of the scienceknowledge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare…. He dared even to attend the Scholomance and there was no branch of knowledge of his time that he did not essay’.47 The Draculas were also ‘a great and noble race’ who had ‘dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance.’48 Harker discovers in the Count’s library English books, magazines and newspapers.49 Dracula consumes information on all aspects of English life, mechanically, in the same way he consumes the blood of his English victims. Through these different acts of mediation, he grasps materiality, surfaces, inscription. As he says, ‘I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them’.50 The mechanical inscription of information through Mina’s typewriter follows the same pattern as the Count’s mechanical memorisation of knowledge and his inscription of bodies. These material acts of mediation reveal that the Count like the machine, repeats information and replicates himself through vampirism indifferently and in a cold rationalist manner. The vampiric automatism of the vampire is most clearly captured by Van Helsing’s comment of Lucy’s mutilations: ‘whatever animal inflicts them has a system or method of its own’.51 Like de Man’s machinic text, so the vampire’s inscriptions are systematic and mechanical.

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Here the notion of media is stretched beyond that of the typewriter and technological apparatus, by including forms of mediation that do not prescribe to traditional understandings of media. Dracula poses various forms of mediation that include the organic, the nonorganic and the supernatural, where communication with the world beyond the living and towards that of the inaccessible and the incommunicable is possible. From the flickering, blue flames and their ‘ghostly figure’52 that reveal where treasure is hidden, to the little specks of dust ‘floating in the rays of the moonlight’ and whose phantom shapes materialise into the ‘ghostly women’,53 the mist that surrounds the Russian schooner, Demeter, as it arrives at Whitby, and the vampire’s different disguises as a bat, wolf and ‘myriad little specks’,54 all these unnatural or supernatural phenomena mediate a world beyond that of the human. Particularly, blood in Dracula communicates a nonhuman world and opens a space to contemplate a mechanical and impersonal universe where matter, the organic and the human are all navigated by forces that are out of human reach. From dust specks, mist, animals, to Mina’s control by the inhuman Dracula and the vampire’s ungraspable materiality, these are examples where the whole of nature exhibits its unnatural character and where the cosmos reveals itself as an impersonal mechanism without the need of a human self at its centre. The three vampire women materialise from ‘floating motes of dust’55 and Dracula appears outside Lucy’s window in the form of a bat and a wolf, and enters through the window in a ‘myriad of little specks’.56 When he arrives at Mina’s house, he is again indiscernible, travelling as ‘a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house’ and which ‘seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own’.57 This is not some vitalistic principle that animates the whole of nature, an example of panpsychism, but rather animated death and vampiric life. Dracula also uses necromancy, the divination of the dead, with whom he can communicate, and he can direct the elements: ‘the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat – the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and become unknown’.58 Dracula communicates with the dead but also with the living, through his corporeal form or metamorphosing into elemental dust or mist, inhabiting the organic and the inorganic and communicating with different realities, human or inhuman. To the humans, the vampire is ungraspable and elusive because he can mediate with both the occult and modern world. He doesn’t remain isolated in his castle, a relic of the past, but he uses reason to assess his strengths and powers and inculcate himself. Van Helsing is aware that Dracula ‘study new tongues. He learn new social life; new environment of old ways, the politic, the law, the finance, the science, the habit of a new land and a new people who have come to be since he was’.59 Dracula has managed to return from the past, ‘from a ruin tomb in a forgotten land’ and the threat he poses is captured by Van Helsing’s warning: ‘What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him’.60 The horror of the vampire is not his supernatural status but his ability to become familiar and infiltrate the human world, while being the master of arcane and modern scientific knowledge. This, together with Harker’s fear that he might ‘create a new and ever-widening circle

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of semi-demons to batten on the helpless’,61 make Dracula a dangerous predator that threatens the survival of the human. There is a correlation between writing and inscribing surfaces, replicating information and a desire to access knowledge beyond the human through blood. Renfield eats flies and keeps a notebook with meaningless or unreadable figures which the psychiatrist cannot decipher. Mina and Jonathan have journals and Dr Seward and Lucy have a diary. There is also the recurrent theme of imprisonment so that access to more knowledge or of communicating with the totally Other is inhibited. Lucy is locked so she doesn’t sleepwalk or consume the blood of innocent infants, Renfield is kept in the asylum and Jonathan is locked in the castle by the Count so he has limited contact with the world of the vampire. Particularly, after Lucy is turned into a vampire, her letters, memoranda and her new diary are to be protected from strangers’ eyes. Her whole existence, her inheritance, her mother’s house and her writings, are ‘signed off’ to Arthur, her future husband. Access to the horror of the Thing is indirect, prohibited or impossible. Even when Dracula performs his terrible mutilations, these are never totally accounted for and are only remembered through sensations or in fragmented images described during Jonathan Harker’s delirium. Mina is the only one who comes the closest in communicating with the vampire after her baptism of blood, during which she gains the ability to see through the eyes of Dracula. In this case, Dracula inflicts an incision on his chest and invites Mina to drink his blood, as he has drunk from her previously, and thus gain access to knowledge beyond the limits of the human. Dracula’s blood enables her to connect with him, and she acts as a medium between the human and the inhuman. Similarly, having drunk from Mina’s blood, Dracula is able to learn through Mina where the men are and what they are planning. As Van Helsing says, Mina acts as a medium for both the human and the inhuman: ‘If it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance, tell what the Count see and hear, is it not more true that he who have hypnotise her first, and who have drink of her very blood and make her drink of his, should, if he will, compel her mind to disclose to him that which she know?’.62 But Dracula’s inscription on her body is punished with Van Helsing’s inscription on her forehead. After placing a ‘Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it – had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal’.63 The ‘red scar, the sign of God’s knowledge of what has been’,64 comes to mark her body a second time, as women in Dracula are turned into surfaces of inscription and, in turn, mechanically reproduce surfaces of inscription as typewriters. Dracula shares many similarities with the character of Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ in their mutual obsession with breaching the limits of human knowledge and communicating with a world beyond phenomenal reality. Like Dracula, Ligeia has ‘immense’ and ‘gigantic’ knowledge.65 The existence of an octagonal and a pentagonal room in Dracula and ‘Ligeia’, respectively, indicates real magic. In Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Harker is greeted by the Count who carries his bags through ‘a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort’.66 In ‘Ligeia’, the narrator describes the bridal chamber of the abbey as ‘pentagonal in shape’.67 Both the characters of Dracula and Ligeia are considered to be magicians or alchemists who hold forbidden knowledge and they both use blood or, in ‘Ligeia’,

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what could be seen as the alchemical elixir vitae, to prolong their corporeal existence and mediate between the known and unknown worlds. The communion with the vampire occurs at the limits of thought, where the human experiences ‘vague terror’, the ‘sense of some presence’68 and is ‘paralysed’.69 The problematic of attempting to grasp the unintelligible is further elaborated in a passage where Dr Seward struggles with the meaning of the vampire and tries to navigate through Van Helsing’s cryptic descriptions: ‘Tell me the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice blundering through a bog in a mist, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move without knowing where I am going’.70 Human thought here is unable to make sense, and the impossibility of meaning and seeing clearly is captured by the image of the impenetrability of the mist and blindness. In another instance, where the men attempt to exhume the body of the vampiric Lucy, Dr Seward considers the passage of time by using aesthetic language to describe images of decay: the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silverplating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life – animal life – was not the only thing which could pass away.71

For Dr Seward, the use of metaphor seeks to control and define a natural world where all things, living and non-living, come to pass away, wither and die. But soon, this secure and meaningful universe crumbles once the grave is opened and the coffin is found to be empty. The vampire remains ungraspable and defies human understanding. The gothic scene of Dr Seward’s musings, despite all its familiarity, is dispelled by the vampire’s elusive nature. Death and the vampire cannot be captured or understood through recognisable clichés, and he is faced with the shock of an ungraspable materiality, nothing. The vampire’s elusive nature is linked to this inhuman engineer’s ability to undermine human free will by controlling its victims through hypnosis. Lucy and Mina’s contact with the inhuman through blood makes them susceptible to the power of the vampire and Dracula can read Mina’s mind or she can go to him in spirit, by his own volition. As Van Helsing explains, when she is under Dracula’s controlling force, Mina is either subdued, restrained or incited to action without her will. Mina and Lucy’s inability to consciously choose, and the way they are hypnotised and used as instruments by Dracula’s inhuman force, reveal this automatic, machine-like force that can be likened to de Man’s mechanical materiality. This is not, however, to flatten the differences between the two characters. Indeed, on the one hand, Lucy represents female passion and rebellious sexuality, whereas, on the other hand, Mina falls within the limits of the ideal womanhood, and as Rebecca Pope points out, she is ‘turned into “a divine exception.”’72 While she does perform the traditional role of feminine devotion, working hard to practice shorthand to keep up with Jonathan’s studies, this is associated with her masculine knowledge. Conversely, Lucy’s female desire is echoed by Jonathan who juxtaposes his masculine modern writing in shorthand

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to the old times and women’s love letters, which threaten to return vampirically.73 If Lucy’s love letters signify her individual passionate emotion, then only Mina can be considered a typewriter in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, since her typewriting is an expression of what is impersonal, automatic and emotionless. With Dracula, we can argue that Mina’s body is piloted by this inhuman, abstract vampiric force that, at times, is seen to pervade the mist, animals, dust or the human, and which is completely indifferent to human emotions. The vampire defies the idea of human free will and autonomy since he ‘can come out from anything or into anything’.74 In this regard, Dracula exemplifies this cold, indifferent, impersonal and mechanical force that exists in nature and which, like Spinoza’s God, has nothing to do with individual emotions and passions, but operates according to its own nature. As Mark Fisher so eloquently writes, Spinoza’s God is different than the personal, transcendent God of classical theism. He is the ‘desolated unlife of cosmos’, the ‘anorganic flatline which manufactures the vital as part of its indifferent process of endless production without final cause;’75 in other words, it is Sigmund Freud’s Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this respect, blood in Dracula, is shed in a systematic and rational way, and marks bodies in a dispassionate manner, subordinating their identity to the vampire’s mechanical cause. Dracula is then this de Manian materiality that is unintelligible, but without which there can be no writing or meaning. Mina’s indifferent typing and copies of papers would not have existed without the inhuman materiality of Dracula. He is the machine that performs the mutilations, and such violence and systematic writing in blood brings to the fore the mechanical repetition of language itself to proliferate text. The vampire’s accreted mutilations stress their methodical and repetitive nature, which is then juxtaposed to the humans’ mechanical transcription of information into typewritten copies. As Jonathan writes in his diary, ‘We were stuck with the fact, that in all the mass of material which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting’.76 What made all this writing possible, the horror of Dracula, is now a mass of typewritten paper, as ‘Every trace of all that had been was blotted out’.77 There is no originary sin, authorial voice or reason for writing and replicating information, but the mere logic of a compulsion to repeat and record. Both writing, typewritten notes and journals, and vampiric inscription in Dracula are indifferent and mechanical processes that are governed by their own internal forces and have nothing to do with the ‘majesty’ of the human mind. Machinic automatism is not merely present in the text of Dracula, but also in the web of texts created out of Dracula. The mechanical nature of language and Stoker’s text itself have triggered numerous other adaptations, films, novels and videogames created out of, and expanding, Dracula’s universe. The proliferation of Draculainspired texts, interpreting and expanding its fictional world, by authors and readers alike, has taken away Stoker’s authorial privilege. Dracula, patched together by a web of multiple voices and various media, from handwritten diaries to newspaper clippings and typewritten notes, was already a composite of parts questioning Stoker’s authority and control. The bloody mutilations and the perforations of human parchments were always there to remind us that writing or biting are machinic operations,

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threatening textual mastery and authority. In the end, both the vampire and the human are superseded by masses of typewritten text. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Rebecca Pope, ‘Writing and Biting in Dracula’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 1:3 (1990), 199. Pope, ‘Writing’, 202. Ibid. Ibid., 203. Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH, 59:2 (1992), 476; 492. Leanne Page, ‘Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter: High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Network, 3:2 (2011), 102. Christine Berthin, ‘Secretions and Secretaries’, in Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 112. Alyssa Straight, ‘Giving Birth to a New Nation: Female Mediation and the Spread of Textual Knowledge in Dracula’, Victorian Literature & Culture, 45 (2017), 383. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel’, PMLA, 96:2 (1981), 255. Sedgwick, ‘The Character of the Veil’, 261. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 324. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 348. H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, in The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther Books, 1985), 440. Berthin, ‘Notes’, in Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 170. Carol Anne Senf, Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 45. Senf, Science and Social Science, 20. Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 143. F. Kittler, in ‘Typewriter’, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183–263. Ibid., 277–8. Claire Colebrook, ‘Matter Without Bodies’, Derrida Today, 4:1 (2011), 18.

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26. According to Kittler, a discourse network refers to ‘the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.’ See F. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 369. 27. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 210–11. 28. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 210. 29. Ibid., 294. 30. Ibid., 298. 31. The problem with de Man and Derridean deconstruction more generally, is this lack of responsibility and the undecidability of meaning. 32. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 189. 33. German physician (1822–1902) who studied in Heidelberg and was the first to describe dyslexia. He wrote Disturbances of Speech, in H. von Ziemssen (ed.), Cyclopaedia of the Practice of Medicine, Vol. XIV (New York: William Wood, 1877), 581–875. 34. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 188. 35. Ibid. 36. N.B. Mellamphy, ‘Nietzsche and the Engine of Politics’, in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Political Thought (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 148. 37. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 183; 186. 38. Ibid., 210. 39. Kittler, ‘Dracula’s Legacy’, in John Johnston (ed.), Friedrich A. Kittler Essays: Literature, Media, Information Systems (The Netherlands: OPA, 1997), 56. 40. Ibid., 63; 64. 41. Ibid., 71. 42. Ibid., 66. 43. Ibid., 71. 44. Ibid., 71–2. 45. Ibid., 73. 46. Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2013). 47. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin, 2006), 322. 48. Stoker, Dracula, 256. 49. Ibid., 26. 50. Ibid., 27. 51. Ibid., 189. 52. Ibid., 19. 53. Ibid., 53. 54. Ibid., 154. 55. Ibid., 53. 56. Ibid., 154. 57. Ibid., 274. 58. Ibid., 252.

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Ibid., 341. Ibid. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 316. Ibid. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, in Thomas Ollive Mabbott (ed.), The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe – Vol.II: Tales and Sketches (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 315. Stoker, Dracula, 23. Ibid., 321. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 205–6. Ibid., 210. Pope, ‘Writing’, 212. Pope, ‘Writing’, 52–3. Stoker, Dracula, 255. Mark Fisher, ‘Staying Alive,’ Kpunk (1 October 2004), http://k-punk.org/sta ying-alive/, Accessed 28 January 2019. Stoker, Dracula, 402. Ibid.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Bibliography Berthin, Christine. Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Colebrook, Claire. ‘Matter without Bodies.’ Derrida Today 4:1, 2011. Fisher, Mark ‘Staying Alive,’ Kpunk (1 October 2004). http://k-punk.org/staying-alive/. Accessed 28 January 2019. Kittler, Friedrich. Friedrich A. Kittler Essays: Literature, Media, Information Systems. The Netherlands: OPA, 1997. ———. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. ‘The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.’ PMLA 96:2, 1981. Lovecraft, H.P. ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature.’ In The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. London: Panther Books, 1985. Mellamphy, N.B. ‘Nietzsche and the Engine of Politics.’ In K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Political Thought. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Page, Leanne. ‘Phonograph, Shorthand, Typewriter: High Performance Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.’ Victorian Network 3:2, 2011. Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘Ligeia.’ In Thomas Ollive Mabbott (ed.), The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe – Vol.II: Tales and Sketches. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978. Pope, Rebecca. ‘Writing and Biting in Dracula.’ Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 1:3, 1990. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Senf, Carol Anne. Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002. Stoker, Bram. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. London: William Heinemann, 1907. ———. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2006. Straight, Alyssa. ‘Giving Birth to a New Nation: Female Mediation and the Spread of Textual Knowledge in Dracula.’ Victorian Literature & Culture 45, 2017. Wicke, Jennifer. ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.’ ELH 59:2, 1992. Wynne, Catherine. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2013.

Visual Gothic Culture

Global Pre-Raphaelitism and the Morbid Composition of Photography Naomi Simone Borwein

A 2007 cover of Chinese Vogue depicts a romanticized evocation of nineteenthcentury Pre-Raphaelitism.1 It is a reimagined image of a Victorian reproduction of the medieval Madonna with alabaster skin and wild vermilion hair, reminiscent of William Holman Hunt’s (1857) illustrations of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott (1833)”.2 Rich opulent robes in the contemporary photo, captured by the Swiss photographer Pierluigi Macor, evoke details that are subtly occult, but also impacted by a mysticism associated with Russian orthodox iconography. Aspects of Chinese symbolism and impressionism are clearly visible in decorative details— for example, embroidery. Much like its antecedents, this overtly Pre-Raphaelite image is mainstream (popular), the glorification of romantic gothic beauty,3 and a junction of cultural influences.4 It offers a new lens to reassess the long reach of influences in the Victorian era. Interestingly, Macor’s work suggests a mixture of digital, photographic, and painterly aesthetics, and it embodies an extension of early high-art popular-art debates, as well as echoes of the infamous photo-painting forger John Atkinson Grimshaw, whose “Silver Moonlight” (1880)5 is a fusion of virtually indistinguishable media. In the nineteenth century, multimedia forms exemplify the revisionist nature of Global Pre-Raphaelitism, betwixt gothic aesthetics and popular reception. From the eighteen hundreds onward, the worldwide spread of PreRaphaelitism, an aesthetic formed and transformed by the “convergence of incongruities”,6 mirrors the global movement of Gothic, as a boundary-blurring, transmedial genre. Through exhibitions, as a primary mode of transmission, the surfacing of Pre-Raphaelite gothic imagery in Russia and China are reconceptualizations of classic Pre-Raphaelite images, for example, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (1870) “Beata Beatrix” or John Everett Millais’s (1851–1852) “Ophelia”.7 Macor’s Vogue photograph speaks to the movement of influences worldwide, and the shifting meaning of gothic and Pre-Raphaelite over the course of the nineteenth century, mirrored in N. S. Borwein (B) Western University, London, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_23

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the contemporary period—sometimes painstakingly composed to resemble paintings through new media techniques of the time. Complex processes and concepts inform an understanding of nineteenth-century gothic Pre-Raphaelite photography, and its global manifestations as a contemporary revisionist analysis that depends on “the ancestry of the Aesthetic movement”.8 Recalling this motile dynamic, the approach in this chapter is achieved through investigation and explication of the unique aesthetic construction of gothic Pre-Raphaelitism that exists in the evolving nineteenth-century photographic medium itself. First, context and definitions are proffered for various image rendering devices and chemical processes that create gothic Pre-Raphaelite atmospheres. Then, an analysis is undertaken of photographs and associated images, largely chosen from exhibition catalogues through detailed examination of visual effects—and including occult and spirit photography. In conclusion, an example of the current global gothic Pre-Raphaelitism in digital vogues is used to extrapolate on nineteenth-century origins, exploring from Beatrice to courtesan portraits in catalogues. Nineteenth-century photographic iconography emphasizes a curious fusion of landscape and subject, facilitating an examination of shifting aesthetic representations by radical realists,9 of “hypnotic hyper-realism”,10 and fantasy-romanticism—be it medieval, spectral, or melancholic—in a revisionist global context. As a consequence of this approach, emphasis is placed on investigation of the technical and cultural complexity of how aesthetics of gothic PreRaphaelitism are produced in changing photographic media. Production methods— from collodion to albumen, monoscopic to spectroscopic, daguerreotype to calotype, and photogravure to photo forgery—will be analyzed in terms of gothic distortions and manipulations. The final section functions as an examination of cross-cultural acquisition. Ultimately, it appears that transmedial translation of aesthetics across photographic media enhance various gothic elements of Pre-Raphaelitism—from harsh gothic realist juxtapositions to soft romantic gothic atmospheres. A gothic mythos surrounds the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), this radical influential Victorian avant-garde movement with seven initial members: Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, William Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, and Frederic George Stephens, who appeared glamourous, voguish and iconographic. Founded in 1848, the original brotherhood broke up in 1854. Consisting of a diverse cohort, “each of whom” uniquely “applied the nebulous ideals of the movement”11 ; this initial group was followed by a second generation formed by Rossetti at Oxford, and further transformed by a late decadent, orientalist, and symbolist wave. As Thomas J. Tobin notes, “the sheer multivalence of the term by the end of the nineteenth century” further muddied any “definition of Pre-Raphaelitism”.12 In painting, gothic Pre-Raphaelitism is obliquely defined through high contrast, vivid hypnotic colours, skewed perspectives, harsh realistic details that augment grotesque and other decadent and excessive, even fetishistic, elements imbricated through medievalism. Here a visual dislocation of conventional order, in temporality or spatiality, is present. Often images are suffused with wistful and ethereal spectrality fed by the execution of “jarring juxtapositions” that “create a Mobius Strip of” “romance and reality”, which “leaves the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility haunted by the abyss between the ideal of heaven and the reality of hell”.13 Oscillating widely in output, Pre-Raphaelite

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works once “acted as a lightening rod of scandal and dispute”,14 varying from an aesthetic return to romantic nostalgic and melancholic gothic beauty, to the vitiated and reviled realism of Pre-Raphaelite radicalism, which was likened to artistic heresy in the 1840s–1890s by myriad critics. Much criticism was invariably tied to optical discourses of the era. Indeed, there is a lasting gothic style in “this genre” of PreRaphaelite Photography.15 Analyzes of gothic photography or gothic Pre-Raphaelite photography by scholars like Fred Botting, Philip Stokes or Marion Wynne-Davies offer what Lindsey Smith describes as “generalised versions of photographic practice”, which “become[s] an all too simple explanation of the perplexing radical optical fidelity of the Pre-Raphaelites”,16 for example, the use of the word negative. More broadly, the gothic impulse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is partly derived from two distinct yet radical aspects of the movement: the first is its structural function of revolt and revision, a rebuttal of the establishment; the second, in the 1850s can be read in terms of the artistic climate, academy and popular taste, that produced it. The elements that are distorted and derided by the Art Academy of the period are gothic derivations or variations on a standard. They have to be read in terms of artistic nomenclature and standards, and then expressed in terms of transgressions of those standards in the nineteenth century through mainstream reviews and criticism of exhibitions from Paris and London to Chicago. Descriptors like grotesque, aberrant, ugly, or primitive are readily applied to work defined by its experimentation with modern techniques and ideologies—for instance, the Oxford movement or socialism. A popular gothic atmosphere hung over the brotherhood from their genesis as a secret society of seven; the secret of their blood red initials “PRB” debuted at the Paris Exhibition in 1858—was only revealed a year later—and “The Cult of Beauty” that personified their ethereal fetishized figures like Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal. In 2019, Tim Barringer notes that, “the movement never fell out of popular favour”.17 The myth of Siddal’s death, from hypothermia, supposedly captured in Millais’s “Ophelia”, would come to be the preeminently popular gothic image of the PreRaphaelite movement in the twenty-first century.18 Yet in the fiefdom of the 1850s Royal Academy of Arts, critical responses were equally gothicized, as with the Exhibition review in the Times (1851): We cannot censure … strongly as we desire … the strange disorder of the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity among a class of juvenile artists who style themselves P.R.B. …19

William Holman Hunt characterized this reception to the Pre-Raphaelites as a “storm of abuse” that “turned into a hurricane”, a “studied determination to destroy us”.20 In the Times, they deride the movement’s optical techniques: absolute contempt for perspective and the known laws of light and shade, an aversion to beauty in every shape, and a singular devotion to the minute accidents of their subjects, … seeking out, every excess of sharpness and deformity.21

Placing the aesthetic in the mainstream domain, they query “the public” response to such “offensive” exposures.22 Elsewhere, Holman Hunt examines the interdisciplinary nature of PRB art and literature, and its relationship to, and inspiration

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from, gothic romantic authors like Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.23 A March 1850 article in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, The Germ, “The Subject in Art No. II”, aptly positions the critical gothic atmosphere of the time: Why paint or poetically depict the horrible race of Ogres and Giants, and not show Giant Despair dressed in that modern habit he walks the streets in?24

Such a horror-fantasy ambience was heighted in popular imagination by Rossetti’s exhumation of Siddal, and the transcription of his worm-eaten poetry manuscript taken from her coffin. This imagery is juxtaposed to haunting photographs of Siddal, Jane Morris, and other Pre-Raphaelite models, figures often tarred as obscene, prostitutes in the Victorian era, figures which later would gild the halls of sensationalist exhibitions and catalogues—for instance, “The Revolt of the Pre-Raphaelites”.25 This gothic mythos seeped into photographic discourse and distribution. In the many “painfully laborious photographic processes at the time”, such as daguerreotype, “calotype, collodion negative and albumen print”, “chemical processes could be exhaustive and even dangerous”.26 Such technologies were marvellous innovations, equally surreal and fantastic. A gothicized vision is bolstered by homogenous critical descriptions of photographic practise, tinctured by romantic idealization, and realist fantasy. In the composition of the image, “[p]eripheral vision vanished”: “the tiniest leaf in the most remote corner of the image” could be the subject of “almost hallucinatory focus”.27 These broad, uncanny markers seemingly succoured the gothic transmission of and reception to Pre-Raphaelite photography. Within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, photography usage varied in tandem with the loosely defined brotherhood itself: different techniques and technologies, different subject matter. Millais was accused of painting over sepia photos, and the art critic John Ruskin famously defended him and the brotherhood: “a school unjustly suspected of plagiarism” through the “collusion between photography and painting”.28 Rossetti staged photographs of Jane Morris, as Beatrice, for the photographer John R. Parsons. But, after the mid-1850s “fringe Pre-Raphaelites were even more involved”,29 as technology became accessible. Style and engagement with photographic practice varied: Grimshaw and John Brett secretly painted “over photographs”30 ; Ford Madox Brown had long conversations with the famous photographer of the Crimean War, Roger Fenton, whose work is tinctured by gothic Orientalism and who “used photography as a practical device to aid the completion of” his art31 ; William James Stillman’s photographic studies of gothic landscape informed the composition and subject matter of his paintings. Liberally cited, William Bell Scott once declared that “the seed of the flower of Pre-Raphaelitism was photography”, which exposed “the unerring fatalism of the sun’s action”.32 This process has been described as actinism, an early theory of what amounts to the gothic effects of the sun’s light waves on the development of photographic images by the photographers’ translation of, for example, colour and contrast. That early Pre-Raphaelite photographs often exhibit a gothic aesthetic is also due to this translation. The resultant gothic affect stems in part from transference of colour into light and dark gradations of intensity, repetition, antithesis and contrast, haunting temporality and spatial dislocations, or re-proportionality of subject and landscape due to manipulation of

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the depth of field, and also the impact of various apparatus, chemical processes, and changing media. From these gothic effects came the fetishization of boundaries and cultural spaces. The intricacies of how gothic aesthetics are formed through various photographic processes, cultural conditions, and modalities are often homogenized. In the nineteenth-century, Pre-Raphaelite gothic photography exhibits a vast array “of visual characteristics depending on the type of paper printed on, as well as variations in process and finishing”.33 Inherently an aesthetic of alteration, Pre-Raphaelite gothic photography existed along a spectrum of productions, moving from the “spectroscopic trash” of the 1850s, in the communal exploration of photography that “worked to shock and distress”34 —epitomized by Oscar Gustave Rejlander and “The Two Ways of Life”, (1857)35 —to high-art representations by Rossetti and Millais. Transformation extended to photo forgeries like those by Grimshaw, or the popular phantasmagoric spectrality of Eduord Buguet, Eugene Thiebault, and numerous strategically anonymous practitioners. Pre-Raphaelite gothic photography is punctuated by experimentation that stems from processes and techniques overtly visible in Stillman or Henry Peach Robinson. Drawing on examples, this aesthetic is examined initially through images created from various calotypes. They expose how, for instance, glass negatives reproduced photographs with different gothic effects. The transmedial translation of Pre-Raphaelite colour, curtailed by early photographic media, accentuated the gothic aesthetics sometimes only latent in Pre-Raphaelite paintings or illustrations, but a predominant feature of the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto. Consider the mutations that occur when translating colour and light effects from “reality” into other media like photography. Instructive is Ruskin’s critique of the visual elements of Anna Elizabeth Blunden’s watercolour entitled “God’s Gothic”, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859: “It looks hard” because of “the appearance of too conspicuous green in the sea”, which “causes the harshness” but this “diminish[es] after a steady look; … the sea is often of this colour, only the bright sunlight of nature”, unequalled in painting “accounts for it to our sensations”, hence “looking wrong”.36 Ruskin argues that Blunden’s attempts at realism fail because of excessive optical fidelity—without translating the content to fit the medium. Author of Pre-Raphaelitism, Stones of Venice, and Modern Painters, Ruskin analyses the exposure of colour through “God’s Gothic”, in relation to the “peculiarities of early photographic chemicals”, the impact of light and exposure, and processes of early monochromatic photography,37 which meant largely manipulating ‘reality’ to contrive realism, or optical fidelity. In monochromatic photographs of the 1860s, colour caused sharp contrasts and imbalances due to multiple reflective light sources in the frame, and the translation of colour itself. Indeed, the spectral action of light “exacerbates the discrepancy”.38 Photographers used “strategies to reharmonize” back and foreground.39 In contrast the paintings of Pre-Raphaelitism were defined by their flat backgrounds, “scant differentiation of highlights and shadows”,40 though the early photographic process recreated the prismatic quality of their colours by intense and unnatural contrast of dark and light. Thus images sometimes contained, for example, leafless, mordent vegetation that limited blur by decreasing friction and movement caused by the elements, and accentuated gothic aesthetics of

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high contrasts. Indeed, blurred edges amplified distortions of temporality and other haunting, spatial effects. Generalized in terms of photographs, the negations and extremes of colour juxtapositions, compounded by reflective surfaces, as sources of light that invert the sky and land, lend otherworldliness to Pre-Raphaelite imagery. The temporal tug of time exposure, and the imperfections in the photos caused by a variety of compounds—for instance, wet silver collodion processes or egg white washes—only intensifies the gothic aspects of Pre-Raphaelite images. A concise definition of Pre-Raphaelite gothic Photography is derived through the contiguity in analogous elements of Pre-Raphaelite, Gothic, and photographic subtypes. Broad gothic aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism are comprised of melancholy, living death, haunting, vanishing past, mythologized present, temporal and spatial displacements, distortions and doublings, fields of vision skewing subject and landscape, decadence, blurring of boundaries, wresting with hierarchy and order. Dreams equally become nightmares, and images are codified by descriptors like uncanny, grotesque, awkward, or even obscene. This is exemplified by a lack of aesthetic conformity in the individual images themselves, where modulations from hyper-real to fantastical are common, in works from Millais to Grimshaw. Gothic photography is analyzed in general or metaphoric capacities by scholars like Botting, Gregory Brophy, or Philip Stokes—a viewpoint criticized by Lindsey Smith in spectroscopic terms41 —through ‘“negation”’, “mirror with a memory”, “the negative”,42 and “deceptive dualism”.43 Voyeuristic apprehension of the image contains what Stokes calls a “shifting, uncertain subversion” of the everyday that is intrinsically Gothic.44 But he signals the importance of a more complex gothic adaptation of technology, where there is always “potential, … through staging, manipulation, … choices of photographic syntax” to create “terrible delights and ecstatic horripilations”.45 However, a distinct style of Pre-Raphaelite photography is discussed by critics like Michael Bartam, Tom Barringer, Lindsey Smith, or Dianne Waggoner. The form highlights a reconceptualization of painting conventions through the material reality created by artificial focus and clarity of the camera. As Smith notes on the spectroscopic quality of Pre-Raphaelitism, with such a medium, practitioners adjust for “perceptual aberration” in art that modifies optical trickery or the depth of field.46 Along with their vivid, arresting subject matter, distortions of the medium become an intrinsic part of this genre of photography. In 1859, H. L. Keen, connects Pre-Raphaelite style to a gothic form of photography: “claustrophobic, ‘morbid’ productions” to a “photographic aesthetic”, where the “particularly dazzling colours” unconventionally “resembles the tonal system of monochromatic photography”.47 As already noted, the excesses and distortions of perceived colour and contrast created by the photographic medium often accentuated gothic aspects of Pre-Raphaelite photography, which are a construction of context, form, aesthetic, and technical processes. Indeed, photographers experimented with and adapted to the photographic exigency. In an exhibition catalogue, Bartram, like Graham Ovenden, introduces standard techniques of Pre-Raphaelite photography using what are essentially gothic motifs. These techniques highlight gothic effects of colour, shadow, subject, and landscape that are a direct result of photographic manipulations and adaptations of chemical

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sensitivity, exposure, and processes. For example, the issue of landscape and subject reflects a binary opposition created by the difficulty of capturing the horizon and controlling light exposure: this is because exposure time for the negative to capture both the minutiae of the image, results in “the skyline appearing overexposed”, “as a black expanse”.48 The problem was sometimes mitigated “by printing two negatives together”, one of the sky the other of the land.49 It conceives an essential gothic space where various elements of the landscape and subject are generatively and artificially altered. Such a space is equally complicated by the effects of various chemicals and light wavelengths.50 The construction of interior and exterior spaces is pertinent to gothic atmosphere. In the outdoors, calotypes, as early an early photographic medium, manufactured “bizarre under- and over-exposures”.51 Indoors, the source of light is controlled and amplified. Windows can create extremes of light and dark. A bright yellow window covering obliterates the subject of the image. Dark blue can give the room a gothic ambiance. Increasing the supernatural effects of photographs, reflective surfaces were points of light that “introduced exaggerated contrasts and distortions on the photograph” representing various colours.52 As exposure times increased and technologies changed, advanced, gothic atmospheres were accentuated less through jarring juxtapositions of extremes caused by exposure than through soft tonal (supernatural) effects. As will be seen, gothic Pre-Raphaelite photography exhibits high contrasts, and distortions, the inversion of rational systems of codification that are at once photographic (colour, space, depth of field, order) and part of the revolt against the establishment inherent in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Further analysis of images and devices helps build a more thorough definition of this genre of photography, and explicates media elements that extend monotropic to spectroscopic manipulation of the depth of field. Equally assessing the gothic progression from paint to photo to photo-painting, to spectral and occult photography, highlights techniques like double exposure, the fusion of multiple negatives, and staining or outright painting over negatives, which are visible across Pre-Raphaelite gothic photographs. Now that the parameters of the mode have been delineated, a spectrum of pertinent images, photographic technologies, and effects will be analyzed in order to explicate aspects of gothic pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in relation to the daguerreotype, calotype, photomontage and photogravure forms, as well as in relation to artificial applications of colour. Many subsets of photographic apparatuses and techniques, and a known pattern of experimentation and transmediality in the PRB, often augment gothic atmosphere. Take the example of the daguerreotype, “Venice, Ducal Palace, Upper Arcade at Judgment Angle” (1849–1852), by John Ruskin and John Hobbs.53 This image of a colonnade on the periphery of a building next to a courtyard is horizontally framed. High juxtaposition of shadow and light, and fading edges make the colonnade look fractured, ephemeral, ghostly, and in motion. Skewing of light from the dark cloister highlights the crisp external background, and the sense of movement caused by the contrast between fading columns from left to right that give the impression of depth. The colonnade on the left of the long dark hall, due to fading, looks like a series of old oak trees with two focal points, one light (background) and one dark (internalised

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within the colonnade), with a spectral door in the lower right corner. The building is framed by the distorted columns that are archetypical gothic arches. Two focal points in the image create visual tension: as internal-external, real-gothic fantasy. The gothic architecture is reminiscent of Roger Fenton, John William Inchbold, and other Pre-Raphaelite landscape artists and photographers—whom largely used later apparatuses. However, the aesthetic effect of the daguerreotype elicits a different gothic atmosphere to newer photo forms like the calotype—which are discussed later in this chapter. Consider the daguerreotype process that forms these images, and its critical position within gothic discourse. Contemporary gothicized renditions put forward in the Pre-Raphaelite Lens, move from time’s living death through toxicity, descriptions of “iodine and bromine vapours”, “exposure to sunlight” “fumes of heated mercury”, and the “revealing [of] the image” “fixed in time”54 to produce a direct positive photographic image or replica. The process is described in fantastic terms in the 1840s by the gothic novelist Maria Edgeworth: “portraitists installed their studious in ‘glass houses’ fitted with blue-tinted glass”, which “maximized the illumination”, “a glass dome casting a snap dragon blue light making all look like spectres and the men in black gliding about …”.55 Equally, the technical process of the daguerreotype allows for an analysis of gothic elements of Pre-Raphaelite images. In the 1830s, Paris Hippolyte Fizeau developed hand colouring techniques that relied on “a thin coating of gold”.56 A silver-plated copper plate was polished into a mirror surface, then sensitized to sunlight over chemicals in specialized light proof boxes; “manipulation of the process out of doors” as can be seen in the image discussed above by Ruskin and Hobbs is unusual, because of unpredictable light and the mercurial complications of climate and other factors. This meant that landscapes taken with daguerreotype were quite rare.57 Ruskin and Hobbs’s landscape has been used as an example in this chapter because it exposes visible extremes and variations due to the process and subject matter, which together create a gothicized distortion. Typical daguerreotypes as portraits, and often death photos, are more commonly associated with moribund metaphors—and standard descriptions of haunting temporality and ghostly aesthetics. The resultant image is static, enhancing gothic motifs. In 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote the first official description of his own invention, the calotype: Into this new apparatus, Talbot invested an awe of new science as magic “the most transitory of things, a shadow, … fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic’”, that could capture a fragment in time “fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy”.58 But elsewhere, Talbot connects “the meticulous realism of his medium to Dutch painting of the seventeenth-century”59 —images of contrast, baroque opulence and decadence with extreme realism verging on the grotesque. Thus, in describing the calotype, Talbot combines fantastic, gothic, and formal realistic elements. Technical processes of the Calotype feature “the reversed image, which showed the shadows light and the highlights dark” that can readily be applied metaphorically to examine gothic tropes. The negative, coined by Sir John Herschel, “led to the development of photography as a medium of multiple production of positive prints”, much like “the graphic arts”.60 Note that the marrying of graphic arts and photography through the negative, becomes

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both mechanism and metaphor and is at the core of this experimental Pre-Raphaelite genre. In the “first practical negative-positive process”, a “paper negative is made by coating … paper with silver salt” solution to render it light sensitive.61 Talbot accidently discovered that these negatives store “information from the subject in latent form”, made visible by chemicals like silver iodide.62 Other paper negative processes involve high quality paper coated with silver nitrate solution then dried, dipped in potassium iodide and dried again, to create silver oxide. Indeed, a diversity of experimental techniques were used in the period. Applying salt and albumen (an egg white wash) in the process is often visually misidentified. But, dilute albumen results in darker images. Salted paper is gritty and results in a pixelated image. Straight albumen has less depth of field, and is lighter. These processes were strategically used, or accidently applied, and led to the development of what can be called a gothic aesthetic. The incorporation of a taxidermy object-subject is compelling in John Dillwyn Llewelyn’s “Rabbit” on Paper Negative early to mid-1850s (collection of the Royal Photographic Society).63 Llewelyn uses a taxidermy rabbit as a simulacrum of a natural image. The picture suggests the juxtaposition of life and death, old and new, the naturalism that early Pre-Raphaelitism embraced—much like Thomas Keith’s gothic study “Foliage on a Tombstone” (1852).64 The taxidermy rabbit (as resurrected subject) is in contrast to what Bartram calls the “alien image of the landscape”.65 The photo frame is vertical, creating jarring tension. Standard high contrast of shadow to light within the ferns makes them look serpentine, as they curve around a dark space that becomes foreboding and rigid. Where the fronds of the ferns are the lightest the edges blur, a technical feature of the long exposure. Equally, corners are blurred. The depth of field is skewed by two focal points, one light and one dark, which draw the eye from shadow, beneath the ferns, to light, the rabbit. This creates a diagonal line through the photo, thus increasing tension. Victorian fear of the romantic, untamed wilderness resonates. Note that the action of silver oxide and the hour-long exposure heightened reflection and darkness, accentuating the strangeness of shadows and extremes of contrast, producing dark gothic spaces in the print. The final chemical development of the negative introduces random effects, smudges—imperfections and errors—all that work to increase the gothic tenor of the image. The dominant print process in the latter half of the nineteenth century, albumen, was introduced in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquard-Evrard. This process is used by Parsons (whose images were staged by Dante Rossetti) and Julia Margaret Cameron (an apprentice of David Wilkie Wynfield). Sheets of paper were “coated with a mixture of albumen (an eggwhite solution) and ammonium or sodium chloride” and “sensitized in a bath of silver nitrate”.66 When dry, it is “placed in direct contact with a negative in a printing frame and exposed to sunlight”, a point at which doubling (as layering, repositioning, or replication of visual features) could be introduced.67 Gold solution toners capture the image but transformed its “reddish-brown to purplebrown” hue—as an example of early colour.68 The glossy finish and rich colour is characteristic of albumen prints. They are comparatively detailed,69 and these textures are easily adaptable to Pre-Raphaelite photo aesthetics.

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Consider Cameron, whom is frequently analyzed in terms of Pre-Raphaelite photographs by myriad scholars, such as Hope Kingsley. Cameron’s photograph, “Sadness” (1864),70 an albumen silver print, is a romantic gothic portrait, suffused by a wistful, pensive, almost melancholic quality. The figure’s exposed shoulders are typical of Pre-Raphaelite partial-nudity—as Victorian mainstream fetishism. The subject is close up, the image unorthodox. As Kingsley notes Cameron created her images with large plates that required long lenses.71 Cameron’s pieces suggest provocatively arranged, obsessively repetitive images. In the twenty-first century, Cameron’s “[d]reamy non-narrative female figures” and the “shadow of her sensual portrait” that “hung heavily” in contemporary exhibitions, is an example of “an untroubled version of popular Pre-Raphaelitism”,72 ironically extending the nineteenth-century Cult of Beauty: “disconcertingly frank sensuality” constructed through a “confusion of styles and cacophony of conflicting [Victorian] theories”.73 Evoking the 1860s Cult of Beauty74 Cameron’s “Sadness” is “marred” by a “damaged negative”, with “uneven edges … peeled back to unveil a window into the past”.75 Inadvertent thumb marks, spots, and scratches from the albumen process accentuate gothic atmosphere. Her niece, Virginia Woolf, intensely disapproved of such an engagement with the cult of beauty, as a popular vogue. Scholars like Andrea Wolk Rager intimate the importance of technique on the gothic aesthetic of PreRaphaelite imagery.76 The photo has only one light source, emanating from the left; only one negative was used on the interior photograph. The female subject’s jaw line is overexposed, and there is high contrast, where fabric and lighting create a fragmentation or abstract quality to the garment she is wearing. Equally its sheer and flowing form, with visible folds, mirror her hair, which is itself resting on, and at the edges, merging into, the wallpaper. The subject’s neck is extended, but not exaggeratedly elongated. Her shadow on the wall is a dark focal point, and acts as a doppelganger projected thereon, a negative subject. Colour translation to black and white creates less extreme contrasts due to the controlled environment. Soft blurs of the interior add to a romantic gothic atmosphere, capturing a haunting remnant of life, crystalized in the chemical bloom of the photograph. Using a camera, Cameron illustrated Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King— Holman Hunt also did so for Tennyson. From this set, consider Cameron’s 1875 “The Passing of Arthur”77 (an albumen silver print from wet collodion glass negative) with its artificial staging, and otherworldly effect. The image is based on Tennyson’s phrasing in “Morte d’Arthur” (1842), where the king is metaphorically likened to a shattered column.78 It is clear from the high gothic contrast in this photo that the Pre-Raphaelite medieval scene was full of colour. Such colour produces gothic extremes—of shadow, dark and light—that blur the colours at the lines of the images, together skewing the depth of field that creates optical illusion or trickery (a trait typical of Millais’s work). These optical illusions are essentially a less formal version of Mach banding, which “exaggerates the contrast between edges of the slightly differing shades of grey, as soon as they contact one another, by triggering edgedetection in the human visual system”.79 A photographic result of the colour blue that is in the high visual spectrum (high actinic activity) is darkness, and “blends into the background”.80 Yellow is in the low visual spectrum (low actinic activity) so “has

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barely registered on the negative”.81 Double exposure clear thumbprints, and marks give the image a very spectral quality; inadvertent thumb marks are shadows that accentuate gothic qualities and the crescent thumb mark in the left top corner resembles the moon. Through such liminal artefacts, this image plays with interior and exterior spaces. Light draped medieval, and largely Pre-Raphaelite, figures contrast dark ephemeral forms in the background, as multiples. These multivalent contrasts, motion and tension are created in the image. Clouds across the bottom horizon, and fading at the edges, make the subjects float in a dense otherworldly fog. The light and dark on the clothing mimics the rich depth and vitality of Pre-Raphaelite painting. In 1865, Parsons took a series of eighteen full and half-length photos of Jane Morris, who was carefully posed by Rossetti.82 Morris was variously positioned in a style reminiscent of Félix Nadar’s (1862) publicity images of Sarah Bernhardt.83 The series is in albumen print from wet collodion on glass negative. The ghostly frames result partly from deterioration of the wet collodian process, with damage caused by securing the negative to its glass plate. The transparency of glass produced a relatively high resolution of image in both highlight and shadow in the resultant print. Rossetti “subsequently used the photographs as studies of Morris’s facial features, hair, and body postures, transposing these elements into a series of striking oil paintings”.84 In a full-length pose, taken outside, the garden becomes “a curious entrapment”.85 The image is both inherently Gothic and Pre-Raphaelite. Technical manipulations and effects build gothic atmosphere: dust particles and fingerprints; a bubble forming on her dress; edges furling as if punctuating temporalspatial distortion, where these margins seemingly ripple and tear, an effect caused by the wet collodian process; black and white contrast, “uncanny precision”86 as “untimely and uncanny effects”.87 Rigidity of the image is created by long exposure, and lends it an ethereal aspect, as living death, and melancholia. Again, the hair is wild, blending into the backdrop, while background vegetation blurs in juxtaposition to the figure against the folds of her fabric garments. Interestingly, the blur of the vegetation forms distorted figures and faces like demonic fantasy images. The gloss and depth of the fabric has the same sheen as with Titian-inspired colours of the Pre-Raphaelites. The rendering of folds of fabric produce a vibrant patina without colour, as well as distorted and awkward postures typical of Pre-Raphaelitism. Parson’s images are mirrored in Rossetti’s paintings of Jane Morris—as for example, versions of “Beatrice” in oil,88 “The Blue Silk Dress” (1868) in oil,89 or “Reverie” (1868)90 in coloured chalk on paper. These art works soften the harsh gothic contrasts of photographic realism through mythic, medieval, and spiritual iconography. The following examples are on the periphery of the discourse surrounding PreRaphaelite gothic photography, but they highlight aesthetic commonalities that warrant examination: from silver to multiple negative to salted paper and glass negative: a spirit photograph called “The Ghost Bernadette Soubirous” (1890) from France91 ; Rejlander’s “The Two Ways of Life” (1857) a multi-negative Tableaux of Swedish influence92 ; and, the British landscapes “Evening” (1854) by Philip Henry Delamotte93 and “Bolton Abbey, West Window” (1854) by Fenton.94

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As Louis Kaplan (2010) and Tom Gunning (1995) suggest, in spirit photography we find an extraordinary conjunction of uncanny themes like the visual double, the “constant recurrence” of icons and ideas, fascination with afterlife, and overcoming death “through the technical device of mechanical reproduction”.95 Such “natural magic” in the corporeal reality of a being transfixed in time and place96 suggests the “magic” Talbot saw in the early calotype.97 The photographs above highlight image decay and technical limitations of subject matter—a form of haunting temporality.98 Pre-Raphaelite gothic images are also tinctured by immortality, living surcease, and common photographic devices like double exposure that produce wraithlike figures as in Charles Dodgson’s The Dream (1857).99 The Anonymous French photograph, “The Ghost Bernadette Soubirous” (1890)100 in Albumen silver, circulated in the 2005 exhibition of “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult”.101 The ethereal image recreating Saint Bernadette Soubirous in apparitions is horizontally framed. The construction of the image relies on multiple exposures of a white-cloaked woman, walking in front of an ivy-covered brick wall. She fades into the wall like a spectral vision. The many light sources create movement, evoking jarring off-kilter statico of multiple exposures. Yet, calm, otherworldliness emanates. High contrast is a result of the tension between the aesthetic and the formal content in the frame used to invoke aesthetic. This effect of cascading exposures parallels the multiple focuses of Pre-Raphaelite photography. A central ivy-covered column divides the human forms on the right from the spectral ones on the left. The background is sharper than foreground. Greenery is a dark blur suggestive of an outdoor environment, while red brick is dark grey, and mortar is white. The inversion of colours of the mortar and brick create an optical illusion in the background and foreground, a motion seen through the multiple exposure of the negatives. The gossamer of the cloak, itself overexposed, may well have been rich blue. The semi-translucent effect is also a result of the albumen silver print process through double exposure, distress and distortion, smears, gradations and curled edges. This hazy effect coupled to the unusual order of the depth of field caused, for example, by the gliding figure, is seen in Rejlander’s “The Two Ways of Life” (1857),102 a facsimile silver gelatin print. It was a controversial photograph, in the vein of Hieronymus Bosch, that both enacts a Victorian moral allegory for human agency that must decide between vice and virtue, and represents a gothic binary reminiscent of Millais’s tableaux. Rejlander’s experimental inter-positive process used photomontage with gelatin starch resins and albumen that could sharpen the image “or alter the tonality of the print”.103 He took over thirty negatives, photographing each model and their background separately, then fused the negatives into one large print. This created a multiplicity of focal points and an extensive manipulation of the depth of field—a stereoscopic image employing the Pre-Raphaelite skewing of depth of field through multiple points of optical clarity that recalls traditional style, but in the ethos of Pre-Raphaelitism, becomes a revolt against canon. The tableaux is part Pre-Raphaelite, part Gothic, high decadence. Interestingly, the same blurring on a landscape affected by translation of colours to monochrome occurs in Delamotte’s Evening (1854), an albumen print.104 Evening evokes a rural Gothic atmosphere

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imbued with the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic: atmospheric affects, the claustrophobic, an encroaching wilderness, and high contrast. A swamp-like river blurs temporal edges, distorts the realism of the photograph into surrealism. Water glows, the intensity of the vertical light feels like that ethereal land is set in the stratosphere, river moving the sky down to earth as the water is pulled up (an inversion) caused by blurring and reordering of elements in the image as a result of how colour is reproduced in a black and white photograph.105 Many visual phenomena replicated “flatly contradicted perceptual experience” due to the composition of sunlight.106 Composition, colour translation, chemical process and experimental techniques of Rejlander, and Delamotte, in very different ways, both “disarrange the order of relation”.107 This tendency in the medium skews such an order and augments its gothic aesthetic. A gothic haze, cloying yet de-sexualized, in Fenton’s “Bolton Abbey, West Window” (1854)108 mirrors the style of Inchbold’s 1853 “The Chapel, Bolton”.109 Here gothic haze is a facet of the albumen print process, with its many complex experimental washes and approaches. More generally, the visual characteristics of calotypes change depending on paper type, work procedure, and end finishes: “brown tones, semi-shiny surface, cool tones, and more”.110 Dangerous chemicals manipulate the finish, colour, shadow, and light, while heat darkens and flattens it, invariably increasing gothic atmosphere. Take the example of Henry Robinson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1861),111 a collodion, combination print. The process of production was discovered in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer. He found that liquid silver iodide that comes from water mixed with silver nitrate then sprayed with potassium iodide produces an image when light is introduced. The image is fixed in a darkroom with sodium thiosulphate or potassium cyanide when the glass is outside the camera.112 “The Lady of Shalott” was widely reproduced in Pre-Raphaelite circles: paintings from Millais’s “Ophelia” (1851– 1852)113 to John William Waterhouse’s three versions of “The Lady of Shalott”,114 contrasted to Holman Hunt’s (1857) painting of the same name,115 infused with a medieval, Orientalist aesthetic. A circle of light dominates the centre of the image, and is reminiscent of an aperture, with columns trisecting it. In Robinson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1861),116 the backdrops are painted, and the people, costumed. The central figure resembles a faceless corpse supine in a canoe, floating away to immolation. The background is mirrored in the water, creating a shimmering finish balanced by the strained juxtaposition of light and dark at the top of the trees. The trees are blurred. Above the body is a shadelike spectral emanation. Lily pads at the front and grass to the right are two focal points. There is a large variation in clarity— possibly a facet of staining, degradation over time, or the collodion wet negative itself. The “absurdities” and artefacts of Robinson’s two negative images117 treat the “weird and wonderful”.118 “Fading Away” by Robinson,119 often analyzed alongside Millais “Woodman’s Daughter”,120 was printed from five negatives. Robinson’s famous manual Pictorial Effect in Photography attests to his experimentation with process and alterations of print.121 “Fading Away” is a reflection of a controlled environment that produces beautiful gradations of shadow and light. It has the austerity of a Dickensian urban Gothic, which is a result of the derivations of the relation between the landscape and subject. In this context, a window in a room frames the external

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landscape, which is festooned with storm clouds and fog, and becomes a focal point of the image. Within the room, it is internally juxtaposed to a frail feminine form cloaked in full rich fabrics, body posture, rigid, and distorted. Robinson’s images are theatrical (as tragedy), at times absurd to the point of “hyperbolic realism”,122 and even commercial. In a slight derivation of process, the once commonplace collodion negative— which applied a silver nitrate solution and allowed for pre-sensitization—was used to produce various photographs. The following images by Dodgson, Cameron and Ronald Leslie Melville suggest the relational order of landscape (brick and wilderness) and subject; here, land merging with subject. The cause is part framing, and posing, part technique, part irregularities of the medium and the apparatus, and equally evokes a transition from naturalism to high decadence. Dodgson’s “The Dream. The Barry Children” (1857),123 in collodion, is notable for the stillness of its subjects, a double exposure reminiscent of spirit photography, and optimized lighting with striking contiguity of light and shadow. Shadows cut diagonally across the picture—jarring a seemingly calm image. The girl in the chair is almost moribund, her unnatural form captured against the starkness of the bricks. It is more nightmare than reverie. Dodgson’s practice included “specialized built or improvised studies” for which he “generated about three thousand negatives, carefully annotating settings and preserving his best images in a set of circulating albums”.124 The naturalistic intertwining of landscape and subject suggests a powerful gothic impulse and the mode of transmission so typical of the Pre-Raphaelites. Ronald Leslie Melville’s “Mrs Godfrey Clarke” (1860s)125 collodion image shows a woman, cheek pressed against a stone wall in a garden. Gothic details include the bleakness of eyes, dilated black pupils, juxtaposition between nature (winding veins on a wall, an esplalier tree), and the figure integrated into the vine—similar to Cameron’s “Athilea”.126 The blooms look dead, while weeds and wildflowers adorn old gothic architecture,127 a garden gone to seed.128 Low contrast of the image is heightened by the clarity of her face, as the focal point, and creates a telescoping effect. However, taken some thirty years later, James Craig Annan’s Photogravure “Eleanore” (1897)129 is an excellent example of Pre-Raphaelite subject embedded in telescoping landscape, produced by a very different process. A Photogravure is produced when a photographic negative is transferred onto a copper plate, which can then be manipulated like an etching. It allows for creative reworking, and results in a wide range of tones in the finished piece.130 Annan’s image, taken in a woodland, has multiple focal points created by light piercing the trees and amplifying the shadow. The rigid stance, of the figure Eleanore, is motion arrested in time. Underneath the photo there is a quote from Tennyson’s elegiac poem “Eleanore” (1832) about death and immortality. Ghostly or spectral photographic elements of this Pre-Raphaelite image are accentuated by the vogue for “dim atmospheric landscapes”, and hackneyed, “doomed Pre-Raphaelite damsels”.131 Eleanore’s face is marked by a dread or distortion; the blurring of her form against the backdrop is wraithlike. A male figure looms in the background, highlighting the palpable sense of voyeuristic spectacle.

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Beneath the light dappled canopy of the trees, “the violent destruction of existing” tonal and colour values,132 are softened and manipulated into a dark medieval reverie of high contrast set in black and white by the photographic process. Colour processes and treatments altered gothic aesthetics. Equally, various early calotypes were prone to fading and staining. Images were kept in the dark to slow the aging and decaying process, and the Royal Photographic Society of Britain created a committee to find methods to stabilize the images. Exploring techniques for the preservation of images became a stepping-stone to colouring them. Colour photography was not invented until 1907, though there were many precursors. These include the three-colour method suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, and furthered in 1861 by Thomas Sutton.133 The early French photographer Louis Ducos du Hauron (1877), who helped pioneer the use of colour, developed a “subtractive method exacted by the spectral power of the distribution of light”.134 Levi L. Hills’s extension of the heliotype (photo-lithographic) process recreated some colour in photographs directly from colour engravings. However, staining, tinting, washes, and filters were ubiquitous; photos often contained colour applied by hand.135 Interestingly, grey often faded to brown. Other tints were introduced like bluish black or purple, and the early purplish-brown was typically seen in the golden tone of albumen print. This technique extended to the application of water-colouring or tinting photos in the eighteen hundreds. Practices of staining and filtering tended, for example, to amplify the natural shadow of the images, increase luminosity, blur objects, create doubles and optical illusions, and cause unnatural, uncanny colour juxtapositions typical of gothic photography. Take the extreme example of John Atkinson Grimshaw, in particular the highly gothic photo-painterly image “Silver Moonlight” (1880).136 Grimshaw admired the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter Inchbold, reminiscent of Brett, Charles Napier Hemy, and William Dyce137 and prised the tonality of moonlit landscapes. “Silver Moonlight” depicts a ghostly night where an increased depth of field is created by the variation and oscillation between patches of actual photo interspersed with patches of painting. These form points of hyperrealism. In the image, the central corridor is an urban Victorian street that glows with a vitreous, mirror surface like water. Trees as mimetic skeletons merge into the architecture. A complex of diagonal lines in the image encompasses the windows in the gothic house to the right, which are filled with flames. Tree branches, around what is quintessentially a rural moon, represent an area of high realism where the photo has not been treated as extensively with paint. Bartram notes that it was well-known that Grimshaw “indulged occasionally in the roguish practise of overpainting photographs and selling them as his own paintings”.138 The signs of photographic foundation are evident in details of shadow and silhouette that are not “a part of ocular perception”, but how a camera represents reality139 —reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite use of optics. To create this effect, Grimshaw projected “a photograph or a [magic] lantern slide on to a blank canvas”.140 The magic lantern was invented in approximately 1650. In the Victorian era the invention of what is called limelight, the burning of hydrogen and oxygen on a lime surface resulted in a dazzling flame enabling projection distances from the magic lantern to “a screen seventy feet away”.141 Photography “revolutionized

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the magic lantern”.142 Specifically images could blend together “transparent colours, like Prussian Blue, Indigo and Raw Sienna” to produce a “rich mellow effect”,143 which is seen in Grimshaw’s pieces. He pencilled over the outlines made by the magic lantern and altered them by painting with “brushes to create a glossy finish, free from visible evidence of his handling of paint”.144 His work had “hallucinogenic clarity”, but lacked “depth, volume, and texture”, and photographic issues remained: outlines were blurry at the edges and in the middle ground, while staying crisp both near and far away. This radical disruption of the depth of field is characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite gothic photography. However, “artists trained in traditional academic methods despised” Grimshaw’s creations.145 But, Grimshaw clearly added to the gothic effect and was indebted to Inchbold and Brett (who later migrated to Australia). These examples highlight the substantial impact of technical experimentation on gothic aesthetic. William James Stillman, landscape artist and author of The Amateur’s Photographic Guide-book (1874), is included in a recent exhibition on radical realist and American Pre-Raphaelitism.146 His manual is reminiscent of Robinson’s Pictorial, and implies Rejlander’s adventures in adaptations. Experimentation with processes and techniques that Stillman employed was a result of altered instruments, chemical variations, as well as gothic aperture, setting, and antithesis to situate the texture of his photography. His “White Mountains” (1860s)147 maintains the clarity of the albumen print. As Waggoner notes, the “pictorial viewpoint corresponds to the camera’s height on a tripod, pointed straight into the forest”.148 It is an otherworldliness that situates the eye of the spectator. In other studies, Stillman builds disorientation through the diagonal lines of the flora. Photographic distortions of the landscape, and aberrations of the optical field, are a feature of these gothic images. Stillman describes the effect in “Naturalism and Genius” (1863), as a destabilizing, vertiginous, immersive atmosphere149 through “every irregular” “and broken” surface that exposes every “faultless mirror-like accuracy”.150 Stillman’s lecture, “Eulogy of Pre-Raphaelitism”, garnered reproach for supposedly embracing such an “unhealthy” “worship of deformity”.151 As a gothicized reflection of image, Stillman suggests that “this creed of microscopic fidelity to nature constituted a distortion of the pictorial world”.152 His discourse on aesthetics harkens back to Ruskin’s commentary on realism and optics in “God’s Gothic”, where the visual representation of corporeal space needs to be carefully transmediated. Through translation of aesthetics from the physical landscape into photography, Stillman points to those gothic distortions and optical fidelities that become part of his practise and repertoire. Despite the plethora of processes and photographic forms, and the many diverse technical and visual effects they caused, the translation of Pre-Raphaelite imagery from painting and illustration into photography in the nineteenth century heighted a variety of gothic aesthetics and motifs, between naturalism and high decadence. Experimentation with, for instance, multiple negatives, double exposures, exposure times, and the manipulation of light sources and chemicals, had a large significant impact on the depth of field, and in turn the temporality and spectrality of the images. The graininess of the salt treatment, the soft but clarified haze of the distilled albumen, or clarity of the later albumen prints, created a spectrum of romantic or more realistic,

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horrific gothic atmospheres or subjects. The artificial manipulation of colours to emphasize variations on brown, before colour photography, equally resulted in the disruption of the perceived order of nature described by Ruskin,153 and a similarly disrupted stratification of the vivid, prismatic, spectroscopic colour range of the early Pre-Raphaelite painters. Interestingly, it is a facet of the technologies and processes that were used, as much as the popular taste that aspects of spirit photography are clearly discernable in Pre-Raphaelite gothic photos. Dodgson’s “The Dream”154 and Annan’s “Eleanore”155 both have spirit or occult photography elements that bind naturalism and decadence through the intrinsic imperfections in the medium. As the photos explored in this chapter attest to, early Pre-Raphaelite photography was always practiced by a more international cohort. Much like Gothicism, Pre-Raphaelitism and photography spread to different cultural spaces, at different speeds, with many aesthetic translations and permutations. Indeed, Pre-Raphaelitism “emerged from the margins of nineteenth-century art and literature to the vanguard of interdisciplinary studies”156 with a global sensibility and appeal.157 In countries from Scotland, Australia, France, Canada, and Spain, to Japan, Wales, Hungary, England, Germany, and Russia, the nineteenth-century movement adapted to each countries own critical context.158 Its spread was a facet of “new modes of exhibition”.159 Indeed, World’s Fair Expositions were one of the first platforms for Pre-Raphaelite works to be viewed “and transmitted abroad”.160 From the mid-1850s through the 1890s, reactions of French critics ranged wildly, fluctuating between scathing derision to warm acceptance of Pre-Raphaelite images and ideals.161 The same can be said for their reception in America.162 In China, the aesthetic took on a romantic, melancholic, gothic sentimentality. Critiquing the 2013 Tretyakov Gallery exhibition in Russia, as a modern reading of the diaspora of the movement, Anna Poznanskaya notes in “The Pre-Raphaelites in Russia” that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century “progressive artists and critics [were] championing new approaches” with Pre-Raphaelite works available to the general public “through prints” and critics’ reviews from “the World Fairs in Paris”.163 After 1900 in Russia, Pre-Raphaelitism became an acceptable subject with “art periodicals” featuring reviews about Rossetti and others164 By about the 1890s, transmission of the movement was secured through catalogues and photographic reproductions “of the works of Burne-Jones, Dante G. Rossetti, Hunt, Millais, Watts, Brown, and Solomon”, which “were readily available for purchase from catalogues issued by” commercial “photographic companies” in Brussels, Munich, Dornach, and some English firms.165 Exhibitions, often incorporating Pre-Raphaelite photography, have become heavily gothicized. Jacqueline Banerjee notes of the twentyfirst century, “[c]urators are under pressure” “to produce sensational” shows, while “visitors expect immediate visual gratification”.166 As with commentary in The Athenaeum (1851), such responses highlighr the static nature of gothic reception to the movement.167 The final portion of the chapter examines this Victorian and Edwardian transnational spread from Russia to China to Japan, where ideas moved non-linearly and modes of transmission varied. Russia and China offered examples of the shapes that Western “ideas could take, and these shapes were terrifying to behold”.168

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Thus a subset of these texts and images were almost “‘haunted’ by the idea of PreRaphaelitism”.169 Consider what series of cultural transitions lead to the issuance of a 2007 gothic Pre-Raphaelite image in Chinese Vogue,170 which is a reimagining of a luminous medieval Madonna, whose gown and unkempt tresses, subtly evoke Russian and French religious iconography, as well as symbolism and impressionism of Chinese embroidery. Indeed, Linda Wong notes “immaculate” Pre-Raphaelite “details, designs, and colors” were difficult to “reproduce and imitate”, by practitioners of the “impressionist Chinese” painting tradition, and as a result PreRaphaelitism affected aesthetic tradition more through gothic romantic atmosphere and allegory.171 This is suggestive of “how and why” aesthetics and ideologies get “conceptually connected”.172 The Chinese Vogue image is overtly Pre-Raphaelite and mainstream, digitized to resemble a painting. It is the glorification of romantic gothic beauty in Modern China tinctured by a Russian aesthetic. Indeed, Russia left an imprint on Japanese and Chinese art and culture in the late nineteenth century. Due partly to military occupation, Pre-Raphaelite artists became quite popular in the Meiji era (1868–1912) in Japan.173 Through Japanese Romanticism in the 1890s, Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne174 entered Chinese culture, along with translations by Lafcadio Hearn, for example, The Pre-Raphaelites and Other Poets (1922).175 Like Rossetti, Morris, and Waterhouse, Sir Frederic Leighton impacted the visual aesthetic in China through graphic reproductions.176 The striking iconography visible in the 2007 Vogue image links to Rossetti’s Beatrice. After the 1890s Pre-Raphaelite pieces were “reproduced in major” Chinese magazines, either in trivial capacities like inserts, or featured on covers.177 This bears similarity to the mode of proliferation of Pre-Raphaelite images in the West through photographic reproductions in magazines and catalogues. In the early 1900s, the mysticism of Rossetti’s later high decadent style exemplified by Beatrice captivated the Chinese imagination.178 Beatrice embodied wistful romanticism, where love evokes a morbid and sepulchric nostalgia. Elsewhere, gothic, and Pre-Raphaelite fetishization can be seen in early Chinese courtesan photography—a technology imported from the Western world substantively in the 1850s–1860s. A courtesan portrait of Sai Jinhau179 bares resemblance to Rossetti’s posed figures. Interestingly, courtesans became the first group to be “drawn to portrait photography on a massive scale”.180 But photographs acted as a temporal haunting, a static, and fleeting moment, often captured to memorialize beauty—like a gothic elegy. Such images were contained in pictorial pamphlets, where erotic feminine subjects, similar to Pre-Raphaelite portraitures of artificial, and distilled beauty have an exotic, and illicit gothic composition as part of their medium and atmosphere. These courtesan images recall the subject of Fenton’s popular photographic series of exoticised and orientalised odalisques, for instance, “Contemplative Odalisque” (1858), a rich sepia albumen silver print.181 The composition of courtesan portraits equally parallels the excessive staging seen in Rejlander, Parsons, Cameron, and others, which are Pre-Raphaelite in their Medievalism, archaic, and dream-like, tinctured by nightmares in their artistry—and defined by transformation across media.

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In the nineteenth century, Gothic elements of Pre-Raphaelite photography were also reconceptualized through new trends with “increasingly global perspective” and new photo technologies that the brotherhood embraced as part of radical realism and revolt against the artistic establishment.182 This praxis or model for cultural exchange is a facet of transmission of aesthetics, fed and circulated worldwide by catalogue reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and their replication and transmission by photographers. Gothic aesthetics of Pre-Raphaelite photography are defined by how new technologies transcribe the vivid, prismatic, clarity, and grotesque even radical contortions. Within the movement, and at its fringe, experimentation with technology developed from the daguerreotype to the magic lantern, through the uses of colour, shadow and light, and perspective, and of multiple negatives and outdrawing, as seen from Robinson, Grimshaw, and Stillman, to Rejlander, underscoring the impact of photo processes and techniques on gothic manifestations in Pre-Raphaelite photography. The intricacies of translation from reality to canvas, or negative to paper impact juxtaposition of subject and landscape as much as foreground and background. Artefacts of time, decay, human error, and chemical development of the negative introduce random effects, smudges—imperfections and derivations—that increase the gothic tenor of the image, creating a spectrum of romantic or realistic gothic atmospheres. Artificial manipulation of colours, as exposure times increased and technologies changed, or advanced, created gothic atmospheres that were accentuated less by jarring juxtapositions of extremes in monochrome than soft tonality and supernatural effects. Ultimately, photographic experimentation catalysed by technological innovation directly influences the expression of Gothic aesthetics in Pre-Raphaelite image and icon. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Pierluigi Maco (photographer). “Vlada Roslyakova, Lace and Tea.” China Vogue, image number 1, January 2007. William Holman-Hunt, “The Lady of Shalott, 1850,” in Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography, ed. Michael Bartram (London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 143. Linda Wong, “The Paradox of Beauty: A Survey of the Presence of the PreRaphaelites in Modern China,” in Tamkang Review (New Taipei City, Taiwan: Tamkang University Press, 2003 Spring-Summer), 198. Mark Gamsa, The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan), 2010. John Atkinson Grimshaw, Silver Moonlight, 1880, oil on canvas, 80.8 × 120 cm, The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, England. David Latham, “Preface,” in Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism, ed. David Latham (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2003), vii. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Beata Beatrix,1870,” The Tate Museum, Ref N01279; John Everett Millais, “Ophelia,1852–52,” in Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography, ed. Michael Bartram (London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 9.

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8.

S. P. Casteras, and A. C. Faxon, Pre-Raphaelite Art in its European Context (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995); Tim Barringer, “A Radical Legacy: The British Pre-Raphaelites and Global Pre-Raphaelitism,” in The American Pre-Raphaelites Radical Realists, ed. Linda S. Ferber and Nancy K. Anderson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 19. C. H. Moore, “The Pre-Raphaelite School,” The College Courant 1, no. 4 (September 11, 1867): 25–26. Roberta Smith, “Blazing a Trail for Hypnotic Hyper-Realism,” New York Times (March 28, 2013), https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/design/pre-rap haelites-at-national-gallery-of-art.html. Thomas J. Tobin, “Introduction,” in Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism, ed. Thomas J. Tobin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 6. Ibid., 6. Latham, “Preface,” viii. Thomas Tobin, Pre-Raphaelitism in the Nineteenth-Century Press: A Bibliography (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 2002), 14. Graham Ovenden, Pre-Raphaelite Photography (Washington, DC, USA: John Wiley &b Sons, 1972), 10. Lindsey Smith, “The Elusive Depth of Field: Stereoscopy and the PreRaphaelites,” in Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed, ed. Marcia R. Pointon (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989), 84. Tim Barringer, “A Radical Legacy: The British Pre-Raphaelites and Global Pre-Raphaelitism,” in The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists, eds. Linda S. Ferber and Nancy K. Anderson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 19. John Everett Millais, “Ophelia, 1851–52,” in Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 9. William Holman-Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Macmillan, Co., 1905), 249. Holman-Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, 237. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 176, 609. Ibid., 158. John Tupper, “The Subject in Art No. II,” in The Germ: Art and Poetry, 3 (March 1850), 121. “The Revolt of the Pre-Raphaelites” Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, March 5—April 9, 1972. Marina Vaizey, The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875 (Cv publications, Kindle, 2017), n.p. Ibid., n.p. John Ruskin, “Letter to Times, 13 May 1851”, “Letter to Times, 30 May 1851,” in The Works of John Ruskin, XII, eds. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London, UK: George Allen, 1904), 319–323, 324–327; John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism (London, UK: Smith Elder & Co 1851); Francois Delaporte & Todd Meyers, Anatomy of Passions, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 146.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

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Michael Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography (London, England: Weidenfeld &Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 7. Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite, 7. Barringer, Global, 28. William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, 1830–1882, ed. W. Minto (London, England: James R. Osgood & McJlvaine & Co., 1893), 251. “Salt Prints at Harvard,” (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2019), https:// projects.iq.harvard.edu/saltprintsatharvard/home. Ian Jeffrey, “British Photography from Talbot Fox to E. O. Hoppe,” in The Real Thing an Anthology of British Photographs 1849–1950, ed. The Arts Council of Great Britain (London, England: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975), 14. Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life, 1857, multiple negative carbon print, 40.6 × 76.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, NY, https:// www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/294822. John Ruskin, Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy, by John Ruskin, Volume 5. Anna Elizabeth Blunden “Art and Artists. The Royal Academy–Middle Room. III.” Critic 18. 463 (21 May 1859): 497. John Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelitism and Other Essays 1906” (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1906), 327. Jennifer L. Roberts, “Certain Dark Rays of the Sunbeam,” in The PreRapahelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington, DC, USA: National Gallery of Art, 1972), 67. Roberts, “Certain Dark Rays,” 67. Ibid., 67. Tobin, “Introduction.” Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism, 2. Smith, The elusive depth of field, 83. Gregory Brophy, “A Mirror with a Memory: The Development of the Negative in Victorian Gothic,” in Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects, eds. Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 42–43. Philip Stokes, “Gothic Photography,” in The Handbook of Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (New York, NY: NYU Press, 1998), 271. Stokes, Gothic, 272. Ibid., 272. Smith, The Elusive Depth, 83. H. L. Keen, Senior, “Truth in Art illustrated by Photography,” in Journal of the Photographic Society, ed. Hugh Welch Diamond (London, England: Journal of the Photographic Society, 1859), 27. Dianne Waggoner, “Uncompromising Truth,” in The Pre-Rapahelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), 10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 9.

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51. 52. 53.

Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 66. Ibid., 68. John Ruskin and John Hobbs, “Venice, Ducal Palace, Upper Arcade at Judgment Angle (1849–1852),” in The Pre-Rapahelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 5. Dianne Waggoner (2010) “Note to the Reader,” in The Pre-Rapahelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), ix. Jeffrey, The Real Thing, 22. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil,” Philosophical Magazine 14 (1839), 196–208. Jeffrey, The Real Thing, 30. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 33. Waggoner, Note to the Reader, ix. John Dillwyn Llewelyn, “Rabbit”, c 1852, Paper Negative, Salt paper print, 208 × 160 mm, collection of the Royal Photographic Society, National Media Museum, Bradford England. Thomas Keith, “Foliage on a Tombstone”, 1852, paper negative, 25.1 × 27.9 cm, Edinburgh City Libraries. Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 66. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 66. Julia Margaret Cameron, “Sadness”, 1864, Albumen silver print, 22.2 × 17.6 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Hope Kingsley “The Cult of Indistinctness: Art Photography in the 1890s,” in The Cult of Beauty, Stephen Calloway (London, England: V & A Publishing, 2011), 246–251; Hope Kingsley, “Pre-Raphaelitism and Photography,” in The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, eds. Robin Lenman and Angela Nicholson (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005). Andrea Volk Rager, “Review: ‘Famous Men and Fair Women’: PreRaphaelitism and Photography Reconsidered,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 40, no. 1 (2012): 328. Stephen Calloway, The Cult of Beauty (London, England: V & A Publishing, 2011), 11. Calloway, The cult of Beauty, 11. Rager, Review, 330.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

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76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

95.

96.

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Ibid., 330. Julia Margaret Cameron, The Passing of Arthur, 1875, albumen silver print., 34 × 28.1 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur, 1842. Federick A. A. Kingdom, “Mach Bands Explained by Response Normalization,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (4 November 2014): Accessed April 10, 2019, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles.10.3389/fnhum.2014. 00843/full. Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 66. Ibid., 66. Rosetti Archive, “Photographs of Jane Morris,” 1865. http://www.rossettiarch ive.org/docs/sa140.raw.html. Paul Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt, 1864, gelatin silver print, 21.1 × 16.2 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Waggoner, The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, 101. Ovenden, Pre-Raphaelite, 136. Ibid., 5. Louis Kaplan, “Spooked Time: The Temporal Dimensions of Spirit Photography,” in Time and Photography, eds. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberg, Hilda Van Gelder (Leuven Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2010), 28. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1870, oil on canvas, 864 × 660 mm, The Tate Museum Ref N01279. The Blue Silk Dress, 1868, oil on canvas, 110.5 × 90.2 cm, Liverpool Museums, Walker Gallery, Liverpool, England. Rossetti. Dante Gabriel, Reverie, 1868, coloured chalks, 33 × 28 inches, Rosetti Archive, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/s206.rap.html. “The Ghost Bernadette Soubirous, 1890,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, eds. Clément Chéroux, Maison Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Andreas Fischer, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), Image 21. Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life, 1857, multiple negative carbon print, 40.6 × 76.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, NY. Delamotte, Philip Henry, “Evening, 1854, albumen print, 8 3/8 × 6 7/16 in.,” in The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 28. Fenton, Roger. (1854) “Bolton Abbey, West Window, 1854, albumen print, 9 7/8 × 13 9/16 in,” in The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 40. Kaplan, Spooked, 33; Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 68. Kaplan, Spooked, 17.

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Talbot, William Henry Fox, “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil,” Philosophical Magazine 14 (1839): 196–208. Kaplan, Spooked, 28. Douglas Robert Nickel, “The Dream 1860,” in Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll (San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art: San Francisco, CA, 2002), 46. The Ghost Bernadette Soubirous, Image 21. Chéroux, et al., “The Perfect Medium”. Rejlander, The Two Ways of Life, 1857. “Salt Prints at Harvard”, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2019. Delamotte, Evening, 1854. Jennifer L. Roberts, “Certain Dark Rays of the Sunbeam,” in The PreRaphaelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), 65. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 67. Fenton, Bolton Abbey, Plate 40. John William Inchbold, “The Chapel, Bolton, 1853,” in The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 39. “Salt Prints at Harvard”, Harvard University, 2019. Henry Peach Robinson, “The Lady of Shalott 1861,” in The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 75. D. C. Stulik and A. Kaplan The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes: Collodion on Paper (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, 2013). John Everett Millais, “Ophelia,1852–52,” Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 9. John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, oil on canvas, 1530 × 2000 mm, Tate Museum, London, England. Holman-Hunt, “The Lady of Shalott, 1850,” Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 143. Robinson, The Lady of Shalott, 1861, Lens, Plate 75. Ovenden, Pre-Raphaelite, 358. Matthew Surface, ed., The Practical Photographer vol vii (Bradford and London: Percy Lund, Humphries, and Co., Ltd., 1896), 332; Ovenden, Pre-Raphaelite. Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858, in The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 125.

98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111.

112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119.

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120. John Everett Millais, The Woodsman’s Daughter, 1850–1851, in The PreRapahelite Lens, eds. D. Waggoner, T. Barringer, J. Lukitsh, J. L. Roberts, B. Salvesen (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2010), Plate 120. 121. Henry Peach Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers (London, England: Piper & Carter, 1869). 122. Rager, Review, 324. 123. Nickel, “The Dream 1860,” in Dreaming in Pictures, p. 46. 124. Nickel, Dreaming in Pictures, 12. 125. Melville, Ronald Leslie, 11th earl of Leven, Mrs Godfrey Clarke, 1860s, albumin print, 23.40 × 17.00 cm, National Galleries of Scotland. 126. Julia Margaret Cameron, Athilea, 1872, in Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography, ed. Michael Bartram (Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, England, 1985), 131. 127. Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (London, England: Morrison and Gibb Ltd., 1960), 57. 128. Melville, “Mrs Godfrey Clarke”. 129. James Craig Annan, Eleanore, 1897, in Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography, ed. Michael Bartram (London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 178. 130. Ovenden, Pre-Raphaelite, 178. 131. Ibid., 178. 132. Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite, 66. 133. Brian Coe, Colour photography: The first hundred years (Surrey, England: Ash & Grant, 1978), 28. 134. Bertrand Lavédrine, Photographs of the Past: Process and Preservation (Los Angeles CA: The J. Paul Getty Conservation Inst., 2009). 135. Georg Fritz, Photo-lithography, trans. E. J. Wall (London: Dawbarn and Ward Ltd., 1895). 136. Grimshaw, Silver Moonlight. 137. Tobin, Worldwide, 283. 138. Bartram, Pre-Raphaelite, 66. 139. Ibid., 66. 140. Richard Dorment, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Guildhall and Richard Green Galleries, review (Art Review) 10:17AM BST 20 Sep 2011, https://www.tel egraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8776001/John-Atkinson-Grimshaw-Gui ldhall-and-Richard-Green-Galleries-review.html. 141. G. A., Household, “Introduction,” in To Catch a Sunbeam: Victorian Reality Through the Magic Lantern, eds. G. A., Household and L. M. H. Smith (London, England: Michael Joseph, 1979), 7. 142. Household, “Introduction”, 7. 143. Ibid., 9. 144. Dorment, John Atkinson Grimshaw, n.p. 145. Ibid., n.p.

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146. William James Stillman, The Amateur’s Photographic Guide-book (London UK: M.T. Tench, 1874). 147. William James Stillman, White Mountain, 1860s, in The American PreRaphaelites: Radical Realists, eds. L. S. Ferber and N. K. Anderson (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2019), 102. 148. Waggoner, “The Perfect Observance with Truth” in The American PreRaphaelites: Radical Realists, eds. L. S. Ferber and N. K. Anderson (Washington and Farnham: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries, 2019), 101–102. 149. William James Stillman. “Naturalism and Genius,” New Path 1, no. 1 (May 1863), 1. 150. Ibid., 1. 151. William James Stillman, “Eulogy of Pre-Raphaelitism as quoted in a 7 May 1858 letter from “T.T.S.” to the Editor,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript (Boston, MA), 11 May 1858, 4; Susan P. Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism and Its Reception in America in the Nineteenth Century (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 33. 152. Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism, 39. 153. Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism. 154. Nickel, “The Dream 1860,” in Dreaming in Pictures, 46. 155. James Craig Annan, “Eleanore 1897,” in Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography, ed. Michael Bartram (London, England: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 178. 156. Latham, “Preface,” viii. 157. Barringer, Global, 19. 158. Tobin, Worldwide, 6. 159. Faxon “Introduction,” in Casteras and Faxon (1995), 11. 160. Casteras, European context, 120. 161. Ibid., 33. 162. Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism, 31 and 43. 163. Anna Poznanskaya (2013) “The Pre-Raphaelites in Russia,” in Tretyakov Gallery Magazine 2 (39), https://www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/art icles/%E2%84%962-2013-39/pre-raphaelites-russia. 164. Poznanskaya, The Pre-Raphaelites in Russia, n.p. 165. Faxon, Introduction, 27. 166. Jacqueline Banerjee, “Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the PreRaphaelites to the Modern Age: A Review of the Tate Exhibition of 2016 and the accompanying book by Carol Jacobi and Hope Kingsley,” http://www.vic torianweb.org/painting/reviews/jacobi.html. 167. Exhibition review in Athenaeum (June 1850 (1851): May 7 1851 Times. 168. Gamsa, Introduction, 6. 169. Tobin, Introduction, 11. 170. Pierluigi Maco (photographer). “Vlada Roslyakova, Lace and Tea.” China Vogue, image number 1, January 2007.

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Wong, Paradox, 200. Gamsa, Introduction, 12. Wong, Paradox, 205. Gamsa, Introduction, 5. Wong, Paradox, 205. Ibid., 205–206. Ibid., 203–204. Ibid., 206. Laikwan Pang, “Fig. 2.2,” in The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (HI, USA, University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 76. 180. Pang, The Distorting Mirror, 76. 181. Fenton, Contemplative Odalisque, 1858, albumen silver print, 35.9 × 45.8 cm (14 1/8 × 17 1/4 in.), J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. 182. Tobin, Introduction, 11.

Cinematic Darkness David Annwn Jones

Film with its ability to track the fluid complexity of motion and capture lost time was often viewed in its early years as a magical, uncanny and inherently Gothic medium. Additionally, cinematic imagery was partly derived from, on one hand, Gothic melodrama and, on the other, from popular Phantasmagoria magic lantern shows both of which had, in their turns, been associated with Gothic literature at least since the 1780s. It is easy to see why lantern-shows involving ghosts, skeletons, coffin-lids, devilish abductions, the Bleeding Nun and threatening demons would remind audiences of, for example, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). With the advent of Georges Méliès’s films, some of which even featured magic lanterns, many in the viewing audiences recognised their connection with the Phantasmagoria and pre-existing Gothic iconography. Gothic cinema has been linked variously to Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière and Ado Kyrou’s attempts to film a version of The Monk in the 1960s and Jan Švankmajer’s Castle of Otranto (1979), Hammer horror films and Italian productions, in particular Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960). Proponents of a horror genre based on the first Universal Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931) have argued that all films of fear created previously (especially silent ones) should be known as ‘Gothic’ rather than ‘horror films’, (though the distancing of ‘Gothic’ per se from ‘horror’ is a proposition that would have baffled such 18th century theorists as John and Anna Laetitia Aikin, and Nathan Drake.) In this study I advance four formative periods within the early evolution of Gothic film: 1896–1912, the earliest productions to extended features, 1913, a landmark year, 1914–1919, the war-years evolving a changed form of Gothic expression and 1919–1922, from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. We find basic Gothic tropes featured in Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir de Diable (1896): a deserted castle, hauntings, the devil, witches and Faustian transformations. There were several different ways in which Gothic could be promoted in the D. Annwn Jones (B) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_24

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new visual medium. One line of development could have involved a darker variety of the Féeries, those fantastical theatrical extravaganzas on which Méliès drew so heavily in his early years as film-maker. This film-maker was perfectly capable of writing a convincing, unadorned narrative when the story called for it (as witness his Jeanne d’Arc [1900]), but when he broached truly macabre subjects such as Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard (1901) and the burning of a noblewoman in Un miracle sous l’Inquisition (1904), he usually chose to lighten the atmosphere by introducing the prestidigitation and farce so familiar from his earliest films. In Barbe Bleu, and at variance with the ending in Charles Perrault’s source tale, the killer’s dead wives are restored to life and given new husbands all arrayed in attractive symmetrical formation. Satan becomes a small imp bouncing and somersaulting round the set. In L’Inquisition a trick of bodily transference and the sentimental sparing of the bloodthirsty executioner detract from the horror of the initial scene. Though Gothic itself had, of course, contained ironies and parodistic elements from its literary inception, Méliès’s way of handling uncanny and horrific themes generally works against the more uncompromising tensions of the genre. The same cannot be said of Segundo de Chomón’s La Légende du Fantôme (1908) which, though it used the familiar fairytale settings, ornate fly-away flats and quest framework of Méliès’s Le Royaume des Fées/The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), also deployed its cinematography in service to a darker supernatural agenda. The film starts with a ghost raising other phantoms in a Gothic cemetery. The main action proceeds through subterranean and devilish caverns, aqueous worlds of lizards and into an explosion of infernal revenge. In some ways, De Chomón’s film is an example of a viable way which Gothic film might have developed even further: a Baroque schema of dark faery bristling with threat and sudden shocks. His Satan harbours real malevolence and is actually able to kill the heroine along with her carload of warriors even if peace is restored in heaven. Méliès’s and De Chomón’s rather tangential influence on horror can still be seen in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (startling décor, stylised action, magic), Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Show (all singing and dancing ghouls), Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (a little girl’s dark fairy fabulation) and, perhaps most strongly, in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) (puppets, songs, a macabre ballroom) yet the main energies of Gothic cinema were to emerge elsewhere. Very early in the evolution of film, many works actually referenced and adapted Gothic and neo-Gothic literature. One example, R. W. Paul’s The Magic Sword, A Mediaeval Mystery (1901) drew on J. K. Green’s juvenile drama The Castle of Otranto or Harlequin and the Giant Helmet (1840), a parodistic version of Horace Walpole’s novel. Percy Stow’s dealing with a ghostly legend, The Mistletoe Bough (1904), in some ways a much more rudimentary production than those of the French and Spanish directors, is a work of true folk-Gothic, stemming from a tale which had circulated in oral form for many years before the poet, Samuel Rogers, wrote it down. A Christmas bride wants to play hide and seek on the night of her wedding but conceals herself high in a tower and within a chest which falls shut with a strong external lock resistant to efforts to open it from within. With flaming torches, the groom and guests seek her around and inside the mansion but cannot find her. After

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thirty years, the groom receives a ghostly vision of the chest which opens to reveal his bride who steps out and embraces him. The apparition vanishes in his arms and, finally, he locates the actual chest in the tower and, opening it, recoils before the skeleton in a wedding dress lying inside. There is a real chill and finality about this movie and there is no Mélièsien frippery or Chomón-esque exuberance on display to vitiate its shock. Alice Guy-Blaché’s La Esméralda (1905) based on Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was, by all accounts, a stern and uncompromising production, featuring a brutalised Quasimodo chained to stocks and whipped in public. This director had moved in two short years from the Mélièsien knockabout of Faust et Méphistophélés (1903), (at least notionally a potential horror work), to her production of Hugo’s tale, which, judging from surviving written sources and a few stills, was a remarkably unsentimental rendition. This trend in Blaché’s dealing with Gothic and Neo-Gothic materials continued over her peak period at Solax where she produced a film every four days, amongst them The Pit and the Pendulum (1913), a 3 reeler about 50 minutes long and The Somnambulist (1911), prefiguring sleepwalking in Wiene’s Caligari. It is fascinating to view this director’s growing confidence as an auteur by the time of this later film, adding her own Gothic character-development and sub-plots as well as multiplying, with an almost Matthew Lewis-esque delectation, the sites and instruments of torture for a new woman character and live rats to chew at the ropes of the tied hero. It would be entirely false to propose that Blaché single-handedly developed Gothic film from early fantasies into longer and more frightening narratives yet, even though D. W. Griffith, Henri Desfontaines, Maurice Tourneur and, a little later, Richard Oswald and Louis Feuillade (a student of Blache’s techniques) consolidate these changes in terms of horror movies, her Gothic oeuvre and her unsentimental and graphic methods of embodying darker themes largely pre-date theirs. Though D. W. Griffith and also German directors were quick to recognise the markets for such productions, it was predominantly early French film-makers who created the first dominant phase of Gothic cinema. In 1911, the cinema houses of Europe: France, Italy and Denmark, faced by increased competition from the U.S. cine industry and embodying the need to compete with the longer theatrical productions, began to move towards a standardised form of multiple-reel films. The ways in which films with Gothic themes developed into the feature movie format around 1913 are fairly easy to trace. Henry Desfontaines had made a version of The Pit and the Pendulum in (1909) and followed that up with further adaptations of Poe in Le Scarabée d’or/The Golden Scarab (1910), Hop Frog (1910) and La Momie/Some Words with a Mummy. Griffith’s debt to Méliès was amply acknowledged throughout his career, but when it came to adapting Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and Honoré de Balzac’s ‘La Grande Bretêche’, into The Sealed Room (1909), a shockingly bleak film, he followed the lead of Charles le Bargy’s The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1908), with its no-nonsense proto-documentary feel and its portrait of psychotic violence.

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Alongside costume dramas and comedies, in 1913 Maurice Tourneur produced Rouletabille Part 1: Le Mystére de la Chambre/The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a thriller about a murderer apparently raised from the grave to kill his wife and Le Système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume/The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether (1913). This latter film was a gruesome production adapted from a Grand Guignol play by André de Lorde, (the ‘Prince of Fear’) who had, in turn, been inspired by Poe’s story of the same name. Though there had been an earlier adaptation of Poe’s ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’ tale: Edison’s Lunatics in Power (1909), it was the bleak power of De Lorde’s production which influenced Tourneur. (So impressed was Tourneur by the success of the film, that he turned again to a De Lorde Guignol adaptation in Figures de cire/Wax faces [1914] soon after.) There was to be no abatement of film companies’ adaptations of Gothic and neoGothic texts over the period 1908–1913. Selig Polyscope hired a theatrical company to act R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and, initiating a new wave of interest in psychological horror, they filmed it in 1908. In the next year, the Great Northern Company of Copenhagen remade it. It was filmed again in Britain in 1912 and twice in 1913. There was much speculative adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s and Nathanial Hawthorne’s tales in The Moonstone (versions in 1909 and 1911) The Woman in White (1912), House of the Seven Gables (1910) and other texts by Poe, R. L. Stevenson, Hawthorne and Collins. Eclair’s American schedules for the period 1912– 1913 included works by Poe, Hawthorne and Washington Irving. J. Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein 1910 reveals a kind of syncretism emerging in Gothic cinema which was very familiar in theatrical productions and lantern shows. Throughout the film, Dawley plays with the Shelleyan idea of Frankenstein’s monster (Charles Ogle) reflecting the scientist’s evil side. In order to gain the depth and layering effects in rather a shallow, static setting, Dawley has used a large mirror to right of frame. In the final scene, Ogle’s monster, exhausted by his attempts to become reconciled with his maker, stands imploringly before the mirror. The monster’s body disappears leaving only its reflected image. Suddenly Frankenstein enters and we see scientist and monster’s reflections juxtaposed. This scene reminds of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and anticipates major visual motifs in Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag/The Student of Prague (1913). Emily’s encounter with a wax cadaver in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Madame Tussaud’s travelling exhibition with Philidor, the Phantasmagorist, had served to establish the Gothic pedigree of wax statuary and museums. Van Dyke Brooks’s and Maurice Costello’s 1912 production: Conscience or the Chambers of Horrors served to renew these associations. Produced by Vitagraph, this film revealed yet again how extraordinarily dark and uncompromising even a short horror production could be. The appearance of Adolfo Padova and Giuseppe De Liguoro’s Dante’s Inferno in the previous year and its massive success in America, had served notice that film-goers were eager for longer horror films. Dante’s Inferno, an expansive 5-reeler, had given a new gravitas and fear to the earliest film-makers’ infernal visions. Shocked audiences witnessed at length victims upended in lakes of fire and

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an immense, gloating devil munching lazily on writhing bodies. This film, accompanied by other longer productions like Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines’s Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth (1912), led to ‘feature-fever’. By 1913, writers and directors had realised that longer feature films with strong, often multiple narratives involving Gothic horror were a major draw for cinema audiences. There was also a new-found confidence in movie production. After all, by this point, directors and screenplay-writers could look back on 17 years of cinematic hauntings, homicidal madmen and dancing witches, and many of the films made were expanded versions or experimental adaptations of subjects, especially literary ones, which had already met with success. Despite the relatively low status that the still fledgling cinema enjoyed in comparison with theatre, the attitudes of critics were changing and, amongst other types of film, horror productions were gaining critical approval. One good example was Herbert Brenon and Carl Laemmle’s version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1913) starring King Baggot, a production which met with popular acclaim and particular praise from Moving Picture World and other papers. On another important cultural and theoretical front, some writers and actors were beginning to pen articles and give lectures on the particular capacities of film to capture different kinds of fear-inducing psychological and psychotic states. It was not just the film-makers’ choice of source subjects or their actors’ performances in Gothic horror roles which gave these products kudos; it was the also the cinematic techniques and ways in which different films embodied these themes which drew the attention of the viewing public. Even one takes into account the many thousands of films created internationally in 1913, the growing number of horror productions is remarkable. As well as titles mentioned previously, Carl Laemmle’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Tourneur’s Le Système, Blache’s The Pit and the Pendulum, there was Max Mack’s Der Andere/The Other where an eminent socialite develops a grimacing, stooping alter ego due to a riding accident. In Frank Wilson’s Dr Trimball’s Verdict a doctor murders his rival only to see the dead’s man’s body reappearing, super-imposed on and around a skeleton. Henry McRae filmed a tale of the first lycanthropic monster in The Werewolf and Tourneur adapted Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset’s Balaoo, The Demon Baboon continuing an interest in the ravages of sub-human beasts and introducing the theme of hypnotism used to induce murder (a modus derived from Poe’s tale The Murders in the Rue Morgue ([1841], Stoker’s Dracula [1897] and George Du Maurier’s Trilby [1897]). These trends later prove vital to the action in a raft of war-time films and in the Gothic landmark Caligari [1920].) Also in 1913, Lois Weber and Philips Smalley were updating the domestic horror of Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909) and similar films in Suspense which shows a clever use of cross-cutting, aerial close-ups and intersecting, triangular frames to convey the tale of a woman threatened in her home by a knife-wielding vagrant. Phillips Smalley’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was also released picking up on Axel Strom’s version from three years earlier. Wladyslaw Starewicz’s adaptation of Gogol’s The Night Before Christmas with its wonderfully expressive villain (Ivan van Mozzhukhin) grimacing though devil-mask and buxom, erotic witch (Lidiya Tridenskaya) both whirling through the sky in clever jump-cuts to close-up and use of

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camera-shake, all nine years before the witch-craze shown in Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan (1922), was a tour-de-force. Two versions of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades were released and Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas serial started to appear, the third episode of which: Le Mort Qui Tue/The Murderous Corpse is particularly Gothic in atmosphere. Monopol’s notable three-reel adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret (1913) appeared. Additionally, though there had been versions of the popular stage melodrama Maria Marten, or the Mystery of the Red Barn in 1902 and 1908, 1913 saw the prolific director Maurice Elvey direct a 70-minute version for George King productions. There was also a clutch of shorter films each of which sought to consolidate earlier horror narratives. Paul Wegener was attracted to Gothic cinematography because technical effects used in such works could be used to capture different and distorted mental states, and because the length of the new horror features gave him more latitude to provoke fear and tension. Various critics have noticed the intense Gothic syncretism of Rye’s Der Student von Prag/The Student of Prague, a work which is sometimes judged the first horror feature film. It is loosely based on ‘William Wilson’, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, the poem, and German audiences would have been particularly aware of the influence of the Faust legend and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The means by which a penniless, despairing student (Paul Wegener) is drawn into a deal with the Satanic Scapinelli (John Gottowt) in order to win the love of a local aristocrat’s daughter is still unnerving to watch. In contrast with Faust and Hyde, Balduin, in selling his reflection, does not understand what he has lost until it is far too late and this changes the moral dynamic of the fable. The seamless double exposure mastered by the cinematographer, Guido Seeber gives the Doppelgänger effects of the film a frightening corporeality as when Scapinelli leads Balduin’s reflection from the student’s room. The departing reflected self looks ruefully back at its prior position and owner, the apparent ordinariness of the gesture underpinning its true horror. The film’s settings: the backdrop of the dark towers, alleys and arches of Prague, the use of chiaroscuro inherited from the stage lighting of Max Reinhardt and the reflection’s increasing sadism towards its former owner all reinforce the power of the film. Its scenes bristle with Gothic motifs and mirrorings: When Balduin shoots his reflection-self, he himself dies within a few seconds reminding us of Dorian Gray with his portrait. Balduin’s ‘double’ grows increasingly threatening in his behaviour reminding us of Stevenson’s Jekyll. When he first appears in a cameo for the opening titles, Scapinelli appears with a crow on his shoulder, a motif borrowed from E.T.A. Hoffman’s novel A New Year’s Adventure. After the film’s running time of 85 minutes, its ending leaves the viewer with Balduin’s sprawled, dead body, his soul confiscated by a tricksy devil. Scapinelli is all infernal malice hidden under twinkling mischief here, a memorable fiend whose dainty, buckled shoes tread a sprightly, skipping measure, forwards and backwards in a parody of a funeral march. As we watch Wegener in the final scene (as the student’s reflection surviving the dead man), sitting anchored to his tomb, we note how he gazes ruefully back at the camera. As he stares, he strokes the suddenly re-instated Hoffmannesque crow, symbol of evil triumphant. There is no hint of

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consolation. Wegener’s closing stare lasting a full forty seconds is otherworldly— somehow in-turned and averted but also flickering, at times, towards the viewer: mocking, ineluctable, accusatory yet also painfully anguished. There had been no closing shot like it in cinema up to that point. The film certainly undermined all stable sense of the individual self as protagonist and led to Otto Rank writing his critical overview ‘The Doppelgänger’ published in Sigmund Freud’s journal Imago in 1914 which promulgated the idea of the ‘double’ complex as a neurotic evasion of erotic attraction. Blaché enjoyed considerable success with her Pit and Pendulum but nowhere near the scale of the acclaim awarded The Student, and by the end of the year her finances were dwindling and distribution of her own and her husband’s films proving difficult. Yet it is testament to her desire to shoot uncanny subjects that, a year later, she made The Dream Woman, a film based on a novel by Wilkie Collins (4 reels) where, once again, audiences were traumatised by visions of a blade suspended over a prone male body. Ewers and Rye obviously, galvanised by the success of The Student went on to produce the punitively censored tale of necrophilia Die Eisbraut (The Ice Bride) and Old Brandis’s Eyes (1913); Wegener, realising his new popularity in horror roles, to Die Raches des Blutes/The Blood’s Revenge and the first of his Golem films. Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience and Wegener and Galeen’s first version of The Golem, both six-reelers produced in the year of the war’s outset, both exhibit a new confidence in the production of sustained horror films. In his exploration of Poe’s tales and poems, in five years Griffith had moved from The Sealed Room’s eleven minutes of superbly-economic dramatic compression to The Avenging Conscience’s (1914) one hour and twenty-four minutes study of a murderer’s mental derangement. A nephew (Henry Walthall), brought up by his sternly possessive uncle (Spottiswoode Aiken) and denied the love of his sweetheart (Blanche Sweet), plots the death of his elderly relative. After he strangles his uncle, the dead man appears to him in double-exposures. In the film’s most graphically Gothic section, the conscience-stricken protagonist questioned by a detective, suffers hallucinations of ghouls: a horned devil and wolf-headed demons, surrounded by smoke and fiery sparks, approaching his house. Laughing manically, the nephew gestures for the infernal crew to enter only to recoil as Satan drives the horde forwards, a sinister sorceress looming forwards and a skeleton ensnaring the murderer. Finally, the murder itself proves to be an illusory nightmare; the nephew awakes and all is resolved happily if rather frustratingly for audiences tired of this kind of anti-climax. The four minutes of remaining fragments of the first Der Golem/The Golem production and Wegener’s and Galeen’s screenplay (photoplay) for the film reveal what a very impressive work it must have been on first release. Finished in July 1914, because of the outbreak of war, it was not screened till 15 January, 1915; it opens with the excavation of a monumental Medieval monster which is promptly purchased by Troedler (Henrik Galeen), a Jewish Antiques dealer. In perusing a recently-purchased tome, Troedler recognises the immobile figure as the Golem, a servant created by a rabbi well-versed in the black arts to defend his community.

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In the first of the extant fragments we see the shop-owner manoeuvre the freshly re-vivified monster (Paul Wegener), seemingly huge as it lumbers under low arches in red-tinted scenes, into his forge. The monster, in trying to beat hot iron, promptly demolishes the anvil. Troedler’s daughter, Jessica (Lyda Salmonova) has fallen in love with a local count but, finding a love-note, the shop-owner imprisons her in his rooms with the Golem as her guard. Wegener (as screen-play writer and director) and Galeen cleverly introduce an ambiguous layer of quasi-erotic behaviour between Jessica and the monster, a form of attraction which will prove highly influential in later films. Guido Seber’s camera-work in forge scene and his contrasting handling of the pell-mell crowd retreating in panic from the Golem at the count’s mansion costume party reveal considerable skill: the contrast between the monster and the richly dressed fleeing socialites is handled particularly well. The film is vividly and extensively proleptic of James Whale’s Frankenstein, (1931). Dominant elements in Gothic film over the war-years proved to be ghosts, haunted houses, hypnotism and the legends of ancient Egypt such as Charles Calvert’s The Wraith of the Tomb (1915) and Will Barker’s adaptation of Richard Marsh’s 1897 Gothic story, The Beetle (1919). It is interesting that, whilst the carnage of the First World War demonstrated the urgent need for physical medicine and surgery and, hence, the prior fin-de-siècle scientific fascination with hypnotism generally diminished, so hypnotism began to dominate the cinema. Influenced by the notable success of Maurice Tourneur’s Trilby (1915) with its sinuous Svengali (Wilton Lackaye), the years 1915–1917 witnessed at least 23 horror films featuring hypnotism, ranging from Edison’s single-reeler, The Experiment (1915) to Robert Leonard’s The Silent Command where, over four reels, a doctor tries to lure a woman into patricide through his hypnotic suggestion. As previously noted, The Student of Prague as well as the proliferation of Jekyll and Hyde films and John W. Smiley’s five-reeler: Life Without Soul (1915), the first feature-length version of Shelley’s Frankenstein, all manifest anxieties about the loss of the stable social self, either in terms of the personality’s hidden sides in madness or evil or through imagining the abomination of an artificially created being. Yet as the trauma of the war increased and maimed combatants returned from the Fronts, the very fabric and coherence of national states and the sanity of their leaders began to be questioned. The war also revealed the popularity of crime and horror serials, for example: T. Hayes Hunter’s The Crimson Stain Mystery (1916), (a 16-parter), Otto Rippert’s Homunculus (1916), Theodore and Leo Wharton’s The Mysteries of Myra (1916) and Louis Feuillade’s The Vampires, the Arch-Criminals of Paris (1916). Whilst Feuillade’s alluring sociopathic women were, as in the cases of a raft of other cinematic ‘vampires’ of the day, vamps rather than gorgers on blood, it has been previously overlooked that The Mysteries of Myra features cinema’s first true supernatural blood sucker. It is true that the Wharton brothers’ Fire Elemental, raised by magic spells, consumes animal’s blood from a glass flask rather than from his intended human victim’s veins (audiences and the censor were probably not ready for direct vampiric predation in films released during the long-term carnage of the First World War), but he is still, nonetheless, a vampire and the first sign that motifs from Stoker’s Dracula were gradually leaching into film.

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In the following year, in Alexander Korda’s film Mágia (1917), Count Merlin (Nyaráy Antal) drinks the blood of a young person at every pre-ordained lunar cycle down the ages to fulfil a perfect work of alchemical transformation, and maintain his own eternal youth. Again, direct blood-sucking is not shown but Merlin’s vampiric associations with Stoker’s count are legion. These films, together with Karoly Lathjay’s Drakula halála (1921), reveal the beginning of the vampire’s sway in cinema but directors of the day were obviously wary of copyright infringement. In 1917, Bram Stoker had only been dead for five years. As F. W. Murnau and Prana Film were to find out seven years later, legal action as a response to the breaking of copyright was a very real threat. Though the basic premise of the first three Alraune films, starting with Michael Curtiz and Edmund Fritz’s version in 1918: the insemination of a prostitute with a hanged murderer’s sperm, or by way of the mandrake growing under the gallows, seems, like most productions involving the transgressive creation of artificial life, promisingly Gothic, the results seem to be little more than ‘vamp’ films of sexual betrayal. Despite the obvious evil of the unscrupulous female protagonist, the temptation and betrayal complex anticipate Der blaue Engel (1930) albeit with a hint of supernatural identity crisis. Richard Oswald had worked through his apprenticeship in film direction in making Sherlock Holmes adaptations and horror war-time ‘murder’ films like Die Rache der Toten/Revenge of the Dead (1916). In his Tales from Hoffmann/Hoffmanns Erzählungen (1916), the young writer of uncanny tales (Kurt von Wolowski) escapes from his uncle’s house through a side window and emerges shakily to the rear of a row of houses. Though Hoffmann’s room has tears in its fabric, nothing prepares us for the prospect from the back of the buildings. The cityscape now revealed is the antithesis of his uncle’s comfortable pre-Beidermeier parlour: all ripped doors, crumbled brickwork, rocky slopes and strewn boulders. It is as though, under the influence of the war, the previously cultured and comfortable civilization has been ripped apart: it is here, behind the well-appointed domestic interiors, that the ingenue will encounter the irrational power of Coppelius (Friedrich Kühne), evil alchemist and maker of magical spectacles. This is only the first of many shocks to his middle-class sensibility in the film. Between the opening of Oswald’s portmanteau Unheimliche Geschichten/Uncanny Tales in November 1919, which instated the taste for tales of madness, through the debut of Robert Reinert’s Nerven/Nerves in December and the launch of Wiene’s Caligari on 26 February, 1920 at Berlin’s Marmorhaus, Gothic cinema changed forever. In the opening framing sequence of Unheimliche Geschichten, a phantasmal trio of The Devil (Reinhold Schünzel), Death (Conrad Veidt) and a Prostitute (Anita Berber) come to life in a booksellers to introduce five stories, the first and second of which: ‘The Apparition’/‘Der Erscheinung’ and ‘The Hand’ feature insanity. In the first of these, a man-about-town called Zimmer (Veidt), whilst strolling alongside a stagnant lake in an urban park rescues a young lady (Berber) from her violent and deranged husband (Schünzel). Zimmer takes the young lady to another city and lodges her in a comfortable hotel room but the husband has followed them.

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Zimmer makes advances towards the lady but she feels unwell so he departs in order to attend a friends’ soirée. On his return, he enters her room and we see his horror as he views dark slashes of torn wallpaper where her bed formerly rested. The woman herself and furniture have vanished, as have the light fittings and newspapers litter the floor. Zimmer’s little scheme with the sly, bourgeois inference that the woman would now become his kept mistress, has been dashed. The wall is scraped as in a frenzied attack, the dark surface initially looking like smeared and congealed blood. We cut to a bright full moon shining through scudding clouds. Zimmer lights a match and its flame casts his bony face into sharp contrasts as the curtains whirl. The terrified lothario recoils from the carnage with mounting panic. The manic husband falls immediately under suspicion but, because we lack prior knowledge of any of these characters, the audience mistrusts them all. In fact, the hotel staff are covering up the fact that the woman has died of an infectious disease. Though Alselma Heine’s source tale Der Erscheinung was written pre-war in 1912, the film’s release coincided with an immense pandemic. From September 1918 onwards, a strain of influenza spread with tremendous virulence, claiming more victims than the First World War hostilities. Heine’s version of an urban myth turns on the horrors of urban anonymity, mobility and disease as the film’s opening shots reveal: the postwar city is a stagnant pool full of lethal bacteria. The film met with wide acclaim and popularity. Oswald’s film opened a month after Otto Rippert’s widely praised The Plague in Florence/Die Pest in Florenz (1919) which also foregrounds an outbreak of overwhelming disease. Robert Reinert’s Nerven/Nerves (1919) opens with tableau displaying catastrophe: a bridge of semi-naked figures and young men dying in a devastated landscape. The main narrative involves two rivals. Herr Roloff (Eduard von Winterstein) preaches the gospel of machines for a prosperous future but his factory explodes in dazzling redtinted tones. The populist preacher Johannes (Paul Bender) speaks of brotherhood to the crowds gathered in front of factory. We are witness to rapidly changing moods of panic and horror sweeping over a huge cast. The action makes clear associations between the mind of the individual and the consciousness of the country. It was public knowledge that the burgeoning economic hardship enforced by the Treaty of Versailles came in the wake of millions killed by industrial-scale weapons created by the armament manufacturers of Europe. The film consistently and forcefully links the physiological effects of international crisis on the individual human body and, by extension, Germany’s population. The plot is threaded with suicide, murder and arson and ends with the remaining characters only discovering renewal in the depths of the Black Forest. Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer’s script for Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari/Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, tells the tale of an insane head of an asylum (Werner Krauss) masquerading as a fairground showman, who hypnotises a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The allegorical nature of the film was only too evident. For the first time a mass audience saw a fable of how a modern society could be influenced by a deranged mind, indeed itself become a hypnotised sleepwalker committing slaughter, as Germany had on a massive scale in the war-years. The script had been changed and Expressionist sets and mise-en-scène introduced in

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order to accommodate the idea that Francis, the man who relates the tale (Friedrich Fehér) is himself insane. These later amendments serve to emphasise the horror of the production. Along with the obsessive oblong iris-ins of the cinematography and chiaroscuro used to isolate parts of the screen and faces, this shifting locus of insanity, in fact, helps build the impression that society itself consists of layer upon intercalated layer of madness. Major Gothic thematics had helped create Caligari: particularly Poe’s Murders in Rue Morgue and ‘Dr Fether’ where lunatics have taken over the asylum. It is true that the novels Frankenstein and Dracula had manifested revolutionary scenarios in their own historical and cultural milieus, critiquing modes of scientific discourse, reverse colonisation and the creation of artificial life. The character of Dracula had imagined a fantasy future of a global vampire empire but the audience that attended the launch of Caligari at the Marmorhaus knew that the film mirrored a world of their present turned inside out by madness and ruled by the insane, a world of rampant inflation, spiralling poverty and civil war. It was as though, in this film, the welter of war-time movies about hypnosis and somnambulism had been given their most graphic expression. In its first four months, with Unheimliche Geschichten, Nerven and Caligari, Weimar cinema had worked a powerful transforming and totalising influence on pre-existing Gothic visual media. Caligari was to prove a global sensation for audiences and critics alike. F. W. Murnau’s introduced a compelling Gothic atmosphere to the ‘detective’ film format in Schloß Vogelöd: Die Enthullung eines Geheimnisses/The Haunted Castle (1921). The wind-blasted heath as the coach of Baroness Safferstät (Olga Tschechowa) arrives at the Lord von Vogelschrey’s (Arnold Korff’s) mansion, the sudden vanishing of a scheming Capuchin priest and the murderous atmosphere surrounding the ineffectual party of hunters all remind one of Gothic texts and plays. At one point in a guest’s dream, a gigantic taloned and hairy hand forces its way through a bedroom window and pulls the sleeper towards it. It is an image very reminiscent of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and is reprised most effectively in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). The following year was to see the appearance of Murnau’s masterpiece: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens where shifting vistas of clouds and mountain-scapes seem to blend psychological horror with supernatural dread. The vampire, Max Schreck’s stiff figure, sharply-framed and shuddering under Medieval arches, the windswept headland graveyard straight from a Caspar David Friedrich painting and the quaint exotic and misplaced detail of a slinking hyena all reveal an inventive visual blend of German Romanticism and Gothic. Additionally, the appearance of Murnau’s vampire is clearly indebted to memories of the traumatised, bug-eyed and crop-haired German soldiers of the trenches and, in his role as a reverse Pied Piper transporting rats to the heart of the city and his fangs, he recalls the horrific rodent infestations of the Western Front; he manifests a kind of outraged revenge on the society that sent men to mass slaughter. To venture into the age of the last silent German horror films such as F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) or that of the superb Hollywood Gothic horror spectaculars: Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Rupert Julian, Ernst Laemmle,

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Edward Sedgwick and Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) or, indeed, to discuss the first Gothic talkies would clearly be to stray beyond the remit of this study. In any case, such an approach would only serve again to reveal how imaginatively and variously pre-existing Gothic media had influenced film in its complex evolution and how, conversely and reciprocally, cinema served to change, enhance and enlarge our sense of the Gothic.

Bibliography Abel, Richard, The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914. Oakland: University of California Press. Annwn, David ‘Cinema’s First Vampires: Theodor and Leo Wharton’s The Mysteries of Myra and Alexander Korda’s Mágia’, http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/uncatergorized/cinemas-first-vam pires-theodor-and-leo-whartons-the-mysteries-of-myra-and-alexander-kordas-magia/. Accessed 23 January 2019. ——— (2018). Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror, 1896–1934, Quanta of Fear. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Kinnard, Roy (1995). Horror in Silent Films, A Filmography, 1896–1929. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Gothic Drama and the Uncanny Stage Madelon Hoedt

In his introduction to the Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825 volume (1993), Jeffrey N. Cox opens the chapter by relating the success of a script penned by Matthew “Monk” Lewis, The Castle Spectre. Opening on December 14, 1797 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Cox describes the repeated runs of the play until 1880, and its extraordinary double performance in 1799, when it was shown on a weekly basis at Drury Lane, and was simultaneously staged at the rival Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Indeed, Cox notes how “immense popularity and little critical respect […] might be the epitaph for the Gothic drama that filled the London stages in the decades around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century”.1 It is difficult to argue with Cox on this point: for all of its popularity with the public, scholars have steered away from the Gothic in its theatrical form, and publications on the topic have been scant. When it does appear, these works often focus on telling the forgotten histories of the form, relating the plots and special effects of individual plays as opposed to taking a more analytical approach. For the purposes of this chapter I wish to do both: to provide an overview of the key periods in Gothic drama and horror theatre across the three centuries, and to point out some key developments within them. In addition, I want to place the tradition within the wider context of performance, with a particular focus on what the qualities to the theatrical form add to the Gothic tropes by placing them on the uncanny stage. Although this form of drama draws on the tradition of Gothic literature in a variety of ways, its influences are more varied than the familiar romances, as is described by Jeffrey Cox: “As Gothic drama, it appeared after and often as an imitation of Gothic novels. As Gothic drama, it struck many as an attempt to revive the conventions and motifs of great Elizabethan and Jacobean plays”.2 Like its literary counterpart, Gothic drama is often seen as a form of low culture, which, according to Cox, was required by critics to be separated from supposedly purer literary works.3 On closer inspection, however, “the Gothic drama, as an immensely successful theatre form, M. Hoedt (B) University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_25

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provides us with a way of glimpsing how a number of key social and cultural concerns of the day were represented in a popular art form”.4 As is stated by Cox, the form was immensely popular, managing to offer exciting new plays while drawing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean traditions, thus creating what he calls a distinctively modern form of tragedy. The success of the form, for Cox, lies in its ability to harness a variety of powerful theatrical forces to provide audiences with a vital new form of serious drama.5 A big part of this “theatrical force” was the innovation in stagecraft, where Gothic drama from its inception brought spectacle to the stage and was able to capitalize on the evolving new technologies for lighting and sound, especially music, and the incorporation of special effects.6 Coexisting with the sentimental plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, both forms offered a similar thrill, rooted in the emotions of its audience. As Bruce McConachie argues, sentimental drama used these feelings to edify its audience, using drama to spark emotional responses in the spectator and to thus rouse in them the need to improve their own sensibility and morality.7 The nature of these emotions, however, differs, as, according to McConachie, Sentimentalism had never arrived at an adequate explanation for evil. If human nature were essentially good, […] sentimentalism could not explain the perseverance of evil in the world. […] Gothicism offered no complete answer for the evil of [its] protagonists, but it did fix images of horror that fascinated audiences – all the more so because the spectators’ sentimentalism could not explain the evil they witnessed.8

The emotions of the audience become undirected and are another example of the Gothic’s insistence on offering emotional impact over coherent narrative. Similar to its literary counterparts, the narrative of Gothic drama often places effect before plot, thus becoming “an impure generic hybrid, a kind of monstrous form oddly appropriate to the chamber of horrors it displayed on stage”.9 Eventually these types of drama appear to have lost their appeal and the domestic melodrama came to displace the Gothic in the theatre, a form which centres on heightened emotions and struggles of morality. Up to this day, the form is notorious for its exaggeration and hyperbolic situations, a mode of performance where, as Peter Brooks argues, “nothing is understood, all is overstated”.10 Many of these elements are retained in more modern definitions of the Gothic drama. Like Cox’s description of its status as “a theater of shock, surprise, seduction, and terror”, Saglia highlights the spectacular component which underpins Gothic drama, and notes the foundation of the form in its ability to affect the audience.11 This is also picked up on by Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore and Robert Dean in their appraisal of contemporary Gothic drama as an appeal to the sensual rather than the rational, where, like other forms, the theatrical Gothic uses a number of devices in order to invoke fear, shock, horror, claustrophobia and disorientation.12 As shall be shown in my overview of the key periods of Gothic drama, as well as a brief discussion of some important texts, these descriptions continue to ring true. In Cox’s survey of the development of the early Gothic drama, it quickly emerges that the mode has existed in this form for nearly as long as it has in the novel. The first Gothic play is penned by the same author responsible for what is widely regarded as

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the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764): Horace Walpole. Unperformed at the time, Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother was printed privately in 1768. It is set in a desolate castle, inhabited by a reclusive countess, who is fraught by guilt over undisclosed family secrets. With a plot and revelation centred on incestuous relations between the countess and her son, and the sister/daughter who was borne from this liaison, it is an early example of the sensationalism and shock value found in many Gothic drama texts. Existing alongside a small group of such early efforts to bring the Gothic to the stage, The Mysterious Mother can best be regarded as a preface to the wider success found by the form in the 1790s. During this next wave, it is arguably Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Castle Spectre from 1797 that spearheaded the movement, as this play became the greatest theatrical success of the Gothic drama. Like Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, Lewis’ play centres on a family drama. The main villain Osmond has tried to assassinate his brother Reginald in order to take over his estate and marry his wife, Evelina. However, as Osmond moves to strike Reginald, Evelina jumps in front of the dagger, sacrificing herself for her husband. Convinced of the demise of both Reginald and Evelina, Osmond’s aim is now to marry his niece, Angela, as a means to obtain the power he desires, yet his plans are thwarted by the hero Percy, who invades Osmond’s castle to save his beloved Angela. Meanwhile, Osmond’s past continues to haunt him: Evelina’s ghost appears within the castle walls and Reginald, who was gravely wounded but had survived the attempt on his life, has also returned. Once more, Reginald finds himself at the end of his brother’s sword, and once more, he is saved by his wife, as Evelina’s ghost thrusts herself on Osmond’s blade. As I will discuss in more detail later, it is this overt depiction of the supernatural onstage that makes The Castle Spectre of interest beyond its popular success. In addition to these sensational texts, the 1790s saw the start of the success of Joanna Baillie, a prolific playwright who, as Gamer explains, was hailed by contemporaries as an antidote to the excess and spectacle of productions such as The Castle Spectre. In current academic study, however, Baillie is most often aligned with the Gothic tradition for her treatment of supernatural themes.13 In whichever way one chooses to read Baillie’s offerings, it stands that her three volumes of Plays of Passion (1798, 1802 and 1812) are among the more influential works from this period. Indeed, Cox refers to Baillie as the most respected and most important playwright in England in the period, active for half a century, and hails De Montfort (published in 1798, first staged in 1800) as the most significant of her works.14 Within the play, audiences are introduced to the titular character of De Montfort, a villain-hero driven by his enduring hatred for a childhood adversary. An obsessive murderer, De Monfort is presented to spectators with some depth and Baillie actively invites her audiences to sympathize with his plight and motives. This more psychological approach towards an antihero is a motif which both precedes Baillie’s writing, and has endured in contemporary Gothic offerings. Yet in addition to outlining the influences of individual texts and playwrights, Cox’s introduction also highlights the more material developments that influenced the theatre of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These dramas emerges as theatres grow in both size and number, and as stagecraft becomes more technically sophisticated, with the Gothic as an early adopter of the new possibilities. The shock value and sensational

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content of many of its plays help to command the attention of audiences in new, larger auditoriums, aided further by these new inventions. Spectators were riveted by what could be conjured up onstage and stagecraft became an important ingredient of the Gothic drama, in some cases going so far as to eclipse the quality of its writing. Despite the shared ancestry of the Gothic novel and play, it is the reliance on devices such as these, and on the stagecraft of the productions, that puts the drama forward as, primarily, a theatrical form. The motifs and themes of the Gothic mode remain, but their specific presentation in performance, and the needs that have to be met in order to be able to put them onto the stage, come to define the form even in these early decades, and will continue to do so in the centuries that follow. The start of the nineteenth century sees the birth of a new period for the Gothic on the stage, defined by Diane Long Hoeveler as the Victorian Gothic drama. She argues that this movement is typified by its status as a hybrid, and that rather than a pure genre, the Victorian Gothic relies on a variety of performance styles that integrate a number of formulaic Gothic devices. These include the use of a juxtaposition of past and present; the uncanny double; the demonic villain with seemingly supernatural powers; and the inclusion of Gothic locales.15 She also divides the period into three key eras: the early, middle and late Victorian Gothic, running from 1820 to 1850, 1850 to 1880 and 1870 to 1910, respectively. Hoeveler describes how the early period was concerned primarily with the revival of older works, such as a renewed run of Matthew Lewis’ The Castle Spectre, and by the melodramatic adaptations of existing works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831). The middle period, then, proved central to aforementioned developments in stagecraft and special effects, such as the evolution of the vampire trap into the Corsican trap and the introduction of Pepper’s Ghost, which were readily adopted by Gothic plays and more conventional melodramas alike. Finally, Hoeveler describes how the late period became focused on what she calls “star vehicles”, with an emphasis on productions made famous by the actors who appeared in them. An example of this is the Lyceum Theatre in London which, in this period, was run by Henry Irving in the position of actor-manager. Irving was responsible for the staging and directing of a variety of work, and would often take the lead role in these productions. Arguably the most famous of these appearances is Irving’s portrayal of Mathias in Leopold Lewis’ The Bells (1851), as a burgomaster haunted and ultimately driven mad by the memory of a man he robbed and murdered many years before in order to pay off a debt. In addition to such star vehicles, Hoeveler notes the prevalence of adaptations during this period. She draws particular attention to the rapid pace at which the stage versions followed the publication of the novels, and to the liberties that were often taken with the source material in order to create a more sensational offering of the work on the stage. These adaptations were often produced as soon as the novels were released and research by Steven Earl Forry (1986) and Ronald McFarland (1987) on adaptations of Frankenstein and the figure of the vampire, respectively, highlights the myriad of changes made in the move to the stage. Within this process, it is often the subtlety of the original fiction that is lost, instead bringing focus to the pure monstrosity of its monsters. Ultimately, Hoeveler describes the period as “straddling two important periods in the history of

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the dramatic form”: the preceding era of late eighteenth century Gothic drama and its excesses of spectacle and shock, and the coming introduction of Hollywood film and Universal’s reimagining of the classic tales of Frankenstein and Dracula.16 Yet there is one more era of horror on the stage that will bridge the gap into the twentieth century: Paris’ famous Theatre of Horror, the Grand-Guignol. Active in the first half of the twentieth century, the Grand-Guignol offered both an evolution and a continuation of the developments of Gothic drama in the previous centuries.17 At first glance, such an assessment of the efforts of the French theatre seems untrue: as Mel Gordon argues, “unlike the Gothic melodramas of the nineteenth century, the Grand Guignol – from its inception in 1897 to its humiliating death in 1962 – based its plots on bloody and murderous criminal exploits, which were taken from real life”, where “only life matched the horror of the Grand Guignol”.18 This idea is echoed in Hand and Wilson, who describe how the Grand-Guignol steers clear of the supernatural in favour of an exploration of the human subject and, in particular, the move from la bête humaine into le monstre humain.19 Specializing in programmes of one act plays that alternated between horror and (often black) comedy, the GrandGuignol did become renowned for its presentation of human actions, emotions and motivations in all their ugly truth. As is pointed out by Hand and Wilson, reality often found its way onto the Grand-Guignol stage and some of its plays drew their inspiration from, among other things, the fait divers of the Parisian popular press as a means to tap into contemporary fears.20 Gordon similarly draws attention to the use of modern and real settings, stating that one of the most prolific Grand-Guignol playwrights, Andre de Lorde, was the first to set plays in operating rooms and insane asylums, and Hand and Wilson list lighthouses, rooms in museums, sitting rooms, boats and doctor’s surgeries as some of the possible locations for classic GrandGuignol plays.21 A marked departure from the ruined castles and abbeys, from the dungeons and secret passages found in the Gothic dramas, the Grand-Guignol instead focuses on contemporary and often familiar locales. Despite these differences and its grounding in the modern, as opposed to the histories and long buried secrets of the previous centuries, the Grand-Guignol also shows its awareness of its lineage. A number of its plays flirt with the possibility of the supernatural and The Kiss of Blood (Le Baiser de Sang, 1929) is an excellent example of this. Audiences are introduced to Professor Leduc and his assistant, Doctor Volguine, as they are confronted with the case of Joubert. The man complains of an unbearable pain in his right hand and is forced by some compulsion to amputate his own index finger when the professor refuses to do so. Following up after the operation, the play introduces the recent death of Joubert’s wife Helene, who appears to be haunting her husband as revenge for him murdering her. At the climax of the piece, it is revealed that Helene is not dead, but was driven mad by her husband’s attempt on her life, and is using the pretence of the supernatural to exact her vengeance on him. Under her influence, Joubert finds himself forced to cut off his right hand with an axe, leading to his death. Although the play is ultimately still concerned with human actions and motivations, with a focus on insanity, the writing and presentation clearly hint at established motifs of the ghost story. Both Joubert’s description of the visits by his wife and a retelling of events by a servant girl invoke the dark and stormy nights and ethereal

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appearances familiar from the classic tales of the supernatural. Looking at a larger body of Grand-Guignol texts, the locations outlined earlier and the plots which take place within them show an affinity with the concerns of the Gothic: of claustrophobia and secrets kept and finally revealed; of mad scientists and the implications of what their research and tests might uncover; and, on a more thematic level, as a direct reflection of contemporary concerns and the fears of its audiences. A further link can be found in the Grand-Guignol’s obsession with stagecraft and the amount of attention that was paid to the special effects used to portray its myriad of horrors. Arguably, the level of gore that was the highlight of many of the one act plays seems a far cry from the notions of subtle terror that were favoured by the Gothic mode, but at the same time, it continues the idea of horror theatre as grounded in shock and spectacle. Finally, the performance style employed by the Grand-Guignol provides a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Hand and Wilson explain, “the Grand-Guignol is a form that seems to break away from conventional naturalism as often as it embraces it”, as “Grand-Guignol may have had its roots in melodrama, naturalism and the well-made play”.22 Evidence of these crossovers comes from the wish to explore the human mind and its capabilities, yet the portrayal of this often culminates in moments of heightened drama in emotions and gestures. During the Grand-Guignol’s existence from 1897 to 1962, with its popularity at its peak during the first decades of the twentieth century, the theatre of horror seems to have left its mark on future incarnations of the horror genre on stage and screen. The GrandGuignol itself was similarly influenced by such offerings, providing adaptations of older plays and new films: for example, a staging of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage, 1960) was one of the last productions performed prior to the theatre’s closure. At the same time, the more traditional Gothic fare does not disappear with the closure of the Grand-Guignol, but instead continues the journey of hybridity that started in the Victorian era. As Jones, Poore and Dean argue in Contemporary Gothic Drama (2018), examples of the Gothic onstage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries fall into two strands. The first is one of more overt Gothic work, often in a historical setting, and Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation of The Woman in Black (1987) is an excellent example of this: an isolated house filled with family secrets, and a vengeful spirit wreaking havoc on the lives of all who come into contact with her. The other, according to Jones et al., is the appearance of Gothic themes and motifs in non-Gothic plays, in what they call the “unGothic Gothic”, or a summoning of the Gothic mode.23 Yet, like Cox, Jones et al. too comment on the way in which the study of these dramas has largely been ignored. Cox even describes how the Gothic drama appears to be skipped over, with many histories of theatre jumping over the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, instead moving onto the work of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. Yet Cox, like other authors such as Hoeveler, Saglia and Jones et al., remind their readers of the importance of not ignoring this period, as “the story of the Gothic drama contradicts standard dramatic and theatrical histories, closing the gap between high and low forms, linking poetry and the novel to the theater, and establishing an alternative tradition to the movement towards late nineteenth-century realism”.24 Its influence can be traced from its inception, and its themes still inform playwrights and dramaturges working in contemporary theatre.

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Yet these histories are only part of the story. At the point of writing, the form consists of a body of work that spans three centuries. As noted by Diego Saglia in his essay “Gothic Theater, 1765-present” (2013), the research into these performances may no longer benefit from a historical approach, merely outlining the different timelines and subdivisions of the form. Instead, his paper opts to cut across the boundaries of period and focuses on thematic threads that run from the eighteenth century until the twenty-first. Saglia’s approach is certainly warranted, and his categories, defined as intersections, bodies and machines / spaces / silences, are fertile ground for further investigations. However, each of Saglia’s themes is based primarily on features germane to the pieces he discusses, focusing on elements of plot, the presence of certain actors within performances, and conventions of performative styles. Instead, what I wish to highlight in the second part of this chapter is the intricate relationship between Gothic and horror theatre and its status as performance. The first aspect of this has already been mentioned, and it focuses on the portrayal of the supernatural onstage. Gamer links the debate on such representations to a wider discussion regarding the quality of theatrical productions at the end of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth century. Detractors were worried by the aforementioned large number of adaptations and sensational dramas, and their discomfort at the idea that the staging of classic works such as Shakespeare were replaced by what they described as German spectres.25 Yet these reservations were part of a larger conversation about productions which chose to show such spectres. Gamer explains: “Simply put, one either believed that ghosts existed materially or that they did not, and to represent a ghost on stage was to support exploded superstitions forbidden by the Church of England, and to be laughed at by the enlightened”.26 Prior to the staging of The Castle Spectre in 1797, even the most spectacular of the Gothic dramas had shied away from placing ghosts on the stage so as to avoid controversy. Indeed, as Cox explains, the idea of staging the supernatural invoked a particular debate about religion, where such depictions of the numinous would always be tinged with a hint of blasphemy. Where the novel could play around with a more vague address of the supernatural, as it is able to be more ambiguous in its descriptions, the stage forces such a representation to be a physical one where a stark choice needs to be made: to move in the direction of the explained supernatural, or to show the ghost to their audiences. As a result, the Gothic theatre has the potential to become truly haunted as its spectres invade the space shared with the audience. These concerns continue into the centuries that follow, and in her discussion of The Woman in Black, Emma McEvoy draws attention to the way the plot of the play supports its Gothic themes. The audience meets Kipps, who was called to Eel Marsh House near the village of Crythin Gifford to attend to the affairs of the late Mrs Drablow. At the house, Kipps is confronted with a ghostly figure of a young woman with a wasted face, Jennet Humfrye, sister to the mistress of the house. Unable to care for her son, Jennet was forced to give him up to be raised by her sister, and ultimately saw him drowned in the marshes surrounding the house. Overcome with grief, Jennet died soon after, leaving the town with a dreadful curse: whenever she, the Woman in Black, is seen, a child will die. After seeing the Woman at the house, the same fate ultimately befalls Kipps. The stage version, an adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel of the same name, has

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become a seminal piece of Gothic drama, not in the least due to its treatment of the subject matter. As Emma McEvoy explains in her discussion of contemporary Gothic theatre (2007), the staging of the work is ultimately about Kipps’ ability to recount the story and thus exorcise the grief for his lost wife and child that has haunted him for all these years. Yet in the telling of what has befallen him, this exorcism does not dispel the Woman, but instead becomes a summoning up of the ghost.27 As is revealed at the end of the play by the Actor, who has assisted Kipps in his effort to stage his tale, the figure of a young woman with a wasted face has been seen in the theatre with them, her presence unexplained. The audience is left with the notion that the ghostly curse endures and may be visited upon them, as they have all seen this figure in the auditorium with them. The Woman in Black remains, and each successive performance of the play only serves to reinforce her presence. This brings me to the more symbolic meaning of the ghost in the theatre, namely in the form of the haunted text. In his book Victorian Hauntings (2002), Julian Wolfreys draws attention to the ephemerality and ghostliness of the medium of the book: “It is a question, then, of phantom texts – textual phantoms which do not necessarily have the solidity or objectivity of a quotation, an intertext or explicit, acknowledged presence and which do not in fact come to rest anywhere”.28 According to Wolfreys, texts can take on a life of their own, constantly haunting culture with the traditions and history they represent. He links this to the way in which texts are addressed within our language, and the weight that is given to them through archiving and the subsequent reverence of specific works. Similar to physical ghosts, texts inhabit a strange no man’s land between different categories, evading any attempt to pin them down, where texts are neither dead nor alive, yet they hover at the very limits between living and dying. As a result, according to Wolfreys, “all stories are, more or less, ghost stories. And, to reiterate another principle: all forms of narrative are, in one way or another, haunted”.29 In order to address this characteristic of literature, he employs the term necrobibliography as a word to describe this reanimation of the text. According to Wolfreys, within these discourses, we speak of a text as saying something and, in effect, having a life or will of its own. The text had a life before the reader encountered it, a life which might be, in want of a better term, haunted by its own history. This idea of the reanimation of text becomes even more poignant in the world of the theatre, where a script is literally brought to life, revisited and revised time and time again, as expressed by Marvin Carlson in his discussion of theatre as a memory machine: “The retelling of stories already told, the re-enactment of events already enacted, the reexperience of emotions already experienced, these are and have always been central concerns of the theatre in all times and places”.30 Inherent in the medium, the theatre offers a way to interact with a text which is both more real and more ephemeral than the written word. Dialogue is spoken by the characters involved in real time, yet at the same time, the experience is more fleeting. Unlike the text of a novel, or a play script, the performance itself cannot be retained, and this dynamic only adds to the sense of a haunting, of something which appears only to disappear. Carlson draws attention to the ephemeral nature of performance as a medium, something which can only be shown, but never completely captured. Any restaging becomes haunted by images of previous productions of the same play, or by

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previous appearances of the actors involved in the performance. It is this experience that to Carlson is a vital part of the perception and interpretation of the audience: “We are able to ‘read’ new work […] only because we recognize within them elements that have been recycled from other structures of experience that we have experienced earlier”.31 The haunted stage, in a way, needs to be haunted in order for spectators to engage with and make sense of the production they are exposed to. Carlson calls this process ghosting, where the identical object is presented to an audience that they have encountered before, yet at the same time, it is ever so slightly altered by a change in time and conditions. The reception process, then, is guided both by the performance as it is experienced in the moment, and by any previous incarnations of the same play an audience may be aware of. The concept of ghosting as introduced by Carlson may simply appear to refer to a new production of an old script, but its definition encompasses much more than simply a revival of an existing play: “Everything in the theatre, the bodies, the materials utilized, the language, the space itself, is now and has always been haunted and that haunting has been an essential part of the theatre’s meaning to and reception by its audiences in all times and all places”.32 As a result, the mere staging of a Gothic play invokes additional layers of meaning that emphasizes the uncanny nature of the mode in its perfomative form. A further layer is added when one considers the role of the theatre space itself in the enhancement of existing motifs. The importance of space to products of the Gothic has been highlighted by multiple authors. McEvoy extrapolates this central role to the very nature of performance itself and describes how the theatre is able to unite past and present within itself, upon the stage, thus reflecting the Gothic’s affinity for twinning history and place.33 Not only does the staging of the Gothic allow for such a way of revisiting and reviving the (imagined) past, it also taps into the tendencies of the uncanny, as defined by Freud (1919) and Bennett and Royle (2009), of making things uncertain through repetition and doubling. Interestingly, a similar discourse can be found within performance studies, when looking at the relationship between space and plot. As Gay McAuley points out, the theatre possesses a duality between the physical reality of the building and its features and measurements, and the fictional reality of the plays that are performed within it, where one can find “the constant dual presence of the physical reality of the performance space and the fictional world or worlds created. The space the spectator is watching during the performance […] is always both stage and somewhere else”.34 The theatrical space, then, holds within itself a doubling, where the places represented by the plot of the production are both separate from and integrated into the actual theatre space. This relationship is further complicated when one analyzes the way in which the spaces within the theatre are constructed and organized. In his analysis of performance, Patrice Pavis distinguishes between three such spaces: the theatrical space, which refers to the building itself and its physical reality and dimensions; the stage space, dedicated to performance and the spaces of the actors and staff; and the liminal space, which “marks the separation… between stage and auditorium, or between stage and backstage spaces”.35 The first two of these are quite clearly delineated in that audiences are able to observe the theatre building itself, and they will likely be familiar with the conventions of where they are or are not allowed to go. For a discussion of Gothic and horror theatre, it is

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Pavis’ category of the liminal space that is of interest, particularly from the viewpoint of how it can be manipulated. By introducing the appearance of actors within the audience space, the separation between performer and spectator can be blurred, and the tension can build. An example of this can be found in The Woman in Black, where one of its main characters appears within the auditorium and walks onto the stage to join the other. Within this moment, the division between stage and auditorium, as described by Pavis, is broken; this is further enforced later in the play with the first appearance of the Woman herself, as she makes her way up the central aisle and onto the stage. The uncanny stage of Gothic drama not only shows a strange doubling of the physical and fictional space, but may further blur the separation between audience and performer as its spectres move beyond the stage and transgress into the relative safety of the auditorium. What I have wanted to show in this chapter is an overview of the rich history of Gothic drama and, in particular, the lack of attention it has received by academics throughout the centuries of its existence. These plays should not be seen as separate from the more traditional works of literature, but rather as an extension of the canon of Gothic texts. Many are direct adaptations of existing novels or are penned by well-known novelists, but all share the same motifs and themes found throughout the Gothic mode. At the same time, their status as performances cannot be ignored as their staging, in front of a live audience, adds multiple layers to the way in which these texts should be addressed. The portrayal of the supernatural onstage and the need to provide a material representation of these spectres leaves less room for the ambiguity found in many novels and raises questions about the meaning of the ephemeral in this context. Secondly, the very nature of the theatre adds a doubling to the experience, imbued with impressions of previous performances and the conflation of fictional and material space. Simply through staging a Gothic drama in a conventional way, the text is ghosted by superimposed histories and interpretations. Within these theatres, the uncanny itself becomes a physical force that haunts its audiences as well as the characters who inhabit these plays. Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1993), 2. Jeffrey N. Cox, “English Gothic Drama”, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125 (emphasis in original). Jeffrey N. Cox, “Introduction: Reanimating Gothic Drama”, Gothic Studies, vol. 3, issue 2 (2001),107. Ibid., 109. Jeffrey N. Cox, “English Gothic Drama”, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 127. Ibid., 127. Bruce McConachie, “Theatres for Knowledge Through Feeling: 1700–1900”, in Phillip Zarrilli et al. (eds.), Theatre Histories: An Introduction (London, Routledge, 2006), 219.

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8. Ibid., 226. 9. Cox, “English Gothic Drama”, 128. 10. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976), 40 (emphasis in original). 11. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 13; Diego Saglia, “Gothic Theater, 1765–present”, in Glennis Byron, Dale Townshend (eds.), The Gothic World (London, Routledge, 2013), 354. 12. Kelly Jones, Benjamin Poore, and Robert Dean (eds.), Contemporary Gothic Drama: Attraction, Consummation and Consumption on the Modern British Stage (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3. 13. Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130. 14. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 50. 15. Diane Hoeveler, “Victorian Gothic Drama”, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 57. 16. Hoeveler, “Victorian Gothic Drama,” 69. 17. It should be noted that the Grand Guignol saw its heyday in Paris in the time mentioned, but there was an incarnation in London’s Little Theatre, spearheaded by Jose Levy between 1920 and 1922, which found its own success. 18. Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York, Del Capo, 1997), vi. 19. Richard J. Hand, and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2002), x. 20. The fait divers were “short items of news (usually involving violent crime), gory and colourful illustrations of which often graced the front and back pages of Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien” (Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 8). 21. Gordon, The Grand Guignol, 22; Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 32. 22. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 35, 38. 23. Jones, Contemporary Gothic Drama, 8. 24. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 4–5. 25. Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, 129. 26. Ibid., 132. 27. Emma McEvoy, “Contemporary Gothic Theatre”, in Emma McEvoy and Catherine Spooner (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007), 216. 28. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (London, Palgrave, 2002), 280 (emphasis in original). 29. Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, 3. 30. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2001), 3. 31. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 4. 32. Ibid., 15. 33. McEvoy, “Contemporary Gothic Theatre”, 214.

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34. Gay McAuley, “A Taxonomy of Spatial Function”, in Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet (eds.), Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography (London, Routledge, 2010), 91. 35. Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance: Theatre, Dance, and Film (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003), 151.

Bibliography Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2009). Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1976). Carlson, Marvin, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2001). Cox, Jeffrey N. (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1993). ———, “Introduction: Reanimating Gothic Drama”, Gothic Studies, vol. 3, issue 2 (2001), pp. 107– 116. ———, “English Gothic Drama.” In Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 125–144. Forry, Steven Earl, “The Hideous Progenies of Richard Brinsley Peake: Frankenstein on the Stage, 1823 to 1826”, Theatre Research International, vol. 11, issue 1 (1986), pp. 13–31. Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny (London, Penguin, 2003). Gamer, Michael, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). Gordon, Mel, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York, Del Capo, 1997). Hand, Richard J. and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2002). Hoeveler, Diane, “Victorian Gothic Drama.” In Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 57–71. Jones, Kelly, Benjamin Poore and Robert Dean (eds.), Contemporary Gothic Drama: Attraction, Consummation and Consumption on the Modern British Stage (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). McAuley, Gay, “A Taxonomy of Spatial Function.” In Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet (eds.), Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography (London, Routledge, 2010), pp. 89– 94. McConachie, Bruce, “Theatres for Knowledge Through Feeling: 1700–1900.” In Phillip Zarrilli et al. (eds.), Theatre Histories: An Introduction (London, Routledge, 2006), pp. 216–239. McEvoy, Emma, “Contemporary Gothic Theatre.” In Emma McEvoy and Catherine Spooner (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London, Routledge, 2007), pp. 214–222. McFarland, Ronald E., “The Vampire on Stage: A Study in Adaptations”, Comparative Drama vol. 21 issue 1 (1987), pp. 19–33. Pavis, Patrice, Analyzing Performance: Theatre, Dance, and Film (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003). Saglia, Diego, “Gothic Theater, 1765-present.” In Glennis Byron, Dale Townshend (eds.), The Gothic World (London, Routledge, 2013), pp. 354–365. Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (London, Palgrave, 2002).

Spirituality, Theology and the Gothic

Victorian Gardens of Death Stephen Sowerby

To the modern imagination nothing evokes a sense of the Gothic like the eerie romantic melancholy of a decaying Victorian cemetery. These unkempt landscapes are instantly recognisable by their classical columns of antiquity rising incongruously from the enveloping undergrowth with their monumental sculpture leaning drunkenly about to topple into the foliage. The rustle of ivy clinging to the memorial crosses, jostling rows of weathered grave stones disappearing into the gloom, grand chest tombs vaguely discernible in their ivy-covered shrouds, imperious mausoleums of once proud families reduced by neglect to forlorn relics of past prestige, and whole generations of the same family entombed together waiting for the resurrection. Mature trees of an ornamental pedigree vainly attempt to retain their picturesque dignity within the enveloping mass of self-seeded trees and bramble. Dappled rays of sunlight fleetingly illuminate a shaded grave, a forgotten life is momentarily pulled into the present before all too quickly vanishing into the shade. A strong vain of romantic melancholy saturates the senses. These deathly landscapes with their arcane symbols remain an incongruous yet tangible testament to a lost age of mourning and the mourned, landscapes where the transient nature of man’s existence is made strangely manifest by these decaying and forgotten memorials. Whilst melancholic neglect and sculptural decay characterise the expressive experience of any visit to a Victorian cemetery, should the curious choose to look closer they will find, and perhaps be overwhelmed by, an abundance of human emotion inscribed on the crumbling stones. Fading inscriptions commemorating past lives, love, faith, despair, tragedy, vainglory, and valour. Look again beneath the creeping ivy tendrils and you will find pious inscriptions memorialising a selfless life of good deeds, beloved to all who knew them, with a sure and certain belief in the resurrection. The sentiments invoked, and the epitaphs inscribed are naturally a reflection of the social and religious certainties of the age, an age that has become totally alien to our modern, more questioning, and longer-lived existence. The clinical and discreet S. Sowerby (B) London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_26

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attitude prevalent towards death and burial today would have been wholly unimaginable to most Victorians. Whereas modern attitudes may view the burial practices and mourning customs of our Victorian forbears with incredulity, to look closer at a society’s attitude and treatment of its dead can provide a sound looking glass into its beliefs, its fears, and perhaps even its soul. Whilst the Victorian cemetery landscape has become inextricably linked to gothic literary1 and twentieth-century subculture2 concepts this is a perversion of the arcadian garden of tranquillity and reflection originally conceptualised and created. To the Victorians these deathly gardens were characterised not by the churchyard chills of mortality and dread, but of medieval romanticism and picturesque views, qualities sublimely evident in the seven garden cemeteries of London laid out between 1832 and 1841. The English landscape garden, epitomised by the country-house estate of the eighteenth century, was the inspirational setting for these new cemeteries. These idyllically rural gardens set within picturesque landscapes gently enhanced by ornamental trees, shrubs, and monuments were deliberately recreated as burial grounds, not attached to a place of worship, for the dignified interment of the deceased’s mortal remains. These cemeteries provided a soothing and attractive setting for mournful reflection or for the casual visitor to take the air, to draw didactic improvement from the array of inspiring epitaphs, or to simply contemplate their own mortality. Indeed, few places provided a better platform to pursue the Victorian vogue of rational recreation than the garden cemetery. In this way did the Victorians seek to create an earthly homage to the Elysian Fields (the abode of the blessed after death) of Greek Antiquity as an Arcadian paradise on earth, in the unlikely setting of suburban London. Until the establishment of the garden cemeteries, subsequently known as The Magnificent Seven,3 the parish churchyard or church crypt had been the destination for London’s dead since the late Middle Ages. The crypt, seen as closest to God directly beneath the interior of the parish church, would become the preserve of the gentry and the middle classes, a tradition widely maintained by the Seven. Not even the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the rebuilding of the City churches stopped the continuity of use of the parish churchyards (including stand-alone churchyards) until the obscene conditions caused by overcrowding finally forced their closure in 1852. Whilst this continuity of use was undoubtedly remarkable at around 400 years, even more so when you consider the relatively small size of the parish churchyard, quite literally God’s acre, it required increasingly undignified and ingenious methods to sustain it.4 As Punch magazine sardonically observed: ‘A London churchyard is very like a London Omnibus. It can be made to carry any number’.5 This is well illustrated by the 200 feet graveyard surrounding the Church of St Martin’s-in-theFields (opposite Trafalgar Square) which upon closure in 1852 was estimated to contain between 60,000 and 70,000 bodies6 or St Mary’s Church, Whitechapel, which had under an acre of burial ground for a parish of nearly 35,000 people.7 To meet demand church sextons would build the graveyard upwards, often requiring the insertion of steps for entry into the church giving the false impression that the church is sinking when it is in fact at ground level. At St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield,

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Illustration 1 A pre-1854 view of Highgate Cemetery (before the opening of the eastern cemetery) emphasising the cemetery’s pastoral and Arcadian qualities (note the chapel building and Superintendent’s house in the foreground)—publication origin unknown

the surrounding graveyard climbs to around 6 feet creating a channelled pathway to the church portico. Nonetheless, building the graveyard higher, or cramming bodies into crypts, was hardly an indefinite solution and so the forbidding Charnel House or Ossuary (sometimes no more than a pit of broken bones) would become a common graveyard method for the disposal of mortal remains after burial. St Brides Church, Fleet Street, retains both a raised graveyard and an Ossuary in the crypt stacked high with skull and bone. The fact that Samuel Pepys, writing in his journal in March 1664, comments on his horror at the prospect of corpses not yet rotten being disturbed to make space for his deceased brother in the crypt of St Brides (after apparently bribing the sexton 6d) suggests that the problem of overcrowding was already longstanding at the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, that other illustrious diarist and social commentator of the seventeenth century John Evelyn (1620–1706) observed in his diary that London’s churchyards were so congested with bodies one above the other they reached the very top of the walls making churches appear to be built in pits.8 Efforts to alleviate this overcrowding were made by Christopher Wren as part of his radical plans for rebuilding London after the Great Fire. Wren proposed establishing extramural burial grounds in the fields outside the city limits but unsurprisingly vested interests and the intrinsic ties between parishioner and parish could not be overcome, and the

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proposal remained a progressive urban vision until its realisation by the Victorians 200 years later. Whilst an extramural burial ground had been established at Bunhill Fields as early as 1665 for London’s nascent dissenting faiths this was a rare civic venture9 and at the turn of the nineteenth century in the face of an unparalleled urban population surge the parish churchyard remained London’s principle burial ground. Great Britain’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the late eighteenth century was accompanied by an urban population boom driven by rural migration searching for work. The rapid transformation of Britain’s inherently rural society into an urbanised society is one of the most remarkable aspects of the new industrial age. In 1801 less than 20% of the population of England and Wales lived and worked in towns whereas by 1851 this figure had jumped to over 50% and by 1901 to 75%.10 The working pattern of daily life was no longer dictated by the rhythm of the seasons but by the relentless ticking of the factory clock. The impact on British towns and cities was equally remarkable. Prior to 1800 nowhere in the British Isles outside of London had a population of more than 100,000, yet when Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 this had risen to five cities, and by 1891 to twenty-three urban areas.11 The impact of industrialisation would transform London’s character into a sprawling Metropolis covering 700 square miles by the turn of the twentieth century. In raw statistical terms London’s population, including its outlaying reaches, grew from 1.1 million in 1801 to 3.2 million in 1861—a 200% increase in 60 years.12 The avid growth of urban industrialisation brought not only wealth but disease and death to London’s rapidly expanding populace. In perverse irony, the wealth generating Laissex-faire capitalist system driving the economic boom proved equally free in doling out death to the unfortunate inhabitants of the Metropolis. Whilst the middle classes cosseted in their spacious town houses were certainly not immune to the rapacious reach of deadly disease the relationship between poverty and death was the closest relationship of all. London’s already basic social infrastructure was simply incapable of meeting the housing needs required to support the rural migratory influx pouring into the capital, and social welfare provision, such as it was, was provided by well-meaning but ultimately inadequate benevolent societies. The horror of the overcrowded Victorian slum tenement needs little introduction today as it has become seared into the popular consciousness (the infamous ‘Rookery’), although its deadly effect on the lives of living is perhaps less appreciated. The horrific extent of the overcrowded slum living conditions of the urban poor is exemplified by Church Lane in the St Giles district of Bloomsbury. This inconsequential street consisting of 27 houses, with no more than average sized rooms, contained 655 people in 1841—a shockingly high-density level in itself—before almost doubling in density to an incomprehensible 1095 people in 1847.13 One 15ft room in this street was found to sleep 37 people.14 Close by in the parish of St Martinin-the-Fields many of the apartments were recorded as housing between 45 and 60 residents.15 Given these squalid and overcrowded living conditions, where overflowing cess pools and open latrines were a part of everyday life, it is not surprising that disease thrived and rapidly spread. The contemporary Victorian perception of London—perfectly captured by Dickens in his opening chapter to Bleak House—as a fetid city enveloped in a fog

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of infectious miasma was no exaggeration in the sense that London’s very environment was responsible for mercilessly killing vast swaths of its population. Even the arterial munificence of the River Thames was calamitously poisoned from a combination of raw sewage and industrial waste deposited into the river each day producing foul and noxious vapours which notoriously prevented Parliament from sitting in 1858. According to the Registrar General, between 1838 and 1844 no less than 100,000 Londoners perished from diseases directly attributable to their environment.16 Typhoid, typhus, smallpox, cholera, consumption, rickets, whooping cough, scarlet fever, measles, and diphtheria were common killers. The contamination of drinking water with human excrement, and other effluence, due to inadequate public sanitation and a general wont of cleanliness were the principle causes of disease. The squalid and overcrowded living conditions of London’s proletarian districts could not have been better suited to incubate and rapidly spread infectious disease among the populace. As might be expected the youngest suffered most from the rampage of deadly disease with up to a quarter of all children in England and Wales dying in infancy until public health improvements finally began to reverse the trend in the late nineteenth century.17 Not surprisingly child mortality rates were highest in the densely populated urban areas with Sir Edwin Chadwick’s famous 1842 Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain finding that 46% of the total deaths in London in 1840 were children under fifteen years of age.18 The commemoration of a young life tragically struck down by preventable disease was the stimulus for Highgate Cemetery’s most exquisitely crafted mausoleum which commemorates the loss of Julius Beer’s beloved eight-year-old daughter to scarlet fever in January 1875. Young Ada Beer was one of the last of 26,000 children to die during the scarlet fever outbreak of 1874.19 Whilst the youngest were disproportionately affected by London’s fetid and infectious environment those who survived infancy were not much better off according to Chadwick, whose 1843 Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry Into the Practice of Interment in Towns found an average life expectancy in middle-class districts of thirty-six and just twenty-two among the labouring classes (these figures were even lower in some provincial towns).20 Whilst the statistics quoted by Chadwick are undoubtedly shocking, they need to be read with a degree of caution as they were intended to shock apathetic Parliamentarians into action and the average figures include the high infant mortality rates. Nonetheless, the statistics reliably indicate the divergent life expectancies among the capital’s social classes. They equally highlight that whilst the middle classes may well have lived longer, they could hardly be considered long lived. In the Victorian city death was the ultimate leveller with even the privileged Aristocracy afforded little protection from an unexpected visitation by the Grim Reaper. Indeed, no less a Royal personage than Prince Albert was struck down by Typhoid fever in 1861, an infectious disease caused by poor sanitation, aged only 42.21 Urban overcrowding was compounded by working-class birth rates continuing unabated in the densely concentrated living environments of the Metropolis. The average number of children born per family in England and Wales in the first half

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of the nineteenth century was around five, of which two or possibly three would be expected to live into adulthood.22 Put simply the first half of the nineteenth century was characterised by high birth rates and high death rates with Chadwick recording a daily death rate in London of 125 people in 1840 (almost all from contagious disease).23 Given these life chances it is hardly surprising that city dwellers looked nostalgically upon the eighteenth century as a rural golden age whose dignified methods of burial in a picturesque country churchyard they wished to emulate in a wholesome garden setting. The common experience of repeated bereavement in the Victorian city created a sentimental mourning culture and a romanticised obsession with death—the adored romantic poets had died young and tragically—finding perfect expression in sepulchral commemoration. Melancholia became a fashionable ailment, particularly among the wealthy, theatrically expressed in elaborate mourning customs and morbid mementos. Indeed, the grandiose treatment of death expressed by the middle and upper classes has become synonymous with the Victorian age. The wealthy classes spent vast sums on funeral expenses and expressive mourning apparel, such as wearing garments made of black crape, adorning themselves in Whitby jet jewellery and sending sentimental mourning cards in expression of grief and to establish social respectability among their peers. Mourning rituals, particularly for women, were prolonged and onerous and governed by strict rules of etiquette effecting the whole household.24 This sentimentality could manifest itself in truly strange ways as it was not uncommon for the deceased’s family to pose for memoriam photographs with the embalmed corpse in its coffin—sometimes standing upright—or even more bizarrely removed from the coffin and placed in a domestic situation.25 This distinctly chilling form of sentimentality reflects what the cemetery historian Chris Brooks refers to as the ‘domesticated dead’, a sentiment first seen in Thomas Gray’s hugely popular 1750 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. In this graveside meditation Gray sublimely invokes a mood of romantic melancholy in contemplating the lives of the churchyard dead both at work and in the home. In this era of morbid sentimentality, the interred dead remain part of the family and wider community. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley) remained a constant presence in the lives of her family long after her death in 1797 with her grave in Old St Pancras churchyard becoming a revered family site. Young Mary spent hours sombrely reflecting and reading beside her mother’s grave including with her future husband, Percy Shelley.26 The hours Mary Shelley spent meditating at her mother’s grave must have had a profound creative effect on the writing of Frankenstein, essentially a novel about resurrection. The stately funeral procession of feather plumed horses pulling a hearse containing an ornately decorated coffin enveloped in flowers, accompanied by professional mourners with silk draped wands, followed by grand carriages carrying the family in dignified grief was to become the fashionable way of expressing outward grief and social respectability. This public display of grief via grand pageantry was distinctly medieval reflecting nineteenth-century gothic tastes as did the imposing neo-gothic chest tombs the middle classes built at the fashionable new garden cemeteries. The message conveyed by these grandiose funerary statements could not be clearer: in

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this age of industrial capitalism the customs and privileges of our landed forefathers can be emulated by all. Whilst grand funerals and ornate mourning rituals are rightly associated with the ostentation of the Victorian middle classes, the working classes were no less sentimental in demonstrating their grief. Unable to afford grand and ostentatious mourning paraphernalia the labouring classes still spent disproportionally large amounts on mourning apparel and morbid keepsakes. However, the single biggest financial outlay a working-class family faced was always likely to be its funeral expenses, including the fees levied by the Church for burial within its graveyard. Edwin Chadwick’s 1843 Supplementary Report found that £5 was the average expense of a working man’s funeral in a common grave in Great Britain—including burial within a common grave in the Magnificent Seven.27 Using wonderfully expressive language Chadwick’s report makes the staggering conclusion that between £4 and £5 million was ‘annually thrown into the grave, at the expense of the living.28 Raising the necessary funds to pay these funeral costs (£5 was over half the yearly wage of a common labourer in 186029 ) was a real challenge for working-class families driven by an almost primeval fear of subjecting their loved ones to the indignities of a pauper’s burial forever associated with the social shame of the workhouse. A fear which would drive working-class families to live alongside the decomposing body of their loved one as they desperately attempted to raise the funerary expenses. The parish provided no dignity in death if you were unable to pay the necessary funerary expenses, providing burial without a pall or funeral service in a flimsy wooden coffin in an unmarked communal grave located wherever space could be found—normally in the workhouse grounds. A popular ditty set to music in 1839 titled the ‘Pauper’s Drive’ jauntily illustrates the undelaying fear of a pauper’s burial: ‘Rattle his bones over the stones; he’s only a pauper who nobody owns’.30 The social stigma of being labelled a pauper and fear of the moral consequences of burial without dignity, or religious recognition, drove the working classes to joining burial clubs which were often no more than extortion rackets. The shame and indignity associated with a pauper’s burial was piously used by Victorian civic worthies to extoll their parishioners to strive, save, and make adequate provision for their funeral expenses if they wished to avoid the associated horrors of the pauper’s burial. Thus, making adequate preparation for one’s death was no longer viewed solely as a religious concern but a moral and social responsibility. Just like her housing stock London’s 200 Anglican graveyards31 did not increase to meet the needs of the population surge and high daily death rate. The overcrowded city graveyards were becoming an obscene and insanitary mass of putrefaction complete with drunken gravediggers disinterring the recently interred to make space for new graves. Indeed, the Metropolitan graveyard was becoming closer to Hades than to Heaven judging by this 1838 newspaper report: ‘What a horrid place is St Giles churchyard! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed, and bodies are removed to the ‘bone house’ before they are sufficiently decayed to make their removal decent… We then crossed to the opposite corner, and there is the ‘bone house’ which is a large pit; into this had been shot, from a wheelbarrow, the but partly-decayed inmates of the smashed coffins. Here, in this place of

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Illustration 2 A deliberately rustic image of Old St Pancras Church in 1820 (containing the Wollstonecraft & Godwin family grave) showing the typically small size of the adjoining Churchyard (note the looming factory chimneys)—from ‘Old and New London: The Western and Northern Suburbs’, by Edward Walford, volume 5, 1877

‘Christian burial’, you may see human heads, covered with hair; and here, in this ‘consecrated ground’, are human heads with flesh still adhering to them. On the north side, a man digging a grave; he was quite drunk, so indeed were all the gravediggers we saw…’32

The report purposefully emphasises the horror of the desecration of Christian bodies on consecrated ground as this cuts into Victorian anxieties regarding resurrection and the age-old Christian belief, particularly prevalent among Anglicans, that the body should be preserved from physical decay for as long as possible to achieve material resurrection. This again accentuates the holistic Victorian concept of death and the relationship between the religious, the moral and the physical. Thus, from a Victorian perspective, making hygienic provision for your burial in one of the new garden cemeteries not only fulfilled your social and moral responsibilities towards public health it fulfilled your religious responsibilities towards preserving your physical form after death. Prior to the sentimental shift in attitudes driven by the musings of the Graveyard poets in the mid-eighteenth century there was a little practical tradition of graveside reflection in England as the dead were seen to have departed to a better place.33 Nonetheless, the obscene conditions of the city churchyards deterred most mourners from attending the actual burial rite. Indeed, women were actively discouraged from

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entering London churchyards due to the attendant horrors and the dissolute behaviour of the gravediggers. Not only were the burial practices of the city churchyards seen as abhorrent to all good Christians but the shallow graves and decomposing body parts littering the graveyards adjacent to densely packed residential areas were viewed by public health reformers as the cause of polluting miasma killing the living. This was certainly the view propounded by the principle burial reformers of the period, Edwin Chadwick and George (Graveyard) Walker. Walker’s shocking 1839 investigation into London’s intermural burial practices, ghoulishly titled Gatherings from Graveyards, did much to expose the obscene conditions and horrific methods of bodily disposal prevalent in the city graveyards. It is therefore impossible to disconnect the establishment of the garden cemeteries in the 1830s and 1840s from the wider public health reforms of the period. Nonetheless, these courageous burial reformers were totally unaware that you were far more likely to catch a deadly disease from the living than you were from the dead. As the established Church since the English Reformation, the Church of England (Anglicanism) dominated the religious sphere of life in England until the eighteenth century when its dominance began to wane under a challenge from a vigorous variety of non-conformist protestant faiths, most particularly Methodism. This religious splintering not only challenged seemingly immutable theoretical beliefs, but it also presented more mundane practical problems relating to established burial custom within the Anglican churchyard. Whilst every person had a common law right of burial within the churchyard of the parish in which they died, the duty of burial remained the preserve of the Church of England whose church was always the parish church. Whilst the parish priest could not refuse to bury the dead of their parish regardless of their Anglican or non-conformist beliefs, doctrinal divisions meant that few non-conformists would countenance an Anglican burial service, and only Anglican Ministers were permitted to conduct burial services within the parish churchyard. The requirement to pay burial fees to the Anglican Church only added to non-conformist ire. The parish church (not just in the Capital) was therefore confronted with both a doctrinal schism preventing burial of increasingly large numbers of its own deceased parishioners and a graveyard obscenely filled beyond dignified capacity.34 The answer to London’s burial crisis when it came stemmed from a surprising source: France. The Gallic origins of the English garden cemetery are surprising given the context that England was only just emerging from the gruelling aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Nonetheless, if mindful of the British upper-class tendency to follow the cultural pursuits and artistic fashions of French high society then perhaps the inspiration is less surprising. The stimulus for establishing the new garden cemeteries in London can be directly traced back to a visit made by the barrister and philanthropist George Frederick Carden (1798–1874) to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise on the outskirts of Paris in 1821. Pere-Lachaise had been established under the orders of Napoleon in 1804 to solve the problem of Paris’ similarly overcrowded churchyards. The cemetery was deliberately sited outside the city limits on a hill majestically overlooking Paris. The landscape of Pere-Lachaise was consciously Elysian, laid out in the style of

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an English landscape garden with spaciously placed graves within a picturesque setting of trees, shrubs, paths, grand vistas, and an array of arresting monuments and family mausolea. Pere-Lachaise’s grand neo-classical monuments perfectly echoed the imperial mnemonics of Napoleonic France. In line with the French Revolutionary principle of egalitarianism the cemetery was secular and affordable to all social classes. The new garden cemetery at Pere-Lachaise was widely reported in contemporary periodicals across Europe and quickly became a Parisian tourist attraction in its own right being variously acclaimed by visitors as an ‘earthly enchantment’, a ‘terrestrial Paradise’, and for ‘removing the gloom from the grave.35 Pere-Lachaise would become a model cemetery much imitated across Europe and North America. Carden believed that the orderly, hygienic, and picturesque qualities of PereLachaise offered an enlightened and progressive solution to London’s overcrowded burial grounds. Here at Pere-Lachaise was a veritable heaven on earth where the dead slept in peaceful serenity awaiting the resurrection and where the fear of death had been tamed in view of the cemetery’s many visitors. This was in stark contrast to the despicable condition of London’s foul and dissolute graveyards where the dead were routinely desecrated, and mourners feared to venture lest they succumb to infectious miasma. Nevertheless, whilst Pere-Lachaise may well have been the inspiration for the English garden cemetery’s extramural setting and physical characteristics, this must not be allowed to overlook the more abstract inspiration behind the development of the garden cemetery in England. An inspiration deeply rooted to England’s landscape and Romantic literary tradition. Whilst the popularity of gothic literature among the English reading public would be firmly established by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through novelists such as Horace Walpole (1717–1797), Matthew Lewis (1775–1818), and William Beckford (1760–1844), it was presaged by a fad for gothic poetry which would spark the genesis of burial reform. Gothic poetry, rich in the invocation of melancholic sentiment, would feed the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the gothic mnemonics of churches, crypts, ruins, and tombs. Whilst the aspect of the dilettante is unfortunately characteristic of much gothic poetry this certainly cannot be said of the genre’s greatest school of poetry, that of the graveyard poets. The Graveyard school of poetry was an immensely popular forerunner to the English Romantics whose poetry hinged on the works of three great poets: the aforementioned mentioned Thomas Gray (1716–1771), Robert Blair (1699–1746), and Edward Young (1683–1765). Taking a romanticised delight in the pastoral English landscape’s gothic forms with an appropriately ‘Baroque sense of the skull beneath the skin’,36 the Graveyard poets reflected on the dreadful details of death, the tragic pain of bereavement, and the commemoration of the deceased. Robert Blair’s first graveyard foray (including that of the school) was The Last Day a reflection on bodily resurrection and the need to keep the body intact. Blair’s most famous work, The Grave (1743) is a deeply Gothick ode to a ghoulish churchyard’s solitary assemblage of graves, vaults, and monuments in moonlit tableaux - with obligatory screeching owl. Blair’s most abiding influence on the development of funerary tastes were his musings on the entombed and intact body resting beneath

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a fitting sculptural commemoration. The desire to keep the body physically intact after death was of course a deeply held Christian belief given renewed impetus and expression during the eighteenth century’s reappraisal of the self. Thomas Gray’s 1750 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard would establish itself as a classic of the genre becoming a favourite of the English Romantics, retaining its popularity into the Victorian period and remaining the Graveyard school’s bestknown work. Ultimately the sentimental shift in attitude towards death and burial in the early nineteenth century would be driven by contemplative tears rather than terror with the Graveyard poets’ Gothicism finding expression in the garden cemetery’s mood inducing architecture. A sublime combination of both tears and terror are evident in the Graveyard trios’ most contemporarily admired work, Edward Young’s poetic elegy Night Thoughts (originally published in nine separate volumes between 1742 and 1746), which has been described as a ‘seminal work’ in the ‘secular cult of sepulchral melancholy.37 Night Thoughts (published in a single volume in 1750) is a melancholic reflection on death and bereavement told over nine nights. Acclaimed a masterpiece on publication, profoundly influencing Edmund Burke’s writings on the sublime, it would prove particularly popular with the intelligentsia of eighteenth-century Europe where it was translated into every European language. Night Thoughts struck a strong chord in Germanic Europe where it became a powerful stimulus to the Sturm und Drang movement becoming Goathe’s favourite English work. Whilst Night Thoughts contains a strong Christian (even proto-Victorian) core message that the fear and terror of death can be overcome through the observance of Christian virtues and a belief in the resurrection, the poem contains all the familiar mnemonics of the Graveyard poets: spooky moonlit graveyards, solitary mourners, melancholic contemplation, and scenes of gothic terror. The novel’s many editions and adaptations would tap into the fashionable taste for melancholy, tombs, and ruins of the late eighteenth century. Perhaps the most influential edition was Pierre Le Tourneur’s French adaptation of the work as Les Nuits d’Young (1769) which changed the narrative’s emphasis to an evocation of the poet’s solitary grief wondering among the tombs.38 This edition enhanced the story’s gothic aspects with expressive illustrations of ruinous churches and moonlight shadows. Tourneur’s version was even given Voltaire’s stamp of approval, one of the foremost intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Night Thoughts’ most significant episode in terms of its influence on the development of the garden cemetery are the events described in Night III recounting Narcissa’s burial. This is Young’s romanticised depiction of furtively entering a chilling French graveyard under cover of moonlight to silently bury his step-daughter (he renames Narcissa) in a ‘stolen grave’ as the heartless Papist French would not permit burial to a ‘heretic’ Englishwoman on consecrated ground. This emotive episode would most effect the sensibilities of the poem’s free-thinking readership, particularly in France, where it powerfully stimulated the vogue for erecting commemorative monuments and tombs within gardens and ultimately garden burial.

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Before we reflect further on the genesis and influence of the garden monument we must briefly deviate to the pictorial arts as their influence on the Arcadian aspect of the garden cemetery was significant—Arcadia being the pastoral home of the God Pan in classical Greece popularised by the Roman poet Virgil. The Baroque artists Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) both painted versions of essentially the same Momento Mori subject portrayed within Arcadian landscapes of tranquillity sharing the same title: ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. Barbieri’s painting (1622) is the more expressively Baroque depicting two shepherds pensively viewing a decaying skull resting on a pedestal inscribed with the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, which translates as ‘Even in Arcadia, there am I’ with the ‘I’ usually interpreted as meaning Death. The stark allegory of the scene could not be clearer, even in Arcadia death’s visitation cannot be avoided. Poussin’s version (1638) depicts four classically attired shepherds carefully considering the ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ inscription written on a classical chest tomb. The image deliberately omits the skull so central to Barbieri’s version and all grim references to death and decay are expunged, replaced with the Renaissance values of contemplation and deduction. One of the shepherd’s casts a shadow over the tomb in apparent allegorical reference to the soul or spirit of man. The whole scene within its verdant setting pervades a gentle melancholy, no deathly horrors here, evoking a mournful sentimentality irresistible to nineteenth-century funerary tastes.39 The Arcadia paintings certainly impacted on perceptions on the civilising benefits of burial within garden landscapes. The popular French poet Jacques Delille (1738– 1813) published ‘Les Jardin’ in 1782 which praised Poussin’s version of Arcadia and promoted the importance of tombs within rural and picturesque settings.40 This view was further propounded by the Swiss romantic poet Salmon Gessner (1730– 1788) whose immensely popular collection of ‘Idyllen’ poems (1756) promoted commemorative tombs within verdant landscapes to facilitate graveside contemplation and to keep the memory of the departed alive. Gessner’s ‘Idylls’ were clearly influenced by Night Thoughts, echoing the sentimental vain of the Graveyard Poets, which illustrates not only the school’s poetic reach but how they had tapped into a deep yearning for the dignified classical vision of death associated with Arcadia and Elysium. Tombs within garden landscapes would thus be seen to promote gentle and civilising virtues. Death was quite literally being civilised. The eighteenth-century art of gardening was the inspirational setting for the garden cemetery. The English landscape garden, forever associated with the grand country house estates of the English Aristocracy, was essentially an exercise in enhancing the natural landscape from several vantage points to form picturesque views. The emergence of the term picturesque relates to seeing the landscape through the artistic medium of painting to induce a mood and inspire the imagination.41 The English garden was generally asymmetrical, gently following the grain of the landscape to draw the eye to natural or artificial features such as lakes, mountains or ruins, pleasingly framed by clumps of trees and shrubs. The features most commonly associated with the English landscape garden (apart from the ha-ha) are its ornamental buildings, monuments (sometimes referred to as ‘eye catchers’) and its sham ruins. The landscape garden’s projection of art into nature

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is strongly characterised by the mood inducing sham ruin insightfully described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as the ‘simplest link between the Gothic mood in poetry and in architecture’.42 The crumbling effect of untrammelled wildness upon man’s civilising architectural efforts (authentic ruins were equally effective) was wont to invoke powerful melancholic and sublime sentiments among eighteenthcentury poets and dilettanti. Whether mock ruins were constructed in classical or gothic form was largely dependent on the mood to be induced or the prevailing tastes of the period. The fashion to construct mock ruins in the landscape garden was strongly influenced by the popularity of seventeenth-century Italian landscape painters among the English Aristocracy, especially Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, whose paintings are rarely seen without a classical ruin standing for the triumph of time. The mock ruin was easily adapted into a classical Memento Mori grave monument in the form of a broken column. Thus, did the broken column become a staple feature of the Victorian cemetery (ruinous variants to the broken column are also found). The landscape garden was purposefully designed to induce a range of sensory emotions from melancholic contemplation to visions of the sublime in nature. Indeed, the picturesque thrills sought by contemporary sightseers have been likened to the thrills sought by watching a horror film today.43 Apart from the landscape’s soothing and reflective qualities the most influential aspect of the English garden on the garden cemetery’s development was its commemorative and melancholic characteristics. Castle Howard’s landscape garden is dominated by Hawksmoor’s magnificent family mausoleum (1729) picturesquely situated on the crest of a hill epitomising Elysium, elegiacally complimented by a monumental pyramid on distant rising ground.44 Perhaps the two most internationally renowned English Gardens were at Stowe (Buckinghamshire) and Stourhead (Wiltshire) where the landscapes were filled with an array of arresting monuments (around lakes) including temples, grand archways, obelisks, pyramids and gothic follies. Stowe was particularly noted for its commemorative qualities featuring a Temple of British Worthies (c.1735) and a sculptural homage to the Elysian Fields (c.1738). The landscape garden’s strong relationship with literature was evident at Alexander Pope’s famous Thames-side garden at Twickenham—where Walpole was an admiring neighbour. Pope was saturated in the classical ideals of the enlightenment and his immensely popular poetry promoted these virtuous notions to a receptive public. Pope was widely regarded as the English Virgil, not least for his sensibility towards pastoral landscapes, whose poetry and literature epitomised the intellectual vogue for Britain’s new Augustan age of stability and enlightenment. Pope’s acclaimed garden was populated with an abundance of classical sculpture, most famously his shell temple and the commemorative obelisk he erected in memory of his mother in 1735.45 The Egyptian obelisk’s longstanding association with classical Antiquity would ensure its adoption as an Arcadian garden exemplar. Similarly, the now forgotten English poet William Shenstone (1714–1763) created an influential memorial garden to his friends at his home in Worcestershire (Leasowes) from which he drew inspiration for his elegiac poetry. Shenstone’s garden

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of wooded groves purposely evoked a Virgilian Arcady resplendent with commemorative urns, pedestals, obelisks, and even a sculpture of a piping Pan.46 The garden was momentously visited by the Marquis de Girardin in the 1760s from which he took inspiration for his famous Élysée at Ermenonville which he populated with commemorative monuments in the English Arcadian style. The verdant parkland at Ermenonville deliberately invoked Elysian sentiments memorialising many Enlightenment worthies including Descartes, Newton, Voltaire, and perhaps most fittingly: William Shenstone. The landscape garden has been described as ‘unquestionably among England’s outstanding contributions to Western artistic cultur,’47 not least to eighteenth-century France where the Jardin Anglais was seen as an expression of refined taste and learning. Most significantly the commemorative and melancholic characteristics of the English garden would be widely adopted in France, particularly after the literary stimulus provided by Young’s Night Thoughts.48 Whilst Arcadian landscapes inspired by Virgil’s poetry and Italian landscape paintings would become a staple feature of the English garden, its monuments and allegories would only really be appreciated by those wealthy enough to have experienced the Grand Tour, which was the essential stimulus to the English garden. Nonetheless, the Paradise on earth vision of classical Arcadia was a fitting vision for Victorian cemetery pioneers profoundly aware that they were creating nothing less than a veritable threshold to heaven, a beauteous space for the deceased’s motel remains to rest as they await the resurrection. This belief is evident in the garden cemetery’s many grave monuments designed as doorways or gates representing the threshold to eternity. The commemorative garden monument took a dramatic next step when the profoundly influential French political philosopher (and noted Protestant) JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–1778) decided to be buried on a small island in the lake in the picturesque gardens at Ermenonville, where he spent his last days as a guest of the Marquis de Girardin. The Marquis’s open-minded tolerance of allowing the burial of the noted heretic Rousseau in his gardens contrasted sharply with the religious intolerance displayed in Narcissa’s burial scene. Classical Arcady was invoked further when Rousseau’s grave was topped by a pedestal and urn (later replaced by a Sarcophagus). Whilst the garden was already popular with the enlightened intelligentsia (a guidebook was available) the burial of such a noted personage as Rousseau within its grounds was widely reported across Europe.49 Not only did the grave invoke English garden exemplars, the urn, the pedestal, but it also demonstrated how a garden was an idyllic setting for a burial, not just for erecting a commemorative monument. Rousseau’s grave would become a powerful stimulus for interring the dead within gardens, not attached to a place of worship, bringing us full circle to the establishment of the garden cemetery at Pere-Lachaise. It can now be seen that the garden cemetery concept was inspired by many diverse strands and the establishment of London’s first garden cemetery was the culmination of these symbiotic strands of artistic and practical endeavour. Nonetheless, it took a concerted public campaign by Frederick Carden after his inspirational visit to Pere-Lachaise in 1821, with influential support from the opinion forming intellectual

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John Claudius Loudon,50 before the General Cemetery Company of All Souls, Kensal Green, was founded in June 1830. Paying due homage to Pere-Lachaise the company purchased 54 acres of land outside the city limits at Kensal Green, North West London, thereby removing London’s dead away from London’s living. The potential impact on London’s overcrowded graveyards of Europe’s Asiatic cholera outbreak of 1831 gave added impetus to the establishment of Kensal Green Cemetery ensuring the support of the forever procrastinating British Parliament. Thus, the General Cemetery Company was incorporated as a limited liability company by Act of Parliament in July 1832 taking its first burial in January 1833. It is noteworthy that establishing a private cemetery did not technically require an Act of Parliament, but Government support clearly provided the credibility and permanence needed to attract investors and encourage public confidence in this new method of burial detached from the parish church. Being the first Kensal Green would become the model cemetery and all except Abney Park were established as limited liability companies under their own Acts of Parliament. The social and economic benefits of private enterprise delivering public services were axiomatic to the Victorians, perhaps most notable in the development of the public railways and the water and gas industries. The joint-stock company method used to finance each of the Magnificent Seven was a characteristic distinct to Britain’s mercantile development, most unlike France where Pere-Lachaise was proudly state owned. The investors in death approach succeeded in raising the not inconsequential funds needed to construct all seven garden cemeteries circling London’s outskirts like the hours of a clock. Most predictably the Church of England objected to the establishment of Kensal Green fearing the loss of revenue generated by churchyard burial fees and London’s Bishops threatened not to consecrate any new cemeteries unless reimbursed for the loss. The importance of burial fees to the parish church cannot be underestimated as the Minister of St. Botolph, Aldgate, exclaimed in 1638: “I must say, if people do not die I cannot live”.51 Thus, all bar one of the seven cemeteries were required under their respective Acts of Parliament to reimburse the parish Church for each body buried originating from its parish, set at 5 shillings for Kensal Green.52 Only Abney Park Cemetery was not required to reimburse church burial fees as being non-conformist the land was not consecrated which is the principle reason why it never obtained its own Act of Parliament. The longstanding problem of providing burial space for dissenting faiths was finally overcome with the subdivision of the cemeteries between consecrated ground for Anglicans and non-consecrated ground for non-conformists. Similarly, the burial needs of the parish poor were considered with the provision of common graves, a much cheaper alternative to purchasing a private grave, these being communal plots for the burial of between 20 and 30 coffins each commemorated by a small wooden cross. The Victorians fervently believed that a building’s design reflected the cultural and moral sentiments of the age, particularly when the building provided a civic or public function. A sentiment expressed in an 1845 edition of the Victorian design journal The Builder, which described architecture as: ‘the monumental representation of history

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and civilization – a reflection of the sentiments, manners, and religious belief of the people practising it’.53 To the Victorians therefore a building conveyed a moral message entwined in an architectural statement, and this questioning of the spirit behind the design, much associated with Augustus Pugin, could solidify aesthetic standpoints or unleash creative forces. What therefore were the sentiments behind the designs of London’s garden cemeteries? A taste for architectural romanticism is powerfully evident, most notably the fanciful mock gothic styles popularised by Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, yet conversely Kensal Green’s architecture evokes the classical splendour of Greek Antiquity. The respective merits of classical and gothic architecture, particularly in terms of a British national style, would become the focus of much passionate and divisive debate during the course of the nineteenth century—most notably over the re-building of the Houses of Parliament in the gothic style. It is therefore not surprising that the design concept for London’s first garden cemetery would become similarly embroiled in this contemporary architectural debate. To give free reign to the imagination most Victorian civic projects were chosen via open competition and H. E. Kendall’s winning design for Kensal Green’s Anglican chapel and lodge gates envisaged an ornate ecclesiastical gothic design resplendent with cloisters, pinnacles, and castellations. However, the Chairman of the Company (Sir John Dean Paul) was an ardent Greek Revivalist and amid much rancour he intrigued in getting Kendell’s gothic scheme dropped in favour of a classical design— Carden would become a victim of vicious infighting forcing his departure from the company in February 1833. Bouts of vituperative political infighting would become an all too common feature in the establishment of London’s garden cemeteries. The Company Directors clearly felt that the Greek Revival style, being closely associated with stability, security, and modernity, would appeal most strongly to the sensibilities of its client base. Moreover, the graceful dignities of the Greek Revival were favoured over a classical Baroque style tainted by European absolutism. Nevertheless, whilst the Greek Revival invoked the high ideals of Greek learning (that spirit behind the design) it was quixotically happy to adopt other unrelated architectural elements such as Egyptian Revival and Palladianism. More prosaically a high proportion of Kensal Green’s shareholders were bankers much taken with Sir John Soane’s Neo-classical rebuilding of the Bank of England. Fredrick Carden on the other hand was an ardent Gothic Revivalist, which at this time was still negatively associated with Regency frippery rather than the structural truth of the later High Church Gothic Revivalists. John William Griffith (1796–1888), the Company’s surveyor, would ultimately layout Kensal Green’s landscape and design its buildings (during this period it was not unusual for surveyors to undertake architectural commissions). The cemetery is entered via an imposing triumphal arch with Doric columned portico. The whole is flanked by symmetrical wings containing the cemetery’s offices. Clearly inspired by the Arcadian landscaped garden with its informal clumps of ornamental planting the carriage drive sweeps round into a broad avenue originally flanked by horsechestnut trees picturesquely framing the approach to the grandiose Anglican Chapel

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dominating the landscape in the style of a Palladian country house. Steps lead up to the tetrastyle Doric entrance-portico flanked by covered colonnades. The chapel interior is not dissimilar to a Greek temple with its side piers and richly decorated domed ceiling. The centre of the chapel is dominated by the magnificent catafalque installed in 1837 (upgraded in 1844) for the lowering of coffins into the extensive complex of brick vaulted catacombs beneath. The ornately decorated catafalque has a rotating top with rollers to facilitate the sliding of coffins in various directions. The hydraulically powered catafalque was a greatly admired piece of machinery in its day not only adding dramatic impact to the funeral service but offering a welcome technological aid to the entombment ritual. The Kensal Green catafalque was an engineering spectacle aptly showcasing burial in the new industrial age which would be unashamedly mimicked by both West Norwood and Highgate in their drive to maintain commercial parity. Kensal Green’s non-conformist chapel is smaller than its Anglican sibling maintaining the Greek temple form (Ionic tetrastyle) with catacombs beneath. This chapel is situated in the non-conformist burial area originally subdivided by iron railings at the southern end of the cemetery. Not only does Kensal Green’s broad avenue serve as an axial approach road with serpentine paths splintering off into the garden of graves it splits into a circular carriage drive around the chapel to enhance the cemetery’s picturesque viewing qualities. Indeed, a review of Kensal Green published in Ainsworth’s Magazine in 1842 carries a sequence of highly romanticised illustrations of public meandering in the cemetery which not only exaggerates the cemetery’s sublime qualities in its portrayal of the monumental architecture it depicts leaning and overgrown gravestones characteristic of an English country churchyard.54 In these illustrations, London’s first garden cemetery not only provides dignified commemoration of the deceased’s mortal remains it satisfies the nineteenth-century impulse for graveside contemplation within an idealised rural setting. Kensal Green’s verdant landscape of ornamental trees and shrubs was expertly managed by a dedicated team of in-house gardeners causing J. C. Loudon to proclaim in 1836 that ‘Kensal Green…is rapidly becoming a school of improvement in architectural taste, and of knowledge in trees and shrubs’.55 Kensal Green was in no way unusual in taking over full gardening responsibilities once the cemetery had been laid out—all seven cemeteries did so. Highgate’s equally holistic approach would see it erect a set of greenhouses in 1872 for growing flowers to sell to grave owners which operated until the 1950s. What made Kensal Green more unusual was that its greenhouses not only grew flowers to sell they housed a collection of tropical plants purely for display to the visiting public. In this endeavour Kensal Green Cemetery enhances the visitor experience with the attributes of a pleasure garden. Whilst the classical architecture on display may not be as originally intended by Carden, Kensal’s Green’s architectural elegance cannot be denied, and it remains the most exquisitely endowered of all the cemeteries in terms of the decorative and diverse grandeur of its monuments and mausolea.56 The Victorian cemetery allowed, indeed encouraged, individual expression in the memorialisation of the deceased and the extraordinary array of taste displayed in its memorials is testament to the creativity

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and passions invoked by this freedom to express. Whilst the grandiosity, sentimentality, and sheer eccentricity of the funerary architecture may not be to modern tastes it nonetheless reflects the aggressive individualism, social aspirations, and sentiments of the age. Sentiments and romantic impulses focused on commemorating the deceased beside the contemplative tomb. Whatever funerary style the monument adopts it invariably commemorates through a combination of symbolism and epitaph the spiritual departure of the soul and the deceased’s worldly achievements. The Arcadian garden memorial features prominently in Kensal Green’s memorial landscape, as it does in all Victorian cemeteries, with its array of obelisks (now Christianised representing eternity), urns, pedestals, sarcophagi, and broken columns (symbolising life broken) interspersed with various representations of the cross. The revered Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin (1812–1852) would roundly condemn the obscurities and inconsistencies of the Arcadian memorials popularly adopted in the Victorian cemetery, believing that the cross was the most appropriate emblem for the tomb—not pagan urns and heathen allegories.57 Nonetheless, should Pugin’s aesthetic censuring of the secular nature and pagan character of Victorian cemetery monuments have been heeded it would surely have deprived us of a range of funerary architecture alive with human interest.58 The next garden cemetery to be established was The South Metropolitan Cemetery, West Norwood, opening in December 1837 which soon became the most fashionable cemetery south of the Thames popularly referred to as the ‘Millionaires’ Cemetery’. In some respects, West Norwood’s Gothic splendour represents what Kensal Green might have been should the Gothicists have won the design argument as originally conceived. Space precludes a lengthy exposition of the nineteenthcentury taste for gothic architecture but some contextual understanding is essential such is the influence of the gothic Revival style on all the garden cemeteries following Kensal Green. Whilst the new taste for gothic architecture was enthused by eighteenth-century Romanticism and gothic poetry, the vogue for antiquarianism and the picturesque ruin were equally important progenitors in the revival of gothic tastes. The landowning classes’ curiosity towards the ruinous medieval buildings populating the English landscape and in old artefacts dug from the ground was wont to awaken powerful sensibilities for a romanticised gothic past. The eighteenth-century antiquarian broadly conceptualised Gothic as the physical expression of the medieval age and this emerging interest in all aspects of medievalism, particularly its architecture, would become something of a craze. This craze is witnessed by the flood of evocatively illustrated pamphlets and publications on gothic subjects in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.59 Indeed, subscribers to the opinion informing Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1780s and 1790s could read something about the Gothic almost every month and after 1805 this becomes practically the only building type illustrated.60 Kenneth Clark suggests that the nineteenth-century impulse for gothic architecture stemmed as much from a reaction against the heavy formalism of neo-classicism (an escape from Palladian monotony) and a desire for a lighter, more multicoloured style, than anything else.61

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Illustration 3 One of the aforementioned images published in Ainworth’s Magazine emphasising Kensal Green’s classically inspired monumental architecture & idyllically rural landscape—from ‘Ainsworth’s Magazine’: Volume II, 1842

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The gothic impulse among the landed gentry (the preverbal old ‘Goth’ in the manor) would manifest itself in the construction of picturesque ruins and gothic follies within their estates to induce a mood of romantic melancholy or evoke associations with heredity and permanence in the landscape. The gothic craze would soon evolve from making picturesque enhancements to the view to making stylised gothic enhancements to the home. To arouse medieval sensibilities, it became fashionable to ornament a house with pinnacles, castellated parapets, mock Tudor windows, and fearsome animal carvings. Whilst the exterior Gothicizing of old English country houses would become fashionable among the gentry it was normally done on the cheap, not dissimilar to architectural set dressing, romantically enhanced by a display of once discarded medieval arms and armour within the house. The Gothicising and gothic rebuilding of British country houses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Churches were similarly Gothicized) was pioneered by Horace Walpole’s profoundly influential rebuilding of Strawberry Hill, his Thames-side villa, in a romanticised gothic style subsequently known as Regency Gothic.62 Walpole’s remodelling of Strawberry Hill into ‘his little Gothic Castle’ would become a three-decade long labour of love and the inspiration for his hugely popular novel, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). The house was essentially a romanticised hybrid of styles, including classical and oriental elements, with an overarching gothic character expressed through its battlements, pinnacles, window tracery, and vibrantly decorated rooms. The house could hardly be more Gothic in its stylistic irregularity. Not only did Strawberry Hill’s rooms showcase Walpole’s magnificent collection of ‘objets d’art’ they were in themselves decorative facsimiles of medieval interiors rich in Gothick gloom. Nonetheless, whilst Walpole’s medieval imitations were visually spectacular, they were essentially a pastiche done on the cheap (papier-mâché fan vaulting) and a World away from the structural truth gothic Revivalists of the mid-nineteenth century.63 Strawberry Hill was primarily an instrument for communicating or inducing gothic associations, moods or reactions—structural or practical necessity did not factor. The fabulously wealthy novelist William Beckford took this romanticised approach to a new extreme building a fantasy gothic home, Fonthill Abbey, between 1796 and 1807. The building’s form was based on Salisbury Cathedral with a 278-foot high tower. The tower soared above an immense fan vaulted nave-like hall designed to inspire awe and wonder. Beckford was quite literally living his gothic dream. The building’s scale and structural appearance like any genuine gothic cathedral was truly sublime, notably painted by J. M. W. Turner, but unlike its medieval counterparts it was structurally unsound collapsing under its own weight in 1825.64 The Regency gothic style, rich in associative themes, reflects the romanticised style of gothic architecture adopted by the six garden cemeteries following Kensal Green. A vibrantly irregular style where a medieval archway leading to a classical forecourt, or grandiose Egyptianising gates leading to a gothic chapel, simply enhances the sensation of awe, romance, and melancholy.65 As Walpole so perceptively observes: ‘one must have taste to be sensible to the beauties of classical architecture whereas one only wants passions to feel Gothic’.66

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Illustration 4 A deliberately picturesque view of West Norwood Cemetery emphasising its landscape garden qualities (note the Anglican and Non-conformist chapels atop the hill)—from ‘The Illustrated London News’, 15th September 1849

Perched on high ground outside London’s then southern environs within 42 acres of countryside West Norwood would become London’s most picturesque garden cemetery after Highgate. The cemetery was entered through a magnificent gothic archway with serpentine drives leading through deciduous parkland to the Anglican and non-conformist chapels situated at the summit of the hill. The cemetery layout and buildings were designed by the eminent nineteenth-century architect Sir William Tite in a perpendicular gothic style rich in towers and pinnacles. The monumentally imposing Anglican chapel, situated just above its smaller non-conformist sibling, was modelled on King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, enhanced by arcaded cloisters each side of the front elevation. Whilst both chapels were demolished in the 1950s due to bomb damage the large complex of brick vaulted catacombs beneath the former Anglican chapel remain a gloomy yet intoxicating testament to the ghoulish Victorian fashion for showcasing the family vault’s assemblage of coffins. The medieval (and distinctly upper class) practice of interring coffins in the Church crypt was most romantically revived at West Norwood in a pompous display of ornately decorated triple shelled coffins (some covered in Utrecht velvet) showcased behind glass panels or iron railings. Many vaults exhibit the family name within a carved heraldic shield or unfurled banner.67 Second only to Kensal Green in the splendour of its funerary monuments, West Norwood retains some exceptionally sculptured tombs and mausolea the most artistically powerful of which vibrantly invoke the medieval past.68 Situated somewhat incongruously within the richly gothic landscape enveloping it stands West Norwood’s Greek enclosure, an area of unconsecrated ground leased by

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London’s Greek merchant community in 1842. Powerfully reflecting the ostentatious character of the Greek merchant class, the enclosure is populated by an exquisite array of classical monuments and mausolea, most notably St Stephen’s chapel built in the 1870s as a precise replica of a classical Greek Doric temple. Constructed almost contemporaneously with West Norwood but not opened until May 1839 due to local opposition, Highgate Cemetery would become London’s most picturesque cemetery and the true heir to Pere-Lachaise. Described as the most unashamedly romantic cemetery in Britain,69 The Cemetery of St James at Highgate, was the child of the London Cemetery Company whose entrepreneurial founder and architect, Stephen Geary (1897–1854), understood the value of a picturesque view. Not only did the location clinging to London’s northern heights command sublime views across the Metropolis it lay within the former landscape garden of the demolished Ashurst Manor contextually befitting a garden cemetery. The old manor house was replaced by Highgate’s new Anglican Church of St Michael in 1832 whose gothic profile towering above the cemetery’s northern extremity (the church is the highest in London) would become a dramatic backdrop to the panoramic viewing platform constructed on the roof of the catacombs beneath. Whilst officially unrelated, the tableaux of church and cemetery would become a popular image with contemporary illustrators giving the comforting impression of a giant churchyard. Upon first opening the visiting public entered the cemetery via a gate next to St Michael’s Church directly onto the viewing platform, whereas funeral parties entered via the chapel gates on the lower slope thus keeping the two distinct types of visitor respectfully apart.70 However, the roof terrace entrance was closed within months due to complaints over loss of privacy from neighbouring residents. Like the finest landscape gardens, the 17-acre western cemetery was designed to impress, sooth, and stimulate the senses through the Arcadian lushness of its grounds to the romantic qualities of its buildings and architectural features. The cemetery entrance consists of two chapels, one for Anglicans and one for non-conformists, within a single Tudor-Gothic style structure divided by a central archway. The cemetery Superintendent’s office was ingenuously situated above the gated archway providing commanding views into the western and eastern cemeteries with internal windows to view chapel services—a superb Panoptic design feature. The opening of the 20-acre eastern cemetery in 1856 was facilitated by the construction of a tunnel under Swain’s Lane (which divides the cemeteries) providing the company with the opportunity to install a hydraulic coffin lift in the Anglican chapel.71 Once lowered into the crypt the coffin was carried through the tunnel into the eastern cemetery for burial. Just across Swaine’s Lane stands the cemetery Superintendent’s house, a small whitewashed mock-Tudor building adorned with battlements and pinnacles strongly reminiscent of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. The chapel gateway enters a spacious courtyard framed by a concave colonnade enticing visitors to the central steps dramatically ascending into the cemetery. The colonnade deliberately screens the cemetery beyond emphasising the transition between the land of the living and the land of the dead when ascending the steps.72 Carriage drives sweep either side of the colonnade into the cemetery’s verdant hinterland of serpentine roads, paths, and rising terraces ‘…where parterres

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Illustration 5 A pre-1905 photographic postcard of St Michael’s Church with the famous viewing platform (roof of the terrace catacombs) beneath—publication origin unknown

of sweet-scented flowers, picturesque trees, and clumps of evergreens are scattered in the most appropriate spots’.73 Indeed, such was the sensory impact of visiting the cemetery in the nineteenth century that some contemporary reviewers found themselves compelled to impart their experiences in sentimental verse.74 The cemetery would become a hugely popular visitor attraction (the first guidebook was published in 1845) to the point where an admittance ticket was required for Sunday entry, a popularity causing the Secretary of the Abney Park Cemetery Company to snootily observe that he had witnessed ‘picnic parties on consecrated ground!’75 The obvious associations between Egyptian architecture and death were palpable to a Victorian public engrossed in a cult of mourning and romantically enthralled by the ongoing excavations in Egypt. This fascination with Egypt was perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the Victorian cemetery, not just in the prevalence of the obelisk, but in the exoticism of its monuments and mausolea.76 The entrepreneurial Geary, always ready to exploit a vogue for profit, incorporated into Highgate’s design an imposing Egyptian facade fronting a barrel-roofed tunnel of 16 catacombs leading to a circle of catacombs built around an old but highly picturesque Cedar of Lebanon tree. The sloping tunnel of catacombs naturally arouses connections with the Valley of the Kings and a theatrical sense of exotic foreboding straight out of a stage setting for Mozart’s Die Zauberflote.77 The facade of Highgate’s Egyptian Avenue would become the cemetery’s principle architectural feature formed of a corbelled archway portal flanked by Egyptianising columns, with lotus bud capitals, and two monumental guardian obelisks—it remains an outstanding example of ‘commercial picturesque’ architecture.

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Illustration 6 A highly romanticised view of the Egyptian Avenue by moonlight (you can almost hear the screeching owl)—from ‘Old and New London: The Western and Northern Suburbs’, by Edward Walford, volume 5, 1877

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The Egyptian style was essentially an alternative form of Gothic in terms of its monumental scale, vibrant colours, and romantic associations. Its monumental scale and decorative qualities making it particularly well suited to imposing or large-scale buildings (with the added advantage of being cheaper to build than the gothic style). Highgate’s picturesque garden qualities attracted a remarkable degree of ‘buy in’ from grave owners. Only a hundred or so meters down from the Egyptian Avenue, imposingly situated on a side terrace, is the pyramidal grave monument of the Oakley family (only the twelfth grave to be purchased). Taking its design inspiration from the cemetery’s Egyptian themes the pyramid acts as a decorative ‘eye catcher’ wetting the visitor’s appetite for the Egyptian Avenue ahead. Beyond the Lebanon Circle—with its iconic Cedar tree standing magisterially at its centre—are the terrace catacombs built in the gothic style beneath the former terrace of Ashurst Manor. The catacombs lie almost directly beneath the high altar of St Michael’s Church deliberately arousing medieval associations of interment within the church crypt. In the grandiose Victorian fashion, the expensive triple shelled coffins (elm, lead, oak) rest within individual compartments ostentatiously displayed behind glass panels or polished marble slabs. The western cemetery originally retained a small structure of non-conformist catacombs in its non-consecrated ground, but these did not prove commercially successful and were demolished in 1967. Whilst lacking the exquisite funerary sculpture of Kensal Green or West Norwood, Highgate’s romantic magnificence is expressed through its architecture, landscaping, and picturesque views. Nonetheless the cemetery does retain some fine if downright quirky funerary monuments, such as George Wombwell’s sleeping lion and Tom Sayer’s mournful guardian dog.78 Following Highgate was Abney Park Cemetery, opening in May 1840, built to succeed London’s historic non-conformist burial ground at Bunhill Fields which had become full beyond capacity. Abney Park was built just outside London’s northern reaches in the parish of Stoke Newington within 31-acres of park land. It was laid out and designed by William Hosking (1800–1861) in a romanticised gothic style freely adopting exotic design elements to arouse the senses. The chapel situated at the heart of the cemetery was built to a compact Greek cruciform plan with a striking 124-foot spire above the bell tower acting as a landmark visible throughout the cemetery grounds. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a nonconformist cemetery the chapel’s stripped down gothic exterior is mundane and uninspiring, the architectural impact clearly derived from the monumental scale of the spire, particularly as approached from the main carriage drive. The egalitarian mindset of the non-conformists did not approve of elitist catacombs and the cemetery’s small catacomb structure was deliberately detached from the chapel to avoid the unseemly class distinctions of interment within the church crypt. The cemetery’s sublime Egyptianising entrance gates remain its most distinctive and impressive architectural feature, one of the most striking examples of ‘commercial picturesque’ architecture in London. The four monumental gate piers adopt the form of Egyptian pylons whose coved cornices feature decorative lotus buds repeated on the cast iron railings leading to the adjoining temple style lodges. The

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lodge cornices are ornately decorated with the classic symbol of Ancient Egypt, the ‘winged orb’ (now a Christianised symbol of resurrection), surmounted with hieroglyphs solemnly proclaiming: ‘The Gates of the Abode of the Mortal Part of Man’. This Egyptian scenic display was a scholarly attempt at architectural accuracy, unlike the playful set dressing of Highgate’s Egyptian Avenue, by the renowned neoEgyptian architect Joseph Bonomi junior (1796–1878)—who would later design the exquisite Egyptian façade of Temple Mills factory, Leeds. Nonetheless, the exoticism of Abney Park’s entrance gates were not to all tastes being famously satirised by a disapproving Augustus Pugin, who despised secular symbolism in cemeteries, in a cartoon sketch in his 1843 publication ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture’.79 Abney Park maintained the finest horticultural standards of all seven garden cemeteries cultivating 2500 varieties of trees and shrubs and a rosarium with 1,029 varieties of rose. Abney Park’s celebrated sylvan romance was reflected in its exquisite array of native and exotic tree specimens, including: alder, ash, oak, beech, willow, elder, popular, birch, dogwood, walnut, plane, acacia, and a Cedar of Lebanon.80 Abney Park’s sylvan and horticultural qualities would make it a favourite of J. C. Loudon who praised its scenic beauty and the mind improving benefits of the labelling of trees and shrubs for the enlightenment of all who walk there.81 The restorative power of nature to the melancholic soul was most powerfully alive at Abney Park and Highgate Cemetery. Belying its affluent market niche, the next garden cemetery to open proved to be the most financially troubled. The original design concept for Brompton Cemetery was a grandiose classical landscape to include Roman Catholic and non-conformist chapels framing a majestic Baroque Anglican chapel. The 39-acre site located in the idyllically rural and prosperous outskirts of West London, adjacent to Kensington canal, opened for business in June 1840—although building work would continue until 1842. Highgate’s Stephen Geary was initially employed as the West London and Westminster Cemetery Company’s architect, but he was acrimoniously replaced by Benjamin Baud (1807–1875) in early 1839. Baud’s grandiose classical vision with ornamental planting to match caused costs to spiral and his architectural vision was stripped back to its bare essentials to include only one (Anglican) chapel. Whilst Brompton would become notorious for its financial mismanagement (Baud himself being sacked) it retains elements of its original grandiose design plan in the form of its triumphal arch entrance, domed octagonal chapel, and circular colonnade with catacombs beneath. Nonetheless, Brompton was the most formal and least picturesque of London’s garden cemeteries whose mundane landscaping fails to inspire the senses in the manner of Highgate or West Norwood. The cemetery’s financial woes would see it nationalised in 1852 before coming under the authority of The Royal Parks. The London Cemetery Company was a keen investor in death opening its second cemetery, the Cemetery of All Saints, Nunhead, (near Peckham) in July 1840. Following the same business model as Highgate, the cemetery was situated on a hill commanding fine views over London. The grounds of the 50-acre site were laid out by the new company architect James Bunstone Bunning who designed the

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wonderfully imposing neo-classical entrance gates with six cast iron inverted torches (symbolising life extinguished) on flanking stone piers. Two splendid Greek Revival lodges framed the entrance gateway. The cemetery’s Anglican and Non-conformist chapels were designed in the gothic style by Thomas Little (1802–1859) with catacombs beneath. The cemetery’s axial drive leads directly to the Anglican chapel’s splendid over scaled porte-cochere whose imposing tower and pinnacles solemnly dominate the approach. The bomb damaged non-conformist chapel was demolished in the 1950s. J. C. Loudon writing in 1843 was mightily impressed by the innovative earth burial technique devised by Nunhead’s Superintendent, Mr E. Buxton. Buxton had invented an ingenious system of hinged grave boards to aid grave excavation—similar to the technique used in sinking a well.82 The method saved much labour in digging and ensured that the grave was excavated to exactly the correct dimensions. In the same innovative vain the London Cemetery Company offered customers use of a weather screen to facilitate burial in all weathers—for an extra fee naturally.83 Whilst Nunhead was lushly laid out its landscaping lacks the romance and picturesque features of its progenitor on Highgate Hill and its monuments are less distinguished. The diminished quality of the monuments erected undoubtedly stems from the fact that Nunhead’s client base was less socially elite than Highgate’s, demonstrated by the fact that common graves account for the majority of the cemetery’s interments.84 The final garden cemetery to be established was the most working class and least fashionable of London’s Magnificent Seven: Tower Hamlets Cemetery, opening in September 1841. The 33-acre cemetery located off the Mile End Road was founded by the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery Company to serve the massive working-class communities of London’s East End. The cemetery grounds were laid out by the architects Thomas Wyatt and David Brandon who designed an interesting pair of chapels with catacombs beneath. The Anglican chapel was built in the early decorated gothic style and the non-conformist chapel in the Byzantine style—both were demolished in 1972 through a combination of bomb damage and neglect. Tower Hamlets cemetery certainly served its purpose with densely packed common graves accounting for 80% of burials—an astonishing 247,000 bodies having been interred by 1889.85 The convenience of its location adjacent to the impoverished East End would drive business seeing it largely full and in a state of neglect by 1900. The Magnificent Seven operated relatively successfully, Brompton Cemetery aside, until the early 1920s when the inexorable rise of cremation coupled with an attitudinal shift in Victorian mourning sentiment initiated their rapid decline. Whilst the shift in Victorian mourning sentiment was most pronounced after the Great War, attitudes had already started to change towards the end of the nineteenth century tied to improved life expectancies. This shift is perfectly encapsulated by Oscar Wilde’s sardonic 1895 comment on the death scene of little Nell in Dickens’ novel The Old Curiosity Shop: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing’.86 This famously long winded and sentimental death scene had reduced

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the Victorian reading public to floods of tears and melancholy when first published in 1841. The custom of selling private graves in perpetuity (to ensure the body remained undisturbed for the resurrection) unwittingly jeopardised the Magnificent Seven’s long-term sustainability by making them a wasting asset, a loss compounded by the Victorian tendency to buy large plots prior to need and then not utilising them to capacity. The policy of selling plots in perpetuity would ultimately cause the utilisation of carriage drives (and even paths) for burial space thus denuding a quintessential quality of the garden cemetery. The Magnificent Seven certainly served their primary purpose of providing new burial space for a Metropolis teeming with dead bodies and obscenely overused graveyards. When first opened Kensal Green was twenty times bigger than any other burial ground available in the Capital and the seven cemeteries combined provided 300 acres of new burial space.87 Indeed, due to their distinct market niche Tower Hamlets and Abney Park were full by the 1950s. Kensal Green was always the most profitable cemetery generally paying out an annual dividend to its shareholders of 8 per cent, well above the rates the railways paid out to their investors.88 Highgate meanwhile averaged a profitable 2000 burials per annum until the turn of the twentieth century. Whether the commercial provision of public cemeteries provided London’s poorest citizens with a dignified place of burial is questionable however. The cost of burial in a London churchyard in the 1830s was somewhere between 6 and 12 shillings whereas the cost of a common grave in one of the new garden cemeteries was more than double that—the need to reimburse Anglican burial fees contributing significantly to this disparity. Therefore, despite their obscene conditions the parish churchyard would remain the principle place of burial for the majority of London’s poorest communities, until their forced closer under the Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852 and the establishment of the parish burial boards. The visual expression of the garden cemetery is essentially an expression of middle-class values and beliefs. The cost of purchasing a private grave and erecting a headstone—and all private graves were required to erect a headstone—was affordable only to the relatively wealthy or to working people who had made provisions to meet the cost. Whilst the grandiose array of monuments clustered either side of the carriage drives were expensively crafted statement pieces (even if they were purchased off the shelf) attainable only to the wealthy. Indeed, the rules of the London Cemetery Company stipulated that all plots adjacent to a roadway had to erect a monument indicating a clear awareness of the visual value of the plots they were selling.89 Tower Hamlets apart the Magnificent Seven would become the fashionable abode of the middle class deceased. Even where the cemetery has a preponderance of common graves, such as Nunhead and Tower Hamlets, it is visually expressed through its grand ensemble of tombs and monuments, those expensive testaments in stone to the power and prestige of the new moneyed class. Public distaste towards the excesses and sentiments of the Victorian past, and the cheaper alternative of cremation, would prove most harmful to the Magnificent Seven’s continuing viability into the second half of the twentieth century—even

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more harmful than the material destruction wrought by Nazi bombs. Whilst Kensal Green was able to operate viably due to the shrewd establishment of a crematorium in 1939 the six remaining cemeteries would struggle financially reducing landscape maintenance to a minimum to cut operating costs before stopping it altogether. Any garden requires ongoing maintenance otherwise it will soon become a wilderness and a garden cemetery is no exception. To various degrees this fate would befall the Magnificent Seven whose once beauteous landscapes would become overgrown gardens of melancholic decay and neglect as described in the opening paragraphs of this essay.90 Whilst the capriciousness of contemporary tastes may have undermined the Magnificent Seven’s commercial viability their physical integrity was denuded by mindless acts of vandalism, laying waste not only to the commemoration of the deceased but to exquisite examples of Victorian craftsmanship. In her 1976 book ‘Vanishing Victorina’ the historian Lucinda Lampton forlornly describes Nunhead cemetery as an ‘oasis of wilderness’ where ‘almost every nineteenth-century gravestone has been smashed, and many prised open, leaving piles of rubble. The grass is waste high, the chapel falling down…’91 Whilst these heathen acts of vandalism were largely the result of juvenile delinquency the cemetery’s gothic eeriness provided an ideal theatrical backdrop to the nefarious activities of the British occult revival’s suburban covens. This strange occult phenomenon of late 1960s and early 1970s would see frequent moonlight incursions into Highgate Cemetery in particular, where tombs and mausoleums were broken into, occult rituals performed, and human remains desecrated.92 The unfortunate accessibility of Highgate’s Terrace Catacombs made them a favourite target for desecration as the 16-year old future lead singer of The Sex Pistols richly recalls in his autobiography: ‘…we’d break into the crypts where the bodies were on shelves, open up the coffins, and have a look. We’d see which bodies hadn’t deteriorated. Was this vampire thing real? So many people were doing it, it was almost like a social club down there. You’d meet so many people, loonies mostly, running around with wooden stakes, crucifixes, and cloves of garlic…’93

The damage was not all caused by individual acts of mindless vandalism however, as both in commercial and public ownership the cemeteries were progressively asset stripped and in West Norwood’s case the local authority attempted an illegal lawn conversion, only stopped, (after egregious loss of many monuments) in 1991. Indeed, both Abney Park and Tower Hamlets have been turned into public amenity spaces which whilst entirely consistent with J. C. Loudon’s vision for filled cemeteries, the overgrown and neglected condition of their landscapes would hardly have met with his approval. Whilst the Magnificent Seven exist in varying degrees of distress, with Abney Park, Tower Hamlets, and Nunhead being the most ruinous and neglected, the dedicated activities of local voluntary groups have at last stabilised the neglect and produced conservation plans to secure their futures. Perhaps most importantly in terms of securing their conservation has been the positive shift in public and academic

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opinion towards the Victorian age since the antipathy of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly a new appreciation of the period’s individualism, technical innovation, and craftsmanship. Indeed, the Magnificent Seven have once again become popular with visitors wishing to experience the soothing strangeness of the Victorian Paradise on earth evoked in a landscape of beauteous angels, classical sculpture, and sentimental verse. Perhaps nowhere is the strange character of the Victorian period, its profound faith, its eccentricity, and sentimentality, experienced more intimately than in its cemeteries. This Victorian strangeness so arcane to modern tastes is most sensually experienced at Kensal Green, West Norwood and Highgate, whose architecture, landscape and monuments radiate a romantic melancholy which is curiously uplifting. The Magnificent Seven continue to captivate the senses, remaining a sacred destination for recreation and reverence. Acknowledgements The author wishes to extend his grateful thanks to John Shepperd (a former Chairman of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust) who proofread the text and provided much helpful feedback; to Adrian Korsner who richly re-produced all the essay’s images; to the Rvd Dr Gregory Platten for his useful advice on the history of Anglican burial liturgy, and to Professor Clive Bloom for providing the author with the opportunity to write it.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Gothic literary connections to eerie crypts and graveyards date back at least to Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel the Castle of Otranto, although today they would most likely be associated with Bram Stoker’s 1897 vampire novel Dracula which contains a plethora of graveyard mnemonics in the form of coffins, ruinous castles, tombs and crypts. The novel’s enduring popularity derives from its inexhaustible manifestations onto celluloid in the twentieth century, most notably in the sequence of Dracula movies made by British film production company Hammer Films. The post punk Goth subculture which emerged in Great Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s is characterised by the distinct sartorial appearance of its followers dressed in exaggerated versions of Victorian mourning costume and adornments emphasising the culture’s morbid qualities. For many years Highgate Cemetery’s intrinsic gothic gloom made it an irresistible place of pilgrimage for the UK’s Goth community. The cemeteries were never referred to as the Magnificent Seven in the nineteenth century or beyond. This fitting soubriquet was bequeathed on them by Hugh Meller in the forward to his 1981 book: London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer. Whilst the soubriquet has certainly stuck it is not strictly accurate as an eighth commercial cemetery, the Victoria Park Cemetery, Bethnal Green, was established in 1845. However, it was relatively short-lived closing in 1879 before the graves and monuments were cleared and the site laid out as a public park - as it remains today. The razing of the cemetery’s physical form in the nineteenth century was responsible for its apparent erasure from history.

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The Magnificent Seven were not the first privately owned extramural public cemeteries to be established in England in the nineteenth century. The first such cemetery to be established was the non-conformist Rusholme Road Cemetery, in Manchester, in May in 1821. Whilst Rusholme Road retained some garden features the design emphasis was functional. The first public cemeteries of architectural grandeur were Liverpool’s non-conformist Low Hill Cemetery opening in 1825, and its Anglican rival, St James’ Cemetery, opening in 1829. The latter cemetery is generally considered to be England’s first garden cemetery. Whilst the tiny non-conformist Rosary Cemetery in Norwich is routinely cited as the first privately owned general cemetery to be established in England (in 1819) recent scholarship suggests that Rusholme Road Cemetery is more deserving of this claim. The credibility of the two claims for being England’s first privately owned general cemetery were analysed in Dr Ian Dungavell’s research paper: ‘Four Cemetery Firsts’, presented at the Victorian Society Study Day: Great Gardens of Death: Urban Cemeteries of the Nineteenth Century in England (18 May 2019). 5. Punch, July–December 1849, cited in Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 95. 6. Morley, John, Death Heaven and the Victorians (Studio Vista London, 1971), p. 35. 7. Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 97. 8. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Sutton, 2004), p. 32. 9. Whilst numerous private burial grounds and crypts, primarily for nonconformists, did exist in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth Centuries they were mainly small, speculative ventures gaining a shocking reputation for profiteering and obscene burial conditions. Probably the best known example is the scandalous Enon Chapel crypt, off Aldwych, which was available to all denominations for a fee. In this small crypt measuring 59 by 29 feet some 12,000 bodies were deposited from 1822 until its forced closure in 1842. The chapel hall was then infamously used as a venue for fashionable Victorian tea dances, shrewdly marketed by the management as ‘Dancing on the Dead’ where the stench of the putrid and decomposing bodies piled only a few feet below caused the dancers to vomit and swoon. The chapel’s dead were disinterred and re-buried with dignity at West Norwood Cemetery in 1847. See Edwin Chadwick’s (1843) Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns for a full list of all denominational churchyards and burial grounds operating within the Metropolis in 1840. 10. Brooks, Chris, Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victorian Cemetery (Wheaton, 1989), p. 1. 11. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (David & Charles, 1972), pp. 21–22. 12. The Times History of London (Times Books, 2004), p. 88.

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13. Hunt, Tristram, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (W&N, 2005), p. 29. 14. Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 99. 15. Morley, John, Death Heaven and the Victorians (Studio Vista London, 1971), p. 7. 16. Hunt, Tristram, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (W&N, 2005), p. 34. 17. Cited in Infant Deaths in 19th Century England, Open University, https://www. open.edu/openlearn/ocw/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=28151§ion=2.2. 18. Cited in Professor A. J. & Bidmead, J. M., Going to Paradise by Way of Kensal Green: A Most Unfit Subject for Trading Profit? (University of Leicester, January 2008), https://lra.le.ac.uk, p. 5. Edwin Chadwick’s immense Benthamite report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, including its 1843 Supplementary Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns, was the most influential of an array of reports produced in the 1830s and 1840s illustrating the need for public health and sanitary reforms within working class communities. These reports culminated in the Public Health Act of 1848 and the Metropolitan Burial Acts of 1852–1857. The socio-political impact of Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary report is comparable to William Beveridge’s equally far reaching welfare report published one hundred years later. 19. Negev, Eilat, and Koren, Yehuda, First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life, Fortune and Tragedy of Rachel Beer (JR Books, 2011), p. 94. 20. Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry Into the Practice of Interment in Towns; Made at the Request of Her Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for the Home Department (1843) (Forgotten Books Classic Reprint Series, 2018), pp. 72 and 198. 21. The exact cause of Prince Albert’s death has become a matter of dispute among historians in recent years. Nonetheless, the contemporary diagnosis for his cause of death was typhoid fever. 22. Evans, Professor Richard J., The Victorians: Life and Death, Lecture Transcript (Gresham College, 2010), https://www.gresham.ac.uk/, p. 7. 23. Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry Into the Practice of Interment in Towns; Made at the Request of Her Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for the Home Department (1843) (Forgotten Books Classic Reprint Series, 2018), p. 189. 24. The recently bereaved—and necessarily wealthy—Victorian could always refer to the relevant chapters in Cassell’s Household Guide (1869 edition onwards) for a detailed guide covering all aspects of dealing with a death in the household including mourning etiquette.

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25. The author was once shown a most morbid Victorian memorial portrait picked up at some emporium by a fellow Highgate Cemetery tour guide. The photograph—contained in a beautiful black leather folder with tassel—was a perfect family portrait of a beaming father standing beside his elegantly dressed young wife sitting in a chair holding their new born baby. The author was therefore incredulous to learn that the wife had apparently perished in childbirth as had the child she was holding. After much scrutiny of the photograph the author was able to satisfy himself that the wife was indeed dead. Whilst the embalmer had certainly earned his fee he could not overcome the vacant expressions of the wife’s eyes. The fact that she was wearing a black dress with jet earrings pointed to a family in mourning. The vaguely discernible black cords strapping the wife to the rear of the chair were conclusive. Into the present day families unknowingly display elegant sepia portraits of Victorian forbears who were in fact dead when the portraits were taken. 26. Mary Shelley’s father was the eminent free thinker and political philosopher William Godwin. Godwin’s ‘Essay on Sepulchres’ (1809) was a philosophical treatise on the special attachment people have for the graves of loved ones based on his family’s reverence for his wife’s grave. The treatise was unsurprisingly Mary Shelley’s favourite graveside read. Whilst not directly promoting burial reform the essay clearly reflects contemporary discourse on the subject in a sentimental vain not dissimilar to the Graveyard Poets or Gessner, as this quote shows: ‘It is impossible that I should not follow by sense the last remains of my friend; and finding him nowhere above the surface of the earth, should not feel an attachment to the spot where his body has been deposited. His heart must be made of impenetrable stuff who does not attribute a certain sacredness to the grave of the one he loved’… Godwin, William, Essay on Sepulchres (London, 1809), cited in McNally, David, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012), p. 96. 27. Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry Into the Practice of Interment in Towns; Made at the Request of Her Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for the Home Department (1843) (Forgotten Books Classic Reprint Series, 2018), pp. 70 and 71. 28. Ibid., p.70. 29. Skipper, James & Landow, Professor George P., ‘Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian Era’, The Victorian Web: Literature, History, & Culture in the Age of Victoria (www.victorianweb.org). 30. May, Trevor, The Victorian Undertaker (Shire Publications, 2011), p. 11. 31. For a full list of London’s Anglican burial grounds in 1840 see Edwin Chadwick’s: Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry Into the Practice of Interment in Towns; Made at the Request of Her Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for the Home Department (1843) (Forgotten Books Classic Reprint Series, 2018), pp. 273–277.

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32. Weekly Despatch, 30th September 1838, cited in Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 101. 33. The Order for the Burial of the Dead within the Book of Common Prayer used by the Church of England between 1662 and 1928 did not even refer to the deceased by name or commemorate their life in any way. The impersonal focus of the service was forgiveness of individual sin and an appeal for resurrection. In extremis the medieval military order of Teutonic Knights was known to leave its dead on the battlefield believing that the soul had gone to heaven in Christian martyrdom—the body was unimportant. 34. This deeply divisive issue remained unresolved until the Burial Laws Amendment Act,1880, forced the Anglican Church to accept all burials within its churchyards regardless of Christian domination or religion, including nonconformist burial rites. This tardy legislative action was a direct consequence of the notorious Akenham burial scandal of 1878—see Ronald Fletcher’s In a Country Churchyard (B.T. Batsford, 1978), Chapter 4, ‘A National Scandal: The Akenham Burial Case’. 35. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Sutton, 2004), p. 70. 36. Brooks, Chris, Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victorian Cemetery (Wheaton, 1989), p. 4. 37. Curl, James Stevens, Freemasonry & the Enlightenment (Historical Publications, 2011), p. 182. 38. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Sutton, 2004), p.7. 39. The avant-garde Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) was inspired by the mournful and reflective qualities of the Et in Arcadia ego paintings to draw his own typically playful version in 1896. In Beardsley’s version an aging dandy (looking suspiciously like Oscar Wilde whom Beardsley knew well) looks upon a funerary pedestal and urn apparently mourning the loss of his youthful good looks! The fact that the Et in Arcadia ego paintings were still inspiring late nineteenth century artists as diverse as Beardsley demonstrates their enduring relevance to Victorian funerary tastes. 40. Curl, James Stevens, Freemasonry & the Enlightenment (Historical Publications, 2011), p. 188. 41. The most influential writer on the ‘Picturesque’ was the former schoolmaster and clergyman William Gilpin (1724–1804) through his ‘Observations’ series of books published in the late eighteenth century. These slim volumes presented lithographic reproductions of Gilpin’s amateur landscape sketches with explanatory texts. The first volume concentrating on the wild riverscapes of the Wye Valley (1782) and its emotive effect on the viewer remains the most influential. Gilpin was the first person to academically define the meaning of the term picturesque to describe and illustrate ‘that kind of beauty which would look well in a picture’ via his ‘principles of picturesque beauty’. Gilpins’s books had a powerful didactic effect on the romantically inclined popularising travel to Great Britain’s most picturesque places. His reflections on the picturesque qualities of the ruins of Tintern Abbey would make the Abbey and its setting a site of picturesque pilgrimage for years to come. See Thacker, Christopher:

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44.

45.

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47. 48.

49.

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The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (St Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 142–145. Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (Penguin Books, 1962), p. 35 Symes, Michael, The Picturesque and the Later Georgian Garden (Redcliffe Press, 2012), p. 31. It is notable that two of England’s earliest and best landscape gardeners, William Kent (Stowe) and John Vanbrugh (Castle Howard) had both worked as theatrical set designers. The landscape would quite literally become their creative stage to inspire a certain mood, perhaps reflecting the changing qualities of the season or time of day, enhanced by elements of theatrical set dressing in the form of mock ruins and other ‘eye catchers’. In fact, Kent even went as far as planting dead trees to create a sense of gloom when making improvements to the gardens of Kensington Palace. The Arcadian garden memorial has antecedents in India with the establishment of South Park Cemetery, Calcutta, in 1767. South Park was a grandiose cemetery resplendent with classical statuary and imposing tombs and mausolea intended to make an imperial statement. The cemetery’s Arcadian memorials had a profound influence on England’s landscape garden designers, particularly John Vanbrugh who advocated the building of temple style family mausoleums within landscape gardens. The mausoleum built by Nicholas Hawksmoor at Castle Howard derives from the influence of India via the writings of Vanbrugh (who was a former employee of the East India Company). See Curl, James Stevens (Introduction): The Art of Memory: Sculptures in the Cemeteries of London by Richard Barnes (Frontier Publishing, 2016) The Egyptian obelisk was revered by the Romans before being adopted as a Christian symbol of resurrection by the early Roman Church. The obelisk located outside St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, is the most prominent and meaningful example of the Christianised obelisk. Hadfield, Miles, The English Landscape Garden (Shire Garden History, 1988), p. 39; Thacker, Christopher, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (St Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 143. Hussey, Christopher, The English Landscape Garden 1700–1750 (Country Life Limited, 1967), p. 11. The melancholic and commemorative qualities of the English Garden inspired various continental writers and philosophers to promote the virtues of extramural burial within landscaped gardens, most notably Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) in his book ‘Etudes de la Nature’ (1784). Bernardin denounced churchyard burial as harmful to the living advocating the establishment of public cemeteries for mournful reflection in landscaped parks with commemorative monuments in the English Arcadian style—not dissimilar to the sentiments espoused by J.C. Loudon 40 years later. See Curl, James Stevens,Freemasonry & the Enlightenment (Historical Publications, 2011), pp. 186–192. The Revolutionary Government moved Rousseau’s body to the Parisian Pantheon in 1794 to rest alongside France’s other heroes of the revolution.

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50. John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) was a profoundly influential horticultural writer, botanist and landscape gardener. Loudon published his enormous Encyclopaedia of Gardening in 1822 before establishing The Gardner’s Magazine in 1826 which greatly influenced contemporary tastes on the subject. Loudon campaigned for the planting of trees on public thoroughfares and establishing parks as public amenities before unsurprisingly being commissioned to design England’s first public park, the Derby Arboretum, which opened in 1840. Loudon’s gardening interests later diversified into promoting the soothing, intellectual and hygienic qualities of garden cemeteries in which capacity he was an early advocate for building extramural cemeteries around the Metropolis. For Loudon, gardens and cemeteries retained a symbiotic relationship which he articulated in his book: On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1843). Loudon naturally advocated that once a cemetery had served its purpose it should become a garden for public recreation. Loudon’s didactive and scientific approach to cemetery design would greatly influence the design and management of the second generation of public cemeteries established by the new burial boards in the second half of the nineteenth century (see James Stevens Curl’s introduction to the new edition of Loudon’s On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1981) for a detailed overview of Loudon’s life and achievements). 51. Arnold, Professor A. J. & Bidmead, J. M., Going to Paradise by Way of Kensal Green: A Most Unfit Subject for Trading Profit? (University of Leicester, January 2008), https://lra.le.ac.uk, p. 7. 52. Ibid., p. 14. 53. Hunt, Tristram, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (W&N, 2005), p. 98. 54. Blanchard, Laman, Ainsworth’s Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Volume II, 1842), pp. 177–188. 55. Curl, James Stevens (Editor), Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins & Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824–2001, Chapter 13: The Landscape of Kensal Green, Brent Elliott (Phillimore, 2001), p. 292. 56. At the time of writing Kensal Green has 153 statutory listed monuments on the national register of buildings of special architectural or historic interest— see the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery website: www.kensalgreen.co.uk. Any visit to Kensal Green should seek out the exquisite sculptural statements of the Graeco-Egyptian Ducrow family mausoleum; the Wyndham Lewis pyramid/obelisk, the imposing Major-General Sir William Casement Egyptian sarcophagus and the classical elegance of the Sievier and Soyer family monuments. Kensal Green was the only London cemetery deemed worthy to receive Royal patronage starting with the Duke of Sussex (sixth son of King George III) in 1843 and ending with Prince George, Duke of Cambridge (grandson of King George III), in 1904 greatly enhancing the cemetery’s popularity. 57. Morley, John, Death Heaven and the Victorians (Studio Vista London, 1971), pp. 53 and 54.

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58. Thomas, David C., The Foundation of Highgate Cemetery—Its Architecture and Significance (Academic thesis 1978, London Borough of Camden Local History Library), p. 7. 59. John Milner’s ‘History of Winchester’ (1798) and John Carter’s series of monographs: ‘Views of Ancient Buildings in England’ (1786–1793) were particularly popular gothic publications. John Milner (1752–1826), a catholic priest and antiquary, was the first Englishman to argue that the pointed arch was the fundamental element of all gothic architecture distinct from its decorative qualities - see Lewis, Michael J., The Gothic Revival, (Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 48. Perhaps the eighteenth century’s earliest taste informing gothic overview was Batty Langley’s highly idiosyncratic ‘Gothic Architecture improved by Rules and Proportions in many Grand Designs of Columns, Doors, Windows, Chimney-pieces, Arcades, Colonnades, Porticos, Umbrellos, Temples and Pavilions, etc’ (1742 & 1747), enhanced by precise architectural illustrations. Despite the bombastically academic title the book was a scholastic attempt to subject gothic architecture to classical discipline. 60. Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (Penguin Books, 1962), pp. 59–62. 61. Ibid., p. 67. 62. In his influential book The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, Sir Kenneth Clark labels this early style of Gothic as ‘Rococo Gothic’ which is broader and less confusing than ‘Regency Gothic’. Strictly speaking ‘Regency Gothic’ only lasted between 1811–1820, however, the term has come to relate more broadly to the romanticised gothic style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century than the actual regency period. 63. Strawberry Hill apart the most famous Regency Gothic building still standing is the Brighton Pavilion commissioned by the Prince Regent, subsequently George IV, and designed by John Nash. Built between 1815–1822 to a distinctly romantic Indo-Saracenic style not untypical of elements of the funerary architecture found within the Magnificent Seven—most notably Highgate’s Egyptian Avenue and Abeny Park’s Egyptian gateway. 64. Fonthill Abbey was designed (in close association with Beckford) by the renowned Georgian architect James Wyatt (1746–1813). Unfortunately, whilst Wyatt designed the building he did not closely oversee its construction. 65. Lewis, Michael J., The Gothic Revival (Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 44. 66. Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (Penguin Books, 1962), p. 31 (the author has slightly paraphrased Walpole’s oblique use of language). 67. The demolished non-conformist gothic chapel was replaced by a new chapel in 1955 to serve the still operating crematorium which opened in 1915 on a site adjacent to the chapel. The crematorium furnaces were (and remain) housed in the now cleared non-conformist catacombs. 68. At the time of writing West Norwood Cemetery has 69 statutory listed monuments on the national register of buildings of special architectural or historic

504

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71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

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interest—see Lambeth Council Website, West Norwood Cemetery: A New Beginning: https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/births-deaths-marriages-and-civil-partnersh ips/deaths/the-south-metropolitan-west-norwood-cemetery. Any visit to West Norwood should seek out the magnificent mock-medieval Berens sarcophagus, the terracotta mausoleum of Sir Henry Tate, the Maddick Mausolum, and the Greek enclosure. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (David & Charles, 1972), p. 86. Referenced in Josie Wall’s research paper: ‘Public Celebration and Private Grief in the Garden Cemetery’, presented at the Victorian Society Study day: Great Gardens of Death: Urban Cemeteries of the Nineteenth Century in England (18th May 2019). Dr Ian Dungavell finally laid years of supposition about the reasons for the construction of the east tunnel to rest in the April 2017 edition of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Newsletter. Essentially the tunnel was a legal mechanism to allow the London Cemetery Company to utilise adjacent land for burial space without requiring a new Act of Parliament. Nonetheless, the tunnel helpfully enabled the Company to install a commercially modish coffin lift. Whilst the tunnel was back filled long ago the entrances remain visible at the time of writing. The colonnade—more accurately an arcade—was added when practical improvements to the cemetery landscape were made around 1842 by the Company’s new architect (later the Architect for the Corporation of London) James Bunstone Bunning (1802–1863). Bunning replaced Geary as company architect in 1839 (both Bunning and Geary are buried in the cemetery) and aside from the arcade built the cuttings catacombs and new carriage drives either side of the colonnade. Originally carriages entered the cemetery through the central archway and straight up a steep drive into the cemetery which proved too steep for heavily laden carriages. Bunning pedestrianised the archway entrance and the main drive turning the side paths into carriage drives. The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: Cemeteries (December 21, 1839), title page. An example of Highgate Cemetery inspired romantic verse can be found at pages 92–93 of James Stevens Curl ‘s 1972 edition of The Victorian Celebration of Death. Readers should note that the author has chosen not to waste word space quoting it. Collison, George, Cemetery Internment (London ,1840), pp. 170–171, cited in Pridham, Matthew, The Egyptian Vaults of Highgate Cemetery, Postgraduate Diploma in Genealogical Studies, University of Strathclyde (2011) (London Borough of Camden Local History Library), p. 14. The peak of the Egyptian Revival’s funerary influence in England was surely the proposal to build a giant pyramidal mausoleum big enough to hold five million bodies (the base being the size of Russell Square and higher than St Paul’s Cathedral) with a decorative obelisk at its apex. This ‘Grand Mausoleum’ designed by Thomas Wilson (1780—1840) in the 1820s was mooted for Primrose Hill

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78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

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where it would have dominated London’s sky line. Whilst the vision was architecturally sublime the huge costs involved in its construction scared investors off and the vision was never realised—shame. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (David & Charles, 1972), p. 94. The tunnel roof was removed in the late 1870s to make the catacombs less eerie and more saleable to changing tastes. At the time of writing Highgate Cemetery has 83 statutory listed monuments on the national register of buildings of special architectural or historic interest— see Highgate Cemetery: Conservation Plan—Prepared for FOHC August 2018 (highgatecemetery.org). Probably Highgate’s best-known grave monument is that of Karl Marx located in the eastern cemetery. This satirical cartoon is reproduced at page 105 of the 2004 edition of James Steven Curl’s Victorian Celebration of Death. Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Sutton, 2004), p. 106. Ibid. Loudon, J. C., On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1843) (New Edition, 1981), pp. 31–33. Woollacott, Ron, Investors in Death: The Story of Nunhead Cemetery and the London Cemetery Company and Its Successors (Friends of Nunhead Cemetery Publication, 2010), p.33. Ibid., p. 84. Taylor, Rosemary, Every Stone Tells a Story: A Short History and History Trail of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park (Privately Published, 1996), p. 4. Sturgis, Matthew, Oscar: A Life (Apollo, 2018), p. 579 Arnold, Professor AJ & Bidmead, J. M., Going to Paradise by Way of Kensal Green: A Most Unfit Subject for Trading Profit? (University of Leicester, January 2008), https://lra.le.ac.uk, p. 24. Ibid., p. 21. The Rules, Orders, and Regulations of the London Cemetery Company (May 1st, 1883), p. 7. Those wishing to gain a picture of the overgrown and neglected state of Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s should seek out the 1972 Amicus horror film ‘Tales from the Crypt’ whose opening credit sequence (evocatively set to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor) was filmed in Highgate’s west cemetery. Not only does the film capture the eerie overgrown state of the cemetery in the 1970s one of its horror segments features Joan Collins being murdered by Father Christmas— unmissable! A literary alternative can be found in Richard D. Altick’s evocative and hilarious description of visiting Highgate Cemetery in the late 1960s: To Be in England: An American Literary Man’s Personal View of the England He Found While Exploring Its Literary Sites (1969). Lampton, Lucinda, Vanishing Victorina (Elsevier-Phaidon, 1976), p. 99. The recording of prominent scenes of Hammer’s 1970 film Taste the Blood of Dracula in Highgate’s Egyptian Avenue and Circle of Lebanon was the likely stimulus for the alleged vampire sightings and upsurge in pernicious nocturnal occult activities that plagued the cemetery in the 1970s. For a dispassionate

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exposition of the Highgate Vampire mania see Paul Adams’ excellent book: Written in Blood: A Cultural History of the British Vampire (2014). 93. Lydon, John, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Picador, 1993), p. 62.

Bibliography Adams, Paul, A Cultural History of the British Vampire (The History Press, 2014) Altick, Richard D., To Be in England: An American Literary Man’s Personal View of the England He Found While Exploring Its Literary Sites (W. W. Norton, 1969). Arnold, Catherine, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Arnold, Professor A. J. and Bidmead, J. M., Going to Paradise by Way of Kensal Green: A Most Unfit Subject for Trading Profit? (University of Leicester, January 2008), https://lra.le.ac.uk. Blanchard, Laman, Ainsworth’s Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Volume II, 1842). Brooks, Chris, Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victorian Cemetery (Wheaton, 1989). Bryan, Cathie, Walk Like An Egyptian In Kensal Green Cemetery (The Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery, 2012). Bulmer, Jenny, Highgate Cemetery: Saved by the Friends (Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, 2014). Chadwick, Edin, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (HM Stationery Office, 1843) (Forgotten Books Classic Reprint Series, 2018). Cox, Jenny, Highgate Cemetery Trail (Friends of Highgate Cemetery, 1978). Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (Penguin Books, 1962). Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation (Harper & Row, 1969). Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (David & Charles, 1972). Curl, James Stevens, Nunhead Cemetery, London: A history of the Planning, Architecture, Landscaping and Fortunes of a Great Nineteenth-Century Cemetery (Ancient Monuments Society Journal, Volume 22, 1977–1978). Curl, James Stevens (Editor), Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins & Development of the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, London, 1824–2001 (Phillimore, 2001). Curl, James Stevens, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Sutton Publishing, 2004). Curl, James Stevens, The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West (Routledge, 2005). Curl, James Stevens, Freemasonry & the Enlightenment (Historical Publications, 2011). Curl, James Stevens (Introduction), The Art of Memory: Sculptures in the Cemeteries of London by Richard Barnes (Frontier Publishing, 2016). Davoli, Silvia, Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from the Horace Walpole Collection (Scala Arts Publishing, 2018). De Novellis, Mark, Arcadian Vistas: Richmond’s Landscape Gardens (Empress Litho, 2013). Dungavell, Dr Ian, Highgate Cemetery: Windows on the Past (Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, 2017). Elliot, Brent, Highgate Cemetery (Friends of Highgate Cemetery, 1978). Evans, Professor Richard J., The Victorians: Life and Death, Lecture Transcript (Gresham College, 2010), https://www.gresham.ac.uk/. Ellis, Bill, Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions and the Media (The University of Kentucky Press, 2000). Flanagan, Bob, Norwood’s Mausolea (Friends of West Norwood Cemetery, 2017). Friends of Highgate Cemetery Newsletter, The Egyptian Avenue, (December 2013).

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Friends of Highgate Cemetery Newsletter, The Terrace Catacombs: Was Brunel Involved (December 2014). Friends of Highgate Cemetery Newsletter, Guiding Visitors in 1845 (August 2016). Friends of Highgate Cemetery Newsletter, Why did they build the tunnel to Highgate Cemetery East? (April 2017). Gemmett, Robert J., William Beckford’s Fonthill: Architecture, Landscape and the Arts (Fonthill Media, 2016). Gray, Thomas, Gray’s Elegy (London, 1834). Hadfield, Miles, The English Landscape Garden (Shire Garden History, 1988). Hunt, Tristram, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (W&N, 2005). Hussey, Christopher, The English Landscape Garden 1700–1750 (Country Life Limited, 1967). Jackson, Lee, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth (Yale University Press, 2014). Johnson, Malcolm, Crypts of London (The History Press, 2013). Joyce, Paul, A Guide to Abney Park Cemetery (Abney Park Cemetery Trust, 1994). Keister, Douglas, Stories in Stone Paris: A Field Guide to Paris Cemeteries (Gibbs Smith, 2013). Kinsey, Wayne, Hammer’s Film Legacy (Peveril Publishing, 2014). Lampton, Lucinda, Vanishing Victorina, (Elsevier-Phaidon, 1976). Lewis, Michael J., The Gothic Revival (Thames & Hudson, 2002). Litten, Julian, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Service Since 1450 (Robert Hall, 1991). Loudon, J. C., On The Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries (1843), A New Edition (Ivelet Books Ltd, 1981). Lydon, John, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Picador, 1993). May, Trevor, The Victorian Undertaker (Shire Publications, 2011). Mckee, Kirsten Carter, Carlton Hill and the Plans for Edinburgh’s Third New Town (John Donald, 2018). McNally, David, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012). Miller, Hugh, London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (Gregg International, 1981). Miller, Hugh, and Parsons, Brian, London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (The History Press 2011). Morley, John, Death Heaven and the Victorians (Studio Vista London, 1971). Negev, Eilat & Koren, Yehuda, First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life, Fortune and Tragedy of Rachel Beer (JR Books, 2011). Nicolle, David, Teutonic Knight 1190–1561 (Osprey Publishing, 2007). Pridham, Matthew, The Egyptian Vaults of Highgate Cemetery (Postgraduate Diploma in Genealogical Studies, University of Strathclyde 2011) (London Borough of Camden Local History Library). Pridham, Matthew, Who Were They? Interments In Highgate Cemetery Dissenter Catacombs (Private Research Project, 2010) (London Borough of Camden Local History Library). The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: Cemeteries (21 December 1839). Pepys, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection (Penguin Classics, 2003). Richardson, John, Highgate Past (Historical Publications, 2004) Richardson, Ruth, Death Dissection and the Destitute (Routledge, 1987). Rugg, Julie, Churchyard and Cemetery: Tradition and Modernity in Rural North Yorkshire (Manchester University Press, 2013). Ruskin, John, The Nature of Gothic (1853) (Charles Lehman Publisher, 1975). Rutherford, Sarah, The Victorian Cemetery (Shire Library, 2010). Rutherford, Sarah, & Lovie, Jonathan, Georgian Garden Buildings (Shire Library, 2012). The Rules, Orders, and Regulations of the London Cemetery Company (May 1st, 1883) (Author’s Private Collection).

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Sampson, Fiona, In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (Profile Books, 2018). Smithson, Alison & Smithson, Peter, The Euston Arch and the Growth of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway (Thames & Hudson, 1968). The South Metropolitan Cemetery, West Norwood: An Introductory Guide (Friends of West Norwood Cemetery, 2007). Summerson, John, The Classical Language of Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 1980). Summerson, John, et al.The Spirt of the Age: Eight Centuries of British Architecture (BBC, 1975). Symes, Michael, The Picturesque and the Later Georgian Garden (Redcliffe Press, 2012). Sweet, Matthew, Black Aquarius, Archive on 4 (BBC Radio 4 documentary on the Occult Revival, 18th April 2015). Sturgis, Matthew, Oscar: A Life (Apollo, 2018). Taylor, Rosemary, Every Stone Tells A Story: A Short History and History Trail of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park (Privately Published, 1996). Thacker, Christopher, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (St Martin’s Press, 1983). The Times History of London (Times Books, 2004). Thomas, David C., The Foundation of Highgate Cemetery—Its Architecture and Significance (Academic Research Paper, 1978) (London Borough of Camden Local History Library). Townsend, Dale (Editor), Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (British Library Publishing, 2014). Tourneur, Par M. Le, Les Nuits D’Young (Paris, 1769). Voller, Jack G. (Editor), The Graveyard School: An Anthology (Valancourt Books, 2015). The Victorian Web: literature, history & culture in the age of Victoria (www.victorianweb.org). Whittingham, Sarah, Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania (Frances Lincoln Limited, 2012). Woollacott, Ron, Investors in Death: The Story of Nunhead Cemetery and the London Cemetery Company and Its Successors (Friends of Nunhead Cemetery Publication, 2010). Yorke, Trevor, Gravestones, Tombs & Memorials (Countryside Books, 2010). Young, Edward, Night Thoughts (London, 1797).

Science and the Supernatural: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and Pseudo-Science in the Nineteenth Century Miranda Corcoran

The second episode of the British-American horror series Penny Dreadful centres around the spectacle of a séance. Airing between 2014 and 2016, this twenty-firstcentury television programme introduces the séance not simply as a convenient expository tool—providing relevant plot details from the great beyond—but as an encapsulation of the broader phenomenon of Victorian occultism upon which the series depends. Presenting the séance as a social event, the culmination of highsociety party, in which both participants and eager spectators eagerly await the performance of spiritual communication, Penny Dreadful demonstrates a keen understanding of the multivalence of nineteenth-century Spiritualism. At once, a religious movement, a scientific penetration of spirit world, an occult practice and a mode of popular entertainment, Spiritualism in the Age of Steam was positioned at the nexus of a multitudinous array of complex, often competing, cultural discourses. By foregrounding a séance early in its narrative Penny Dreadful not only gestures towards this polysemy, but it also highlights how crucial Spiritualism and other analogous scientific constructions of the supernatural are to our modern understanding of nineteenthcentury Anglo-American culture. Contemporary fiction and film—from the historical novels of Sarah Waters to the sensational horror comics of Emily Carroll—repeatedly employ Spiritualism, séances and spirit conjuring as a sort of textual shorthand for the complex dynamism of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it could be argued that Spiritualism and scientific approaches to the mystical are essential to how we, as modern cultural consumers, understand the Steam Age. The cinematic and literary representations of the period that now constitute the imaginary afterlife of the nineteenth century frequently employ Spiritualism as a narrative cue, a contextual device to establish the distant Otherness of a time when respectable society sought to commune with the beyond and the notion of a scientifically verifiable supernaturalism did not seem wholly incongruous. M. Corcoran (B) University College Cork, Cork, Ireland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_27

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Although representing a brief historical moment, when the methods of empirical investigation promised to map out the secrets of the spiritual realm as if they were circuit diagrams, the nineteenth-century preoccupation with Spiritualism, psychical research and the paranormal remains central to our understanding of the period. Moreover, these movements left indelible marks on both nineteenth-century gothic fiction and on more contemporary iterations of the Gothic. Although, as Dara Downey observes, “Considering the immense popularity of Spiritualism itself as a quasi-religious belief system throughout the nineteenth century in the United States, there seems to be a bizarre paucity of overtly supernatural stories revolving around mediums or séances from this period, apart from a small number that undermine Spiritualism’s credibility”,1 it is possible to trace the influence of this movement through the fiction of the period. Rarely manifesting in a direct incorporation of Spiritualists, psychical researchers and their paraphernalia, Steam-Age horror fiction nevertheless alludes to shifting attitudes towards the spectral by integrating notions of the scientific into their portrayals of the ghastly, approaching spirits from a rational position or foregrounding debates that pitted scepticism against belief. Where Spiritualism is specifically mentioned as a new religious or cultural movement, it often forms part of the broader milieu of nineteenth-century society, a signifier of evolving social mores and new technological paradigms. Moreover, the nineteenth-century intersection of the scientific and the supernatural—from the medium’s so-called “spiritual telegraph” to the craze for spirit photography—impacted not only contemporaneous literary fiction, but it also influenced subsequent technical and aesthetic developments in the visual arts, stage performance, photography and cinema. The echoes of this era and its fusion of two realms we now understand as irreconcilably disparate—the scientific and the supernatural—continue to haunt our fantasy lives. Fictive representations of the nineteenth-century regularly establish the dynamism of the era by portraying Spiritualists and their séances as embodiments of the exciting, and occasionally unsettling, ways in which spirituality, technology, entertainment and politics intersected in an age of seemingly unstoppable advancement. This chapter explores the myriad, fascinating encounters between science and the supernatural that occurred during the nineteenth-century Age of Steam. Analysing how this explosion of scientific approaches to the supernatural not only transformed the spiritual lives of people in the nineteenth-century but also seeped into fiction, performance and the visual arts, the subsequent pages contextualise the emergence of rationalist attitudes towards the supernatural while also tracking the cultural impact of these perspectives. The first part of the chapter discusses the emergence of Spiritualism in the context of an increasingly rational, technocentric culture. The second section explores how ideas derived from Spiritualism, and equally scientific approaches to the spectral, influenced gothic and horror fiction of the period; while the third section suggests some of the ways in which the more spectacular aspects of these movements influenced the visual arts, early cinema and stage performances. The chapter will close with a brief consideration of the rich afterlife of nineteenthcentury Spiritualism, indicating some of the ways in which the era’s co-mingling of the supernatural and the scientific have shaped contemporary Gothicism.

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Published at the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)— a novel associated in the contemporary imagination with an old world of crumbling Transylvian castles and caped vampiric counts—features a conversation that is emblematic of the manner in which the technological and the preternatural repeatedly collided, overlapped and intermingled throughout the 1800s. In a conversation between asylum administrator Dr John Seward and his mentor Abraham Van Helsing, the older man cautions his protegee that “there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity – who themselves would themselves not so long ago have been burned as wizards. There are always mysteries in life”.2 Van Helsing’s admonition forms part of a larger dialogue in which the elderly professor attempts to explain to Seward the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Lucy Westerna. Alluding to phenomena such as corporeal transference, materialisation, astral bodies, mindreading and hypnotism, Van Helsing suggests, through the connection he establishes between these paranormal phenomenon and the once-mysterious realm of electrical science, that preternatural occurrences are merely new “mysteries”.3 For Van Helsing, apparently miraculous events are simply puzzles to be unlocked through the application of rational thought, and consequently such mysteries as telepathy, astral projection and materialisation may be unravelled in much the same way that humanity has mastered the power of electricity. Coming at the end of a century in which a host of miraculous abilities—from long distance communication to the duplication of images and the power to light one’s home with the flick of a switch—had come within the purview of human capability, Van Helsing’s conflation of electrical science and paranormal activity was not out of step with the popular thought of the period. As Pamela Thurschwell observes, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, a varied range of discourses, “occult, literary, scientific, psychological, and technological converge[d] to inaugurate shifting models of the permeability and suggestibility of the individual’s mind and body”.4 A similar admixture of conceptual models also functioned to recalibrate popular conceptions of the afterlife, spiritual communication, telepathic messaging and religious faith. The nineteenth century was, after all, an era in which rapid transformations in scientific thought brought about by the Enlightenment, the advent of telecommunications, photographic technology and evolutionary theory had “unmoored man from traditional morals”.5 Indeed, in the words of Jason Colavito, “Spiritual values and beliefs were one of the frontiers of change as the Victorians continued to deal with the fallout from the Enlightenment’s critique of faith and celebration of science. This impacted beliefs about the fate of the human soul, which had a long and mostly unchallenged history before this time”.6 Alongside the epistemic upheavals that followed on from the Enlightenment, new technologies were capable of transcending natural laws and imbuing humanity with seemingly supernatural powers. Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message, aptly containing the words “What hath God wrought?”, was sent between Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC, in 1844 and appeared to miraculously compress space and time through the power of instantaneous communication.7 The still-novel medium of photography advanced with such speed over the course of the nineteenth century that by 1908 AM

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Worthington was able to use high-speed photography to capture water splashes and other phenomena previously imperceptible to the naked eye.8 At the end of the nineteenth century Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays enabled scientists to peer inside the human body. All of these advancements suggested that technology could empower humanity to penetrate the mysteries of the universe and utilise scientific techniques to probe the occult realms of the supernatural. Just four short years after Morse dispatched his first telegram, using a coded system of dashes and dots, a similar technique was employed by two adolescent girls living in upstate New York in order to communicate with spirits. Kate and Margaret Fox claimed to converse with a spirit inhabiting their Hydesville home by encouraging the spirit to knock or rap in response to questions they posed to it. Although the use of rapping as a mode of spiritual communication actually predates the Hydesville events, with the first reported case dating back to 1762 when a London woman named Elizabeth Parsons claimed to receive messages from a spirit who had died in her home via a similar system of raps,9 the Hydesville case captured the popular imagination in a thoroughly unprecedented manner. The two Fox Sisters, later joined by their older sibling Leah, became a sensation and took their spiritual conversations on tour. Performing in Rochester and Auburn, the Fox Sisters engaged in public communication with a variety of different spirits, encouraging them to move objects in front of an enraptured audience.10 A true phenomenon of their age, circus-owner and showman PT Barnum displayed the Foxes as “the world’s greatest mediums”.11 As spectacular as the Fox Sisters performances were, their mediumship did not remain a mere diversion, populist entertainment for the pre-cinematic age. Rather, in a short space of time, the spectacle of ghostly rappings transformed into a new and dynamic religious system, Spiritualism. In many ways, Spiritualism was a new faith for a new age. As Richard Noakes observes, Rapid developments in astronomy, chemistry, geology, natural philosophy, physiology and zoology, and the application of the sciences in an astonishing number of new inventions, had inspired confidence that the extension of scientific knowledge into unexplored territories and the discovery of new natural facts and laws would continue at an ever increasing pace.12

The methodology of the Fox Sisters with its careful system of numbered knocks aligned to particular responses undoubtedly appealed to an era when the application of scientific techniques had stripped bare the secrets of the natural world and now promised to unfurl the intricacies of the spiritual realm in a similar manner. Within this context of advancement and transformation, Spiritualism exploded in popularity. By 1860 the United States boasted between 1 and 3 million Spiritualists in a country of only 30 million.13 Although the popularity of the new faith was certainly connected to the high mortality rates of the period and compounded in the United States by the massive death toll of the Civil War (1861–1865), many were attracted by the scientific nature of Spiritualism. According to Jason Colavito, “Spiritualism sought to make use of modern science, explaining its phenomena with pseudoscientific terms; and many leading scientists investigated Spiritualism in the hopes of offering scientific

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proof of life after death”.14 For its millions of nineteenth-century adherents, Spiritualism was a scientific movement,15 a fusion of religion and science, whose inherent modernity rendered it uniquely suited to progressive movements like abolitionism, temperance and the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Kontou and Willburn connect Spiritualism explicitly to the dizzying momentum of the era, noting how in both Europe and the United States, the nineteenth century was an age of reform and revolution: “it was the Industrial Age with advances in science and technology both visible and dazzling, such as the 1860s completion of the Atlantic Cable—a popular spiritualist metaphor for the instantaneous communication between this world and the next”.16 Spiritualism eagerly aligned itself with the scientific advancements of the period, employing telegraphy as a metaphor for communication with the other side and referring to mediumship as the “spiritual telegraph”. Likewise, the spirits who conversed with the teenage Fox Sisters did so because the girls’ house was “peculiarly suited to their purpose from the fact of its being charged with the aura requisite to make it a battery for the working of the telegraph”.17 The earliest modes of communication employed by Spiritualists were tablerapping or table-turning. A comparatively simple mode of spiritual engagement, the process involved creating a suitably sombre atmosphere and the posing of questions to the great beyond. With the participants generally seated in a circle around a table, the table itself—acting as a conduit for spirits—would respond to questions in a code remarkably similar to that employed by telegraphy: it would knock or tilt once for no, thrice for yes.18 H Spicer termed this process the “the science of rapping”,19 while mediums conferred upon it the rather scientific term of “typtology”, from tupto meaning “I strike”.20 Out of this system of table-rapping and table-turning came the formal séance.21 Like its typtological predecessors, the séance was governed by a set of clear rules, a methodology that ensured these experiments in spiritual communication would be replicable across a host of diverse scenarios. Ronald Pearsall describes the rules of these spirit circles as beholden to pseudoscientific ideas about electricity, magnetism and even mathematics.22 Apparently, the individuals who comprised the circle should be of opposite temperaments, alternately “positive and negative”: the number of participants should not be fewer than three nor more than twelve, with eight being the ideal number; no person of a “strong magnetic temperament” should be involved, as they would “quash the power of the spirits”.23 Choosing the ideal medium to act as the mouthpiece for visiting spirits was also a scientific process. Evelyn de Morgan, a practicing medium of the period noted that mediumistic qualities often accompany “the sparkling dark eyes and hair of what phrenologists call the nervous-bilious type”, though blue eyes and fair hair were also acceptable.24 Drawing on phrenology, another popular science of the period, de Morgan carefully inserted the séance into the language of new scientific paradigms that defined this age of advancement and transformation. Whether facilitated by typtology, mediumistic trances or later innovations such as automatic writing and planchettes, Spiritualism was viewed by many as emblematic of their age, an exciting fusion of religion and science. It is likely that this hybridity is what contributed to the increased popularity of Spiritualism throughout the nineteenth century and on into the early decades of the twentieth. In their collection of essays

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on the phenomenon Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn are careful to suggest that Spiritualism was culturally central rather than relegated to the fringes of Victorian society. Peter Manseau stresses in his study of nineteenth-century spirit photography that during and after the Civil War, Spiritualistic beliefs were not held by an “oddball few” but formed part of mainstream religious and cultural discourse.25 Quoting a lecture from the latter half of the century, Manseau draws attention to the words of a Spiritualist speaker who saw the faith as the religion of tomorrow: Spiritualism is the future church […] Its roof will be the stars; its walls the universe; the earth its foundation. Its choir will the wild waving sea. Its idea the union of progress, steam, intelligence, and the locomotive; its aim God, Justice, and Immortality.26

Deploying the central scientific images of the period, steam and the locomotive, the speaker connects Spiritualism to notions of progress and demonstrates that religiosity and technical innovation are not wholly incongruous values. Although many of the established sciences were sceptical of Spiritualism’s claims of scientific legitimacy, noting that mediums were not trained scientists and that the movement lacked a core set of concepts,27 those affiliated with Spiritualism repeatedly attempted to frame séances and mediumship as scientifically verifiable phenomena. Karl von Reichenbach, attempted to explain mediumistic communications with the dead by appealing to the existence of what he called an Odic, or Odylic, force.28 Positing the existence of an energic field akin to Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer’s magnetic field, Reichenbach explained mediumship and table-rapping as the product of “universal emanation or force in nature that was the ultimate cause of the more familiar imponderables of heat, light, electricity, magnetism and chemical affinity, and he claimed that it was only manifest to peculiarly sensitive individuals”.29 Many Spiritualists thus attempted to reclassify supernatural phenomena as an extension of the natural world, framing spirit activity and spectral manifestations as facets of the mundane world that we simply do not understand yet.30 After all, transatlantic communication had been consigned to the realm of fantasy before the (1860s) and the capacity to peer inside the human body had been thought impossible before Röntgen’s X-rays. The spiritual realm, like anatomical interiority, was one that would eventually become comprehensible to humanity once we established the correct scientific methods for its explorations. It is also as a result of this conflation of natural and supernatural that paranormal or psychical research emerged as a serious field of study in the nineteenth century. Founded by Cambridge academics in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which still exists today, sought to rigorously and carefully apply scientific techniques to the investigation of the supernatural. Largely sympathetic to the claims of Spiritualism, the SPR aimed to utilise scientific methodologies and replicable experimental conditions to investigate the movement’s claims that the human personality can survive death and is contactable by the living.31 In the words of James P. Keeley, the investigations of the SPR constituted an attempt to “salvage such religious beliefs as the spiritual, the miraculous, and the afterlife from the predations of post-Darwinian science by placing them firmly, if possible, on a scientific foundation”.32 The SPR, like the Spiritualists, telepaths

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and clairvoyants they investigated clasped tightly to a worldview in which new technology, rather than rendering the supernatural redundant, would open up new vistas for its exploration. Considering the broad excitement generated by the dynamic manner in which the scientific and the preternatural intermingled in the nineteenth-century popular imagination, it is hardly surprising that ideas about the technologically verifiable supernaturalism would migrate to fiction. Not content to simply appear as fictive devices, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spirits frequently produced their own fiction. Anthony Enns cites numerous examples of spectres who employed the new sciences of mediumship and automatic writing to create their own literary works. Years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe was allegedly dictating poems like “The Streets of Baltimore” and “Farewell to Earth”, both of which according to biologist and Spiritualist Alfred Russel Wallace were “finer and deeper and grander poems than any written by him in the earth-life”.33 Transcribed by a medium named Lizzie Doten and published in the January 1864 edition of the Spiritualist periodical Banner of Light, “Farewell to Earth” apparently narrates the author’s experience of his soul transcending to a higher plane of existence.34 Describing the sensation of the spirit breaking free of earthly bonds, the poem purports to be Poe’s farewell to terrestrial life: So my spirit, voiceless—breathless,— Indestructible and deathless, From the heights of Life Elysian gives to Earth my parting song; Downward through the star-lit spaces, Unto Earth’s most lowly places35 Doten also took dictation of posthumously composed literature by other deceased poets, including William Shakespeare and Robert Burns.36 In her 1863 collection of poems, Doten includes a forward in which she explains that due to her “natural poetic tendencies”, she attracts spiritual influence of a “kind nature; and when I desire it, or they will to do so, they cast their characteristic inspirations upon me, and I give them utterance according to my ability”.37 Likewise, another medium, Hester Dowden, claimed to be in communication with the spirit of Oscar Wilde, employing automatic writing to receive messages from the deceased writer.38 In the early part of the twentieth century, Theodora Bosanquet, who had worked as the amanuensis of author Henry James, claimed that following his death in 1916, she had continued to transcribe messages from James on her typewriter.39 Beyond their prolific posthumous outputs, numerous writers expressed a fascination with the occult sciences while still living. In her study of Poe’s medical fiction, Cristina Pérez Arranz observes that the author’s interest in medical pathology, the spiritual realm and transcendental philosophy went beyond the private conversations he held with his one-time fiancée, the poet and Spiritualist Sarah Helen Whitman.40 Indeed, these themes can be found throughout his published works, as numerous poems and tales, from “Loss of Breath” and “Berenice” to “The Fall of the House of Usher” present a deep-seated preoccupation with the unstable boundary

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between life and death. Furthermore, in tales such as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), the murky realm of the afterlife is explored through scientific, or pseudo-scientific, means. As the narrator of that particular tale observes in its opening passages, “My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine months ago it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis”.41 Speaking in a dispassionate, scientific tone, the narrator articulates his desire to hypnotise a patient on the verge of death in order to discover if an individual in such a condition might be susceptible to the magnetic influence necessary for hypnosis and whether the proximity of death would impair or increase such magnetic susceptibility. Furthermore, the narrator seeks to evaluate how long the process of dying might be arrested by placing the patient under hypnosis. Although now viewed as little more than a parlour trick, in the nineteenth century mesmerism was seen“as a developing science that obliterated the limits of human capability”.42 Despite its horrific denouement, “The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar” captures the nineteenthcentury belief that new scientific disciplines—be they typtology, automatic writing or mesmerism—held the power to open up and illuminate the once opaque vistas of the spiritual realm, providing incontrovertible proof about the nature of life after death. In a similar manner, another luminary of nineteenth-century American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, devoted a number of his works to the era’s vibrant intermingling of the scientific and the preternatural. His 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance features the Veiled Lady, a “forgotten celebrity” by the time the narrator tells his tale who was at one point “a phenomenon in the mesmeric line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug”.43 Equally preoccupied with the emergence of a “new science” that might just as easily be categorised as “the revival of an old humbug”, Hawthorne’s earlier story “The Birthmark” (1843) seems to trace a direct line between the alchemists of centuries past and the supernaturally inflected sciences of the nineteenth century. “The Birthmark” centres on a scientist named Aylmer who, according to the narrator, believes that “by the plainest scientific logic” he will discover “the universal solvent by which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and base”.44 His scientific hubris leads him to experiment on his wife Georgiana, a woman whose beauty—we are told— is marred only by the eponymous birthmark on her cheek. Aylmer’s experiments straddle the border between the natural sciences and the occult, and his attempts to remove Georgiana’s birthmark ultimately lead to her death. A clear critique of scientific arrogance, it has been generally accepted that Hawthrone’s story is drawn from the life of Sir Kenelm Digby, a seventeenth-century natural philosopher who reputedly caused the death of his wife by poisoning her with “viper-wine”.45 Although some historians have speculated that Digby murdered his wife out of jealousy, it has also been posited that she died following her husband’s experiments with a “physicke” intended to conserve her youth and beauty.46 The intention behind Hawthorne’s story may have been a criticism of hubristic scientific ambition, however the central allusion to the alchemical fusion of the mystical and the scientific suggests that author had

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identified certain parallels between then-contemporary science and the philosophical mysticism of the past. Indeed, a similar congruity was noted by nineteenth-century mathematician and Spiritualist Augustus De Morgan, who observed that Spiritualists and early modern scientists were bound together through their engagement in “universal examination, wholly unchecked by fear of being detected in the investigation of nonsense”.47 In their respective portrayals of scientific and pseudoscientific techniques applied to such previously obscure fields such as the investigation of life after death and the manipulation of aging and decay, Poe and Hawthorne engage explicitly with the transformative nature of Steam-Age science. Imagining how new methodologies could uncover the secrets of the universe, both authors reflect the concerns of an epoch in which the parameters of scientific legitimacy had expanded to include the esoteric and the occult. Other writers of the period, while not directly addressing the intersection of the scientific and the supernatural nevertheless brought a rationalistic attitude and a pseudoscientific vocabulary to their renditions of the spectral. Jason Colavito notes that despite a pronounced lull in the publication of ghost stories between 1820 and 1850, the period directly following the American Civil War witnessed a surge of spectral tales.48 As Colavito observes, ghost stories of the late nineteenth century distinguished themselves from their predecessors by their contemporary settings and their adoption of Spiritualist doctrine about the endurance of the soul after death.49 The short stories of Robert Hichens, for example, abound with allusions to occult sciences and Spiritualist ideologies. His gothic tales often deal with subjects such as reincarnation, soul transference and psychic vampirism.50 “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”, a short piece published in the 1900 collection Tongues of Conscience foregrounds a debate between religion and science on matters of the supernatural.51 Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 story “Green Tea” features a character named Jennings who is plagued by visions of a spectral black monkey. The creature’s exact nature remains vague and Melissa Dickson attributes this ambiguity to the “blending of past and present scientific, medical, religious, and spiritualist discourses” that occurs throughout the story.52 Jenning’s consultant, a German physician named Martin Hesselius, ultimately attributes the visions to a poison that acts upon both the nerves and the spirit, an explanation that Dickson allies with the pseudoscientific Swedenborgian mysticism that emerged during the eighteenth century and preempted the scientific supernaturalism of the Spiritualist movement.53 Later in the century, Stuart Cumberland’s 1889 “Shilling Shocker” Fatal Affinity features a sequence in which the hero battles the villain on the astral plane.54 Thus, even when literary works did not explicitly engage with the Spiritualist milieu, they nevertheless engaged with the popular pseudoscientific discourses of the era, portraying events and phenomena that exceeded the parameters of “normal science”.55 As Roger Luckhurst observes fin-de-siècle Gothic readily “adopted the language of the psychical researcher and relocated spooky phenomena within the quotidian spaces of English modernity”.56 Within such texts, the supernatural was not antithetical to modernity, but simply another field of study whose mysteries would be laid bare through the application of scientific techniques. Conversely, while many nineteenth-century authors were inspired by the era’s rationalist attitude towards the supernatural, others

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intentionally wrote against this tradition. Bridget Bennett argues that in the opening sections of his 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw Henry James expresses a “nostalgia both for a particular art-form and also for an emotion – that of a familiar and recognisable kind of terror produced by the very best (that is, believable) ghostly fictions”.57 For Bennett, this nostalgia is implicitly contrasted with the public, rationalised and often commodified practices of Spiritualism. The ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw, its vagaries and equivocal approach to the existence of ghosts can therefore be seen as a rejection of the era’s tendency towards the scientific categorisation of spirits and psychic phenomena. As Bennett elucidates, James explicitly reverses the ways in which the supernatural was increasingly seen as capable of being explained and rationalized as the nineteenth century progressed and takes it into a decisively different and more complex direction, in one sense returning it to a realm in which the supernatural was both mysterious and terrifying58

Yet, whether adopting or rejecting the rhetoric and ideology of nineteenth-century scientific supernaturalism, the growth of Spiritualism and related sciences left an indelible mark on nineteenth-century Gothicism. From the spectres of deceased poets communicating their posthumous compositions to authors intrigued by the new possibilities afforded by the integration of the technological and preternatural, nineteenth-century literature was a spirit-haunted art. Moving beyond the printed page, however, the new rationalist approach to the supernatural also inflected the period’s visual art. The abstract sketches and paintings of Georgiana Houghton exemplify the manner in which new ideas about the preternatural shaped the fine arts. A London artist, although born in the Canary Islands, Houghton became a drawing medium in 1861.59 Initially working in pencils, before moving on to watercolours, Houghton produced automatic “spirit drawings while in a trance state”.60 According to Houghton and her fellow Spiritualists, spirit guides provided the painter with the content of each image, while the visual style came directly from Houghton herself.61 Often dealing with transcendent or religious themes, Houghton’s work has been described by contemporary critics as a stylistic and thematic precursor to twentieth-century abstract painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.62 Barnaby Wright, the curator of London’s Courthauld Gallery, admits in an interview with The Guardian newspaper that upon first seeing Houghton’s work, “I fell straight into the trap of saying it was a piece of 1960s or 1970s psychedelia. Turns out it was 1865. I was a hundred years out”.63 Although Wright admits that there is no way to determine if abstract pioneers like Kandinsky and Mondrian were directly influenced by Houghton’s work,64 Houghton’s use of expressive, emotionally evocative colours and shapes to explore religious themes certainly pre-empts their innovations. Similarly guided by the spirit realm, American artist George Inness claimed he received artistic instruction from the long-deceased Italian painter Titian. As Charles Colbert notes in his study of Inness, on his third trip to Europe Inness’s style changed: “It is as if the American, equipped with a depth of spiritual wisdom he did not possess on his previous two trips to Europe, were enlisting the Renaissance master in his efforts to capture the enchantments of the Italian countryside”.65 In the same century, the artist James McNeill

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Whistler was also heavily influenced by the tenets of Spiritualism. Viewing ghosts not as miraculous entities but rather as the product of natural processes, Whistler claimed that the emergence of spirits in gloomy settings was akin to the capacity of the darkness to “cause changes in certain chemical compounds”.66 Colbert connects this linking of spirits and darkness to the gloom that pervades many of Whistler’s compositions,67 while also stressing the recurrence of ephemeral, spectre-like woman clad in white within Whistler’s oeuvre.68 His 1862 painting Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl led many contemporary critics to describe the woman depicted in the portrait as “a white apparition,” a “vision” and a “portrait of a spirit, a medium”.69 Despite the influence exerted on painting by Spiritualist philosophies, it was in the comparatively new technology of photography that the supernatural sciences made themselves most apparent. The daguerreotype—the first successful and publicly accessible form of photography—was invented only at the end of the 1830s when Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre first succeeded in fixing images on silver-plated sheets of copper.70 Yet, from the moment of its inception photography seemed to provide a uniquely hospitable home for the preternatural. Peter Manseau observes how, “From its earliest days scarcely thirty years before, it had been called the ‘black art’ – a phrase referring primarily to the silver nitrate stains on a photographer’s hands, but also suggestive of a possible connection to the much older ‘dark arts’ of magic and sorcery”.71 With its uncanny capacity to replicate the human form, fixing in eternal monochrome stillness the image of an individual, photography seemed to possess an inherent twinge of supernaturalism, a proclivity for the eerie and the mysterious. In the 1860s, William H. Mumler—a former engraver from Boston who had since entered the field of photography—discovered a “spirit extra” in a photograph he had taken of himself alone in his studio.72 Eventually exposed as a fraud, Mumler was accused of simply coping photos of the deceased and juxtaposing them onto portraits of living through a “combination of double exposure and manipulation”.73 Nevertheless, spirit photography seized the popular imagination by capitalising on both the immense popularity of the Spiritualist movement and the grave losses of the Civil War. For many contemporary observers spirit photography was the perfect fusion of the technological and the ethereal, spirits from the beyond captured through the machinations of human invention. James Coates in his 1911 book Photographing the Invisible claimed that the 1895 discovery of invisible x-rays gave credence to the claims of spirit photographers and those who believed in the phenomenon; after all if scientists could capture images of the body’s interior, then why couldn’t photographers similarly render visible the normally unseen spiritual realm.74 Even Mumler himself drew parallels between spirit photography and the recent scientific innovations that had enabled humans to view ordinarily invisible forces. Describing how, “by employing a medium, in the form of a vacuum tube” and then connecting this tube to a battery, “a stream of invisible electricity is made visible to the human”, Mumler clearly expressed a belief in the power of new technologies to lay bare the secrets of the universe.75 After all, if electricity could be rendered visible to the human eye in its natural state, then surely with the aid of photographic equipment, spirits could also be clearly seen. Although Mumler would be tried for fraud in

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1869, the popularity of his Boston photography studio—where patrons could pay to have their photos taken alongside the spectres of deceased loved ones76 —suggests that many of his contemporaries likewise believed in the power of new technologies to render unveil the spiritual realm. In addition to curious and bereaved members of the public, numerous Spiritualists and psychical researchers hoped to employ photographic technology to prove both the existence of life after death and other psychic phenomena. William Henry Harrison, the founder of the Spiritualist periodical, planned to use photography to capture images of Odic phenomena, which would supposedly be visible as luminous flames.77 For both Spiritualists and ordinary members of the public, then, spectral photography was a source of immense intrigue. In the United States and Europe, the nineteenth century was an age of spectacle and thrill-seeking. Matthew Sweet notes, for instance, how in Victorian Britain new technologies were increasingly employed as forms of entertainment.78 Children of the period gazed in wonder at the visual displays generated by stereoscopes, magic lanterns and zoetropes, all of which enabled families to conjure forth miraculous, vibrant images in their own drawing rooms and parlours.79 Spirit photography formed yet another exciting component of this visually and sensually dynamic period. Imitation spirit photography and the techniques employed in order to create the illusion of a ghostly presence was also a source of fascination, especially following high-profile Fraud trials such as Mumler’s. Simone Natale notes that within this context, numerous interested parties attempted to demystify spirit photography as a mere trick, describing the ghostly interlopers present in these images as the result of multiple exposures and other techniques.80 Scientific publications of the period also offered detailed advice on how to create spirit photographs for the purposes of amusement or in order to expose frauds.81 In this way, staged spirit photography developed into something of an artform in its own right. Techniques used to create the illusion of ghostly sitters in photography thus proliferated not only in so-called “trick photos”, but in stage shows and early cinema. Natale stresses that numerous scholars—including François Jost, Matthew Solomon, Karen Beckman, Lynda Nead, and Tom Gunning—have acknowledged the debt early cinema owes to the techniques and iconography of spirit photography.82 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stage magicians regularly employed methodologies and images derived from spirit photography, often as part of their performances but also in various attempts to debunk Spiritualism and expose the trickery of fraudulent mediums and spirit photographers.83 Early cinema, likewise, drew heavily on spirit photography, either to satirise the practice or to create spectacular visual effects. Within the genre of the trick film the technique of multiple exposure was regularly used to create the illusion of ghosts and mystical beings.84 In 1898 the British filmmaker George Albert Smith produced a now-lost trick film called “Photographing a Ghost”, drawing—presumably—on his experience as a photographer, hypnotist and participant in the Society for Psychical Research’s experiments on telepathy and hypnotism.85 Likewise, Georges Méliès, an early pioneer of special effects cinema also employed techniques drawn from Spiritualist circles to create the impression of apparitions in his fantasy and horror films. Having been involved in attempts to debunk Spiritualism, Méliès also made a film on the subject of spirit

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photography, entitled Le portrait spirite, or A Spiritualist Photographer (1903).86 In this way, while the relationship between spirit photography and early cinema is not a simple one, nor is it a case of direction influence or appropriation, the two are closely intertwined. The public preoccupation with both the possibility of gazing into the beyond and the related thirst for spectacle made these images into objects of intrigue. Even among sceptics and non-believers, the techniques employed by fraudulent spirit photographers were a source of endless fascination, suggesting new methods of conjuring illusions and telling fantastical tales. The migration of techniques and images from spirit photography to film and popular media also helped to create and reinforce a uniquely nineteenth-century gothic aesthetic predicated on the intersection of the mechanical (the camera) and the ghostly. Consequently, just as Spiritualism and allied paranormal phenomena had infiltrated Steam-Age fiction, offering new imaginative avenues through which to explore the relationship between science and the supernatural, so too did the era’s soldering of the technological and the mystical transform the visual arts and open up new possibilities for early cinema. Returning to the discussion of Penny Dreadful that opened this chapter, it is apparent that Spiritualism—the conception of a scientifically verifiable supernatural—is central to our understanding of the Steam Age. Far from being confined to a few eccentric outliers, this new faith and the attendant belief that the supernatural could be studied rationally seized hold of the nineteenth-century popular imagination in a uniquely potent manner. Indeed, so potent was the impact of Spiritualism that our contemporary conception of the period is still defined by images of mediums, séances and ghostly figures in faded monochrome. Contemporary literary works that revisit the nineteenth century often employ Spiritualism, not merely as a decoration or a mode of scene-setting, but as a conceptual lens through which to understand an era when discourses of science and the supernatural confronted each other, overlapped and intertwined in a host of dynamic ways. Tatiana Kontou observes how the two novellas that make up AS Byatt’s book Angels and Insects (1992) engage with anxieties about Darwinism and how these were integrated with mysticism in the form of Spiritualism.87 Likewise, Kontou stresses that Victoria Glendinning’s novel Electricity (1995) employs Spiritualism as a means of exploring the Victorian-era relationship between progress and retrogression.88 Other neo-Victorian works such as Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) also foreground nineteenth-century Spiritualism as a means of evoking the era in a manner both historically accurate and alluringly exotic.89 Just under two decades later, Emily Carroll’s collection of fairy-tale inspired graphic narratives, Through the Woods (2014), presents nineteenth-century mediumship as a liberatory force, twinged with both pleasure and danger. In her short story “My Friend Janna” two teenage friends fake spiritual communications through elaborately staged séances wherein the title character wails, howls, convulses and contorts her body into strange positions.90 In this way, Carroll’s story, like the séance sequence in Penny Dreadful, frames mediumship and spiritual communication as a liberatory experience for young women who would ordinarily be forced to adhere to strict rules of decorum. That mediumship performed such a function, enabling women to speak and act out in public, is discussed at length by Ann Braude in her book Radical Spirits where she asserts that Spiritualism empowered women to

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seize vocal roles within the movement at a time when most faiths required them to remain silent and subservient.91 Contemporary revisionings of nineteenth-century intersections of science and the supernatural thus enable us to explore the central discourses that defined the Steam Age imagination. Encompassing a host of ideas about gender, sexuality, religion, technology and popular entertainment, Spiritualism and pseudoscience encapsulate the dynamism of the era. Moreover, whether confined to contemporary works of art or reimagined for the modern age, scientific supernaturalism exists as a unique mode of Gothicism in which seemingly irreconcilable discourses are blended, reintegrated and transformed. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Dara Downey, American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (London, Palgrave, 2014), 92. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London, Penguin Classics, 2010 [1897]), 214. Stoker, Dracula, 214. Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. Jason Colavito, Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge and the Development of the Horror Genre (Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2008), 115. Colavito, Knowing Fear, 113. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), 222. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 223. Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author: Spiritualism, Technology and Authorship ’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), 59–60. Colavito, Knowing Fear, 117. Colavito, Knowing Fear, 117. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain: Possibilities And Problems’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to NineteenthCentury Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), 29. Colavito, Knowing Fear, 121. Colavito, Knowing Fear, 121. Tatiana Kontou, and Sarah Willburn, ‘Introduction’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), 1. Kontou and Wikburn, ‘Introduction’, 4. Quoted in Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author’, 60. Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1972), 34. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 29. Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author’, 60. Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers, 41.

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22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

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Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers, 42. Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers, 42. Ronald Pearsall, The Table-Rappers, 42. Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 6. Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists, 6. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 30. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 31. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 31. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 37. James P. Keeley, ‘Subliminal Promptings: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Society for Psychical Research’, American Imago, 4 (2001), 767. James P. Keeley, ‘Subliminal Promptings’, 767. Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author’, 55. Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author’, 70. Lizzie Doten, Poems from the Inner Life (Boston, Colby & Rich, 2018 [1863]), 163. Manuel Barea Muñoz and Miguel Cisneros Perales, ‘Poems from the Inner Life: How to Translate Spirit Voices’, Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences, 173 (2015), 319. Lizzie Doten, Poems from the Inner Life, xii. Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author’, 69. Anthony Enns, ‘The Undead Author’, 72. Cristina Pérez Arranz, ‘Edgar Allan Poe, Md: Medical Fiction and the Birth of Modern Medicine’, Trespassing Journal, 4 (2014), 63. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar’, ed. by The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (2016 [1845]), n.p. Cristina Pérez Arranz, ‘Edgar Allan Poe, Md’, 70. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (2008 [1852]), n.p. Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Birthmark’, in Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories (1996 [1843]), n.p. Alfred S. Reid, ‘Hawthorne’s Humanism: “The Birthmark” and Sir Kenelm Digby’, American Literature, 38. 3 (1966), 337. Alfred S. Reid, ‘Hawthorne’s Humanism’, 337–38. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 30–31. Jason Colavito, Knowing Fear, 127. Jason Colavito, Knowing Fear, 127. Nick Freeman, ‘What Kind of Love Came to Professor Guildea? Robert Hichens, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Ghosts of Hyde Park’, The Modern Language Review, 11. 2 (2016), 335. Nick Freeman, ‘What Kind of Love Came to Professor Guildea?’, 335. Melissa Dickson, ‘Confessions of an English Green Tea Drinker: Sheridan Le Fanu and the Medical and Metaphysical Dangers of Green Tea’, Victorian Literature & Culture, 45. 1 (2017), 89.

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53. Melissa Dickson, ‘Confessions of an English Green Tea Drinker’, 90. 54. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), 181. 55. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 182. 56. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 183. 57. Bridget Bennett, ‘“The Dear Old Sacred Terror”: Spiritualism and the Supernatural from the Bostonians to the Turn Of the Screw’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), 313. 58. Bridget Bennett, ‘The Dear Old Sacred Terror’, 314. 59. Rachel Oberter, ‘Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye: The Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton’, Victorian Studies, 48 (2006), 222. 60. Rachel Oberter, ‘Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye’, 222. 61. Rachel Oberter, ‘Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye’, 222. 62. Mark Brown, ‘Spiritualist Artist Georgiana Houghton Gets UK Exhibition’, The Guardian, 2016. 63. Mark Brown, ‘Spiritualist Artist Georgiana Houghton Gets UK Exhibition’. 64. Mark Brown, ‘Spiritualist Artist Georgiana Houghton Gets UK Exhibition’. 65. Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism & American Art (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 160. 66. Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism & American Art, 17. 67. Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism & American Art, 17. 68. Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism & American Art, 126–27. 69. Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism & American Art, 126–27. 70. Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists, 30. 71. Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists, 5. 72. Louis Kaplan, ‘Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography’, Art Journal, 62. 3 (2003), 19. 73. Hirsch quoted in Louis Kaplan, ‘Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal’, 21. 74. Louis Kaplan, ‘Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal’, 19. 75. Quoted in Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists, 20. 76. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 10. 2 (2012), 128. 77. Richard Noakes, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism’, 47. 78. Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London, Faber & Faber, 2002), 2. 79. Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians, 3. 80. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 130. 81. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 131. 82. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 127. 83. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 131. 84. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 139. 85. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 141. 86. Simone Natale, ‘A Short History of Superimposition’, 141.

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87. Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin De Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (London, Palgrave, 2009), 115. 88. Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing, 147. 89. Martin Paul Eve, ‘“You Will See the Logic of the Design of This”: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6. 1 (2013), 112. 90. Emily Carroll, Through the Woods (New York, Faber & Faber, 2014), n.p. 91. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America, 2nd edn (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001), 3.

Bibliography Arranz, Cristina Pérez, ‘Edgar Allan Poe, Md: Medical Fiction and the Birth of Modern Medicine’, Trespassing Journal, 4 (2014), 63–78. Bennett, Bridget, ‘“The Dear Old Sacred Terror”: Spiritualism and the Supernatural from the Bostonians to the Turn Of the Screw’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), pp. 311–31. Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd edn (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001). Brown, Mark, ‘Spiritualist Artist Georgiana Houghton Gets UK Exhibition’, The Guardian, 2016. Carroll, Emily, Through the Woods (New York: Faber & Faber, 2014). Colavito, Jason, Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge and the Development of the Horror Genre (Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2008). Colbert, Charles, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism & American Art (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Dickson, Melissa, ‘Confessions of an English Green Tea Drinker: Sheridan Le Fanu and the Medical and Metaphysical Dangers of Green Tea’, Victorian Literature & Culture, 45. 1 (2017), 77–94. Doten, Lizzie, Poems from the Inner Life (Boston, Colby & Rich, 2018 [1863]). Downey, Dara, American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (London, Palgrave, 2014). Enns, Anthony, ‘The Undead Author: Spiritualism, Technology and Authorship’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), pp. 55–78. Eve, Martin Paul, ‘“You Will See the Logic of the Design of This”: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 6. 1 (2013), 105–25. Freeman, Nick, ‘What Kind of Love Came to Professor Guildea? Robert Hichens, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Ghosts of Hyde Park’, The Modern Language Review, 11. 2 (2016), 333–51. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ‘The Birthmark’, in Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories (1996 [1843]). ———, The Blithedale Romance (2008 [1852]). Kaplan, Louis, ‘Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography’, Art Journal, 62. 3 (2003), 18–29. Keeley, James P., ‘Subliminal Promptings: Psychoanalytic Theory and the Society for Psychical Research’, American Imago, 4 (2001), 767–91. Kontou, Tatiana, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: from the Fin De Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (London, Palgrave, 2009).

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Kontou, Tatiana, and Sarah Willburn, ‘Introduction’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), pp. 1–16. Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002). Manseau, Peter, The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Muñoz, Manuel Barea, and Miguel Cisneros Perales, ‘Poems from the Inner Life: How to Translate Spirit Voices’, Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences, 173 (2015), 318–23. Natale, Simone, ‘A Short History of Superimposition: From Spirit Photography to Early Cinema’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 10. 2 (2012), 125–45. Noakes, Richard, ‘The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain: Possibilities And Problems’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012), pp. 25–54. Oberter, Rachel, ‘Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye: the Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton’, Victorian Studies, 48 (2006), 221–32. Pearsall, Ronald, The Table-Rappers (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1972). ‘Penny Dreadful’, in Séance, ed. by J. A. Bayona (Showtime, 2014). Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar’, ed. by The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (2016 [1845]). Reid, Alfred S., ‘Hawthorne’s Humanism: “The Birthmark” and Sir Kenelm Digby’, American Literature, 38. 3 (1966), 337–51. Stoker, Bram, Dracula (London: Penguin Classics, 2010 [1897]). Sweet, Matthew, Inventing the Victorians (London, Faber & Faber, 2002). Thurschwell, Pamela, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006).

Theological Readings of the Victorian Ghost Story Jonathan Greenaway

Why should only the faces of beauty show the divine? Startling us, sometimes monstrous faces seem truer masks of the divine, for even in the revulsion they call forth a reckless consent. William Desmond, God and the Between (London: Blackwell, 2008), 197

Given the startling popularity of the Gothic, academic debates about its nature and definition have been a regular feature of the field of gothic studies. Yet, what these claims to the end of the Gothic almost always acknowledge is the hybridity and resilience of the form. As the critics draw the curtain over the Gothic form, the possibility of return, of renewal, is always present. If the era of the classic Gothic form concludes with the publication of something like Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) it is also the beginning of an exponential growth in gothic texts as it spreads from beyond its early generic formula to take on new, darker forms as the Gothic becomes found in almost all aspects of life. Jarlath Killeen points out that in the public imagination, the Victorian age is an unmistakeably Gothic one, with ‘public respectability disguising private perversity’1 (Killeen, UWP 2009, p. 9). Such a conception goes some way to explaining the critical interest in the psychoanalytic in relation to the Victorian Gothic as critics sought to decode and bring to light the uncovered Gothic nature of this ostensible respectable time. Coupled with the rise of popular scientific discourses, most famously with the cultural response to the work of Darwin, it is tempting to look at the Victorian age as one in which religion was replaced, or overwritten, with the repressed and the disturbing as the vision of the subject at the centre of a divinely ordered universe was overturned. This certainly provides a productive way to analyse the proliferation of supernatural fiction that appeared throughout the Victorian Gothic. Yet, as Killeen takes pains to point out, this idea of the Victorian age is itself a product of a specific set of ideological and historical conditions (3–12). Work from a whole host of literary J. Greenaway (B) University of Chester, Chester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_28

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and historical researchers have shown the great complexity of the Victorian age and highlighted a key aspect to Victorian society and cultural production which much work on the Gothic has either missed or marginalised—namely, the role and function of Christian theology and religion. Despite the long-standing cultural idea of the nineteenth century being marked by, in Matthew Arnold’s words, the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of faith,2 it was the age of the Society for Psychical Research, spiritualism and seances, religious revival and theosophy. The nineteenth century saw also the start of the Gifford Lecture series and a whole range of theological debates as new approaches to faith and the Bible were keenly discussed. Not for nothing does David A Furgusson call the nineteenth century ‘one of the most diverse and creative periods in the history of Christian theology.’3 In addition, Mark Knight and Emma Mason make the point in their excellent study of Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature that the Victorian era was an intently religious one, seriously engaged with a range of theological and religious notions.4 Christianity—contested though it was— remained a foundational discourse upon which much of Victorian life still rested. As Timothy Larsen argues in his work on the Bible, Christian belief and thought were seen as essential to Victorian life and society as well as being an indelible cultural influence.5 In the words of Charles Taylor, the Victorian age is a secular one, wherein religious faith has not disappeared but has simply become one option among many and religious faith cannot be held in a naïve or disinterested way.6 This led to a critical examination and retelling of Christian faith, which arguable could be seen as resituating religious belief rather than under cutting it or seeking to negate it. Thus, rather than return to the constant reiteration of interiority or repression with the ghost being seen as a return of the uncivilised past into the present, taking a theological view of supernatural fiction allows for a critical engagement with the religious ideas within the text without reducing them to psychoanalytic discourses. Therefore, the aim of this chapter will be to make the case for a theological approach to the ghost story, to show how the ghost story not only responds to the historical, theological and religious tensions of a given historical moment, but can be of use for imaginative theological work in the present. If, as Zoe Lehmann Imfeld claims, the ghost fiction of the Victorian age was haunted by an uncertain hope for a metaphysical revelation behind the empirical rationality of the world, then in the wake of post-secularity that same feeling of haunted-ness still lingers in the contemporary age.7 As Simon Marsden points out in his work on the contemporary Gothic, the gothic text is inescapably haunted by theology and so, even in the historical supernatural ghost story, the reader might engage with not just the religious and theological ideas of a historical moment but an ongoing and unfolding imaginative theological discourse.8 In J. Hillis Miller’s landmark study of nineteenth-century writing, the author expresses the fear of an absent God—that either divinity was gone, or simply inaccessible.9 In contrast, a theological reading of the Victorian ghost story might show that as knowledge about the Victorians and critical interest in the theological renews, we might find in these texts that beyond the veil of material reality is something more than just an absence but a strange and unexpected theological reality. What this necessitates is not a retroactive baptism, wherein the ghost story is made into something which was a religious text

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all along, but rather involves rethinking the relationship between the literary ghost and the theological. Such a rethinking necessitates not just the spotting of theological semiotics within the supernatural gothic text, but also examining the ways in which there are spectral, haunted aspects to theology. Such a critical methodology not only takes the theological aspects of the Gothic seriously, but also recognises that there is much for theology to learn from the Gothic. As Peter Hampson, Alison Milbank and Zoe Imfeld express it in their edited collection tackling theology after the age of postmodernity communication between theology and other disciplines requires both honest interdisciplinarity and a degree of theological humility.10 Therefore, the first question to tackle is the issue of how to bridge the gap between theology and the Gothic—how best to draw together two disciplines with such varied terminology and critical registers. In Alison Milbank’s landmark study of God and the Gothic, Milbank positions the Gothic as a cultural means of mediation between secular cultural and the divine11 and in Imfeld’s study of the Victorian Ghost story and theology, Imfeld argues that the ghost story opens a participatory space in which non-theological readers might be drawn into an encounter with theological ideas, realising themselves as theological beings, rather than just materialist readers.12 In a secular age theological claims are not easily understood and so, in the Gothic, wherein the supernatural does not require belief per se, but simply the admittance that supernatural encounters could be possible there remains the always present possibility of theological encounter. Taken seriously by theologians then, the supernatural Gothic ghost text with its consistent renegotiation and reimagining of theological language, trope and theme allows theological doctrines to find fresh expression outside of the confines of orthodox belief and practise. The supernatural Gothic serves as a site of contestation to theological thinking, presenting theo-logos or talk of God in provocative, challenging and hostile ways. Thus, reading the ghost story theologically is not supposed to replace or overwrite secular critical methodologies but to emphasise that these texts, produced as they were in a context of great theological and religious tumult, are also engaged with a struggle over the nature and reality of religious ideas. Theology and horror are closely linked and a critical approach to the ghost story, which sidelines this aspect, misses much of what gives these texts their power. As Rudolph Otto notes in his The Idea of the Holy, fear has a distinct theological role.13 For Kierkegaard, fear and dread are not simply affects produced by the textual impact but are existential and theological states which fundamentally impact human subjectivity. Thus, imaginative forms such as the supernatural gothic tale are fundamentally bound up within the theological and existential impacts of fear and dread. Finally, a word on method—the approach taken here is broadly historical, proceeding from early Victorian ghost stories to the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, such an approach can in no way claim to be exhaustive—the sheer volume of Victorian supernatural ghost stories would necessitate a multi-volume work, so the aim here is to provide a snapshot of sorts, that shows potential avenues for exploring the ways in which theology and popular cultural forms interact. Perhaps the most well-known of the Victorian ghost story writers, Charles Dickens, would be an appropriate place to begin. Dickens, who popularised the link between Christmas time and the ghost story making it both a hugely successful

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form and a vehicle for moral didacticism. In the 1835 short story ‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,’ Dickens rehearses many of the themes that would reach an apotheosis with the more famous A Christmas Carol. In the short story, an ‘ill-conditioned, surly fellow’ by the name of Gabriel Grub is visited by a cabal of goblins with the aim of correcting Grub’s morose, anti-social character.14 It would be easy enough to read this as a literary exercise in conformist bourgeoise morality, with the aim of inculcating the correct degree of sociality in the readership. This would be entirely correct but missing something of the distinctly religious character of Dicken’s text. It is deliberately set in an old Abby town and Grub is the sexton and grave digger at the local church yard. From the outset Dickens establishes the idea that Grub’s character fails to respond appropriately to the religious setting. ‘Surrounded by the emblems of mortality,’ as Grub is, there is no reason for him to be a ‘morose and melancholy man.’ For Dickens then, good temperament is not simply a mark of good character but is also an outward sign of an inward faith appropriate to Victorian society. After encountering a group of children and consoling himself with thoughts of their painful death, Grub finds himself in an unfinished grave. He is positioned as not just socially outcast, but figuratively—and almost literally—dead. In his own words Grub occupies ‘Brave lodgings for one, these, in holy ground!’ It is here, whilst in the incomplete grave, that the spiritually dead Grub has a supernatural encounter with a ‘strange unearthly figure, whom Gabriel felt at once, was no being of this world.’ Mocking him, the goblin and the unseen voices form their own hellish parody of religious ecstasy as they sound like ‘many choristers singing to the mighty swell of an old church organ.’ The religious air of the setting reaches a crescendo with ‘brilliant illumination within the windows of the church’ and a host of goblins pour into the church yard. What follows is a conversion experience of sorts, as the goblins show the ‘man of misery and gloom, a few of the pictures from our own great storehouse.’ Grub, and by proxy the reader, are shown the death of child with a family that knew the dead child ‘was an angel looking down upon, and blessing them, from a bright and happy Heaven.’ Whereas in A Christmas Carol Dickens would remain with the personalised scene of suffering, through the focus on the Cratchett family, here the story moves beyond the personal to take a wider view of the world, as the goblins show Grub a cross section of contemporary society and the ways in which suffering is perpetuated. Grub concludes that: men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all.

Had the text concluded here it would have been easy to dismiss this as a conversion from anti-sociality to more amiable character, but the narrative frames this as something far more profound. Awakening from his vision or dream, ‘he could not bear the thought of returning to a place where his repentance would be scoffed at,’ and so Grub leaves his job and his disappearance becomes another aspect of faith. The rumour is that Grub has been taken away by the goblins is ‘devoutly believed’ until he returns some ten years later, ‘ragged, rheumatic and contended.’ What this move

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underscores is that Gabriel Grub’s conversion is not simply a move into the social realm but is something beyond the concerns of day-to-day society. Dickens ends the short story with a didactic moral, a dire warning to his readers that they should beware drinking alone at Christmas lest they too end up like Gabriel Grub. Despite this, the text as a whole swings between a conversion narrative and a middle-class morality play, highlighting the extent to which the ghost story form exists in an in-between state, shifting back and forth from material reality to a supernatural beyond. This state of indeterminacy, of an experience that could be true, is a recurrent theme throughout the Victorian ghost story. Amelia B. Edwards’s ‘The North Mail’ from 1864 develops the ghost story in some interesting and suggestive ways for thinking through spectral encounters as a theological space. The short story opens by deliberately highlighting the potential truth status of the experience—‘the circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them,’ begins the narrator.15 There is not an attempt to create a literary sense of realism but rather to recommend possible truth that aims to imaginatively engage the reader without requiring a realist form or style. The story follows one James Murray who, twenty years ago whilst hunting in the far north of England, found himself caught in a snowstorm. Trapped by bad weather and increasing cold, the Murray’s thoughts turn to issues of death: ‘Death … how hard to die just now, when life lay all so bright before me’ (117). Interestingly, this line suggests that rather than read a ghost story as a return of the past; the spectral encounter can also be read as a response to the lost potential of the future. From a theological point of view, history has a particular teleology— namely an eschatological one, and here the narrator argues that a death in the midst of bad weather is not frightening on its own terms but because of what they may be deprived. At the opportune time, an old man with a lantern comes into view. ‘Thank God! was the exclamation that burst from my lips’ (117) but the older man is quick to remind the narrator that ‘folks do get cast away hereabouts fra’ time to time, an’ what’s to hinder you from bein’ cast away likewise, if the Lord is so minded’ (117). Accompanying the taciturn older man to a house, the Murray is introduced to the master of the house, an elderly white-haired man who is presented as a cross between a scientist and theologian. The house is full of scientific apparatus and geological samples, but there is also an ‘organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of medieval saints and devils’ (120). Murray and the host converse, and the topic of conversation shows a similar range, moving across practical science to mental philosophy … he passed on to that field that lies beyond the boundary line of even conjectural philosophy … he spoke of the soul … of the spirit and its powers; of second sight; of prophecy; of … ghosts, spectres and supernatural appearances. (122)

Given his unorthodox and metaphysical interests, the master of the house has retreated from public life, serving a model for the ways in which the various challenges to theological truth were being contested at the time. Yet what is notable is the extent to which the text refuses to privilege one discourse over another—strict materialist science does not eliminate the supernatural and the ghostly but comprehensively fails to explain it. As the old master of the house puts it, ‘the world … grows hourly more

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and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius’ (122). Yet, despite this indictment of the flaws and limitations of scientific scepticism, the scientistpriest figure has not abandoned his scientific and experimental interests—Murray notes the range of scientific study that is clearly still on going. What this suggests then, is the possibility of reading the ghost as a phenomenon of natural theology— beyond both divinely ordered revelation and outside of strict materialist scientism there remains an irreducible present metaphysical element, which cannot be wholly contained by either. Sent from the house to catch the late mail coach, Murray hears of an old accident wherein the coach left the road and four passengers were killed. Now late into the night, he finds his way to the coach and clambers aboard, noting the atmosphere of the coach ‘was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell.’ The coach itself is in the throes of decay and Murray realises that the passengers are ‘no living men – that none of them were living men, like myself!’ (128). Flinging himself from the coach Murray awakens to find himself out of the supernatural and in a hospital, waited on by his wife. ‘The surgeon found me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken arm and a compound fracture of the skull.’ Here then the story could easily explain away the supernatural as a hallucination, but the final paragraph of the short story once again highlights the limits of strictly scientific explanation. Murray discusses his experiences with his surgeon, ‘until we found we could discuss it with temper no longer, and then we dropped it.’ The ultimate truth of the event cannot be decided and as Murray finishes his narrative, ‘others may form what conclusion they please – I know that twenty years ago I was the fourth inside passenger in the Phantom Coach’ (129). The story as a whole exists in this interstitial space, between the limits of rationalised scientific explanation and the supernatural metaphysics that exists beyond that limit. The story serves as a microcosm of the secular, scientific and theological tensions of the day. The issue is not the absent supernatural, but that the supernatural is existent and inexplicable. Here then, we see the limit of seeing the ghost as a solely psychoanalytic discourse. The conversation between Murray and his surgeon at the close of the short story shows that viewing the ghost as simply a psychological affect is limited, and with a tendency to lapse into undecidability. Here the theological ghost offers the reader the opportunity to make their own conclusions about the truth status of these spiritual events—a choice which can take them beyond the material limits of what is rational, embodying the participatory hermeneutics for which Imfeld argues. It is more than likely that writers who were believers at the time were familiar with the theological and spiritual impact of a ghostly encounter. Thomas Street Millington’s short story ‘No Living Voice’ (1872) shows the ways in which theologians and religious figures produced their own short fictions and used it as a space within which one could frame the ghost in more explicitly theological terms. The story opens in media res, a conversation between two gentlemen in a country house drawing room. One is asked whether ‘you think, then, that it was really supernatural?’ Mr. Brown acknowledges, as the scientist priest in the previous story did, that Nature is infinitely strange and mysterious, ‘we can scarcely speak of anything that happens as beyond it or above it.’16 Faced with the offer a ghost story, Mr Browne’s audience make explicit the mechanism at work—that the ghost stories potential truth claims

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function as an exercise in faith of sorts regarding a theological or non-material reality. The crowd promise that they will ‘give it a respectful hearing, implicit belief and unbounded sympathy.’ [emphasis mine] Furthermore, the text itself rejects a solely psychological understanding of ghost experience, as the audience to Mr Browne’s story promise to discount their psychological and sceptical theories and simply accept the possibility of what will be recounted. The story unfolds that Mr Browne is in Rome during Holy Week—this context is both a call back to the traditional gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that saw Europe as a place of exotic spiritualism and dangerous Catholicism (in contrast to the sober Protestantism of England). However, it seems the story refuses the anti-Catholicism that Diane Long Hoeveler would call the gothic Ideology. Mr Browne is taken seriously as a Catholic pilgrim who, after a long day wandering through the countryside collecting ‘relics from the ruins of the old Pelasgic fortresses’ ends up at an old dilapidated inn. There he is awakened by the ‘groaning of one in anguish and despair, but not like any mortal voice … a long, loud hollow protracted groan … which seemed to stop my breath and paralyse my limbs.’ Fleeing the inn, Mr Browne is found by the local chief of police who explains that the inn is a haunt for bandits (here the old gothic tropes about Italy continue). The police and Mr Browne return to the inn and discover in the room below where Mr Browne slept a patch of uneven bricks. Here, the unfortunate inn keeper confesses that the body of his son is buried beneath the floor. Wounded in a fight he was taken to the house and as there was ‘neither doctor nor priest, and in spite of all we could do for him he died.’ Importantly for the innkeeper the hauntings and strange sounds heard at night are only solvable through theological means. As the inn keeper puts it, ‘let him alone now, or let a priest first be sent for; he died unconfessed, but it was not my fault; it may not be yet too late to make peace for him.’ It turns out that the inn keeper and son used to kill visitors and rob them. Mr Browne realises that the son had lived long enough to repent his deeds and had ‘urged his father to bring the confessor to his bedside … his prayers were disregarded, and his dying admonition were of no avail.’ Thus, the ghost here is not malevolent but is a theological virtue—the ghost of the son haunts the inn to stop his father from committing further murders and thefts. Here, in the final section of the story Mr Browne continues his religious journey and comes across a mendicant friar collected coins for the dead in purgatory. Mr Browne admits that ‘I did not believe in purgatory, not in supplications for the death; but I dropped a piece if silver into that box … my prayer went up to heaven in all sincerity, — Requiescat in pace!’ In the case of Millington’s short story, it is possible to see the theological reading of the ghost rendered in more explicit terms. The ghost encounter is a positive religious experience—something literally life saving in the case of Mr Browne, and the text ends with a reinforcement of a particularly gothic theological moral—namely that the dead are not simply gone, absent, but are capable of impacting and acting in the world. Framed in religious terms, it could be said that the dead do not rest peacefully, particularly (the text argues) when denied the sacramental rites which only religious orders can provide. The ghost is laden with religious meaning, not simply a kind of theoretical heresy or simple conversion narrative but a form which

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can be used for religious ends of greater complexity than the religious conversion narratives with which the chapter began. However, the ghost text is not simply a case of increasing religious complexity as the nineteenth century moves on. Richard Marsh’s ‘A Set of Chessman’ from 1890 serves a good example of the ways in which theological and religious ideas can become generic features of the form.17 Following a chess enthusiast who buys an exquisite set of chess pieces, which were owned by the chess fanatic M. Funichon. Funichon had recently died during a game of chess. Taking the set, the narrator ends up playing a game of chess with his morose flat mate, St Servan. Beginning their game, the two men realise that neither of them are playing in their usual styles and that there seems to be some force influencing the moves they decide to make. The narrator seems to take the possibility of the set having some form of spiritual influence with remarkable pragmatism—‘curiosities nowadays do fetch such fancy sums — and what price for a ghost? They appeared to be automatic chessman, automatic in a sense entirely their own.’ As the game goes on the presence of the supernatural becomes harder to ignore. Finger marks appear on the two players wrists, yet in contrast to the previous story, which would see the intervention of the spectral on the physical world as something positive here the reaction is more mixed. The narrator maintains a calm interest, whereas St Servan is deeply unsettled for explicitly religious reasons. ‘Believe — in ghosts! In what then, do you believe? I, Monsiuer, am a religious man.’ Here then, the ghost is not something which can be explained within religious or theological ideas but seems to exist entirely outside of it. St Servan can only conceive of the ghost as some kind of demonic or anti-theological phenomena which has to resist. In contrast to his austere religious flat mate the narrator treats the ghost an entirely natural phenomenon. In the first appearance of the ghost the narrator seeks to experiment on the range of the ghost, testing its strength and trying to test whether it can offer some physical or audible sign of its presence. After this first encounter, the narrator mentions the possibility of communicating with the Psychical Research Society (a clear reference to the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 under the leadership of Henry Sidgwick). The narrator sees this as a huge commercial opportunity and the experimental and scientific approach is a chance to exert power and control over supernatural phenomena: ‘I almost began to hug myself on the possession of a ghost, a ghost too, which might be induced to perform at will.’ Returning to his apartment which he shares with St Servan, he finds that his religious flat mate has returned with a priest and two acolytes who ‘appeared to be holding some sort of religious service.’ What they’ve done is grind the chess pieces into a powder, casting it into the fire. To the narrator’s horror it turns out that St Servan and the priest have ‘exorcised the demon.’ The response of the narrator is one of horror ‘they had ground my ivory chessman in the pestle and mortar, and then burned them in the fire.’ The narrator is aghast that such a move would be made in ‘the days of the Psychical Research Society! And they had cost me a hundred francs!’ Here then, the ghost becomes something which must be explained, but cannot be explained by the religious. Theology takes on a fundamentally conservative and oppositional tone— all that it can do here is seek to expel the supernatural and so the ghost encounter becomes caught between emergent scientific rationality (that Psychical Research

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Society) and an authoritarian religion that can make no place for the supernatural that exists in unexpected fashion. What this demonstrates is not a waning of religious faith or practice but perhaps a contraction of theological imagination that could only respond to the supernatural in certain set ways. In texts covered earlier in the chapter, the ghost encounter is bound up with sacramental theology, or serves as a spur for repentance and a renewed commitment to the ideological precepts of Victorian society, yet for Marsh it seems that the ghost is at best a good investment which can all too quickly be snatched away by the religious and short-sighted. What this reflects is a concern expressed by Andrew Lang that, through overexposure, the ghost had become a ‘purposeless creature,’ that no longer had any ‘message to deliver.’18 Yet in the same decade as Richard Marsh’s story there also comes work from figures such as Margaret Oliphant, of whom M. R James would write that ‘The religious ghost story, as it may be called, was never done better than by Mrs Oliphant in “The Open Door” and “A Beleaguered City.”’19 ‘The Open Door’ follows the retired army officer Colonel Mortimer who, along with his young family, has taken the lease on Brentwood Manor. On the grounds are the remains of an older version of the property. Part of the ruin includes the titular door, which opens out onto nothing. For the Colonel it stands as a ‘melancholy comment upon a life that was now over. A door that led to nothing.’20 Whilst settling in, the Colonel’s son Roland becomes ill whilst riding home in bad weather. The doctor is summoned and suspects a hallucination or some kind of ‘brain fever’ and his father returns to his son. Roland however insists upon the supernatural reality of his experience, a response to which his own father seems to have little context for understanding and the idea of Roland having had a genuine supernatural encounter is something rather distasteful to the Colonel: ‘My blood got a sort of chill in the my veins at the idea that Roland should be a ghost-seer; for that generally meant a hysterical temperament and weak health’ (99). In the words of the manor’s servants ‘the certainty that the place was haunted was beyond all doubt’ (102), but to make a ‘wark about ghosts’ would be to open oneself for ridicule as even the ‘minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face’ (103). The class discourse here is well worth highlighting as the middle and upper classes are keen to rationalise away the supernatural, whilst working class communities are convinced of the metaphysical reality of the supernatural. Arguably this class divide reflects wider shifts in religious discourse, as the rationalistic theism of the middle classes was seen as an acceptable form of faith in contrast to the superstitious faith of the poor and working class (which was seen as both irrational and convenient, as it naturalised class positions and class hierarchies).21 The next evening the Colonel and his old batman Bagley go out to investigate the strange haunting noises that seem to have so effected Roland. The two hear again the ghostly voice calling for its mother, coming from the open door which leads nowhere. ‘In the name of God, who are you’ asks the Colonel of the mysterious voice, and yet immediately he wonders to himself whether to ‘use the name of God was profane, seeing that I did not believe in ghosts or in anything supernatural.’ The voice returns, yet the Colonel is quick to try and explain away the encounter as ‘recollection of a real scene … I began to listen, almost as if it had been a play’ (113). The doctor too seeks to rationalise things away, as he dismisses the supernatural voices as nothing

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more than some ‘trick of the echoes or the winds — some phonetic disturbance or other’(114). Simson the doctor comes out and whilst again there is another supernatural encounter, the doctor himself admits that he does not believe anything to do with ghosts, underscoring the way in which Oliphant positions scientific rationalism as being its own form of faith—presented with undeniable evidence, the doctor still clings to the belief that there must be a reasonable and comprehensible cause behind things. Unsurprisingly the Colonel next calls for a minister, Dr Moncrieff, who is ‘strong in philosophy, not so strong in Greek, strongest of all in experience’ (120). Moncrieff’s reaction to the story of the Colonel is not to separate the natural and the supernatural (as the Doctor does) but instead Moncrieff insists upon both compassion and his own willingness to investigate the phenomena. Strikingly, the minister claims that he has no ‘cut and dried beliefs on the subject’ (121), in contrast to the Simson. It seems then, that it is the minister of religion who more properly embodies scientific rationality as the narrative seeks to bring together supernaturalism and religious office. That evening, the Colonel, Simson and Montcrieff go out again to explore the ruins of the old mansion. The minister carries a lantern, ‘an old fashioned [one] with a pierced and ornamental top’ (124) which is reminiscent of the lantern carried by Christ in the famous William Holman Hunt piece, The Light of the World (1851–1856)—a famous Victorian piece of religious art with which Oliphant’s contemporary readers would no doubt be familiar. Montcrieff’s encounter with the ghost is both far more personal and far more powerful as he names the ghost, Willie. This leads to the minister ordering the spirit away—‘if you will lie and sob and greet, let it be at heaven’s gate, and no your poor mother’s ruined door’ (126). The minister calls upon God; ‘Lord, take him into Thy everlasting habitations’ (126–127) and the ghost is gone. Strikingly, Montcrieff emphasises the extent that religious or theological knowledge is essentially limited and contingent. Asked by the Colonel if he believes in Purgatory, the elderly Minister responds that ‘an old man like me is sometimes not very sure what he believes. There is just one thing I am certain of — and that is the loving-kindness of God’ (128). From this point of view then, what is essential is not to understand the ghost (whether that understanding is framed in scientific or theological terms but rather to show compassion towards them. The success of the exorcism-cum-redemption of Dr Montcrieff is constantly undercut by the attempts of the doctor Simson to explain the hauntings in terms of ‘human agency,’ and the discovery of a small hole in which there is evidence of human lodging (131). Yet, this revelation comes after the compassionate religion which sets the spirit to rest. The desperate drive of Simson to find a human agent underneath all things is entirely insufficient and can only look (at best) ridiculous when confronted by the religious supernaturalism of a haunting. In conclusion, this chapter has sought to offer both an overview of nineteenthcentury ghost stories and the ways in which religious and theological language, symbolism and theme shift as the form develops. The ghost story serves as a site in which theological and religious ideas can be contested, challenged and explored, removed from the restrictions religious institutions. As seen, the ghost story can serve to be a moral conversion narrative that spiritually resurrects the anti-social to the life

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of good Victorian subjectivity. The ghost becomes a subject drawn into the emergent secularism of the Victorian age, and as many of the stories covered here have shown, the ghost can be a source of religious consolation or a phenomena which draws one into both scientific and religious discourses as a liminal phenomenon which exists between those two fields. As the ghost story proliferates, it’s religious elements and the supernatural seem to come into conflict, as to be a religious believer becomes something which is antithetical to the supernatural. However, as the final text covered shows, the tensions between scientific-materialist explanations of the supernatural and the religious understandings of it are not necessarily in conflict and can, in fact, be brought together by religiously engaged writers. As Zoe Lehman Imfeld points out at the end of their study on the Victorian ghost story, ‘the supernatural tale provides a space in which the non-theological reader can participate in the theological journey’ (167)—reading the ghost is to be reminded of the uncertainty, ambiguity and strangeness of the world—its sheer excess of meaning to which we, as theological readers, are invited to respond, even now decades after the texts were first published. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Jarleth Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 9. Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach,’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ 43588/dover-beach (first accessed 15 October 2019). David A. Furgusson, The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), xi. Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth Century Literature and Religion: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Timothy Larsen, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Zoe Lehman Imfeld, The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From La Fanu to James (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). Simon Marsden, Holy Ghosts: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Peter Hampson, Alison Milbank, and Zoe Lehman Imfeld (eds) Theology and Literature After Postmodernity (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). Alison Milbank, God and the Gothic, Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). See Imfeld (2016), especially Chapter 1. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). All quotes taken from Charles Dickens ‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole A Sexton,’ https://familychristmasonline.com/stories_other/dickens/gabriel_g rub.htm (first accessed 31 October 2019).

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15. Amelia B. Edwards, ‘The North Mail,’ in The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. II, ed. Alastair Gunn (London: Wimbourne Books 2018), 116–129, 116. 16. All quotes taken from Thomas Street Millington, ‘No Living Voice,’ http://gut enberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606111h.html (first accessed 31 October 2019), n.p. 17. Richard Marsh, ‘A Set of Chessmen,’ in The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 5, ed. Alastair Gunn (Kindle edition) (London: Wimbourne Press, 2017), n.p. 18. Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894), 95. 19. M. R. James, Some Remarks on Ghost Stories, https://www.berfrois.com/2015/ 10/m-r-james-on-ghost-stories/ (first accessed 29 October 2019). 20. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Open Door,’ in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby (London: Virago Press, 2006), 88–133, 91. 21. For more on this see Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2014).

Bibliography Arnold, Matthew: ‘Dover Beach,’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach (first accessed 15 October 2019). Dickens, Charles: ‘The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,’ https://familychristmasonline. com/stories_other/dickens/gabriel_grub.htm (first accessed 31 October 2019). Eagleton, Terry: Culture and the Death of God (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014). Furgusson, David A. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Gunn, Alastair (ed.),The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. V (Kindle ed.) (London: Wimbourne Books, 2017), n.p. Gunn, Alastair (ed.), The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. II (London: Wimbourne Books, 2018). Hampson, Peter, Alison Milbank, and Zoe Lehman Imfeld (eds.),Theology and Literature After Postmodernity (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). Imfeld, Zoe Lehman:The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From La Fanu to James (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). James, M.R.: ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,’ https://www.berfrois.com/2015/10/m-r-james-onghost-stories/ (first accessed 29 October 2019). Killeen, Jarleth: Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason: Nineteenth Century Literature and Religion: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Lang, Andrew: Cock Lane and Common Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894). Larsen, Timothy:A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Marsden, Simon, Holy Ghosts: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Milbank, Alison: God and the Gothic, Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Miller, J. Hillis: The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press 2003). Millington, Thomas Street: ‘No Living Voice,’ http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606111h.html (first accessed 31 October 2019), n.p. Oliphant, Margaret: ‘The Open Door,’ in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby (London: Virago Press, 2006). Otto, Rudolph: The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2007).

Women Writers and the Theosophical Tale of Terror Christine Ferguson

The final decades of the nineteenth century represent a high water mark in the history of British Gothic, engendering many of the mode’s most enduring and frequently adapted archetypes, from the mutating Dr Jekyll to the parasitical Count Dracula and the hellishly immortal Dorian Gray. On the face of it, the occult orientation of this particularly successful gothic efflorescence might seem as undeniable as it is historically unsurprising. Coinciding with the resurgence of public interest in seemingly discredited forms of magical belief and spiritual practice known as the “occult revival,”1 the landmark horror fictions of Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker, and Richard Marsh are suffused with stock occult tropes of supernatural threat, alchemical transformation, mesmeric attack, and menacing pagan entities.2 Yet even the most cursory of glances at the critically entrenched all-male canon of fin de siècle Gothic—women writers remain persistently under-represented in surveys of this period3 —should raise questions about the extent to which it is not simply about, but rather of , the occult revival. Few of its writers were demonstrably or significantly involved with any of the era’s leading occult institutions at the time they published their best-known gothic narratives;4 furthermore, the tales of terror through which they made their name typically take a decidedly hostile view of the unorthodox supernatural belief systems vaunted by contemporary spiritualists and magical practitioners such as Emma Hardinge Britten, W.T. Stead, Samuel Lidell MacGregor Mathers, or Anna Kingsford, to name just a few. While, like these real-life practitioners, the late Victorian Gothic might temporarily grant the occult world ontological validity, it does so for the very different purpose of terrifying its readers, with its plots often working to the vindicate the forms of religious and moral orthodoxy that its protagonists have temporarily traduced. Indeed, the closer we scrutinize this corpus, the stronger our conviction might grow that the late Victorian Gothic is in fact a profoundly anti-occult enterprise, invoking C. Ferguson (B) University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_29

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the magical revival’s processes and intermediaries only to demonstrate the “great horror and loathing of soul”5 they invoke in hapless percipients such as Dr Matheson in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894). The latter trajectory, Marco Pasi argues, in fact places the canonical Gothic in direct opposition to the “largely … positive epistemology” of nineteenth-century occultism, and western esotericism more broadly, one which expresses “confidence both in the human capacity of knowing the other reality and in the desirability of such knowledge.”6 Of course, we need not always judge the ideological valences of a text by its narrative outcome in dread and terror alone. Critics such as Andrew McCann and Roger Luckhurst have recognized more complex and sympathetic deployments of occultism within the late Victorian Gothic, ones manifest, for example, in its depictions of thought transference and authorial identity.7 We can extend our understanding of the multidimensional relationship between the two cultural forms even further by considering the fiction produced within the fold of the fin de siècle’s most successful and controversial esoteric organization: the Theosophical Society. Founded in New York in 1875, the Society (henceforth, TS) offered spiritual seekers an opportunity to study and gain initiation within an ancient wisdom tradition allegedly transmitted by a group of mysterious eastern sages to the movement’s chief philosopher and co-founder, the Russian aristocrat H. P. Blavatsky. Across Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), her two massive, dense, and, hence, somewhat surprisingly commercially successful works of occult theory, Blavatsky taught a complex and shifting cosmology drawn from various global esoteric systems. Chief among its tenets was the idea that the individual human soul was immortal and destined to experience a series of incarnations on earth and other planets as part of a gradual but relentlessly progressive process of spiritual evolution, one that believers might expedite through the study of occult science and pursuit of spiritual purification.8 For our purposes here, the most important aspect of the Theosophical worldview was its inveterate spiritual optimism. Yes, the TS acknowledged the existence of black magicians and hostile spiritual entities known as “elementals,” but these, it insisted, could be defeated through appropriate spiritual training. Furthermore, unlike Christianity, Theosophy offered believers not one but many successive lifetimes through which to work off the consequences of their poor moral choices and negative karma; the arc of human existence inevitably tended towards reunification with the Divine, no matter how slow or painstaking this process might be. What this meant was that the many Theosophical fiction writers who turned to the Gothic for either commercial, propagandistic, or aesthetic reasons at the end of the nineteenth century did so in an entirely different way than their less esoterically affiliated counterparts, and with a vested interest in reversing the latter’s sensationalist stigmatization of the occult. This chapter will demonstrate how the Theosophical tale of terror, long neglected within the critical canon of the fin de siècle Gothic, can expand our understanding of the mode’s tone, scope, and politics. It also injects into the latter category some much-needed gender diversity, for it was produced in large part by women: Mabel Collins, Florence Marryat, Mina Sandeman, “Rita” (pseudonym of Eliza Humphreys), Margaret B. Peeke, Rosa Caroline Praed, and even H.P. Blavatsky

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herself. As historians have long recognized, occultism and spiritualism held particular allure for female seekers in this period, offering them access to forms of authority and agency unavailable through orthodox religious institutions.9 The occult fiction produced by such figures is significant not only to the development of women’s heterodox spirituality, but also to that of the Female Gothic, a category which has had relatively little traction within discussions of fin de siècle horror fiction due to the latter’s traditional critical construction through an almost-exclusively male canon.10 As Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace remind us, the Female Gothic was in its earliest articulation by Ellen Moers imagined as a quietly subversive mode which worked to deflate and expose the supernatural mystifications deployed by men to control women; it was positioned against a “Male Gothic plot … of masculine transgression of social taboos, characterized by violent rape and or murder … which tends to resist closure, leaving the supernatural unexplained.”11 Moers has been criticized for opposing the male and female Gothic in a somewhat reductive dichotomy, one that the Theosophical tale of terror places under further pressure by imagining how a feminist supernatural ontology might serve both anti-patriarchal and anti-imperial ends. By the end of the nineteenth century, I will argue, female Theosophists had forged something of a fifth column within the ranks of the popular male Gothic, reversing some of its most common horror conventions to depict the non-western world as a source, not of sexual threat or imperial anxiety, but of spiritual superiority and magical authenticity. To demonstrate this process, I will analyze the epistemological, cultural, and gendered coordinates of two key works of the female Theosophical Gothic: Rosa Caroline Praed’s occult novel The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of To-Day (1886), and H.P. Blavatsky’s posthumously collected short story collection, Nightmare Tales (1892). Both Praed and Blavatsky were deeply connected to the late Victorian London Theosophical circuit, albeit in different ways. By the eighteeneighties, Blavatsky was the movement’s central theologian and most recognizable international figurehead, renowned for her fiery and sometimes schismatic clashes with other TS members during her regular residencies in the British capital. Like Blavatsky, Praed was also an émigré, having moved to the United Kingdom from her native Australia in 1876. In the decade which followed, she established herself as a highly successful writer of colonial tales and became increasingly involved in the London TS, holding branch meetings in her home and befriending the Indian Theosophist Mohini Mohandas Chatterjee. From then until her death in 1935, Praed’s fiction and channelled writing was suffused with Theosophical themes of reincarnation and spiritual evolution.12 The two women were also knowledgeable students and deft practitioners of the gothic mode then in ascendance within their surrounding popular fiction milieu, one which, as we will see, they sought not simply to imitate, but to transform. As practiced by Blavatsky and Praed, the Theosophical terror tale reroutes the familiar nexus of anxieties habitually ascribed to late Victorian Gothic: namely, the fears of degeneration, reverse colonization, urban threat, and intellectual overreaching that have been relentlessly enumerated in survey chapters and companion essays to the mode. Indeed, such themes have been presumed so central to this

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period’s canonical Gothic as to prove virtually axiomatic. Reviewing such fin de siècle horror heavy-hitters as Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), for example, Glennis Byron surmises that “what links … these texts is the drive to define and categorize the features of a culture in crisis, to determine the exact nature of the agents of dissolution and decline. There is the desire to identify what is unfixed, transgressive, other, and threatening, in the hope that it can be contained, its threat defused.”13 Often if not exclusively, as Patrick Brantlinger has influentially argued, this threat came in the form of a foreign and racial other who, like Stoker’s monstrous Count Dracula or Haggard’s amoral white queen Ayesha, threatened to do to Britain precisely what Britain had done to its own colonies: to steal their land, destroy their moral codes, social structures, and languages, and seduce, rape, and miscegenate their people. Within what he calls the era’s “imperial gothic,” we find again and again “anxieties about the ease with which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery, and thus about the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony.”14 When not located in Britain’s colonial or Celtic margins, the threat emblematized within this mode is located in the scientific laboratory, and in the selfish spirit of dilettantism which inspires researchers such as Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll, Wells’s Dr Moreau, and Machen’s Dr Raymond to venture beyond legitimate bounds of inquiry: “the scientists at the centre of Victorian Gothic,” notes Byron, “like latter-day Frankensteins, are frequently shown dabbling with forces that are better left alone.”15 These separate characterizations attribute to the fin de siècle Gothic a conviction that bad things happen when individuals do not know their place, whether geographical, cultural, or epistemological. Other tropes frequently identified within the Victorian Gothic include its domestication and urbanization of monstrosity, and its psychologization of alternate forms of consciousness that might previously have been depicted as demonic or supernatural in provenance.16 My goal in recapitulating these common and mutually confirming accounts of the late Victorian Gothic is not to dispute their accuracy: on the contrary, they describe the mode’s established canon in a largely effective and non-controversial way. Yet this canon, as I have previously observed, covers only a fraction of the massive body of the gothic writing published in nineteenth century’s final decades. Any hermeneutic based on such small, however high-profile, fraction of the available data set can only be of limited use. Indeed, its limitations become dizzyingly apparent within the interracial occult romance plot of The Brother of the Shadow, published in 1886 when Praed was reaching the height of her fame as a writer of colourful Australian stories. Updating the classic woman-in-peril narrative inherited from first-wave Gothic, it tells the story of a beautiful and neurasthenic young woman, Toni Vascher, who is psychically seduced and nearly forced into murderous complicity with her husband Julian’s best friend, a mesmeric doctor named Lemuel Lloyd who has undertaken her treatment. A would-be occult initiate, Lloyd first sees in the naturally clairvoyant Toni a quick route into the secret wisdom from which his own overly material character debars him. This lofty spiritual ambition is soon compromized by more sensual yearnings. During their mesmeric sessions, he gloats over her supine body, fixating on the curve of her lip and breast as he bathes her in invisible Odic fluid. “Her soul,” Lloyd recognizes, “should be his guide into unknown regions, and should unfold

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to him the pages of the Astral Book. But the woman clung to his imagination.”17 In the novel’s climax, Toni’s husband Julian returns from his posting in the East to interrupt the occult Scin-Lecca ritual through which Lloyd plans to murder him by summoning and attacking his astral double. Toni is rescued just in time, and the fiendish elementals invoked to destroy Julian turn their wrath back on their summoner, leaving Lloyd “alone with Death.”18 Set in a remote French château and focused on a love triangle between three white Britons, The Brother of the Shadows might seem to offer late Victorian readers a return to the exotic feudal milieu and feminine entrapment plot staple to the Radcliffean romance. Yet Praed simultaneously and radically disorients this referent through the two Eastern characters who frame the novel’s anti-Enlightenment and anti-racist ethos, an ideological strain which Andrew McCann similarly diagnoses in her later works of occult fiction and past-life memoir.19 The occult narrative is spurred and given philosophical weight by two dark-skinned male initiates who, although occupying morally opposed roles, each share spiritual authority and superiority over the white British men who try unsuccessfully to exploit them. The first of these is the novel’s titular “Brother of the Shadow,” a sinister red-clad Egyptian magician or, in the Theosophical parlance which Praed sprinkles freely throughout the novel, “Dugpa” who psychically inserts himself into Toni and Lloyd’s mesmeric sessions and counsels the latter to seduce his patient for his spiritual benefit. No true adept, the Dupga known here as Murghab the Egyptian “aim[s] only at internal enjoyment, sensuality, the things of the flesh, which red signifies. The blood is the life … It is red in its material aspect, blue in its higher one. Thus the colour of the true occultist is blue, and the Dugpa is forced to have some red about his person. It is an occult law.”20 Echoing the prohibition on blood drinking from Leviticus 17:11, this complex passage requires some unpacking. First of all, by appropriating the Levitical code for its own alternative esoteric theology, it effectively occults the Old Testament, suggesting that the spiritual significance of blood is determined by esoteric law rather than the Abrahamic father god—or rather, that the two are commensurate. Second, the account displaces the source of Murghab’s chromatic threat from his skin to his sartorial expression (the red turban), thus dissociating it from any biological taxonomies of racial degeneracy. Indeed, unlike Stoker’s Dracula or Marsh’s Beetle, Murghab’s non-European body inspires only admiration and awe in its British percipients, and, in contrast to Haggard’s Ayesha, it does not need to be rendered inexplicably and preternaturally white in order to do so. Perceiving the magician while in trance, Toni exclaims “His skin is dark. He is like an Egyptian; and he has black eyes which pierce me through. His face is full of intellect and majesty.”21 Lloyd queerly echoes this feeling of aesthetic and erotic penetration when he finally sees Murghab for himself and observes his “superhuman … beauty [and] … dark, piercing eyes.”22 Finally, we might note here the emphasis on regulatory metaphysical law which, later, will come to limit and countervail the negative epistemology so typical of mainstream occult Gothic. Despite Murghab’s considerable menace, the narrative insists that such entities pose no threat to those seekers who approach the unseen world in good faith and with right intention: “Those who are pure in heart have nothing to fear; the Dugpa cannot injure the pure and good.”23 From this

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perspective, the peril faced by Toni comes not from the East but the West, a product of her fatally self-driven doctor’s sexual desires and spiritual ambitions. Within the novel’s culturally coded Theosophical ontology, Lloyd’s final extinction at the hands of Murghab and his crew of vengeful elementals represents not an act of terrifying invasion or displacement, but rather the logical result of a process of moral suicide. The Brother of the Shadow further distances itself from the white supremacist ethos, cultural paranoia, and sexual paranoia of the imperial gothic mode through its choice of in-text exegete: namely, the Indian mystic and occult proselytizer Ananda, whose role it is to explain the narrative’s Theosophical concepts to uninitiated readers. Clearly based on Praed’s friend and fellow Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, Ananda is a character virtually unprecedented within the annals of late Victorian popular fiction—a high-caste Indian travelling abroad to study the manners and mores of the mysterious West, while spreading among its spiritually debased denizens an ancient occult doctrine for which they stand sorely in need. “He had been educated in Calcutta,” we are told, “and even in point of western culture was the equal, if not the superior, of Dr Lloyd.”24 In sharp contrast to other gothic assimilationists such as Collins’s Count Fosco and Stoker’s Dracula, Ananda’s command of Western cultural mores represents here not a threat but a boon, allowing him to prosper in his plans for “the formation of occult societies in Europe” and to recognize the true nature of Murghab.25 These are not the only ways in which Ananda networks East and West to the latter’s redemption. For he, no less beautiful in appearance than Murghab, is quickly established as the novel’s erotic as well as spiritual centre, his sexual allure working to free Toni from Lloyd’s mesmeric thrall. Residing with Lloyd at the time of Toni’s arrival, Ananda immediately evokes the doctor’s initially inarticulable jealousy. Lloyd baulks when he sees the yellow roses that Ananda has sent to greet Toni, suspecting the pair of a secret romantic alliance developed during their earlier acquaintance in Egypt; while watching Toni later clasp one of the flowers between her fingers during a mesmeric session, Lloyd feels “the faintest disagreeable sensation … troubled that Ananda, and not he, had been the donor.”26 These suspicions are only heightened when, at Toni’s instigation, Ananda recites a passage from the famous “Sanscrit love song” the Kumara Sambhaba.27 Lloyd becomes convinced that the mystic is a hypocritic concealing his true intentions behind a pose of asceticism. His own urgent subsequent courtship of Toni seems as much propelled by a fear that he might be romantically usurped by a racial other as it is by any quest for true adeptship. The spectre of British male sexual displacement—or indeed, obsolescence— represented here by Ananda was, of course, not new to the Gothic at the time of Praed’s writing. We find it in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806); it surfaces again in late-century works such as Dracula, George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), and, perhaps most violently, in Bertram Mitford’s The Weird of Deadly Hollow (1891). In these examples, cross-racial desire is represented as dangerous, deviant, and ultimately fatal, a horrific transgression of a naturalized racial hierarchy to which white women only ever succumb by force, manipulation, or innate corruption. In The Brother of the Shadow, however, Praed upends this trope by rejecting the xenophobic panic which condemns such miscegenative unions and hinting that

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Toni’s true romantic affinity may lie not with her absent husband Julian but rather with the Indian mystic who saves her. Murghab certainly uses this prospect to goad Lloyd into undertaking the dangerous Scin-Lecca ritual: “Fail now in this opportunity ” he taunts, “… and either in this incarnation or the next, she will be united to Ananda, and you lose her— not for Time only, but for Eternity.”28 He then cements this threat by summoning a vision of erotic race-mixing designed to send Lloyd into a frenzy: “Two spirits of air, yet gloriously human, divinely beautiful, Toni and Ananda floated together. Their forms seemed to blend … Their faces met. Their lips were joined as one.”29 This scene of passionate and consensual romantic encounter between a British woman and an Indian man is remarkable both in its intensity and in its clear spiritual endorsement. Praed’s narrative sanctifies Toni and Ananda’s union by opposing it to the wishes of the novel’s two villains, Murghab and Lloyd; it is further valorized through the lovers’ shared status as the only morally pure possessors of occult power—Toni as innocent clairvoyant, Ananda as ascetic initiate—within the novel. This erotic affinity positions Ananda as Toni’s sole protector after her distant husband Julian foolishly consigns her to the care of his lustful friend. Ananda watches the development of Lloyd’s obsession with increasing alarm, telepathically consulting his own spiritual master as to how he might save Toni from violation. The response speaks volumes in its coyly elliptic nature: with “a smile of exceeding tenderness” on his “god-like face,” the master counsels, “Fear not Ananda, nor trouble for the morrow. The affinity of souls must, in the end, assert itself.”30 Who exactly constitutes this true affinity of souls is left tantalizingly unspecified, but the adept’s tender gaze suggests a sympathy with the claims of his troubled petitioner. The future union augured here could just as well be that between Ananda and Toni as between Toni and Julian. Even if only imaginable in spirit—Praed never shows us Toni and Ananda kissing in the flesh—this union represents a potent assault on the sentimental erotic ideology being deployed to justify colonial domination in Praed’s contemporary imperial milieu. At a time when, as Gayatri Spivak has famously observed, Britain’s violent incursions in South Asia were defended through recourse to a heroic fantasy of “white men saving brown women from brown men,”31 Praed delivers a Theosophical tale of terror in which brown men, both in and out of the body, must rescue white women from the predations and apathy of the white men supposed to be their protectors. In this reversal, the novel becomes anything but the simply “fashionable” shilling dreadful that one of its reviewers supposed it to be;32 on the contrary, it traduces and explodes the established coordinates of the male imperial gothic to imagine the erotic-spiritual salvation of British women through miscegenative union. Given the debts of Praed’s racially subversive occult fantasy to Theosophy, it comes as no surprise to see the novel’s anti-Western orientation echoed and intensified in the fiction of the movement’s controversial co-founder, H.P. Blavatsky. Although an accomplished writer of gothic stories, Blavatsky’s iconic status in the TS seems to have militated against critical inquiry into this vein of her literary production. Non-Theosophists, who know Blavatsky only as the figurehead and theorist of an occult new religion, rarely realize that she engaged in this kind of writing at all; those

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within the Theosophical fold who are aware of her fictional output have traditionally downplayed its significance, perhaps afraid that Blavatsky’s demonstrable creative prowess and ambitions might call into question the authenticity of her channelled works. Consider the verdict of Theosophical historian Sylvia Cranston, who, upon surveying the deliberately arcane style of Isis Unveiled, concludes, “HPB apparently had no ambition to become a popular or successful author.”33 It is simply impossible to reconcile this claim with the extent and duration of Blavatsky’s fictional career. Indeed, one could say that fiction ran in her blood, with her mother Helena Von Hahn being a successful author of domestic novels and her sister Vera Petrovna de Zhelihovsky writing literature for children and regularly contributing articles to occult periodicals such as The Theosophist and Lucifer.34 Blavatsky demonstrated her own creative powers in From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, the fictionalized series of Indian travel writings she published in Russia between 1878 and 86,35 and in the supernatural tales she published pseudonymously and anonymously in the Theosophical press from 1880 onwards. Three of these—“A Bewitched Life,” The Cave of Echoes,” and “The Ensouled Violin”—are collected alongside the previously unpublished “The Luminous Shield” and “From the Polar Lands” in Nightmare Tales, the short story collection Blavatsky was revising at the time of her death in 1891.36 When published posthumously by the Theosophical Publishing Society in the following year, the volume was headed by a preface from co-religionist Annie Besant which carefully minimizes the gravity of Blavatsky’s fictional pursuits even while lauding their quality: The world knows H.P. Blavatsky chiefly by her encyclopaedic knowledge, her occult powers, her unique courage. This little book, composed of stories thrown off by her in her lighter moments, shows her as a vivid, graphic writer, gifted with a brilliant imagination. The student will catch glimpses of reality under the garb of fancy, and will know that only the hand of an Occultist could have added some of the touches to the pictures. The Nightmare Tales were rewritten during the last few months of the author’s pain-stricken life; when tired with the drudgery of The Theosophical Glossary, she, who could not be idle, turned to this lighter work and found therein amusement and relaxation.37

The stories are thus offered as a form of palliative escape, adjacent to but implicitly less significant than the serious Theosophical non-fiction which took up most of Blavatsky’s time and strength. Besant’s skittish need to quarantine the tales from the rest of Blavatsky’s oeuvre may stem in part from their superficial of the progressive and largely consoling vision of the supernatural world which Theosophy impressed upon its believers, one in which there was permanent hell or damnation, only eternal and inevitable progress through the ultimately beneficent mechanism of karma. Fascinatingly, the tales choose not to focus on this triumphant spiritual pay-off, instead dramatizing the frequently horrifying consequences of human interactions with the numinous. Consider, “A Bewitched Life,” the collection’s longest story, which offers a sinister lesson about why Europeans abroad should always take the local religious practices seriously. A German businessman working in Japan, known only as “the Stranger,” panics when he receives no news from his beloved sister back home; momentarily dropping his rationalist prejudices, he consults a local Shinto priest who reveals her

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dismal fate through clairvoyance. Horrified, he sees his sister reduced to a “helpless grovelling idiot” in a lunatic asylum after her husband’s fatal dismemberment in an industrial accident38 ; his nephew has been forced into brutal servitude as a cabin boy, while his niece, in a characteristic display of Blavatskian anti-Semitism, falls prey to a Jewish procuress. The Stranger rushes back to Germany without heeding the priest’s insistence that he perform the purification rituals which such scrying exercises require. As a result, he falls subject to constant and terrifying persecution by malevolent spiritual entities known as Daji-Dzin who confront him with constant, repetitive visions of both his own family tragedy and other forms of human suffering. “It was as though,” he remarks, “some mocking fiend had taken upon himself the task of making me go through the vision of everything that was bestial, malignant, and hopeless, in this world of misery.”39 Prematurely aged, and with his whole family now dead, the Stranger returns to Japan to undertake the training that might reduce, if never eradicate the effects of the evil elemental spirits who now subject him to Sisyphean mental torment. Other characters in the collection fare little better in their encounters with the unseen. In “The Cave of Echoes,” a villainous Siberian nobleman is drowned when an indigenous shaman summons the vengeful spirit of the uncle he murdered; “The Ensouled Violin” features a Paganini-esque young violin prodigy who is strangled on stage by the spirit of the former mentor with whose intestines he has strung his violin in a bid to gain magical virtuosity. As these short synopses make clear, Blavatsky had a distinct flair for grotesque body horror, one which, in combination with the tales’ enduring supernaturalism, places her work more firmly in the tradition of Matthew Lewis than Ann Radcliffe. Admittedly, the volume’s remaining two stories are less gruesome in tone,40 but their greater brevity and air of incompletion give them less weight than their more ghoulish counterparts. By contrast, the three longer Theosophical tales appear to align with surrounding genre hallmarks such as Stevenson’s Strange Case and Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” in dramatizing the dangers of esoteric experimentation, ones we might typically associate with a negative occult epistemology. Such thematic similarities are hardly surprising in light of the clear awareness of the European gothic tradition that Blavatsky telegraphs via direct references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Cremona Violin” (1819), and indirect allusion to works such as Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni (1842), whose character Glyndon is the clear inspiration for the spiritually tormented protagonist of “A Bewitched Life.” Yet repeatedly, Blavatsky invokes these comparisons to gothic precedent only in order to signify her own deliberate and Theosophically driven departure from it. Incidents of deliberate genre defamiliarization abound in Nightmare Tales. Consider the opening to “From the Polar Lands” which initially situates us in the familiar gothic setting of a “hereditary castle” replete with grim worm-eaten portraits of famous ancestors and knights and ladies, old deserted turrets, with bastions and Gothic windows; mysterious, sombre alleys, and dark and endless cellars, easily transformed into subterranean passages and caves, ghostly prison cells haunted by the restless phantoms of the heroes of local legend.41

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Yet “this once,” the narrator informs us, such hoary “commodi[ties] for romantic horror … serve for nought; in the present narrative these dear old horrors play no such part as they otherwise might.”42 The castle serves only as a fleeting venue for the frame narrative, before we dart into an enclosed tale about the saving psychical powers and extreme longevity of a Sámi hunter. A far more substantial example of such defamiliarization lies in Blavatsky’s repeated rejection of the cultural dichotomies endemic within her surrounding imperial gothic milieu, a tactic she shared with Praed even if she did not pursue it in similarly eroticized terms. Certainly Nightmare Tales aligns with the imperial Gothic in its fascination with exotic geographies, with its settings ranging from Kyoto to Siberia, Istanbul, the Arctic Circle, and Styria. Significantly, however, these locales never morph into stark manifestations of non- or anti-Western alterity. On the contrary, far from being insular genus loci, the entities which populate these landscapes are manifestations of a glocalized occult cosmology, beings, and forces that operate on a local level without being exclusive to it: their ubiquity and mobility puts paid to any dichotomy of rational West versus occult East. Thus the itinerant Hungarian pedlar who operates the Siberian shaman Tehuktchene in “The Cave of Echoes” explains that he “will employ the native magic,” not because it has no European alternative but rather because it is “more effective’ and “more appropriate to this wild place.”43 Simply put, when magic is always already everywhere, there can be none of the anxious occult invasion paradigms so central to novels such as Dracula and She. The fiendish Daji-Dzin who torment the benighted narrator of “A Bewitched Life” are not demonic colonists aiming to gain a foothold in the West, but, as they show in pursuit of their quarry, universal entities are able to span the globe with ease; they become localized only through the non-Western spiritual practices and traditions which better understand and hence fend against them. Indeed, as in The Brother of the Shadow, non-Western subjects and practices are depicted in Nightmare Tales not as sources of danger, but as valued collaborators in the fight against a debased urban modernity which constantly targets and exploits its most vulnerable subjects, notably women and the working classes. Far more dangerous than the Daji-Dzin in “A Bewitched Life”—who can, after all, be avoided through correct spiritual preparation—is the social anomie which allows families to be utterly destroyed, their children raped and sold, within weeks of the death of their sole male provider. An insatiable Moloch, the European metropolis consumes and commodifies the bodies of girls and boys alike, selling the former into prostitution and the latter into indentured naval servitude. A similar, if even more gruesome, form of corporeal commodification occurs in “The Ensouled Violin,” in which the young violinist Franz Stenio quite literally turns his tutor Samuel Klaus into catgut. While this act of evisceration is pursued as part of a black magic ritual, its motivations are strictly material. Stenio’s musical ambition, we are told, was utterly harmless and indeed laudable until, at the instigation of his tutor, he began to chase fame and fortune rather than spiritual communion with the classical deities beloved of his youth. “Hitherto,” the narrator explains,

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… he had been content to receive applause only from the Gods and Goddesses who inhabited his vivid fancy; now he began to crave once more for the admiration of mortals. Under the clever and careful training of old Klaus, his remarkable talent gained in strength and powerful charm with every day, and his reputation grew and expanded. These laudations very soon made master and pupil completely lose their heads.44

With sinister or playful intent, the final phrase foreshadows the act of bodily violation to come; Klaus is about to lose more than just his head. Within the debased metropolitan West in which the tale takes place, one in which bodies are constantly mutilated, trafficked, and objectified, the restorative enchantments of the foreign occult are much to be welcomed. Taken collectively, the Theosophical tales of terror produced by Blavatsky and Praed reveal a hitherto neglected and even unsuspected vein of the late Victorian gothic imagination—a form of outward-looking dark feminist fantasy which recognizes that the claims of European enlightenment have been over-sold and underrealized for women and non-whites alike. The rationality enlisted in earlier forms of female Gothic is here depicted as a spiritually and morally bankrupt enterprise, one used to justify the ongoing sexual exploitation of women and the cultural denigration of non-Western indigenous traditions and belief systems. It is countered in these plots not by orthodox Christianity, but rather by a system of globalized occult belief, which networks the living and the dead, the West and the East, the past and the present, and the human and non-human within a vast spiritual community from which none can opt out. As such, this mode serves as an important prelude to the more familiar mode of occult Gothic which would by the early twentieth century succeed in over-shadowing it: namely the black magic story. Manifest in such works as Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild (1929) and Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934), the black magic story has been characterized by Tim Jones as an often prurient and essentially conservative gothic sub-genre which both plays with and takes seriously its occult referent, “work[ing] in the space between contrary beliefs and claims, uncertainties and possibilities.”45 No ephemeral product of the media sensation around Aleister Crowley, we can now recognize this form as a reactionary backlash against an earlier, more woman-focused, and anti-imperial expression of the occult Gothic that sought to expose and equate the horrors of materialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. That it never found the audiences of its better-known, male-authored counterparts is no reason for its continued exclusion from the fin de siècle’s procrustean horror canon: the Theosophical tale of terror remains a vital chapter in the development of a radical global gothic tradition. Notes 1.

Scholars use the term “occult revival” to describe the nineteenth-century fascination with ritual magic, spirit contact, and so-called occult sciences such as alchemy, geomancy, and astrology that coalesced through the birth of the modern spiritualist movement in 1848 and later led to the foundation of occult organizations such as the Theosophical Society in 1875, the Hermetic Society in 1884, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888. For more on

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the origins and scope of the revival, see Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Overview (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, Green,& Co, 1886); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Ward, Lock, and Company, 1891); Rudyard Kipling’s Life’s Handicap (London: Macmillan & Co., 11891), which includes the occult gothic tales “The Mark of the Beast” and “At the End of the Passage”; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite (London: A. Constable & Co., 1894); Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light, 1894 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2018); Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Archibald, Constable, and Co, 1897); and Richard Marsh, The Beetle (London: Skeffington & Son, 1897). See for example Alexandra Warwick, “Victorian Gothic,” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007): 29–37; Glennis Byron, “Gothic in the 1890s,” A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012): 186–196; Roger Luckhurst, “Transitions: from Victorian Gothic to Modern Horror, 1880–1932,” Horror: A Literary History, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes (London: British Library, 2016): 103–129. All of these focus on an almost exclusively male Victorian gothic canon, with the Brontës occasionally featuring as rare outliers. When women writers have been considered in relation to the late Victorian gothic, it has typically been through the ghost stories of Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, and E. Nesbit (e.g. Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011]).Yet the diverse affective range of such tales, ones which as frequently aim at sentimentality and aesthetic reflection as they do terror, does not necessarily with the Gothic. While Arthur Conan Doyle began his preliminary investigations into spiritualism and telepathy in the eighteen-eighties, he was still decades away from declaring this public affiliation with spiritualist movement when he published The Parasite in 1894, a work which takes a considerably more pessimistic view of human psychic abilities than his post-conversion and decidedly nongothic spiritualist propaganda novel, The Land of Mist (1926). Arthur Machen would briefly and, by all accounts, half-heartedly, join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1899 only years after the publication of The Great God Pan. Bram Stoker is sometimes alleged to have been a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the period of Dracula’s composition, but no proof of this affiliation has yet been found. For a discussion of these allegations, see Christine Ferguson, “Dracula and the Occult,” The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 57–65.

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

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Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 50. See Marco Pasi, “Arthur Machen’s Panic Fears: Western Esotericism and the Iruption of Negative Epistemology,” Aries, 7 (2007): 63–83, 64, 74. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Andrew McCann, Popular Literature, Authorship, and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For a more thorough exposition of first-wave Theosophical theology, see Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (London: University of California Press, 1980, Goodrick-Clark (2008), and Julie Chajes, Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). See Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Scholarship on the Female Gothic has typically focused on one of two historical periods: the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and the nineteentwenties to present. See Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976); Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998), and Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, eds., The Female Gothic: New Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, “Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic,” The Female Gothic: New Directions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1– 12, 3. See for example Praed’s Affinities: A Romance of To-Day (London: Bentley & Sons, 1885); As a Watch in the Night (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901); The Insane Root: A Romance of a Strange Country (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), and Soul of Nyria\: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome (London: Rider & Co, 1931). More information on her Theosophical involvement can be found in Chris Tiffin, “Praed [née Murray-Prior], Rosa Caroline,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and McCann. Byron 187. Patrick Brantlinger, “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914,” in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townsend (London: Routledge, 2004), 233–259, 235. Byron 190. See for example Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988); Warwick 2007; Jessica Cox, “Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales,” The Cambridge History of Short Fiction, ed. Dominic Head (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 49–66.

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17. Rosa Caroline Praed, The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of To-Day (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886), 45. 18. Ibid., 158. 19. McCann argues that for Praed, Theosophy “urged a prioritization of the spiritual over the corporeal” and of the “colonial over the metropolitan” (McCann 128). 20. Ibid., p. 69. In this characterization Praed is clearly drawing upon the Theosophical understandings of the Dupga as unreformed and degenerate practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism who, the since fourteenth century, “have given themselves over to sorcery, immorality, and drunkenness … the word Dugpa has become a synonym of ‘sorcery,’ ‘adept of black magic,’ and everything vile” (Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, 106). In light of their immorality and materialism, Blavatsky would link Dugpas to the contemporary medical vivisectionists and neurologists whose practices she hated; see her condemnation of Charles Richet and Jean-Martin Charcot as Dugpas in “Occultism Versus Occult Arts,” Lucifer. 15 May 1889, 173–1781. 21. Praed, The Brother of the Shadow, 57. 22. Ibid., 76. 23. Ibid., 70. 24. Ibid.,15. 25. Ibid., 96. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Ibid., 49. The poem referred to here is Kalidasa’s epic Kum¯arasambhava. 28. Ibid., 142. 29. Ibid., 142. 30. Ibid., 145. 31. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313, 93. 32. “Two Mystical Tales and One Idyll,” The Saturday Review, 14 November 1885: 647–648, 647. 33. Sylvia Cranston, HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 155. 34. For a discussion of Von Hahn’s literary career, see Cranston, 13. Zhelihovsky’s (sometimes rendered ‘Jelihovsky’ or ‘Zelihovsky’) contributions to the Theosophical press include “A Spectre Guide” (1880) and “Spirit Pranks in the Caucasus” (1880). 35. Selections from this article series were collected and translated into English by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1892. 36. All three of the previously published stories appeared initially in The Theosophist: “An Ensouled Violin” [attributed to ‘Hilarion Smerdis’] in January 1880; “The Cave of Echoes” in April 1883; and “A Bewitched Life” in August 1885 and September 1885. “A Bewitched Life” and “The Ensouled Violin” were printed in Lucifer in December 1891–January 1892 and March–April 1892, respectively.

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37. Annie Besant, “Foreword,” Nightmare Tales by H. P. Blavatsky (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1892), n.p. 38. H. P. Blavatsky, Nightmare Tales (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), 36. 39. Ibid., 48. 40. In “From the Polar Lands,” a mysteriously long-lived Laplander uses clairvoyance to find a group of stranded arctic travellers, while in “The Luminous Shield” a deformed Muslim oracle uses her magical powers to help an English tourist find her lost dog in Istanbul’s labyrinthine streets. 41. Ibid., 93. For another Theosophical exploitation of the such traditional Gothic settings, see C. W. Leadbeater’s The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories (1911). 42. Blavatsky, Nightmare Tales, 94. 43. Ibid., 77. 44. Ibid., 106. 45. Tim Jones, “Aleister Crowley and the Black Magic Story,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom. (Cham: Palgrave, 2020): 337–353.

Bibliography Besant, Annie. “Foreword.” Nightmare Tales. By H.P. Blavatsky. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892, n.p. Blavatsky, H.P (under the pseudonym ‘Radda-Bai.’). From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892. ———. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. New York: J.W. Bouton, 1877. ———. Nightmare Tales. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892. ———. “Occultism Versus Occult Arts.” Lucifer. 15 May 1889: 173–181. ———. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1888. ———. The Theosophical Glossary. London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914.” Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2004: 233–259. Byron, Glennis. “Gothic in the 1890s.” A New Companion to the Gothic. Edited by David Punter. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012: 186–196. Campbell, Bruce F. Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement. London: University of California Press, 1980. Chajes, Julie. Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Cox, Jessica. “Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales.” The Cambridge History of Short Fiction. Edited by Dominic Head. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016: 49–66. Cranston, Sylvia. HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993. Crowley, Aleister. Moonchild: A Prologue. London: Mandrake, 1929.

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Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya; or, The Moor. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806. Dixon, Joy. Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Land of Mist. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1926. ———. The Parasite. London: A. Constable & Co., 1894. Du Maurier, George. Trilby. London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co, 1894. Ferguson, Christine. “Dracula and the Occult.” The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Edited by Roger Luckhurst. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017: 57–65. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Grimes, Hilary. The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998. Jones, Tim. “Aleister Crowley and the Black Magic Story.” The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Edited by Clive Bloom. Cham: Palgrave, 2020: 337–353. Kipling, Rudyard. Life’s Handicap, Being Stories of Mine Own People. London: Macmillan & Co., 1891. Leadbeater, C. W. The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories. Adyar: Theosophist Office, 1911. Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. “Transitions: From Victorian Gothic to Modern Horror, 1880–1932.” Horror: A Literary History. Edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes. London: British Library, 2018: 103–129. Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018: 9–54. Marsh, Richard. The Beetle: A Mystery. London: Skeffington & Son, 1897. McCann, Andrew. Popular Literature, Authorship, and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mitford, Bertram. The Weird of Deadly Hollow: A Tale of the Cape Colony. London: Sutton, Drowley & Co., 1891. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City: Doubleday, 1976. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. ———. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pasi, Marco. “Arthur Machen’s Panic Fears: Western Esotericism and the Irruption of Negative Epistemology.” Aries 7 (2007): 63–83. Praed, Rosa Caroline. Affinities: A Romance of To-Day. London: Bentley & Sons, 1885. ———. As a Watch in the Night. London: Chatto & Windus, 1901. ———. The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of To-Day. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886. ———. The Insane Root: A Romance of a Strange Country. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902. ———. Soul of Nyria: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome. London: Rider & Co, 1931. Smith, Andrew, and Diana Wallace, eds. The Female Gothic: New Directions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988: 27–313. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1886. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Archibald, Constable, and Co, 1897. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. London: Routledge, 1988.

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Tiffin, Chris. “Praed [née Murray-Prior], Rosa Caroline.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi-org.ezproxy-s1.stir.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/56709. Accessed 1 August 2019. ———. “Two Mystical Tales and One Idyll.” The Saturday Review. 14 November 1885: 647–648. Warwick, Alexandra. “Victorian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007: 29–37. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. London: Hutchinson, 1934. ———. Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr Moreau. London: Heinemann, 1896. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Ward, Lock, and Company, 1891. Zelihovsky, Vera Petrovna. “ A Spectre Guide.” The Theosophist. July 1880: 245–246. ———, With H.P. Blavatsky. “Spirit Pranks in the Caucasus.” The Theosophist. August 1880: 271–273.

The Haunted Regions of Sabine Baring-Gould Joan Passey

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) was an Anglican priest, antiquarian, novelist, folklorist, scholar, archaeologist, and biographer. He is most popularly remembered as a writer of hymns, with the most well-known being ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ (1871). Baring-Gould’s second most prominent claim to fame is the fact that his The Book of Werewolves (1865) is cited as one inspiration behind the creation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Correspondence demonstrates that Baring-Gould promised Stoker a similar text documenting the history of the vampire, though there is no evidence of this coming to fruition.1 Baring-Gould was a clear influence on the popular imagination in the nineteenth century, and a prominent influence on one of the most canonical works of Gothic fiction, but Baring-Gould himself has been critically overlooked as a prolific author of Gothic fiction in his own right. This chapter will provide a short biography of Sabine Baring-Gould and illustrate his place in a Victorian intellectual network. It will then go on to provide an analysis of the Gothic in his short stories and novels, before demonstrating how his wider works of folklore, antiquarianism, biography, and local curiosities can be interpreted as Gothic and fed into the Gothic imagination in this period. In doing so, this chapter will illuminate Baring-Gould’s popularity and his significance as a nineteenth-century author and will rectify a recurrent gap in literary and cultural criticism of the period. An analysis of Baring-Gould’s Gothic fiction and non-fiction will contextualise other Gothic works of the period. Furthermore, an analysis of Baring-Gould’s fiction alongside his wider scholarly interests will demonstrate the centrality of antiquarian activity to the development of the Gothic novel in the long nineteenth century. This chapter will focus on an overview of four of Baring-Gould’s Novels—Mehalah (1880), Red Spider (1887), The Gaverocks (1889), and In the Roar of the Sea (1891), as well as short stories from A Book of Ghosts (1904) alongside ‘Margery of Quether’ (1891). These are a representative sampling of a significantly J. Passey (B) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_30

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wider oeuvre. Baring-Gould published over 1200 works across his lifetime, and other novels including The Pennycomequicks (1880), John Herring (1883), Eve: A Novel (1888), Arminell (1890), Cheap Jack Zita (1893) and Noemi (1895). Sabine Baring-Gould was born in St Sidwell, Exeter, on the 28th January 1834. The Baring-Goulds were an ancient and aristocratic family who could trace their ancestry back to John Gold, crusader, who was present at the siege of Damietta in 1217 and was consequently granted an estate in Somerset. The Baring side of the family is related to the Barings of Barings Bank, the second oldest merchant bank in the world, founded in 1762 by Sir Francis Baring. Baring-Gould’s historic family and their various exploits likely influenced the scholar’s interest in inheritance, family names and aristocracy—all key themes in his Gothic writing. Sabine Baring-Gould was a sickly child, and largely educated by private tutors due to spending his youth travelling around Europe. Later in life he attended Cambridge University, earning a Bachelor and Master of Arts. Following his university education he taught at schools for wayward boys, where he would paint the window frames with murals from ‘The Faerie Queene’ and ‘The Canterbury Tales’. He was ordained and became a curate in 1864 where he met his then fourteen-year-old future wife, Grace Taylor. The couple later married and had 15 children. Baring-Gould became the rector of East Mersea before inheriting his father’s estates of Lew Trenchard in Dartmoor. He appointed himself to the property as parson and squire and remodelled the property’s manor and church, which is now a luxury hotel. Baring-Gould was a scholar of eclectic tastes. He wrote novels, short stories, hymns, biographies—including a biography of the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker—and the 16-volume The Lives of the Saints. He also collected folklore and curiosities, the most famous of which is The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), still one of the foremost and most oft-cited studies of lycanthropy. The Book of Were-Wolves is best known for inspiring Dracula, but also potentially provided fuel for another quintessential Gothic text—Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. While researching Dartmoor it is likely Doyle stumbled across Baring-Gould’s work. He certainly engaged in conversation on Dartmoor’s natural history and folklore with Fletcher Robinson, who himself ‘gleaned much of his material from the published works of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’.2 Notably, Baring-Gould’s grandson, William Stuart Baring-Gould, became a celebrated Sherlock Holmes scholar. William penned Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective (1962), a fictional biography of Holmes, using his grandfather’s childhood as inspiration. Later, Sabine Baring-Gould became a major character of Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Moor (1998), in which Baring-Gould is Sherlock Holmes’ godfather. Another of Baring-Gould’s historical works, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866), has been noted as an important source for the construction of the medieval period in the nineteenth-century imagination—and as a source of confusions and misinformation.3 H. P. Lovecraft referred to the Curious Myths of the Middle Ages as ‘that curious body of medieval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form’, and the text is recognised as an influence on Lovecraft’s work.4 Perhaps especially ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924), potentially inspired

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by Baring-Gould’s retelling of the Bishop Chatto, eaten by rats after starving his congregation. Baring-Gould nurtured a particular interest in the West Country and its legends and lore and published A Book of the West (1899), Cornish Characters and Strange Events (1909), and Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (1908). He also published extensively on Dartmoor, including Dartmoor Idylls (1896) and A Book of Dartmoor (1900). In folk circles he is most celebrated for his collection of folk songs, created collaboratively with local people across the South West. Baring-Gould worked with celebrated folk song collector Cecil Sharp, with whom he produced English Folk Songs for Schools (1907). Baring-Gould’s work on folklore clearly informs his Gothic fiction. His novels are laced with footnotes, historical detail, songs, and legends and there are frequent asides to explain titbits of regional and local detail. Baring-Gould draws heavily from the historical bent of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, entrenching his work in a fantastical version of history and making claims to history in a similar way to Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764). It is estimated that across his career Baring-Gould produced somewhere in the region of 1200 works. Given his prolificacy, he would have been a recognisable name throughout the long nineteenth century. Mehalah: The Story of the Salt Marshes (1880) is regarded as Baring-Gould’s masterpiece. As a novel it was referred to as ‘one of the most powerful that has, so far as we know, appeared for many years’.5 The Scotsman compared the novel to Wuthering Heights (1847), and suggested that in some respects it was ‘even more painful and more powerful’.6 William J. Hyde refers to the antagonist, Elijah Rebow, as the ‘Heathcliff-like hero’ and compares Baring-Gould’s use of place to Thomas Hardy’s in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).7 Hyde further notes that ‘[a]n important medium of atmosphere as Baring-Gould’s work continued, and often presented, too, in a pictorial design, is the element of folklore, particularly of local superstition, that casts a spell of the weird and grotesque over his plots, even as it does in many successful parts of Phillpotts, Blackmore, or Hardy. Hints of the supernatural play a small but important role’.8 Mehalah was the last novel Baring-Gould wrote in Mersea before becoming the squarson of Lew Trenchard, where he spent much of his life. Mehalah is a work of Essex Gothic fiction, the most recent inheritor of which is Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016). Rather than drawing upon the Cornish or Devonshire coast this text derives Gothic inspiration from the mysteries of the Essex marshes. The novel was based upon Baring-Gould’s largely negative experiences of the Mersea marshes—he found the place isolating, the people dreary, and the weather made him and his family unwell. Like Cornwall and Devonshire, Mersea offered a sparse, atmospheric landscape and a people seemingly separated from civilisation. The narrative is archetypally Gothic, featuring a virtuous young woman faced with a terrifying villain and escaping horrific situations. Place is central to Baring-Gould’s work, and landscape is described in anatomical terms, rendering the marshes a pulsating, monstrous body: ‘[t]he creeks, some of considerable length and breadth, extend many miles inland, and are arteries whence branches out a fibrous tissue of smaller channels, flushed with water twice in the twenty-four hours’.9

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Baring-Gould notes that ‘A more desolate region can scarce be conceived’.10 The novel’s Gothic energies rely upon dislocation and severance, made geographical by Mersea’s tides—‘[a]t noon-tides, and especially at the equinoxes, the sea asserts its royalty over this vast region, and overflows the whole, leaving standing out of the flood only the long island of Mersea, and the lesser islet, called the Ray’.11 Like Cornwall surrounded on three sides by water, Mersea is almost an island of an island, further fragmenting the Atlantic archipelago. While Judith of In the Roar of the Sea is in conflict with the smuggler colonising the Cornish coast, the titular Mehalah is at loggerheads with the equally stormy, passionate, and dangerous landlord Elijah, who had recently purchased their property. Coppinger calls Judith Goldfish, and Elijah calls Mehalah Gloriana. Mehalah comes just a year before Alec d’Urberville torments Tess in a similar fashion, and In the Roar of the Sea is published in the same year. Yet there are more explicit parallels to be drawn with Thomas Hardy’s work. Both Baring-Gould and Hardy were archetypally Victorian authors focused on the rural and regional as microcosms of wider national anxieties and both draw nuanced portraits of the conflicts between complicated characters. Each draws on legend and tradition, and neither admitted to reading the other. The Red Spider (1887), in particular, has been noted as a potential inspiration for Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).12 Like Tess, Red Spider focuses on a young, virtuous woman from a financially doomed family with a drunken patriarch at its head, convinced that his family are cut from an ancient cloth and an aristocratic name. The daughter cares for a horde of smaller siblings, and she is forced to marry a wealthy neighbour to rescue her family from deprivation. It has even been noted that characters are named in similar ways and that both feature the tragic death of a horse as a key plot point. Further, Honor and Tess are both portrayed as sacrificial victims, though Honor, unlike Tess, escapes a terrible fate and has a happy ending. Most of Baring-Gould’s narratives, while drawing upon Gothic horror, settle on conventional, pleasing endings for their protagonists. Once such narrative is The Gaverocks, which like In the Roar of the Sea, is set on the Cornish coast and draws from smuggling and wrecking legends. This novel features an old Cornish family and their plight to maintain their name and status. The youngest Gaverock, Constantine, is seen by his father as having been softened by life in the city of Exeter and a career as a lawyer, and old Gaverock takes the boy to sea to roughen his edges. While out to sea there is a terrible tempest, and old Gaverock is convinced he sees the ghost and ghost ship of his old foe—the terrible smuggler, wrecker, and pirate Red Featherstone. Gaverock shot Featherstone through with a harpoon years before and is convinced Featherstone is here for his revenge, the harpoon still puncturing his spectral breast. Constantine is washed out to sea and presumed dead, but Gaverock survives. Constantine washes upon a different coast and is taken in by the heirs of old Featherstone, while his friends back home seem to be haunted by the harpooned ghost. This is another of Baring-Gould’s novels preoccupied with legends of shipwrecks and wrecking on the Cornish coast. The image of the shipwreck is a fundamentally Gothic one, subverting humanity’s dominion over nature and depicting anxieties

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over the rise of steamships following the golden age of sail. The shipwreck threatens globalised development, trade, and movement; it breaches the boundary between surface and depth and land and sea, coming to represent descent and degeneration as it sinks beneath the waves. Life and travel at sea were perilous and maritime disasters were numerous and sensationalised frequently in the press. The Victorian public were thirsty for these horrifying tales, and Cornwall’s many real shipwrecks and real smuggling histories provide ample fuel for Baring-Gould’s Gothic imagination. Both Featherstone of The Gaverocks and Captain Coppinger of In the Roar of the Sea are morally ambiguous antiheroes cut from a recognisable Victorian Gothic cloth— they are Heathcliffs and Rochesters, and recurrently described as hybrids of land and sea. Each demonstrates an anxiety over Victorian masculinity and morality in an increasingly secularised age. Both narratives, too, play on the tension between the rural and the urban, the margins and the metropoles, the growth of the city sprawl, and the movement of rural populaces out of the countryside. In the Roar of the Sea was recognised at its publication as a distinctly Victorian Gothic novel. George Saintsbury states that [a]n ‘ugly’ critic (if critics could ever be ugly) might, indeed, suggest that the hero of In the Roar of the Sea, ‘Cruel,’ or ‘Captain Coppinger,’ is only Mr. Rochester transformed from an inland squire to a Cornish smuggler, and made a little more robustious still. But Judith Trevisa is not much like Jane Eyre, and Oliver Menaida, the fortunate rival of Mr. Rochester—we mean Captain Coppinger—is a tall man of his hands and deserves his victory.13

The novel focuses on a swaggering smuggler, Captain Cruel Coppinger, arriving mysteriously on Cornish shores, and tyrannically ruling the local populace with an iron fist. He becomes obsessed with Judith Trevisa, a beautiful young orphan, yet fails to use his terrifying powers to win her virtuous Christian heart. Having failed to woo her, he instead forces her into his home by manipulating her foolish twin brother, Jamie, into riding a donkey across the coast with a lamp in the dead of night—luring a ship to wreck against the rocks. The novel is full of lurid effects, from Coppinger dashing Jamie’s puppy into the rocks to his eventual end, burning to death in his own auspiciously named Othello Cottage. It is emblematic of the Victorian Gothic, concerned as it is with an increasingly globalised world, maritime exploration, poverty in rural spaces, pale, swooning waifs, and dark, brooding antiheroes. It uses the image of uncanny twins and draws heavily from Cornish folklore. It is preoccupied with borders and boundaries and the littoral space between land and sea. Further, it centres on the real lived experience of horror of the Cornish people and the frequency of wrecks against their coast—bloodshed, death, and sensational horror was a regular occurrence as they witness ships dragged beneath the waves. In this way, it draws upon the tempestuousness of natural space and the inability to tame the sea. The novel is further emblematic of Sabine Baring-Gould’s interest in folklore. The novel is entrenched in Cornwall’s history and legend and draws explicitly from the works of other South West antiquarians. Cruel Coppinger is taken from Robert Stephen Hawker, whose work on King Arthur at Tintagel went on to inspire Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King decades earlier, and more generally from legends

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of phantom ships or death ships. Arguably Roar is tapping into the same cultural fascination with ships as liminal spaces that motivated contemporary interest in the abandoned Mary Celeste, the Flying Dutchman, and The Raft of the Medusa, as well as Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Baring-Gould’s grotesque interests occasionally deviated from the shipwreck. ‘Margery of Quether’ was published in Margery of Quether, and Other Stories in 1891. The story is narrated by George Rosedhu, the last in a long line of Rosedhus, a member of the landed gentry who jealously guards his ancestral property on the Devonshire coast of Tavistock. Rosedhu, like the Rosedhu men before him, plots to marry old and marry an older woman so he will not have too many offspring to spend the Rosedhu fortunes—and Rosedhus always have male issue. Rosedhu is a flagrant misogynist who finds women deeply foolish and spends the first section of the narrative ambivalently wooing the young Margaret Palmer, who he admittedly will not want to be marrying for at least another twenty years. On Christmas Eve Rosedhu is forced to travel to the thirteenth-century church to ring the bells as no one else is able, and when there finds a strange creature—the size of a baby, with claws and a single tooth, her skin a dried, crumpled hide, who calls herself Margery Palmer of Quether—the same name as his beloved. She admits that she prayed to live forever and her prayers were answered, and she had been living in the belfry for over two hundred years—though while given eternal life, she was doomed to forever age, shrinking and withering away. Blind and deaf, she becomes convinced that George Rosedhu is her George Rosedhu—the Rosedhu ancestor from the 1600s who flirted with her then abandoned her for a much older woman. Rosedhu feels pity for the ancient creature and carries her home, where she latches onto his chest with her one remaining tooth. He cares for her like a baby, fixing her a cot and a bottle, and conceives of himself in a maternal fashion. He also begins, himself, to age and tire, and she grows plump and fresh. ‘Margery of Quether’ is Sabine Baring-Gould’s contribution to a nineteenthcentury vampire Gothic tradition, following in the footsteps of Carmilla (1872), The Vampyre (1816), The Blood of the Vampire (1897), and Varney the Vampire (18451857), but preceding Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) by six years. It is very much a narrative concerned with monstrosity as articulation of the ‘topsy-turvy’ state of the modern world. Rosedhu is anxious about changes in government and economics in an increasingly globalised and swiftly moving Britain. He worries about the landed gentry being left in the past, and what is to be done with small rural communities like his own. He is a man who values tradition, the ancient, his ancestry, and the importance of doing things in the same way as his ancestors. He identifies himself through a familial and regional, communal past, and sees the present and—worse—the future as antagonistic towards his historic values. This is articulated early in the narrative through the ruined thirteenth-century church. Rosedhu explains that an architect offered to tear down the old structure ‘and build a sort of Norman Gothic cathedral in its place’.14 Rosedhu and the locals find the proposition horrific—this, after all, was a church ‘seen by Rake and Raleigh as they sailed into Plymouth Sound, just the same as we see it to-day’.15 But this relic is decomposing. It ‘smelt of mildew and death’ and ‘holds the wet, and weeps it out at

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every change of weather’.16 The church is a rotting, organic thing, ‘a sort of pumice, full of holes, and therefore by nature spongy’.17 The landscape, the architecture, and the animated material body blur, as the Rosedhus are as old as the hills—literally, as their name comes from the name for the surrounding hills—and the surrounding path ‘is worn down to the rock, and the rock breaks up as it likes and stones itself, just as the coats of the stomach renew themselves’.18 The landscape is a pulsing body, as the church is rendered steaming and stinking, and Margery’s ancient body almost becomes an object in its age and degradation. Rosedhu first thinks Margery is ‘a ball of dirty cobwebs’ and notes ‘that the object was descending the rope slowly’.19 Rosedhu again ponders upon ‘the object before me’: The creature I could now see had a human form. It was the size of a three months’ old baby. In colour the object was brown, as if it had been steeped in peat water for a century, and in texture leathery. It scrambled, much as I have seen a bat scramble, and worked its way with its little brown hands and long claws up a rafter, and seated itself thereon, holding fast by a hand on each side of what I suppose was the body, and then blinked, much in the same way as a monkey blinks, drawing a skin over the eyes different in colour from the skin of the face.20

The leathery Margery almost takes on the characteristics of an ancient tome, a dusty book, weighty with history but fragile and threatened by the abrasive modern world. Margery, like the church, is an ancient thing in a state of unmitigated decay, arousing Rosedhu’s sympathy for the past: Then the old creature began to laugh, but stopped with a short scream. ‘I must not do it. I dare not laugh. I be too old, and I shall crack my sides and tear my skin. Then what is cracked bides cracked, and what is tore bides tore’.21

Further, Margery is manifest of popular perceptions of rural people as preserved, backwards, and strange. She is ‘blinder and ever blinder, till I shall look into the sun and see only blackness and darkness for ever. I gets deafer and deafer, but I can hear the bells still’.22 She drives herself bodily into the beams of the rotting church with her one tooth to hang on to a crumbling past, and she is deaf and blind to the world around her, receptive only to the thirteenth-century bells. George comes to understand his young Margaret and this ancient Margery are a mirror one to the other. Like other contemporaneous vampire narratives, Margery is both palimpsest and warning. She admits that she prayed for immortality as burial customs in Devonshire horrified her: The graves here be digged out of the living stone, and be full of water afore the coffins be slashed into them, and the corpses don’t moulder; they sop away and go off the bones just as if they was oiled to rags.23

Instead she becomes a whole, dry, contained body, rather than a dissolving, abject body. She is, however, completely numb—‘I have no pleasure in life at all now, and the only feeling in me is fear - fear lest I should get broke or tore, for I be past mending’.24 She is manifest of the failures of conservation and preservation, the

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fragility of very old things—she is an antiquarian’s nightmare. Further, she resists the sensation of sensation fiction, feeling nothing.25 George takes pity on his ancestor, and carries her home, and ‘[h]er tooth, which was driven into my chest like the proboscis of a mosquito, held fast’.26 He ‘nurses’ her as she clutches him. Through his life he has rejected children, and married older women, and now he is cursed with this ancient-woman-child, and he himself is rendered the maternal figure. Eventually [s]he fell off, and dropped on my knees, and lay there like a sleeping infant after its meal. It struck me that old Margery looked younger than I had taken her to be when I saw her in the belfry. There was a human-like moisture on the leathery skin, which also looked less liable to part at the folders, and there was even a rosy tinge on the lips.27

He makes her a baby bottle full of rum, and realises Margery ‘was not that of a doll stuffed with bran, but of a baby with milk and flesh and blood in it adapted to its age’.28 Baring-Gould here considers parallels between old age and infantilisation through vulnerability. George leans into the genderbending of his role, realising that ‘if any woman had come into my house with her baby in her arms and had asked me to admire it, and then had looked disparagingly at Margery, I should have hated that woman ever after’. Though he becomes wounded by the idea that Margery shall never be truly his child—‘that day a child was christened in the church. I looked at its soft pink skin, and went away from the sacred edifice with envy and anger rankling in my heart’.29 Rosedhu has dedicated his life to producing an heir as late as possible, and his surrogate child takes the form of an ancient ancestor, demonstrating the persistence of ideas of lineage and ancient families in rural Devonshire, and sensationalising the idea of history repeating itself to monstrous effect. George leaves Margery in a bassinet, and feels a prickling in the wound on his chest when she needs him.30 Others begin to notice that he grows older, pale, and ill, ‘nigher forty than twenty’.31 When she feeds upon him he marvels at ‘a soothing sensation’: I knew by this time that when the little old woman had had enough she would drop off, just as a leech does when full. I would not have you suppose that Margery was sucking my blood. Nothing of the sort; that is, not grossly in the manner of a leech. But she really did, in some marvellous manner, to me quite inexplicable, extract life and health, the blood from my veins and the marrow from my bones, and assimilate them herself.32,33,34

Margery’s vampiric transformation collides the monstrous past with the monstrous future, the old with the new, the preserved with the emerging. George’s own teeth begin to break off and fall out in turn. As her hair thickens, his falls out. Her eyes clear, and his become dim. George has sacrificed his life, his joy, and his energies for the preservation and recreation of his ancestor. George is proud of his declining form, and ‘[i]f I could see the hundred, it would be something to be proud of before I was four and twenty’.35 Baring-Gould, an antiquarian himself, satirises the idea of a young man giving up his youth to bury his head in the past. Margery insists on taking George as her husband-father-mother-dinner. Upon the reading of the banns the local people, still entrenched in their own history, identify Margery as unnaturally preserved, and threaten to burn her at the stake on bonfire

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night. Margery realises that this will not work—‘[t]hey cannot kill me, but they can fry and burn me! Then I shall live on-on-on, a scorched morsel, not like a human being’.36 The horror of the image of Margery’s life being forever contained, her consciousness distilled in a pile of ash, is a transcendent one. Margery promises to restore some of George’s strength if the locals spare her. George feels the ‘streams of vital force’ flowing from her body into his and he becomes stronger.37 Margery, now aged once again, but less shrivelled, takes herself away to hide. Baring-Gould ends the narrative on a less-than Christian note, as the lesson George learns is to ‘[n]ever succour those who solicit succour, or they will suck you dry’.38 ‘Margery of Quether’ is emblematic of Baring-Gould’s wider concerns as a Victorian Gothic author—of ancestry, inheritance, lineage, and ancient families; of the difficulties of preserving the past in an increasingly modern world; of the dangers of burying one’s head in the past; of land, greed, and selfishness and the decaying gentry; of legend and lore, and of a specifically visceral, grisly physicality which occasionally transcends into the truly horrific. Baring-Gould uses monsters and legends to articulate the very real horrors of rural life at the end of the nineteenth century and the anxieties surrounding radical changes in everyday life in a swiftly advancing world. Baring-Gould develops these themes later in his career. A Book of Ghosts, published in 1904, collates Baring-Gould’s ghost stories. It opens with ‘Jean Bouchon’, featuring a wronged waiter haunting a restaurant and pilfering the tips until a customer suggests using them to build a highly flattering (and highly inaccurate) statue in his memory, a satire of memorialisation and historical narratives. In ‘Pomps and Vanities’ Baring-Gould draws upon his contemporaries and consciously references Charles Dickens, suggesting a horror beyond Dickens’ depictions, as ‘Dickens caricatured such people in Mrs. Jellby and Mr. Chandband; but he sketched them only in their external aspect, and left untouched their private action in distorting young minds, maiming their wills, damping down all youthful buoyancy’.39 In this narrative two sisters are raised separately, one by a gentle soul and one by an old miser. As is a theme in Baring-Gould’s works, this text is used to satirise those who deny themselves the pleasures of life in the name of Christianity. The sister raised by a miser dies of scarlet fever only to possess her happier sister for the purposes of enjoying some ‘pomps and vanities’.40 She attends numerous balls in the body of her sister, and even marries as her. The illustration of the spectral sister in her wedding dress, given the earlier reference to Dickens, harks back to Miss Havisham. This narrative articulates anxieties surrounding frivolities and propriety, the uncanny double, and a contemporary interest in somnambulism and consciousness. ‘McAlister’ takes the form of a travel narrative with the protagonist reading a travel guide on his journey through Bayonne. It opens very much like one of BaringGould’s ‘curiosities’ or histories of regions. The traveller drinks whiskey propped up against a tombstone, awakening a Scottish ghost, speaking in heavy dialect. Like many of Baring-Gould’s ghosts, this one is maimed—‘There is only half of me herethe etceteras are in the family vault in Scotland’.41 Like Margery of Quether’s terror at the prospect of dismemberment and abject dissolution, McAlister represents a fear of the whole becoming irrevocably and eternally fragmented, gesturing towards a larger culture of the fear of degeneration and disintegration.

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In ‘The Leaden Ring’ a young woman torments a potential suitor and pushes him to suicide. She feels no remorse, as ‘[h]ow could I help his blowing out his brains, when those brains were deranged?’42 She is then repeatedly haunted by a phantom gunshot, ‘as though a bullet had been discharged into my brain’.43 She feels torn asunder by the experience, as ‘I felt as if all the nerves and tissues of my head were being torn, and all the bones of my skull shattered-just what Mr. Hattersley must have undergone when he pulled the trigger’.44 She attempts to wed another, only to experience the same explosive force. She wakes with a leaden ring, as if forged from a bullet, around her wedding finger, and realises she is a dead man’s wife. In this narrative the past is both inescapable and malevolent. ‘The 9.30 Up-Train’ draws from a longer tradition of phantom train narratives, the most famous being Charles Dickens’ ‘The Signal-Man’ (1866). Baring-Gould’s narrative features a train with one carriage that can never be booked. A bold adventurer insists upon purchasing a ticket in the forbidden carriage, and as the train travels through a tunnel he is struck by the sudden, spectral company of a primitive beast before him: I saw a face opposite me, livid as that of a corpse, hideous with passion like that of a gorilla. I cannot describe it accurate, for I saw it but for a second; yet there rises before me now, as I write, the low broad brow seamed with wrinkles, the shaggy, over-hanging grey eyebrows; the wild ashen eyes, which glared as those of a demoniac; the coarse mouth, with its fleshy lips compressed till they were white; the profusion of wolf-grey hair about the cheeks and chin; the thin, bloodless hands, raised and half-open, extended towards me as though they would clutch and tear me.45

In this figure are traces of Dracula, The Book of Werewolves, and Hyde of Jekyll and Hyde. ‘The 9.30 Up-Train’ responds to two strands of contemporary anxiety: the threat of radical social, economic, cultural, and geographic change offered by the railway as emblem of development, and the threat of the irrepressible savage— a barbarous primitive beneath the veneer of civilisation and progress. The primal, monstrous side of humanity has not been escaped, but is merely locked in a carriage of the train. ‘Aunt Joanna’ tells the story of a lonely old woman in Zennor who dies with hidden riches. Her greedy neighbours decide to take her money and finer goods and use some of it to pay for her funeral. The ghost of Aunt Joanna comes to them to count out her silver and linen, though in the morning all is returned to its proper place. Terrified, the neighbours lay the sheets, silver, and money on Aunt Joanna’s grave: Both saw a lean hand come up out of the grave, and lay hold of one of the fine linen sheets and drag at it. They saw it drag the sheet by the corner, and then it went down underground, and the sheer followed, as though sucked down into a vortex; fold on folder it descend, till the entire sheet had disappeared.46

Aunt Joanna’s lean hand takes a winding sheet for her own corpse, and sends the other sheets billowing in the wind towards the garden of her last remaining descendent. She then throws the exact cost of her funeral down at the feet of her neighbours. Like the ghosts of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ this immaterial presence serves to question the value of material goods, and to deliver judgement from another realm

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in an increasingly secularised world. ‘A Dead Finger’ is thoroughly in the spirit of M. R. James, with James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) published just a year after The Book of Ghosts. Baring-Gould also seems to be drawing from Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection In A Glass, Darkly (1872), as he alters the Biblical passage to state that the protagonist ‘could see everything in my room, though through a veil, darkly’.47 While sitting in the British Museum he feels something wandering up his leg, and though he sees nothing is sickened and weakened by the experience. Later, he sees something crawling from his overcoat, and thinks it a mouse: I became convinced that what I saw was a finger, a human forefinger, and that the glossy head was no other than the nail. The finger did not seem to have been amputated. There was no sign of blood or laceration where the knuckle should be, but the extremity of the finger, or root rather, faded away into indistinctness, and I was unable to make out the root of the finger.48

The finger creeps across the fireplace and expresses alarm upon being chased. BaringGould here taps into a longer tradition of disembodied limb ghost stories, anticipating Arthur Quiller-Couch’s ‘A Pair of Hands’ (1910), and perhaps W. F. Harvey’s ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ (1919). The narrative perpetuates Baring-Gould’s fascination with the fragmentation and dismemberment of the body and visceral damage tempered by spectral, phantom means—such as the phantom explosions in ‘The Leaden Ring’. Baring-Gould’s Gothic fiction responds to contemporary anxieties and changes in nineteenth-century culture while building upon recognisable Gothic motifs. It is a Gothic that reaches both backwards and forwards, considering history and its preservation against erosion, and the relevance of history, lore, and artefacts in a modernising world. In Baring-Gould’s gothic world the history is irrepressible and forever re-emergent, puncturing into the present. Secrets, legends, and crimes are inevitably disinterred, and the gloomy, sparse landscapes consistently promise the resurgence of the repressed. Baring-Gould articulates this through concerns with lineage and family names, the crumbling aristocracy, local legends, folklore and folklore collecting, and vivid descriptions of the ways in which even the very fringes of the nation were being altered throughout the long nineteenth century. Baring-Gould’s Gothic world is redolent with the concerns of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, from globalisation and transportation development to lost histories and modernisation. Further, Baring-Gould’s writings on the medieval period shaped popular Victorian medievalism and thus the Victorian Gothic in turn. While BaringGould has fallen out of the public consciousness, in the nineteenth century he was a popular and prolific author of Gothic and sensation fiction. While his texts may have been forgotten, his influence is lasting. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and likely Stoker’s Cornish Gothic short story ‘The Coming of Abel Behenna’), to Arthur Conan Doyle, to H. P. Lovecraft, and potentially even Thomas Hardy, Baring-Gould inspired and informed the Gothic canon as we know it today.

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Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Alison Flood, ‘“Dracula was Not from Exeter”, Insists Bram Stoker Descendent’, The Guardian, accessed 7 January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/feb/08/dracula-was-not-from-exeter-insists-bram-stoker-descen dant. Christopher Frayling, ‘The Writing of the Hound of the Baskervilles’, The Baker Street Journal, 58.1 (2008): 18–32. Donald D. Palmer, ‘Don Quixote and the Remembrance of Things Medieval,’ Comparative Neomedievalisms, 5.1 (2014): 10–20. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965), 352. William J. Hyde, ‘The Stature of Baring-Gold as a Novelist’, NineteenthCentury Fiction, 15.1 (1960): 1. Hyde, 1. Hyde, 3–4. Hyde, 5. Sabine Baring-Gould, Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes (London: J. Murray, 1920), 1. Mehalah, 1. Mehalah, 1. Max Keith Sutton, ‘Baring-Gould’s Mehalah and Red Spider: Sources for Hardy’s Tess?,’ English Literature in Translation (1981), 91–98. George Saintsbury, ‘New Novels’, The Academy (1892), 610. Sabine Baring-Gould, Margery of Quether, and Other Stories (London: Methuen, 1891), 18. Margery, 18. Margery, 19. Margery, 29. Margery, 16. Margery, 21–22. Margery, 21–22. Margery, 25–26. Margery, 24. Margery, 27. Margery, 27. Margery, 29. Margery, 30. Margery, 30–31. Margery, 31. Margery, 33. Margery, 35. Margery, 36. Margery, 37. Margery, 36.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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Margery, 38. Margery, 40. Margery, 54. Margery, 57. Margery, 61. Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of Ghosts (London: Methuen, 1904), 16. A Book of Ghosts, 20–21. A Book of Ghosts, 46. A Book of Ghosts, 58. A Book of Ghosts, 63. A Book of Ghosts, 66–67. A Book of Ghosts, 340. The Book of Ghosts, 365. The Book of Ghosts, 279. The Book of Ghosts, 280.

Bibliography Baring-Gould, Sabine. A Book of Ghosts (London: Methuen, 1904). Baring-Gould, Sabine. Margery of Quether, and Other Stories (London: Methuen, 1891). Baring-Gould, Sabine. Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes (London: J. Murray, 1920). Flood, Alison. ‘“Dracula Was Not from Exeter,” Insists Bram Stoker Descendent.’ The Guardian. Accessed 7 January 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/08/dracula-was-notfrom-exeter-insists-bram-stoker-descendant. Frayling, Cristopher. ‘The Writing of the Hound of the Baskervilles.’ The Baker Street Journal 58.1 (2008): 18–32. Hyde, William J. ‘The Stature of Baring-Gold as a Novelist.’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15.1 (1960). Lovecraft, H. P. ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’. Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1965): 352. Palmer, Donald D. ‘Don Quixote and the Remembrance of Things Medieval.’ Comparative Neomedievalisms 5.1 (2014): 10–20. Saintsbury, George. ‘New Novels.’ The Academy (1892): 610. Sutton, Max Keith. ‘Baring-Gould’s Mehalah and Red Spider: Sources for Hardy’s Tess?’ English Literature in Translation (1981): 91–98.

The Cult of Pan in Nineteenth-Century Literature Katy Soar

For a god whose name has been associated with ‘all things’,1 it is appropriate that the Greek God Pan appears in a multiplicity of guises within literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite—or perhaps because of—his lesser stature in the Greek pantheon compared to his Olympian brethren, Pan—half goat, half man—is the most frequently mythologised of the Greek gods in the literature of these centuries. His allusive nature in Greek mythology and cult practice (as a god with limited mythology and few monumental cult installations, he has been referred to as the Citreon 2CV of Greek gods2 ) makes him the perfect vehicle for literary ruminations in the post-Classical age. His popularity may be due to his position at the liminal edges of the Greek pantheon—neither Olympian nor Titan, neither man nor beast, neither dead nor alive even.3 This ambiguity offers a wealth of ‘Pans’ who came to be newly mythologised by poets, lyricists and prose-writers in the periods under consideration. In particular, the figure of Pan could be profoundly gothic, with its emphases on liminality, ambiguity and transgressions. Between 1895 and 1914, Pan became so obligatory that it is not an exaggeration to speak of a ‘cult of Pan’, at least in literary circles. This chapter will focus in particular on the representation of Pan in these 20 odd years, with particular emphasis on the subversive, gothic elements of the Greek god in the works of Arthur Machen, Saki, E. M. Forster and E. F. Benson.4 Pan was an important theme for the early nineteenth-century Romantics. Writers like Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats invoked a gentle, sympathetic god, who represented all the elements with which these writers invested the natural world—mysterious, awe-inspiring, sublime and comforting.5 The early Romantic poets’ idealised Ancient Greece, which they perceived as a golden age, untarnished by the industrialisation of the modern world.6 They particularly drew upon the notion of the Orphic Pan,7 seeing him as an abstract principle representing nature itself, standing K. Soar (B) Winchester University, Winchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_31

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in opposition to the rationality of the Enlightenment. Pan is not generally represented in these works as a corporeal entity, but rather as a kind of spirit of place, intimately connected to nature8 ; for example, Keats’ ‘Hymn to Pan’ invokes Pan as the unseen influence behind the blooming flowers, the ripening fruit, and the mellowing harvest. This Pan was utilised and repurposed as part of a paganist revival, an alternative to traditional religion, which sought to place man back into the natural world.9 There is a strong element of nostalgia in this Pan, who sleeps in shady nooks and deep forests, a world free of agriculture and industry, where no one worked.10 This picturesque, soothing Pan can be seen in Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake’ in which ‘Great Pan’ ‘low-whispers through the reeds’ that ‘tranquility is here’.11 This premodern vision of England represents, like Pan, all things Arcadian and primitive. However, this lush bucolic landscape is not Arcadia, which was in reality a barren and forbidding landscape. This Arcadia is a place of the imagination, a fictional concept; Pan, as an all-god, inhabits everywhere, just at home in English woods and landscapes than in the groves and peaks of Greece; Matthew Arnold could even find him in Kensington Park gardens.12 This cult of Pan extended beyond the confines of the page; Shelley and his circle often refer to themselves as ‘pagan’, ‘Bacchic’, or ‘Athenian’,13 and they celebrated a cult of Pan in Bisham Woods near Shelley’s house, where he had set up an altar to the god, alluded to in his correspondence with W. S. Scott, to whom he writes in 1821 that he had ‘raised a small turf altar to the mountainwalking Pan’.14 However, Keats, in his ‘Endymion’, catches a glimpse of a darker Pan, pre-shadowing his move into the more macabre realms of later nineteenth-century writers. Here Pan is called the ‘dread opener of the mysterious doors/Leading to universal knowledge It’15 ; while Pan is still Orphic, there is a hint of something more awesome in his presence than before. By the 1890s and into the twentieth century, the cult of Pan had taken a darker turn; the more sinister elements of Pan came to the fore in literary works by authors such as Arthur Machen, Saki, E. F. Benson and E. M. Forster. The literature of the 1890s abounds with hints at mysterious fears and terrors, the breaking down of boundaries, the dissolution of certainties16 —a world in which a more sinister Pan would fit with ease. Pan’s ambiguity—both animal and man, a god but not an Olympian, a living god who had died—was key to his role and representation in these later works of literature. There is no one unique form of Pan in this period; rather, as befits his multifaceted nature, he stood for and represented multiple ‘causes’ in later Victorian and Edwardian Britain.17 An ambiguous god was perfect for a time of huge societal changes; as a being that occupied the threshold between two separate states, he embodies the confusion that was rife at the time in the ways people made sense of the world.18 And the world in the late nineteenth century did not make sense to many, with monumental changes occurring in the realms of industry, religion and science, changes that made people question long-held certainties regarding the nature of humanity and what it meant to be human. Literature reflected this crisis, as it began to fixate and identify on what was transgressive, other, and threatening, partly in the hope of containing it, and partly to re-establish the boundaries that were being

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disrupted and destabilised.19 A more ambiguous Pan reappeared at a time when the idea of God was threatened by the forces of science, modernity and secularisation.20 However, despite the changing literary and contextual landscape, the Romantic vision of Pan continued in perhaps the most famous work to feature the god in this period—Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). In chapter seven of the book, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, Ratty and Mole are searching for Otter’s missing son, Little Portly. After a fruitless night on the river, as dawn begins to break, they hear the distant playing of pipes and, following the ethereal sounds, they encounter Pan (never named as such) on an island in the middle of the river. Between his feet, Little Portly lies fast asleep. This Pan is described as a ‘Friend and Helper’; as a loving, paternal god,21 he is an extension of the Pan whom Grahame first wrote about some 17 years previously in his 1891 essay ‘The Rural Pan’, later reproduced in Pagan Papers (1898). In this essay, which extols the virtues of rustic simplicity,22 the countryside is described in terms of the pipes of Pan23 : ‘But remote in other haunts than these the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches only the ears of a chosen few’.24 In this projection of his idealised notions about the rustic life as a kind of Golden Age,25 Grahame conjures a Pan of quiet backwaters, accessible only to those worthy of him; those, like Grahame, who were ‘faithful pagans’.26 Grahame’s paganism, however, features as its main doctrine a non-utilitarian approach to life with an emphasis on ‘loafing’ or reclining, and an avoidance of work27 —an approach which shared much with the Romantics. This landscape is nostalgic—a fantasy set in a rural Arcadia,28 in which no one ever worked or toiled. Life in Grahame’s rural idyll, for the RiverBankers at least, is one of the perpetual holiday, where agriculture, or the running of estates, is replaced with boating, adventuring and eating.29 This friendly, helpful Pan, found cradling the lost otter child, has been described as domesticated and sentimental, a safe god for a middle-class Arcadia.30 So far, so Romantic. But there are still hints of the transgressive in this Pan. His appearance evokes an almost epiphanic experience in Ratty and Mole, a mingling of awe and revelation tinged with fear: “Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid! Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.”31

Pan here is clearly corporeal, not an abstract concept or principle like the earlier Romantic Pan. His physicality is noted, his masculinity emphasised: his ‘rippling muscles’, ‘broad chest’, ‘long supple hand’ and ‘the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease’.32 This emphasis on his power and muscular beauty33 is softened by his ‘kindly eyes’ and ‘half smile’34 and the presence of the sleeping, contented baby otter between his hooves. His representation has been described as suggestive of heroic statuary,35 but the lingering and sensual way his physique is described has led to receptions of this section as sexually charged and homoerotic.36 Pan’s music ‘[e]ntrance[s]’ Rat and ‘possesse[s] [Mole] utterly’,37 and their experience is intensely felt, ecstatic even, moving from initial intoxication to violent

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trembling, rising to a peak with a combination of love, fear and worship, and ebbing away to end with physical exhaustion in such a way as to be described as intensely erotic38 —especially for a work meant to be ‘clean of the clash of sex’.39 While hints of the transgressive appear in Grahame’s work, this motif is given fuller flavour in the works of other writers, particularly those who came to be considered under the umbrella of ‘Decadence’. The Decadent movement in art and literature was one of the reactions to these social, political and ideological changes of the late nineteenth century. In this modern world of change, isolation and doubt, a love of beauty for its own sake was, according to Walter Pater in 1873, the only way existence could be given meaning and purpose.40 Art was not transcendental; it existed solely for moments of experiential pleasure; decadent artists and writers thus dedicated their lives and their art to the cultivation of such pleasures.41 In this, they drew upon ancient Greece, and ancient Greek paganism in particular; as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘Pleasure is the only thing one should live for… and to realise oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain. I am, on that point, entirely on the side of the ancients – the Greeks. It is a pagan idea’.42 However, paganism in this sense was not real devotion to the ancient gods, but rather an opportunity to revel in freedom and self-indulgence’,43 an opposition to, and conscious subversion of, traditional hierarchical religious and political systems.44 This often crossed the boundary into outright defiance and relishing in what was considered ‘evil’ and ‘sinful’, and Decadent artists and writers created images of the ancient world in which immorality was emphasised more strongly than before.45 Pan himself was often drawn into this; his priapic imagery and reputation for sexual adventure in ancient sources made him particularly attractive, as he served as a challenge to Victorian prudery, providing an alternative version of male divinity to the non-sexual Christian god.46 This is best exemplified through the works of Aubrey Beardsley, in whose work the classical and generally sympathetic Pan of the Romantics became a satanic hermaphrodite.47 Decadent representations of Pan as alluringly evil were contextually appropriate for a period when approaches to religion were in crisis (in this context, from developments in archaeology and anthropology which extended the timespan of the earth, consequently shortening the timespan of man’s supremacy on it) and ideas and possibilities denied by mainstream religion and philosophy were being explored.48 Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan is often considered the quintessential representation of Pan as a terrifying, corrupting entity, and also one of the earliest to do so. The relationship between this work and the Decadents was made explicit by Aubrey Beardsley’s cover art for the Keynote series edition of the novella, and it became a standard work in the genre of late nineteenth-century Decadent horror, although it was met with mixed success when it was first published. The Great God Pan tells the story of a scientific experiment performed on a 17-year-old girl named Mary by Dr Raymond, as part of what he refers to as ‘transcendental medicine’, in order that Mary may span ‘the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit’49 —in other words, to see beyond the material world to the realm of the spirit beneath. Raymond refers to this metaphorically as ‘see[ing] the Great God Pan’.50 As a result

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of the experiment, Mary is reduced to a catatonic state. Years later, London society is plagued by a strange woman named Helen Vaughan, who disturbs and destroys several prominent men, causing a spate of suicides. At the end we learn that Helen is in fact the daughter of Mary and Pan, born nine months after Dr Raymond’s experiment. After tracing Helen’s life and movements, the amateur detectives Villiers and Clarke, learn of Helen’s whereabouts, and along with a medical doctor, present Helen with a rope and demand that she kill herself. Although Pan is stripped of his corporeal appearance here, in essence a more terrifying version of his Orphic literary predecessors, his imagery is the often the source of fear. Instead of the soul of all things, a cosmic force that unifies all, Machen’s Pan symbolises degeneration rather than unity. Strange and sinister episodes mark Helen’s childhood. On one occasion, a boy is traumatised by his experience in the forest, where he is disturbed by ‘a peculiar noise, a sort of singing’ before seeing the younger Helen ‘playing on the grass with a “strange naked man”’.51 He later becomes hysterical when he sees a carved Roman head, identified as a faun or satyr, the Roman equivalent of Pan, which he claims is the face of the man in the wood. Clarke reports that: ‘Dr. Phillips tells me that he has seen the head in question, and assures me that he has never received such a vivid presentment of intense evil’.52 Other connections to Pan are seen in the presence of the obscure Romano-British deity Nodens,53 whose ruined temple lies below the childhood home of Helen, where a young girl had died in a terrible way. Significantly then, it is a pagan god of the classical world which shapes Machen’s novella. While the time spent describing Pan in the novel is brief, his effect upon the narrative is substantial: whomever attempts to unveil the mysteries surrounding his ancient religion and powers falls prey to unspeakable events. In many ways the Pan of Machen represents the anxieties of the fin-de-siecle. A particular anxiety of the time revolved around the theory of evolution which had inspired a deep, existential anxiety about the origin and future of the human race. Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 caused a radical rethinking of the human condition, implying that man, and God in an abstract sense, did not control nature, as a result questioning human sovereignty and superiority.54 His 1871 publication The Descent of Man made this even more explicit, by essentially dissolving the boundary between man and animal: man was subject to the same natural processes as animals because they were of the same ‘kind’.55 Followers of Darwin such as E. Ray Lankester argued that if there was evolution, a reverse process, ‘devolution’ or ‘degeneration’, was also possible. In 1880 Lankester contended that natural selection could not ensure biological, social or ‘race’ progress, and that human beings might regress to lower and less complex forms of life and behaviour.56 Evolutionary theory was threatening to Victorians because if, as Darwin had asserted, ‘man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals’57 then this raised disturbing implications for what it meant to be human. If humans no longer held their default position at the centre of the universe, they would be forced to view themselves in terms of their relationship to a world no longer designed specifically for them, a world under no compulsion to privilege the human species,58 making degeneration a crucial source of anxiety for fin de siècle Gothic.59

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In The Great God Pan this idea is explicit in the body of Helen Vaughan herself. At the end of the story, Helen’s death is described thus: The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and then bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve…I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depth, even to the abyss of all being.60

Finally, after a reversal of the evolutionary tree, Helen becomes a jelly-like substance, essentially protoplasm. The association with the horror of biological degeneration is depicted here in its physical manifestation. Machen’s images are exaggerated versions of the fears of many Victorians, that humanity was not special, but simply another animal descended from the basest of creatures, to which base level they could still descend. Here, the primeval past is never far below the surface. But even after the slime that was once Helen Vaughan disappears, there was to be found: ‘a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of … a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast’.61 In mentioning lava, Machen is presumably referring to the infamous Pompeii statue of Pan copulating with a goat. The horror here lies in the contemplation of something imperfectly evolved, something which can only be expressed through the form of Pan.62 As an agent of madness, moral degeneracy, suicide and death, Machen’s Pan seems straightforwardly evil. Helen, as a human avatar of Pan, uses her hybrid body and sexuality to seduce her victims and lead them to their fate.63 At one level, then, his Pan fulfils the notable criteria for gothic or decadent horror, such as unrestrained sexuality, and degeneration. But there is a deeper level to this Pan, one that again shows his ambivalent, hybrid nature. Machen had long had an interest in the classical world, and its mysteries in particular. This can be most clearly seen in his 1880 poem ‘Eleusinia’. As a young man of 17, Machen wrote this poem, based on an account of the festival in William Smith’s 1842 version of ‘The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities’.64 The poem was also influenced by Algernon Charles Swinburne, particularly those works concerned with Persephone. Swinburne’s work presumably inspired Machen to read the entry in the Classical Dictionary, and then to write ‘Eleusinia’ as an antithesis to Swinburne’s poems.65 ‘Eleusinia’ describes the festival of Demeter at Eleusis, and the experiences initiate into Demeter’s mysteries. The poem culminates in the line ‘the glory of the goddess was revealed’,66 and the poem includes the epigram OUDEIS MUOMENOS ODURETAI: ‘No one laments being initiated’.67 To the young Machen, the mysteries of the Greek gods were a glory to be celebrated.68 The tonal differences between ‘Eleusinia’ and The Great God Pan can be explained on a simple level by Machen rejecting his Swinburn-ian phase of the 1880s, abandoning poetry for prose (he later referred to ‘Eleusinia’ as an example of the ‘horrible rubbish’69 he was writing in that decade). However, it is not so much that ‘Eleusinia’

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and the Great God Pan differ as that they are the flipsides of the same coin. In both works, an underlying theme is the idea of a hidden initiatory Mystery. This theme unites two opposing narrative paths, summed up in Machen’s 1895 short story ‘The Red Hand’: ‘There are Sacraments of Evil as well as Good in the world about us’.70 Whereas in 1880 Machen was wistful about the loss of ancient rites, in The Great God Pan he reflects the darker side of an idea he was fascinated with before becomes the focus.71 The first chapter of The Great God Pan includes the Oswald Croillis quote ‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star’,72 a reference to the Eleusinian mysteries. But while Machen seems to have viewed the Eleusinian Mysteries as something holy, the ceremonies in The Great God Pan represent something more sinister,73 something which ‘cannot be imagined except under a veil’.74 This notion of penetrating into forbidden realms is the supreme sin in Machen’s work. Machen’s worldview was Neoplatonic, in that he considered the real world to be located beyond the veil of material reality. He himself notes this in his notebooks of the 1890s, where he mentions plans for further writings: ‘Make the “Investigation of Gregg” the framework of the story; an investigation into the “overworld”, the discovery of the Bacchae, + the olive, + that Lesbos of Sappho in the society of our modern London; London is but Miletus under a thin veil’.75 This view is also expounded by several of his characters, in particular Dr. Raymond, who speaks of rendering the veil to justify his surgery on Mary: ‘There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision…beyond them all as beyond a veil….it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan’.76 But while in ‘Eleusinia’ this is done correctly, through proper initiation, in the Great God Pan it is the result of trespass. During the fin de siècle, science became more involved with the transgression of boundaries as it moved away from its materialist base and towards matters of the mind.77 Along with the development of evolutionary theory, human nature was now seen as a threat to social and psychic order; as such, the workings of the mind were often considered better left alone.78 Machen himself was hostile to science, describing it as ‘great bully’, which ‘for the last sixty or seventy years […] has been bragging and blustering and pretending to know everything’.79 In The Great God Pan, Dr. Raymond seeks to lift the veil between the material and the spiritual worlds by way of an experimental neurosurgical procedure—‘a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of a hundred’.80 The sin is not so much the action but the means. The danger comes not when mankind seeks to ‘unveil’ these powers, but when he does so through unnatural or occult scientific means. Dr. Raymond is a typically Gothic Frankenstein-like scientist, who tries to access forbidden knowledge regardless of the consequences, and his hubristic arrogance leads him to say, when asked by his friend Clarke about Mary’s safety, ‘her life is mine, to use as I see fit’.81 Raymond is far from a positive character, and the outcome of the story suggests that Machen disapproved of Raymond’s methods when it came to parting the veil.82

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The darker elements of Pan inherent in the novel can be understood by an examination of Machen’s 1902 work Hieroglyphics, a treatise on literature. In this, he describes ecstasy as the feeling provoked when one suddenly ‘feels’ the presence of the invisible world, and it is the writer’s task to transmit this ecstasy to his readers using the medium of symbolic text: For literature, as I see it, is the art of describing the indescribable; the art of exhibiting symbols which may hint at the ineffable mysteries behind them; the art of the veil, which reveals what it conceals.83

In regards to Pan, Machen explains the work as a whole as a hieroglyph, a symbolic text, which aimed at transmitting the awe and wonder he felt as a boy. Caerwent, also a Roman city, was buried in the earth, and gave up now and again strange relics – fragments of the temple of ‘Nodens, god of the depths’. I saw the lonely house between the dark forest and the silver river, and years after I wrote ‘The Great God Pan’, an endeavour to pass on the vague, indefinable sense of awe and mystery and terror that I had received.84

Machen’s knowledge of Swinburne may be where his darker version of Pan can be traced.85 In his three major poems about Pan written between 1887–1889 (‘Pan and Thalassius’, ‘A Nympholet’, ‘The Palace of Pan’) the mingling of both ecstasy and terror is a key element of exposure to the god: It is rapture or terror that circles me round, and invades Each vein of my life with hope – if it be not fear86

While Machen may have rejected the Swinburn-ian poetry of his earlier years, the Swinburn version of Pan, with its mingling of terror with beauty and awe, is the perfect ‘hieroglyph’ through which he sought to transmit his own emotions. In utilising the figure of Pan, Machen sought to translate his own views on spirituality and materiality into the kind of Gothic language that late nineteenth-century readers would understand. That a story meant to evoke awe and wonder instead evoked horror in its readers Machen blamed on his own inability to translate his ideas into words: ‘Here then was my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay’.87 Pan’s hybrid sexual nature is a major element in other gothic works, and the homoerotic elements hinted at in Grahame’s depiction of Pan reach a height by the early twentieth century. In antiquity, one of his loves was said to be the beautiful youth Daphnis,88 and as a tool to be wielded against traditional Victorian respectability and morality, Pan could be seen as a liberator of sexualities suppressed or forbidden by convention.89 ‘Homosexual panic’ developed during this period, as a result of shifting definitions of homosexuality, with many men harbouring an exaggerated fear of monstrous homosexuality dwelling within themselves,90 and works such as Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) meant that homosexuality was the subject of public debate.91 The sense of a society in regression was compounded by this sense of a confusion over gender categories.92 By utilising the figure of Pan, whose hybrid body both defies and embodies nature, the ancient Greek conception of homosexual love was given a Gothic makeover.

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Ideas of homosexuality are often intertwined with nature in other gothic Pan works. Breaking free from the Romantic idea of the countryside, with its ideals of tranquillity and closeness to past, nature was now considered wilder and potentially dangerous. This was partly in relation to the development of Darwinian thought; Tennyson had evolution on his mind when he wrote his famous line ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’,93 which became a metaphor for Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest.94 Widescale industrialisation meant that, by the 1880s, there was shift from agricultural to urban areas as centres of social and economic enterprise. Thus the countryside at the turn of century was a site of ambivalence.95 There was a widespread but often submerged anxiety in late nineteenth-century attitudes to the countryside, featuring as it did its remoteness from ‘the machinery of justice’, its innocence of civilised ways, ‘poor ignorant folk’, and its potential for hellish cruelty.96 Thus early twentieth-century writers of Pan stories presented a form of nature which was far from nostalgic, and sometimes openly and contemptuously disruptive.97 Both these themes are evident in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1903).98 In this novel, a group of middleclass-tourists (14-year-old Eustace’s spinster aunts; a would-be artist named Mr Leyland; the retired curate Mr Sandbach; and the narrator, Mr Tytler) holiday in Italy. While walking the woods, Eustace carves a whistle from a branch while the adults discuss nature—during which Mr Sandbach, referring to Plutarch and reacting to Sandbach’s comment that the woods no longer give shelter to Pan, proclaims that ‘Pan is dead!’99 The party is disturbed by the onset of a wind after Eustace blows his whistle, which brings with it ‘brutal, overmasting, physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes’,100 causing them to drop their belongings and flee, not realising they have left Eustace behind. The adults return in confusion to find Eustace has remained alone in the clearing, which is now marked with hoof-prints. Eustace refuses to speak of what he has seen, but he wears a ‘disquieting smile’.101 Returning to their hotel, Eustace begins to act oddly (at least in the eyes of his English relatives), running around the wood and reappearing holding a dazed hare, and soon becoming interested in Gennaro, ‘a clumsy impertinent fisherlad’102 hugging him in ‘a habit of promiscuous intimacy’ which the narrator notes ‘was perfectly intolerable and could only lead to familiarity and mortification for all’.103 Awakening one night to find Eustace, wearing only his nightshirt, dancing and ‘blessing the great forces and manifestations of Nature’,104 the adults conspire to keep him in his room. Gennaro frees Eustace and together they leap from the hotel window; Eustace runs off into the night, while Gennaro dies from the fall, but not before crying out ‘He has understood and he is saved… instead of dying he will live!’105 The story ends with Eustace running away far into the night, in which ‘still resounded the shouts and laughter of the escaping boy’.106 Pan’s encounter with Eustace is both appealing, threatening and transformative, and from it the more ‘irresponsible’ forces of sexuality are unleashed. Forster provocatively associates nature and homosexuality as a deliberate inversion of the ‘natural state’ which viewed alternate sexualities as perversions.107 In the figure of Pan, writers such as Forster offered to their readers a deity whose cult released a sense of ‘otherness’ which had long been denied or suppressed.108

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Here, submitting to Pan means abandoning civilisation and its morality, cutting oneself off from the contemporary artificial divisions of class and convention, and embracing primitivism.109 Rather than the ascetic Platonic ideal of homosexual relations, this is a sensual, chthonic pre-Platonic Pan. During this period, the ‘Cambridge Ritual School’, inspired by the works of J. G. Frazer, saw ‘darker and older shapes’ behind Greek splendours. Jane Harrison believed there to be a deeper, more primitive layer of gods than the Classical pantheon, and it was from their dark, elemental rituals that the Olympian gods developed.110 Thus in literature Pan works as a convenient shorthand for writers’ more primitive urges, a literary symbol ‘without any highest common factor except a vague full-blooded animalism’111 —a wild, primitive nature, a landscape for sexual elements long repressed by conventional society. Although in Forster’s novel the actions of Pan lead to madness and death, the god himself is not at fault—rather it is that of the cynical bourgeois tourists, who, in their refusal to understand and embrace the mysteries of nature, bring about their own punishment. ‘Music on the Hill’ by Hector Hugh Munro, aka Saki (1912), is less overtly homosexual than Forster’s work, but more violent in its denouement. The story features an unhappily married couple, Sylvia and Mortimer, who move from London to the countryside of Yessney at Sylvia’s insistence. However, her bucolic fantasies are soon disappointed, as Yessney lacks the charming rusticity she had expected. Instead she finds ‘wild open savagery’ where ‘there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things’.112 She ruminates to Mortimer on the wildness of the place, ‘one could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out’ to which Mortimer replies ‘The worship of Pan never has died out’.113 Walking in the woods one day, Sylvia comes across a statue of Pan in a clearing; being ‘religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way’,114 she is annoyed and unsettled to see an offering of grapes placed on the statue, and contemptuously removes them before leaving the wood, but not before spotting ‘a boy’s face… scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes’.115 Startled, she drops the grapes and hurries home, only to be chastised by Mortimer when he discovers what she has done and whom, in response to her dismissal of his worries, warns her: ‘All the same… I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm’.116 His words prove to be prophetic: the following day, Sylvia climbs a hill overlooking Yessney, only to come across a stag, which drives its antlers through her body as Pan watches delightedly. In her last moments, she hears a boy’s echoing laughter, ‘golden and equivocal’117 —the same kind of laughter with which Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ ends. Malicious and violent though his actions may be, Saki implies that Sylvia brings her fate on herself through her hubris, the greatest of crimes to the Greek gods—a transgression of pride not unfamiliar to readers of Gothic drama, where mortals are often punished for attempting to exceed their own power or challenge the supremacy of God, or a god in this case. Mortimer describes Pan as an all-father: ‘Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn’.118 Unlike the Orphic Pan of the Romantics,

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Pan is corporeal and his nature darker. His original offering stolen, Pan is not to be placated and must receive his sacrificial offering.119 Sylvia’s transgressions are not simply that she steals the gods’ offerings. Her presence, as the personification of domesticity, femininity, and urbanism is essentially a rebuke to Pan’s wild, and crucially masculine, domain. Her true crime seems to be that she has married a contented bachelor,120 having entrapped her husband ‘in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family’.121 Bachelorhood, in contrast to the traditional Edwardian expectation of marriage, could be read as a form of unconventional sexuality, or ‘unheterosexuality’.122 Paganism in Saki’s novel, defined as ‘pantheistic nature worship’123 is not an issue of genuine piety but rather a destructive force incorporating unorthodox sexualities124 that threaten the natural order. Nevertheless Saki, by associating them with Pan, seeks to naturalise them.125 Certainly the landscape of Pan in ‘Music on the Hill’ is strongly masculine, in contrast to both traditional interpretations of nature as feminine and of Pan’s presentation in classical literature accompanied by female nature deities such as nymphs.126 Saki utilises the motif of Pan as a form of hybrid sexuality to create a destabilising landscape, one that is both natural and threatening. E. F. Benson’s 1904 story ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’ also revolves around Pan’s punishment of hubris, but in this case the pride comes, not from denying Pan’s reality, but denying his true, multifaceted nature—his ‘all-ness’. The story focuses on a young artist, Frank Halton, who has abandoned London in favour of rural life. His friend Darcy comes to visit and finds him younger and healthier looking than when he lived in London. He explains to Darcy that his closeness to nature is due to having heard ‘Pan playing on his pipes, the voice of Nature’.127 His first encounter with the god was not numinous, ‘I was terrified, terrified with the impotent horror of nightmare, and I stopped my ears and just ran from the place and got back to the house panting, trembling, literally in a panic’.128 But once recovered from this, he is ashamed, and realises that ‘Nature, force, God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer web of essential life’129 and he tells Darcy he intends to encounter Pan and become the latter’s acolyte, preaching ‘a gospel of joy, showing myself as the living proof of the truth’.130 Darcy, uneasy about his friend’s intentions, warns Halton that to the Ancient Greeks, to ‘see Pan meant death, did it not?’131 But Halton dismisses his concerns; he is willing to sacrifice his life and he is sure Pan will grant him immortality ‘whatever the revelation is, it will be God’.132 A few days later, after hearing a scream, Darcy discovers Halton dead in the garden, his face frozen in ‘horrible contorted terror’, his body covered with ‘strange discolorations… as if caused by the hoofs of some monstrous goat that had leaped and stamped upon him’.133 Like Forster and Saki, Benson also interweaves homosexuality into his story134 and Halton’s combination of strength and youthful beauty is typical of the idealised young male of Ancient Greece: ‘He was of medium height and rather slender in build, but the supple ease and grace of his movements gave the impression of great physical strength… His head was small, his face of an exquisite beauty of modelling, while

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the smoothness of its contour would have led you to believes that he was a beardless lad still in his teens’.135 In ancient Greece, homosexual practices were based on a mentorship as well as physical attraction, in which the older male educated the younger on social norms, self-control and character development.136 Pan’s transcendental tutorship of Halton is very much in this spirit—a sexually charged transfer of knowledge.137 Halton himself see his newly reinvigorated youth not just as a renewed beauty but also as a source of potential ‘Think what youth means! It is the capacity for growth, mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger’.138 However, Halton’s blind devotion to Pan proves to be his undoing. His worship of him is unambiguous, and he sees only the beauty and wonder of nature: ‘I am one with it … the river and I, I and the river. The cool and splash of it is I, and the water-herbs that wave in it are I also. And my strength and my limbs are not mine but the river’s. It is all one, all one, dear Fawn’.139 In his belief in the oneness of nature, Pan invokes the Orphic Pan, but, like in Saki, being all involves more than just beauty and wonder, and Halton refuses to acknowledge that suffering is also part of the whole, going so far as to flee from a crying child ‘Can’t you understand that that sort of thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely, throws me back, retards the coming of the great hour!’140 In seeking communion with Pan and the natural world, Halton’s fatal error is the assumption that Pan is entirely benevolent, and that the natural world is safe and beautiful. In his initial impressions of the village to which Halton has moved, Darcy immediately notes the darker nature of the landscape: ‘he inhabitants of St. Faith’s will not willingly venture into the forest after dark. … [A]nd though it is difficult to get from these villagers any very clear story of occult appearances, the feeling is widespread. One story indeed I have heard with some definiteness, the tale of a monstrous goat that has been seen to skip with hellish glee about the woods and shady places, and this perhaps is connected with the story’141 —something that Halton, blinded perhaps by the passion of the newly converted, refuses to see. In his denial of Pan’s dual nature, in his simple pursuit of natural joy, Halton commits the hubris of failing to show respect for the god’s darker nature.142 Here the ambiguity which offers so many perspectives of Pan for writers is essential to his nature, and by not accepting this ambiguity, Frank is essentially doomed. This cult of Pan extended beyond the pages of literature.143 Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet, L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of the Faun) was first performed in 1912, and drew on the 1896 poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé, which also inspired Claude Debussy’s symphonic poem (1894). While the titular character of the ballet is an unnamed faun, rather than Pan himself, the poem on which it draws was inspired by the Greek myth of Pan and Syrinx, and from the Renaissance onwards, Pan became intertwined with representations of satyrs, silens and fauns.144 Nijinsky’s representation of the Faun in this piece is striking, and his presence and character draws on the transgressive, primitive representations of Pan seen in the literature under discussion. Nijinksy was a member of Ballet Russes, a Paris-based ballet troop formed in 1909 by Sergei Diaghilev, who pioneered new, more erotic representations of the male dancers’ body which gave away to a new, more atypical treatment of movement.145 Nijinksy wears a piebald leotard (with patches of dark colour to suggest fur), pointy ears, an erect tail and a fig leaf to cover his genitals,146

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drawing on typical Pan elements but, through the flesh-covered body stocking, also highlights the dancers’ athletic physique.147 Pan/Faun was a perfect vehicle for these developments. Not only was Pan’s ‘queerness’ a key element in his representation, both in ancient myth and more modern depictions, but Pan himself was closely associated with dance. In classical art, he was often depicted playing music as nymphs dance, while in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, lines 14–26 include a lengthy description of his dancing with the nymphs.148 Nijinksy’s representation of Pan was described at the time by a commentator as a ‘strange commingling of the archaic and the decadent’,149 and Nijinksy himself wanted ‘to move away from the classical Greece that Fokine likes to use. Instead I want to use the archaic Greece that is less known and, so far, little used in theatre’. The antiquity depicted in this playthus drew on the idea of Ancient Greece seen in the works of the Cambridge Ritualists, as well as the works of Frederick Nietzsche, in particular The Birth of Tragedy. The Greece of Nijinksy’s ballet—like the Pan of Forster, or Saki—was primitive, pagan and irrational, and could serve as a mirror on modern concerns regarding, among other things, gender categories and roles.150 A god who had multiple personas from his birth is a fitting god for fin de siècle literature. His ambiguity means he can be utilised as a symbol for multiple causes, and that very ambiguity makes him a transgressive figure from the start. He is no longer the gentle, bucolic god of earlier ages, but one who is liminal, mercurial, unknowable. For fin de siècle and Edwardian writers, Pan could be a motif for fear of scientific developments, for evolution and associated degeneration, for homosexuality, for the wild and the rural—all things which were very much on the minds of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century populations as they struggled to make sense of their place in a changing world. But most of all Pan stands for ambiguity, for uncertainty—he is the zeitgeist of the period given uncanny, divine form. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

Albeit incorrectly; his name actually comes from the word Pa-on, from the root p¯a(s), meaning the ‘guardian of flocks’. Philip Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 77. Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology (London, Routledge, 1992), 126. Curiously, Pan is the only Greek god who is known to have died. At least according to Plutarch (46–120 CE), who wrote that during the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE) a ship’s pilot was commanded by an unseen voice to announce ‘Great Pan is dead’ while passing the Greek island of Palodes. After the pilot delivered this news ‘there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement’ (Plutarch, Moralia V.29: ‘The Obsolescence of Oracles’, 17). Other examples of Pan literature not discussed in this chapter include ‘The Garden God’ (1906) by Forrest Reid, ‘The Crock of Gold’ (1912) by James Stephens, and ‘The Touch of Pan’ (1917) by Algernon Blackwood. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), 46.

586

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6.

Jennifer Hallett, ‘Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, The Pomegranate 8:2 (2006), 166. By the Hellenistic period, Pan had been amalgamated into Orphism. The term itself is a twentieth-century development (Fritz Graf, ‘Orphism’, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.) Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.) Orphism was a mystery cult or religious philosophy which claimed descent from the teachings of the mythical hero Orpheus and combined ideas from Dionysian mysteries and Pythagorean philosophy, and in which there was a belief in the immortality and transmigration of the human soul. In the Orphic Hymn to Pan, the ‘all’-ness of Pan becomes essential; here the notion is developed of a ‘cosmic’ Pan, an allegorical interpretation in which his dual nature symbolised the nature of the universe, Pan’s doubleness representing the fusion of the physical and the divine that runs through all (Martin Butler, ‘Ben Jonson’s “Pan’s Anniversary” and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral’, English Literary Renaissance 22:3 (1992), 374). Mark de Cicco, ‘The Queer God Pan: Terror and Apocalypse, Reimagined’, in S. Hutchinson and R.A. Brown (eds.), Monsters and Monstrosity from the fin de siècle to the Millennium: New Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 52. For more on this see Ronald Hallett (op cit.), Jennifer Hutton (op. cit). Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 46. William Wordsworth, ‘Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake’, The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 1806–1815 (New York: Cosimo Inc, 2008), 34. In his 1852 poem ‘Lines Written in Kensington Gardens’. Suzanne L. Barnett, Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4. Barnett, Romantic Paganism, 62 n.9. John Keats, ‘Endymion’, l.288–289. Glennis Byron, ‘Gothic in the 1890s’, in D. Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Wiley, 2012) 196s. Nicholas Freeman, ‘Nothing of the Wild Wood: Pan, Paganism and Spiritual Confusion in E.F. Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far”’, Literature & Theology 19:1 (2005), 23. Kelly Hurley, ‘British Gothic fiction, 1885–1930’, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 190. Byron, ‘Gothic in the 1890s’, 197. De Cicco, ‘The Queer God Pan’, 53. Hallett, ‘Wandering Dreams and Social Marches’, 167. Robert Dingley, ‘Meaning Everything: The Image of Pan at the Turn of the Century’, in K. Filmer (ed.), Twentieth-Century Fantasists; Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in Twentieth-Century Mythopoeic Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992), 52.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

The Cult of Pan in Nineteenth-Century Literature

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

587

Miles A. Kimball, ‘Aestheticism, Pan, and Edwardian Children’s Literature’, CEA Critic 65:2 (2002), 52. Kenneth Grahame, Pagan Papers (Portland, OR: The Floating Press, 2014), 24. Peter Green, Beyond the Wild Wood. The World of Kenneth Grahame (London: Grange Books, 1993), 149. Hallett, ‘Wandering Dreams and Social Marches’, 177 Paul March-Russell. ‘Pagan Papers: History, Mysticism, and Edwardian Childhood’, in A. E. Gavin and A. F. Humphries (eds.), Childhoods in Edwardian Fiction. Worlds Enough and Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 30 Jane Darcy. ‘The Representation of Nature in The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden’, Lion and the Unicorn 19:2 (1995), 212. Green, Beyond the Wild Wood, 152. John David Moore. ‘Pottering About in the Garden: Kenneth Grahame’s Version of Pastoral in “The Wind in the Willows”’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 23: 1 (199), 58. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Scribner, 1908), 156. Grahame, Wind in the Willows, 155. Michael Steig, ‘At the Back of The Wind in the Willows: An Experiment in Biographical and Autobiographical Interpretation’, Victorian Studies 24 (1981), 314. Ibid. Gillian Bazovsky, ‘The Paradox of Pan as a Figure of Regeneration in Children’s Literature’, in H.V. Lovatt and O. Hodkinson (eds.), Classical Reception and Children’s Literature. Greece, Rome and Children’s Transformation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 137. In a discussion of the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ by the Guardian, it is described as ‘strange compared to all the others [chapters] and, to some, is vaguely homo-erotic’ (Mark Brown, ‘Mole and Rat Meet the Horned God Pan in British Library Summer Exhibition’, The Guardian, 28 February 2012). David McCooey and Emma Hayes, ‘The Liminal Poetics of The Wind in the Willows’, Children’s Literature 45 (2017), 65 n.15. Steig, ‘At the Back of The Wind in the Willows’, 3. Quoted in Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame, a Biography (London: John Murray, 1959), 197. From the introduction to the 1908 edition by Grahame. Maureen Moran, Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Continuum books, 2006), 122. Ibid., 122. Quoted in Freeman, ‘Nothing of the Wild Wood’, 23. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 27. Barnett, Romantic Paganism, 11. Hallett, ‘Wandering Dreams and Social Marches’, 163. Barbara J. Davy, Introduction to Pagan Studies (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2007), 21.

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47.

Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 58. Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘The Great God Pan’, Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 1 (2016), 221. Arthur Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, in A. Worth (ed.), The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. Nodens appears to be a Romano-British god who was sometimes linked to the Roman god Silvanus (Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts (Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton, 1986, 176) who was also associated with or identified as Pan, thus Machen’s implicit identification of the two is based to some degree in the archaeological evidence. Susanne Duesterberg, Popular Receptions of Archaeology: Fictional and Factual Texts in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Britain (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 69. Ibid. Bill Lucklin, ‘Revisiting the Idea of Degeneration in Urban Britain, 1830– 1900’, Urban History 33:2 (2006), 239. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 2d ed., 1874), 6. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56–57. Ibid., 65. Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 50. Ibid., 50. Johnston, ‘The Great God Pan’, 226. De Cicco, ‘The Queer God Pan’, 60. Gwilym Games, ‘Dim Legends Handed Down’. The Source of Eleusinia’, in J. Preece (ed.), Eleusinia (Croydon: The Friends of Arthur Machen, 2013), 35. Gwilym Games, ‘Before the Greyness of the World has Come’, in J. Preece (ed.), Eleusinia (Croydon: The Friends of Arthur Machen, 2013), 32. Arthur Machen, ‘Eleusinia’, in J. Preece (ed.), Eleusinia (Croydon: The Friends of Arthur Machen, 2013), 11. Ibid., 1. Johnston, ‘The Great God Pan’, 226. Arthur Machen, ‘Far Off Things’, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen (Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2017), 80. Arthur Machen, ‘The Red Hand’, in A. Worth (ed.), The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 205. Daniel Corrick, ‘Machen and the Mysteries’, in J. Preece (ed.), Eleusinia (Croydon: The Friends of Arthur Machen, 2013), 55. Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 12. Corrick, ‘Machen and the Mysteries’, 56.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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74. 75.

589

Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 47. The Friends of Arthur Machen, Arthur Machen’s 1890s Notebooks (Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2016), 116. 76. Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 10. 77. Byron, ‘Gothic in the 1890s’, 190. 78. Ibid., 190. 79. Quoted in James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 146. 80. Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 10. 81. Ibid., 12. 82. Eva Valentová, ‘Dreaming in Fire and Working in Clay: The Problem of Translating Ideas into Words in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan’, Brno Studies in English 43:1 (2017), 216. 83. Arthur Machen, ‘Beneath the Barley’, in J. Preece (ed.), Eleusinia (Croydon: The Friends of Arthur Machen, 2013), 46. 84. Machen, ‘Far Off Things’, 16. 85. See de Cicco, ‘The Queer God Pan’, for more on Swinburne’s darker version of Pan. 86. Algernon Swinburne, ‘A Nympholet’, in L. Findlay (ed.) Selected Poems (London: Routledge, 2002), 234. 87. Machen, ‘Far Off Things’, 111. 88. Pan’s (homo)sexual encounters were prolific enough that the phrase τoν
àva τιμαν (“to honor Pan”) was used to signify male homosexual practices (Borgeaud, Cult of Pan, 75). 89. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 50. 90. Victor Imko, ‘Pan and “Homosexual Panic” in Turn of the Century Gothic Literature’, Chrestomathy 12 (2013), 1. 91. Byron, ‘Gothic in the 1890s’, 194. 92. Ibid., 194. 93. Kenneth M. Weiss, ‘“Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw”, So What?’ Evolutionary Anthropology 19 (2010), 41. 94. David LaRocca, Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 261. 95. Dingley, ‘Meaning Everything’, 50. 96. Ibid., 51. 97. William Greenslade, ‘Pan’ and the Open Road: Critical Paganism in R. L. Stevenson., K. Grahame, E. Thomas and EM Forster’, L. Hapgood and N. Paxton Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–30 (London: Routledge, 2000), 145. 98. With thanks to The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and the Society of Authors as the E. M. Forster Estate for permission to reproduce Forster’s work here. 99. E. M. Forster, ‘The Story of a Panic’, The Celestial Omnibus: And Other Stories (Portland, OR: Floating Press, 2012), 9. 100. Ibid., 11.

590

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

K. Soar

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 34. Eleanor Toland, And Did Those Hooves: Pan and the Edwardians (University of Wellington, 2014), 39. Greenslade, ’Pan’ and the Open Road’, 146. Avtar Singh, The Novels of EM Forster (New Delhi: Atlantic & Distributors, 1986), 268. Robert Ackerman, ‘Jane Ellen Harrison: The Early Work’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 13 (1972), 229. Green, Beyond the Wild Wood, 94. Hector Hugh Munroe, ‘The Music on the Hill’, The Collected Short Stories of Saki (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 140. Ibid, 140. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 140. Robert Drake, ‘Saki’s Ironic Stories’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 5:3 (1963), 377. A. J. Langguth, Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 22. Munroe, ‘The Music on the Hill’, 139. Brian Gibson, Reading Saki: The Fiction of H.H. Munro (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2014). Freeman, ‘Nothing of the Wild Wood’, 25. Ibid. Imko, ‘Pan and “Homosexual Panic”’, 1. Toland, And Did These Hooves, 40. E. F. Benson, ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’, in J.L. French (ed.) Masterpieces of Mystery (Bremen: Dogma, 2012), 104. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 119. Freeman, ‘Nothing of the Wild Wood’, 23. Benson, ‘The Man Who Went Too Far, 93.

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136. Marina Fischer, ‘Sport Objects and Homosexuality in 53 Ancient Greek VasePainting: The New Reading of Tampa Museum Vase 86.70’, Nikephoros 20 (2007), 165. 137. Imko, ‘Pan and “Homosexual Panic”’, 12. 138. Benson, ‘The Man Who Went Too Far, 98. 139. Ibid., 94. 140. Ibid., 110. 141. Ibid., 91. 142. Toland, And Did These Hooves, 33. 143. For further reading on representations of Pan and fauns on stage, see Rhiannon Easterbrook, Performing Classical Antiquity on the Popular Stage in Britain, 1895–1914 (University of Bristol, 2017). 144. John Boardman, The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 9. 145. Alexandra Kolb, ‘Man as Beast: Nijinsky’s Faun: Three Case Studies’, Journal of European Studies 39:2 (2009), 151. 146. Penny Farfan, ‘Man as Beast: Nijinsky’s Faun’, South Central Review 25:1 (2008), 76. 147. Kolb, ‘Man as Beast: Nijinsky’s Faun’, 161. 148. Andrew Faulkner, ‘Et in Arcadia Diana: An Encounter with Pan in Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis’, Classical Philology 108:3 (2013), 224. 149. Russell Millard, ‘Feminine Arms, Goat Legs, and Little Monkeys: Performing Masculinity in Daphnis and Chloe’, in F. J. Schopff (ed.) Music on Stage, Vol. III (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 109. 150. Nicoletta Momigliano, ‘Modern Dance and the Seduction of Minoan Crete’, in M. G Morcilo and S. Knippschild (eds.), Seduction and Power: Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 49.

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Joris-Karl Huysmans, Decadence, Satanism and Catholicism Giles Whiteley

In one of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ (1848–1907) lesser-known novels, En Rade [Stranded] (1887), the protagonist Jacques Marles, in the midst of an existential crisis, moves from Paris to the countryside of Île-de-France. Seeking to escape his creditors in the capital, he relocates to Château de Lourps, but discovers no succour in nature. The novel begins as Marles walks towards the château, spotting an old church in the distance, illuminated atmospherically against the setting sun. ‘Pierced by the red of those windows whose circular, star-shaped traceries of lead were like gigantic spiders’ webs hanging above an inferno’, the Gothic structure ‘appeared sinister to him’.1 In the harsh natural environment of fin de siècle France, the promise of Christian redemption seems to be symbolically denied, turned into an image of hell-fire. Marles ascends to the top of the hill, and looks back from whence he came to see the landscape ‘vanish[ing] in the blackness’, a barren wilderness, ‘hollowed out like an abyss’,2 its emptiness reflecting Marles’ own haunting melancholia. It gives a preliminary introduction to the Château de Lourps, located in Longueville, lying approximately eighty kilometres southeast of Paris Its gothic chapel dated to the beginnings of the twelfth century, and Huysmans would stay there in 1886 in preparation to write the novel. A gothic mansion festering in ‘the mournful silence of an ashen sky’, the crimson dusk lights the château ‘from behind, striking the haughty ridge of the roof, the lofty form of the chimney and the two towers’.3 The adjectives, speaking to the monumental function of height that defines gothic architecture, also seems to pass subtle comment on the class agitation that had been such a persistent feature of French social life during the nineteenth century. The Paris that Marles escapes had witnessed not only the fallout from the French Revolution itself, but also further violence in the forms of the 1848 Revolution and the 1871 Commune—‘All irrational obsessions’ and ‘burning hatreds’, as Durtal puts in Là-Bas [The Damned] (1891), the novel which followed En Rade, set in 1889 in a Paris convulsed by fresh social G. Whiteley (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_32

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unrest in the form of the nationalism of Georges Ernest Boulanger (1837–1891).4 Against this revolutionary spirit, Château de Lourps bespeaks a class system which French society hoped to have partly superseded, ‘haughty’ and ‘lofty’, impressing its arrogant sense of superiority over the countryside whose views it commands. ‘Illuminated like this, the château seemed like a burnt-out ruin in which a badly extinguished fire was still smouldering’,5 so that, read allegorically, the ruin is untimely. But the embers, the unextinguished flames, of the past also persist in this ruin, resonating somewhere in the unconscious of both the subject and the nation, returning here as the repressed at the fin de siècle. The late nineteenth-century readers who expected a sequel to the jewelled decadence of Huysmans’ previous novel, À rebours [Against Nature] (1884) from En Rade may have been puzzled by this opening. Here was a novel that was not easy to categorise. In its descriptions of the hardships experienced by those who tried to eke out a livelihood in the French countryside, En Rade was far removed from the decadence of À rebours. On the other hand, in the series of nightmarish, otherworldly dream visions that wrack Marles as his mental stability fractures, fragmenting the text, the novel is hardly a work of naturalism. But in this sense, recognising En Rade’s generic instability, as a novel poised between naturalism and decadence, also helps us to begin to come to terms with some of the broader contours of Huysmans’ career. More particularly, it helps us to place Huysmans’ novels of decadence and Catholicism, 1884–1903, as well as to contextualise them within French nineteenth-century literary history and alongside the gothic tradition. Huysmans worked as a civil servant for the French Ministry of the Interior for some 32 years, only retiring in 1898, following the commercial success of one of his later novels, La cathédrale (1898).6 In the preceding years, he had been at the centre of French literary life, writing explosive novels like Là-Bas on headed Ministry paper. Before the publication of À rebours, Huysmans had identified with naturalism and the towering literary presence of Émile Zola (1840–1902), with whom he was on friendly terms. His Marthe, historie d’une fille (1876), Les Sœurs Vatard [The Vatard Sisters] (1879) and En ménage [Married Life] (1881), were all works of naturalism. So too, if to a lesser extent, À vau-l’eau [Downstream] (1882), the story of a perpetually disappointed Parisian clerk, although here, Huysmans’ black humour and burgeoning sense of existential crisis mark the beginnings of a break with Zola. Still, during the latter half of the 1870s, Huysmans had worked hard to cultivate good relations with the naturalists, establishing himself as a respected, if somewhat minor literary figure. But his career radically changed course when À rebours appeared in May 1884.7 The success of this novel meant that Huysmans was no longer a disciple but had himself become a master. He swiftly garnered a new, different set of followers, including radical young voices of the French literary scene including Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889), Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) and Léon Bloy (1846–1917). He promoted the poetry of Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), leading figures in the Symbolist movement, the latter of whom was so taken by Huysmans’ atmospheric quotations of his work that he wrote ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (1885), dedicated to his fictional protagonist.8 Nor was Huysmans’ reputation limited to France: in Britain, he became something of a

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celebrity among the aesthetes and decadents, with Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) claiming À rebours the model for the ‘poisonous’ ‘yellow book’ of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891), and Arthur Symons (1865–1945) championing Huysmans’ novel as the ‘breviary’ of decadence.9 Huysmans recalled the context surrounding the publication of À rebours, and the reasons lying behind his break with Zola, in his 1903 preface, written for the novel’s republication. ‘Naturalism was then at full tide’, he noted, ‘but that school, which was destined to fulfil the invaluable service of placing real characters in precise settings, was condemned to repeat itself over and over, and endlessly to go over the same ground’.10 Most problematically, the subjects it illuminated were by definition average. Naturalism ‘had no room – in theory at least – for exceptions’, so that ‘in the pretext of being true to life’, Zola created characters ‘who came close as possible to the average person’.11 Not so À rebours, a work that focuses on a subject, des Esseintes, who is exceptional in nearly every respect. Affluent, privileged, highly educated, uninterested in social engagement, retiring from the public, des Esseintes lives an aesthetic life in the spirit of art. It is a life of excess, devoted to the greatest pleasures that money could buy, open to experiences denied both economically and morally from the ‘average’ late nineteenth-century French citizen. With the novel, Huysmans gave an insight into a very different world to that which concerned the naturalists, drawing on an alternative literary heritage, most notably exemplified by the work of Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). If Zola, too, showed something of the influence of this tradition in the infamous scene of the ‘macabre’ where Laurent visits the Paris morgue in Thérèse Raquin (1867), experiencing there a ‘strange pleasure’ in the sight of the dead bodies,12 then the gothic qualities of naturalism differ from those of Huysmans’ decadence in being rooted precisely in the everyday material realities of the nineteenth-century subject. Read as a reply to Zola, the decadence of À rebours and Là-Bas respond to the limitations of naturalism’s ‘materialism’ by reviving the gothic. This chapter begins with À rebours, an example of the ways in which gothic and decadent traditions intersected in fin de siècle culture, before turning to Là-Bas, the first of Huysmans’ novels to focus on the semi-autobiographical figure of the writer, Durtal. In this novel, Durtal is writing a biography of the fifteenth-century Satanist, paedophile and child-murderer, Gilles de Rais (1405–1440), the research for which thrusts him into the world of fin de siècle Parisian Satanism. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of La Cathédrale, the middle volume of the trilogy of novels that followed Là-Bas, focusing on Durtal’s conversion to Catholicism. In En route (1895), Durtal leaves Paris to stay at a Trappist monastery, while La Cathédrale finds Durtal moving to Chartres, and L’Oblat (1903) sees him become a Benedictine Oblate, as Huysmans himself had two years earlier. In La Cathédrale and this trilogy, Huysmans’ decadent gothic is reworked into an alternative interest in the ‘au-delà’ or ‘beyond’. As with Huysmans’ earlier works, what is at stake is precisely the feeling that there is more to existence than could be explained through the materialism of his contemporaries, a transcendental ‘beyond’ that naturalism could never quite reckon. It links Huysmans’ extraordinarily powerful descriptions of Notre-Dame de Chartres

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of La Cathédrale to the works of his decadent period, with Catholicism offering the fictional balm for both Durtal’s and Huysmans’ wounded souls. The links between the Gothic and decadence are some of the more complicated questions of the ways in which literary history diverted and fragmented across the long nineteenth century. Moreover, the links are always operating in two directions, with decadence both an expression of, and active negotiation of, its literary past, and highly formative on modernism.13 Gautier’s focus on the ‘macabre’, on death, disease, moral and physical corruption, was a lesson he drew out of Romanticism, and particularly from the gothic literature of the period. It was a lesson that the naturalists learnt in their turn from Gautier, although for many of them, this macabre is less a question of a compromised experience of pleasure, than a quality that needs accounting for, sanitised by the novelist’s sense of critical distance. Gautier’s macabre, for its part, was developed in its turn in Baudelaire’s influential and radical volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] (1857), in which he depicts the modern metropolis as a haunted space, turning Paris into a nightmarish city. This sense of a specifically modern Gothic is accentuated in the poems in which Baudelaire openly deals with sex, such as ‘Lesbos’, ‘Femmes damnées’ [The damned women] and ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’, for which the author and publisher would be prosecuted for outraging public decency. In Baudelaire’s hands, such fallen women are at once eroticized and damned, their gothicism lying in their vampirelike monstrosity, the way they destabilise the (male) subject and provoke libidinal desire. Throughout, sex and death intertwine. Des Esseintes, the protagonist of À rebours, is taken by Baudelaire, owning specially printed volumes of his poetry,14 and these kinds of misogynistic fantasies of the femme fatale are common to Huysmans’ novel, as when he muses on the paintings of Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) depicting the biblical figure of Salomé. Dancing for Herod and claiming the head of John the Baptist, Salomé becomes a symbol of the decadent desire for the forbidden, a ‘monstrous Beast’, a gothic dream woman, whose erotic power of fascination is linked to the death drive.15 À rebours opens with a survey of some ancestral portraits housed at Château de Lourps, the family seat of des Esseintes. The theme is common in nineteenth-century Gothic, linking Edgar Allen Poe’s (1809–1849) ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842) to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.16 In the location of Château de Lourps, the mansions of À rebours and En Rade are identical, so that the latter novel reads as a kind of commentary on the former, Marles’ lack of exceptionalism a perverted simulacrum of des Esseintes’ exceptionalism. Such echoes make the two into doppelgänger figures, also linked by their propensity for vivid, sexual and violent nightmares, something they have in common with Durtal and Rais in Là-Bas. Having passed from the faces of his ancient relatives, the narrator turns to one portrait in particular, ‘a strange, sly face’, whose ‘cheekbones were punctuated with cosmetic commas of rouge’, troubling gender, and manifesting ‘the defects of an impoverished stock, and the excess of lymph in the blood’. The portrait witnesses the beginnings of the ‘degeneration’ of the ‘ancient house’, the face effeminate, his progeny becoming ‘progressively less manly’. The house of des Esseintes eventually turn to ‘intermarrying amongst

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themselves’,17 accentuating their decline in an incestuous motif recalling Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839).18 Des Esseintes is an image of degeneration. His childhood had been ‘overshadowed by sickness’, orphaned early when his mother died of ‘nervous exhaustion’ and his father from an unspecified ‘obscure illness’.19 Having been educated in a Jesuit institution, he turns away from Catholicism, ‘his contempt for humanity’ growing fierce, and attempts to slake his desire in the pleasures of the flesh, keeping mistresses ‘famed for their depravity’, and, boring of them, turning to the lower classes, ‘hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses’.20 This emphasis on the poor as a commodity which can be bought and sold for the purpose of des Esseintes’ pleasure is not simply a comment on the prostitutes’ poverty, but figures their ‘filthiness’ as an erotic quality itself. It perhaps also passes subtle comment on the naturalists, who arguably exploited the lower classes in their fiction, as Huysmans himself had in his earlier novels. Still unfulfilled, des Esseintes turns to ‘unnatural love-affairs and perverse pleasures’, coded language, suggesting homosexual encounters.21 Homoerotic desire is a consistent undercurrent to the narrative, as when the narrator describes des Esseintes’ friendship with a boy ‘as attractive in his way as any girl’; likewise, later in the novel, when he becomes fascinated by Miss Urania, a circus performer in whom ‘he thought he saw an artificial change of sex’, her ‘feminine affectations’ supplanted by ‘the agile, vigorous charms of a male’, and with whom he imaginatively trades gender roles.22 Regardless, libertine that he is, des Esseintes finds his desire only fleeting, prone to bouts of ennui and sinking into lethargy. He contemplates suicide, as befitting someone attracted to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1777–1860), only prevented from the act ‘by the cowardice of the flesh’.23 Deciding to sell Château de Lourps, des Esseintes purchases Fontanay-aux-Roses, a villa in the Parisian suburbs (reversing the journey of Marles in En Rade). There, he becomes a kind of ‘refined’ hermit from modern life, taking ‘refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity’.24 The following chapters of À rebours follow des Esseintes’ on a series of adventures into ‘sensual depravity’, alongside various forms of aesthetic experimentation and connoisseurship.25 One of the most famous of these experiments comes when des Esseintes encrusts the shell of a tortoise with precious stones, turning the living creature into an artificial work of art. He collects items from around the world: fabrics, furniture, fine wines, perfumes, flowers, paintings and books. Des Esseintes waxes lyrical on the Latin authors of the decadent period, which leads him to muse on the fall of the Roman Empire at the hands of the Goths, the once great capital city ‘paralysed’, seeing ‘her extremities, the East and West, thrashing about in pools of blood’.26 The passage would have reminded some of Huysmans’ readers of the etymology of the word ‘décadence’, which had entered French from Medieval Latin during the gothic period as a moment of Christological commentary on the excesses of the pagan past. Decadence implies the idea of decaying, a falling down (de-cad¯ere) from a prior state of greatness. Huysmans’ readers, irrespective of their own sympathies, would have perceived the implied analogy between the violence of the Goths and the latter-day Gothic, between the

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fall of Rome and the seemingly ‘universal dissolution’ of all values at the fin de siècle.27 This theme of dissolution, whether unwilling or willed, and as an expression of a death drive either collective or personal, underwrites so much of À rebours’ Gothic. In one of the most famous episodes in the novel, des Esseintes, suffering from dyspepsia, begins to take his sustenance à rebours, a diet of liquid enemas which constitute a kind of ‘perverse epicurism’.28 Earlier in the novel, he had tried his hand at growing flowers. Engaging in horticultural experiments, crossbreeding species, he finds them syphilitic flowers of evil. He is taken by ‘a sudden vision of the unceasing torments inflicted on humanity by the virus of distant ages’,29 a millenarian nightmare figuring the nineteenth century as the culmination of a Darwinian lesson that humanity may no longer be the fittest to survive, linking to his own hereditary degeneration. Des Esseintes falls asleep, his violent, sexual dream anticipating those of Marles in En Rade, and one which has prompted a great deal of critical commentary, much of it informed by Freudian psychoanalysis.30 He meets a woman in a forest at dusk, before then encountering ‘a strange figure’ on horseback: ‘the rider was an equivocal, sexless creature with a green skin and terrifying eyes of a cold, clear blue shining out from under purple lids; there were pustules all round its mouth’. A monster with ‘the arms of a skeleton’, ‘shaking with fever’, it stands as ‘the image of the Pox’.31 Des Esseintes flees, finding refuge in a summerhouse, encountering the woman again, but hearing the Pox’s horse returning, he panics and strangles the woman to keep her quiet. He sees a door, opening it to find ‘in the middle of a vast clearing, enormous white pierrots […] jumping about like rabbits in the moonlight’.32 This surreal image anticipates modernism in its defamiliarisation, a technique which also suggests the alienation of the fin de siècle, what Karl Marx (1818–1883) would call its quality of ‘Entfremdung’, linked to capitalism. With des Esseintes’ path blocked, the pierrots expand to fill ‘the whole horizon and the whole sky’,33 and he hears the sound of the hoofs cease, finding himself face to face with the Pox, resigned to his death. His enemy vanishing, he is confronted by a new scene, ‘a hideous mineral landscape’, ‘stretching away into the distance without a sign of life’. Antediluvian, this landscape echoes his earlier vision, standing at once as an echo of the primordial past and an apocalyptic intimation of the future. Coming across ‘an ashen-faced woman, naked but for a pair of green stockings’,34 he recognises her as ‘the Flower’, linking these dreams to his hothouse experiments.35 The Flower embraces him, turning into a kind of hermaphroditic succubus. Horrified, des Esseintes finds himself unable to escape, witnessing ‘the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its swordblades gaping open to expose the bloody depths’.36 In its mingling of resistant terror with erotic fascination, mobilising that chthonic element of desire which Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) calls ‘thanatos’ or the death drive, des Esseintes’ dream rests on gothic tropes, offering another allegorical representation of the decadence of the fin de siècle. In the final chapter of the novel, des Esseintes considers the changing face of French society and the rise of the middle class, blaming the bourgeoisie for a levelling down of the exceptional. The ideas recall Huysmans’ critique of Zola, that

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naturalism amounted to little more than ‘a torrent of hackneyed phrases and conventional ideas’.37 The markers of the nobility and their past power and glory were now only encountered in ‘the very mansions, age-old escutcheons, heraldic pomp’ of gothic ruins such as Château de Lourps, attributed to the ways in which democracy and the ideology of capitalism, with their ‘passion for profits’ and ‘love of lucre’, had supplanted older feudal models.38 The theme and phrasing is recalled in LàBas, where Durtal compares the nobility of the fin de siècle to that of the gothic period. ‘Society has only degenerated in the four centuries which separate us from the Middle Ages’, he reflects, the moderns lacking that Trieb or drive which Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) called ‘der Wille zur Macht’ [the will to power]. Its ‘instincts for carnage and rape’ had been ‘moderated’, replaced by ‘the passion for lucre’.39 Des Esseintes is unimpressed with modern life, desperate to find a meaning that its gross materialism is unable to provide. Perhaps it is for this reason that, while he loses religion early in his life, he finds himself consistently flirting with Catholicism throughout the novel, an expression of his ‘uneasy’ ‘longing for faith’. But for des Esseintes, Catholicism is as much an aesthetic pose as a genuine promise of revelation. He is fascinated with the ‘costume and jewellery’ of ritual, ‘the poetic and poignant atmosphere of Catholicism’.40 His ‘hunger for religion’ is met throughout by the insufficiency of faith, and in its stead, des Esseintes finds himself drawn, if not spiritually then at least aesthetically, to medieval Catholicism, where the fear of God’s retributive justice and ‘the indispensable dread of hell’ was a palpable motive.41 He harks back to the gothic period, a time when Catholicism was ‘seasoned with a touch of magic […] and a touch of sadism’, a desire for a kind of faith that organised Christianity was ill-equipped to satisfy during the fin de siècle.42 These ideas return in Là-Bas. As the novel begins, Durtal’s ‘need for the supernatural’,43 has already seen him socialise with minor ‘dabblers in the dark arts’, the usual suspects of ‘defrocked priests and long-haired poets’, alchemists, astrologers, cabbalists, demonologists, ‘the kind of extraordinary characters only to be found in Paris’.44 But if initially sceptical towards this ‘mystic circus’,45 Durtal finds that, almost against himself, he is drawn deeper and deeper into this world, fascinated by Satanism, both ancient and modern. The first of Huysmans’ novels to feature the semi-autobiographical Durtal, Là-Bas is a particularly ‘literary’ exercise, constituting both a novel about Durtal and a novel about Durtal’s writing. It tells a number of related stories: of Durtal’s friendships with des Hermies, the bell-ringer Carhaix, and the astrologer Gévingey, and their spiritual conversations; his struggles to write his biography of Rais; passages which read like versions of this biography; Durtal’s affair with Hyacinthe Chantelouve; his burgeoning interest in contemporary Satanism and the spiritual battle waging between Canon Docre and Dr. Johannès; his discussions of contemporary and historical accounts of séances and witchcraft, incubi and succubi and other forms of socalled ‘possession’; with the novel concluding with Durtal’s eventual attendance at a Black Mass. Throughout, the focus on Rais sheds a strange kind of light on the contemporary moment. Durtal and Huysmans situate Rais as both an exception and a product of his time, simultaneously a gothic monster and a monster born of the Gothic. Indeed, a series of juxtapositions between the ancient and the modern

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permeate the novel, what Paul Valéry (1871–1945) called its ‘parallel demonstration’,46 where Rais’ life and crimes pass comment on the decadence of the fin de siècle, and vice versa. Canon Docre is called ‘a modern Gilles de Rais’, and the historical parallel works both ways, with Rais considered ‘the Des Esseintes of the fifteenth century’, with Huysmans citing his own fictional character.47 Like des Esseintes, Rais is positioned as an exceptional figure, ‘the most exquisite sadist and the most terrible artist in crime the world has ever known’.48 Indeed, according to Durtal’s biographical research, Rais’ ‘artistic’ qualities arose at precisely the moment ‘his perverse tendencies’—both sexual and spiritual—begin to emerge.49 If an admittedly extreme example, Huysmans’ portrait of Rais as an artist suggests he stands as an image of the risks posed by a refined decadence. There are therefore two important contexts for understanding Huysmans’ gothic in Là-Bas: the world of fin de siècle Parisian Satanism, and the growing scholarly interest in Rais. Robert Mighall has discussed the increased attention that Rais enjoyed during the nineteenth century, linked to the burgeoning discourse of sexology.50 In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) pathologises Rais,51 and the parallel he draws between Rais and the Marquis de Sade (1740– 1814), another figure associated with the Gothic, is also made by Durtal, who early in the novel states that ‘Sade was no more than a timid bourgeois, a wretched little fantasist, in comparison with Gilles’.52 But Durtal’s motives for writing on Rais differ from those of the sexologists. Citing the criminology of Cesare Lombroso (1835– 1909) and the psychiatry of Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), Durtal, while admitting Rais’ ‘monomania’, claims that there are things science cannot explain: ‘encephalic lesions, the adherence of one or other of the membranes to the cerebrum teach us nothing. They are just the secondary consequences, effects derived from a cause which itself remains in need of an explanation, which is just what the materialists are incapable of providing’.53 Indeed, this suspicion of sexology is rooted in a broader suspicion of materialism, linked to Huysmans’ break with naturalism and his turn to writing decadent Gothic. Thus, the opening salvo with which Là-Bas begins sees Durtal attack the contemporary propensity to blame everything ‘on the appetites and instincts. Sex and insanity’.54 As Mighall puts it, Huysmans sought ‘to discredit the materialist’s demystification of Rais’ demonic status’, to take seriously Rais interest in Satanism.55 This meant properly contextualising Rais historically and spiritually, rather than treating him as a scientific case study. To this end, Huysmans was conversant with the historical literature on Rais, referring in the novel to early work by Hippolyte Bonnelier (1799–1868) in Le Maréchal de Raiz (1834), an 1857 article by Armand Guéraud (1821–1868) and Eugène Bossard’s (1853–1905) Gilles de Rais (1885).56 Durtal stresses that Rais’ horrific crimes began only after his attempts to communicate with the supernatural failed. Following his time fighting for Jeanne d’Arc (1412– 1431), Rais became fascinated with the alchemists, but found no miracles in the mysticism of Nicolas Flamel (1330–1418), whose work Rais is supposed to own and which amounted to little more than ‘a tissue of nonsense’.57 The allusion to Flamel also binds Rais to the nineteenth century, his work having been the source of renewed interest, recently retranslated by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse

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Constant) (1810–1875). Frustrated by his lack of progress, Rais begins to court Satan, signing a pact in blood. His close accomplice Jean de la Rivière claims to see the devil appear ‘in the shape of a leopard’, one unnamed demonologist is found ‘lying in a pool of blood on the floor, his head crushed and his body horribly mangled’,58 and another, Francesco Prélati, meets a similar fate. However, Rais himself never sees Satan, nor realises the secrets promised by the occult. It is in this context that Durtal explains his rampage of rape, vampirism and murder in terms of ‘the law of Satanism which decrees that the elected one of Evil must descend the spiral of sin to the very bottom to be fulfilled’.59 To modern readers, Durtal (and Huysmans) appears far too detatched, and somehow, in spite of the historical evidence amassed, to underestimate the true horrors of his crimes. But the significance of Huysmans’ gesture towards historicisation is to firmly root Rais’ monstrosity as a product of the Gothic, in this anticipating Le procès de Gilles de Rais [The Trial of Gilles de Rais] (1959) by Georges Bataille (1897–1962), one of his modernist heirs. Compared to the average baron, Durtal opines, Rais ‘exceeded them’ not in kind but degree, ‘in the opulence of his debauchery, in the magnitude of his murderous proclivities’.60 It is in this that Rais’ crimes for Durtal become less ‘carnal’ than ‘spiritual’.61 Divining the possible models lying behind the characters drawn in Là-Bas, as well as the facts regarding whether or not Huysmans himself attended a Black Mass in the course of researching the novel, has prompted the spilling of a great deal of critical ink.62 Certainly Huysmans was involved with a number of significant figures in fin de siècle Parisian Satanist circles, and his interest during the period was not solely academic, providing a preface to Jules Bois’ (1868–1943) Le Satanisme et la magie (1895). Hyacinthe Chantelouve was based on Berthe de Courrière (1852–1916), to whom he was introduced by Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915). Courrière was interested in spiritualism, which Là-Bas’ Carhaux considers simply ‘the new name for what the ancients used to call necromancy’,63 and Huysmans would personally attend a séance she and Goncourt organised, as well as organising his own.64 Canon Docre, who leads the Black Mass, and who is said to have ‘a cross tattooed on the soles of his feet, so that he may have the pleasure of continually walking upon the symbol of the Saviour’, may have been partly modelled on Abbé Lodewijk Van Haecke (1829–1912), reputed to have the same tattoo.65 An inspiration for the character of Dr. Johannès was Joseph Antoine Boullan (1824–1893), whom Huysmans knew personally, meeting him in February 1890, introduced by Courrière. A defrocked priest, Boullan headed the Society for the Reparation of Souls. However, according to the poet Marquis Stanislas De Guaita (1861–1897), their meetings were simply an excuse for orgies. But if the Dr. Johannès of Là-Bas is on the side of good in the novel, the real Boullan was a murderer, having killed the child he fathered with a former nun, Adèle Chevalier in 1860 (although Huysmans would not have known of this until after Boullan’s death). As two faces of a seemingly outdated fascination with the au-delà, the world of contemporary Satanism is contrasted with that of Catholicism in Là-Bas. Much of the novel’s action takes place at the Église Saint-Sulpice, where Carhaux works, his job as a bell-ringer suitably anachronistic in the context of fin de siècle Paris. Located in the sixth arrondissement in the centre of the city, the Baroque church

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towered over its surroundings in the capital. It was the second highest structure in the city during the period, overtopped only by Notre-Dame de Paris, to which Durtal compares the architecture of Saint-Sulpice unfavourably,66 and the subject of one of the key works of French Romantic Gothic, Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). But in both the ‘modernity’ and decadence of contemporary Paris, Saint-Sulpice seems like an uncanny or untimely residue, anatopic or out of place. It is there, in Carhaux’ home, that he, Durtal and des Hermes dine, later joined on occasion by Gévingey, discussing questions of faith, as well as Satanism and the occult. Saint-Sulpice provides a safe space, but there is also the sense of blasphemy in broaching such topics within earshot of its panoptic towers, something partially confirmed when the men tactfully choose to narrate the more graphic or extreme only when Carhaux’ wife is out of the room. Indeed, there is perhaps another reason lying behind Huysmans’ choice of this specific location: although unmentioned in Là-Bas, both Sade and Baudelaire had been baptised in Saint-Sulpice. Topographically and thematically, Saint-Sulpice is placed into relation with two doubles in the novel: the chapel where Durtal attends the Black Mass, standing as its metropolitan other, and the Château de Tiffauges, its double in the countryside. The latter was Rais’ gothic castle, located in Pays de la Loire, dating to the eleventh century, in which he committed his crimes. Durtal visits its ruins in preparation for writing his biography, and in a series of striking passages, he describes the surrounding countryside, with its ‘long bluish lines of emaciated cabbages, consumptive turnips, straggling carrots’, and its peasants and livestock which ‘had managed to perpetuate themselves since time immemorial, unchanged and unchanging against the same landscape’.67 The space is figured as a land that time forgot, but one which when read rightly, speaks to the degeneration of French and European society more broadly. Scrabbling about these ‘overgrown’ ruins, gradually being reclaimed by the diseased countryside, Durtal experiences a ‘sense of dread’ that could not be rationally dispelled, the space uncanny.68 Walking inside the ruins, he considers ‘the opulent flesh’ that would have ‘covered this sandstone skeleton’ in Rais day.69 Suitably grave, Durtal’s metaphor reverses the horrors of Rais’ dungeons in which the flesh was often stripped from his victims’ bones. Durtal then imagines these interiors kitted out in rich fabrics and furniture, in passages which recall the itemised style that Huysmans had used to signal decadence in À rebours. At moments like this, Huysmans makes bold imaginative leaps, reading the Gothic past through the decadent present. Another such moment comes when Durtal, with no clear historical source, imagines one of Rais’ moments of repentance, when, overcome with the horror of what he had done, he fled into the ‘dark, impenetrable forests’ of Tiffauges. The forest landscape becomes nightmarish, recalling des Esseintes’ dream in À rebours. ‘A tree appears before him like a living being, […] limbs waving in the air, spread wide apart, an endless multiplication of opening and dividing thighs’, with ‘the very bole of the tree […] a phallus entering a skirt of leaves’.70 He is faced by a ‘landscape of abomination’: Everywhere obscene forms spring from the ground […]; the clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge with fecundity and disperse in milky parabolas; they obey the rhythm

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of the dank, obese foliage […] of enormous or dwarf-like thighs, feminine triangles, great Vs, the mouths of Sodom, burning scars, moist orifices.71

The imagery of an orgy not only echoes Rais’ crimes, but anticipates the Black Mass which Durtal will shortly attend. Rais returns to his château and sleeps, overcome first by spectres of incubi and succubi, before dreaming of the corpses of his victims ‘reviv[ing] in the larval state and attack[ing] his lower organs’.72 Writhing in pools of his own blood, Rais dreams of crawling to kiss the feet of a Crucifix, before hearing his victims ‘pleading for mercy in his own voice’.73 Read psychoanalytically, the uncanny displacement of the murderer’s voice into those of his victims suggests Rais’ desire for death, another expression of that fascinated death drive that compels him to seek out Satan. Saint-Sulpice’s other double is the chapel which hosts the ‘diabolical underworld’ celebrating the Black Mass. This scene also doubles Rais’ dream, with Durtal’s attendance at the Mass an expression of his own death drive. Located on Rue Olivierde-Serres in the fifteenth arrondissement, where Durtal travels with Hyacinthe (once Canon Docre’s mistress), the chapel had been part of an Ursuline convent in a prior life. Like Saint-Sulpice, it is another relic of Paris’ Catholic history, but paradoxically when compared to the church’s visibility, the chapel, precisely in its secrecy and as a site of transgression, feels somewhat less out of place in the fin de siècle city, as though its gothic horrors were both to be expected and ‘proper’ to such a space. Arriving, they are met by ‘a withered little man’ with ‘a worn, lecherous face’, later revealed to be one of Docre’s choir boys, ‘his cheeks plastered with cosmetics and the lips caked with carmine’. Durtal supposes himself simply to have ‘stumbled into the lair of a pack of sodomites’.74 Inside, he sees the attendees in the shadows, looking on with ‘sad’ faces, the conversation ‘grave and awed’ before the ceremony begins. On the tabernacle surmounting the altar there is an ‘infamous’ crucifix, the face of Christ ‘racked by bestial laughter’, naked with ‘a virile member projected from a bush of horsehair’.75 After a while, Canon Docre enters, ‘wearing a scarlet bonnet from which two buffalo horns covered in red cloth protruded’. He is naked beneath his chasuble, with ‘the figure of a black billy-goat showing off his horns’ adorning his robes.76 The imagery suggests the Baphomet, the Sabbatic Goat drawn by Levi, which would come to be taken as a symbol of the Church of Satan in the twentieth century. The ceremony itself is a simulacrum of the Mass, with Durtal amazed by Docre’s ‘foul torrent of blasphemy’.77 Earlier, des Hermies had speculated that the fin de siècle versions of the Black Mass would see ‘the invocation of Beelzebub’ only as ‘a preliminary to the carnal act’.78 Indeed, Durtal witnesses no supernatural visitations, with the ceremony climaxing at the moment when Docre elevates the host, while one of the choirboys fellates him. He throws it to the floor and tramples on it, when ‘a wave of collective hysteria […] spread through the hall’,79 with choirboys and women falling to consume the despoiled wafers. In this extraordinary fervour, Durtal considers the place ‘like the padded cells of a madhouse, a monstrous pandemonium of insanity and prostitution’. An orgy begins, choirboys copulating with men, a woman ‘straddling a crucifix’. Durtal looks on horrified, but Hyacinthe is spellbound,

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‘inhaling, with flared nostrils, the sexual perfume of the rutting couples’.80 The two leave, making their way to a ‘sordid hole’, a wine shop that is still open. Hyacinthe leads Durtal into a private room. There, after he initially resists her, she ‘possesses’ him and ‘initiated him into obscenities whose existence he had never suspected’. Hyacinthe becomes a succubus-figure, a real-life version of those monsters which haunted both Rais’ and des Esseintes’ dreams. When it comes time to leave, Durtal, who had witnessed the Black Mass only as a spectator, never active in the ceremony, notices for the first time, to his horror, that ‘the bed was littered with fragments of the Eucharist’.81 It makes Durtal complicit in the orgy of the chapel, if only after the fact. By the end of Là-Bas, Durtal had confirmed the continuing practice of Satanism in modern Paris but not the reality of Satan. Nevertheless, it is his thirst for a world au-delà, one that links him both with his subject Rais and binds him uncomfortably to the participants of the Black Mass, which concerns Huysmans in the continuation of Durtal’s story. Remarking of his own conversion, Huysmans wrote that ‘it was through a glimpse of the supernatural of evil that I first obtained insight into the supernatural of good. The one derived from the other’.82 If Là-Bas historicises Rais as one side of the Gothic, then Huysmans argues that his monstrosity could only be understood in the context of the world of Catholic faith, which penetrated all aspects of all life. And if Rais’ world may be said to have survived in some senses in the Satanism that Durtal witnesses in late nineteenth-century Paris and the occult circles of which Huysmans himself was very much a part, then the central novel of his conversion trilogy, La Cathédrale, reads Notre-Dame de Chartres as a very different kind of gothic survival.83 In Là-Bas, the forests of Tiffauges of Rais’ dream are weird, as are those in des Esseintes’ dream in À rebours. They are threatening and violent, a space where the subject is exposed to the forces of the unconscious. By contrast, it is important to note that from the very first paragraph of La Cathédrale, Huysmans figures NotreDame de Chartres as a ‘sheltering forest’ for the weary soul.84 What was demonic in his decadent Gothic is translated into a space of a very different kind of divine inspiration. In the course of the novel, Huysmans set out to express ‘the very soul of the Church in its totality—mysticism, symbolism, liturgy, and literary, pictorial, sculptural, musical, and architectonic art’,85 and he holds up Notre-Dame de Chartres as ‘the finest expression of art bequeathed to us by the Middle Ages’.86 For Durtal, the cathedral is a building the epitomises both Heaven and Earth, but the latter is neither the world of Zola’s La Terre (1887) nor a product of the materialism of the nineteenth century. Rather, the earthly life that the Cathedral connotes and promotes is a life of the spirit rather than the body, ‘the elation of the soul, the ascension of man’.87 As such, Notre-Dame de Chartres becomes an expression of lightness, and offers a reply to that other darkness of the Middle Ages, that night-side of the Gothic that Rais embodied. In La Cathédrale, Huysmans implicitly places into contrast these two versions of the Gothic, the luminous glories of Notre-Dame de Chartres with the chthonic horror of Château de Tiffauges, the heights of its towers to the depths of its dungeons. The two novels are different but related expressions of this thirst for the au-delà, which has survived from the Gothic to the modern. In this way, the

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gothic world of late nineteenth-century Paris that he had described in his novels of decadence is intimately related to that world of the past that its modernity seemed desperate to deny. It links the horror of À rebours and Là-Bas to Huysmans’ later novels of conversion and salvation, offering something of a reconciliation of the gothic with the Gothic. Notes 1.

J.-K. Huysmans, En Rade (Paris, Tresse & Stock, 1887), 6; Stranded, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, Dedalus, 2010), 47–48. I give references to Huysmans’ French first, followed by reference to translations. Christopher Lloyd also points out the sense in which the opening of En Rade seems drawn from the pages of a gothic novel in J.-K. Huysmans and the fin-de-siecle Novel (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 102. 2. Ibid., 7; 48. 3. Ibid., 8; 49. 4. J.-K. Huysmans, Là-Bas, ed. Yves Hersant (Paris, Gallimard, 1985), 339; The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001), 262. 5. Huysmans, En Rade, 9; 49. 6. The standard biography of Huysmans in English is Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, Clarendon, 1955), although it tends to over-simplify in reading somewhat uncritically Huysmans’ fiction biographically. Also useful is the survey in chapter one of Lloyd, J.-K. Huysmans and the fin-de-siecle Novel. In French, see Patrice Locmant, J.-K. Huysmans, le forçat de la vie (Paris, Bartillat, 2007). 7. On the novel, see François Livi, J-K. Huysmans: À rebours et l’espirit decadent, 3rd edn. (Paris, La renaissance du livre, 1991). 8. Although whether or not Mallarmé’s poem was really written ‘for des Esseintes’ is open to debate, much of its material dating to earlier than May 1884: see Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), 208–222, and for Huysmans’ discussion of L’après-midi d’un faune (1876), see J.-K. Huysmans, À rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier (Paris, Imprimierie nationale, 1981), 274–275; Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003), 197–198. 9. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, Dutton, 1919), 265, and see Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 274. Wilde makes the claim regarding À rebours in a letter to E. W. Pratt, 15 April 1892, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Mervin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, Fourth Estate, 2000), 524. A few months earlier, Wilde had met Huysmans at a dinner in his honour held at the house of Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) in Paris, 15 December 1891: see Richard Hibbitt, ‘The Artist as Aesthete’, in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London, Bloomsbury, 2010), 65–79, 70. 10. Huysmans, À rebours, 52; Against Nature, 205.

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11. Ibid., 52; 205. 12. Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, ed. Auguste Dezalay (Paris, Fasquelle, 1984), 105; trans. Andrew Rothwell (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 75. 13. On the relationship between decadence and modernism, see for instance, Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). 14. Huysmans, À rebours, 82; Against Nature, 31. 15. Ibid., 126; 64. 16. The recurrence of the theme, linked to contemporary interest in phrenology, is discussed by Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), 83–87. 17. Huysmans, À rebours, 67; Against Nature, 17. 18. As with Baudelaire and Mallarmé before him, Huysmans was deeply indebted to the gothic of Poe, whose ‘quality of strangeness’ is eulogised in À rebours, 255; Against Nature, 180, and see also his discussion of Poe and Baudelaire, in ibid., 265–267; 190–192. 19. Ibid., 68; 18. 20. Ibid., 73; 23. 21. Ibid., 73; 23. On Huysmans’ own homosexual experiences, see Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 82. 22. Huysmans, À rebours, 141, 179; Against Nature, 80, 111. 23. Ibid., 73; 23; and see ibid., 155, 298; 92, 219, for des Esseintes’ appreciation of Schopenhauer. 24. Ibid., 72; 22. 25. Ibid., 76; 26. 26. Ibid., 106; 49. 27. Ibid., 106; 49. 28. Ibid., 287; 209. 29. Ibid., 167; 101. 30. For a discussion of this critical heritage, as well as of the dangers of overly ‘interpretative’ approaches to the interpretation of des Esseintes’ dream, which seem to ignore Huysmans’ frank discussions of sex elsewhere in his œuvre, see Lloyd, J.-K. Huysmans and the fin-de-siecle Novel, 97–98. 31. Huysmans, À rebours, 169; Against Nature, 103. 32. Ibid., 170; 104. 33. Ibid., 170; 104. 34. Ibid., 170; 105. 35. Ibid., 173; 105. 36. Ibid., 173; 106. 37. Ibid., 297; 218. 38. Ibid., 293; 214. 39. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 148; The Damned, 102, 103. 40. Huysmans, À rebours, 149, 151, 156; Against Nature, 86, 88, 93. 41. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 150; The Damned, 104.

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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Huysmans, À rebours, 294; Against Nature, 215. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 32; The Damned, 7. Ibid., 47, 48, 49; 19, 20, 21. Ibid., 101; 63. Quoted by Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 163. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 175, 74; The Damned, 125, 42. Later in the novel, after Durtal has witnessed first hand the Black Mass, des Hermies remarks that Canon Docre ‘is hardly in the same league as Gilles de Rais’ (301; 231). Instead, the novel ends with another implied juxtaposition of Rais with a modern figure, that of the proto-fascist Boulanger (340–341; 263–264). Ibid., 47; The Damned, 19. Ibid., 74; 41. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 235–39. See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia, F.A. Davis, 1921), 55. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 80; The Damned, 46. In À rebours, too, one of the models for des Esseintes’ gothic decadence is Sade, ‘who spiced his frightful sensualities with sacrilegious profanities’, ‘the strength of sadism’ lying ‘entirely in the forbidden pleasure of transferring to Satan the homage and prayers that should go to God’. À rebours, 235–236; Against Nature, 163. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 139; The Damned, 95. Ibid., 28; 3. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 235; also quoted by Hales in The Damned, xxiii. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 46–47; The Damned, 19. Ibid., 106; 67. Ibid., 109, 110; 70, 71. Ibid., 193; 141. Ibid., 79; 46. Ibid., 198; 144. See Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 148–149. For a summary account of Là-Bas’s characters’ models, see Terry Hale’s editorial introduction to his edition of Against Nature for Penguin. In what follows, I also draw on Baldick, Locmant and Lloyd. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 166; The Damned, 118. See Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 192, 202. Ibid., 174; 124. Ibid., 265; 201. Ibid., 142; 98, 97. Ibid., 144; 99. Ibid., 145; 100. Ibid., 200; 146. Ibid., 200–201; 147.

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72. Ibid., 202; 147. In a moment of life imitating art, Huysmans himself would later dream of being visited by a succubus, a key moment in his conversion, fictionalised in En Route: see Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 196–97. 73. Ibid., 202; 148. 74. Ibid., 288–289; 221. 75. Ibid., 289, 290; 222. 76. Ibid., 292; 224. 77. Ibid., 295; 227. 78. Ibid., 285; 219. 79. Ibid., 296; 227. 80. Ibid., 297; 228. 81. Ibid., 299; 230. 82. Quoted by Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 180. On the important links between the movement and religion, see Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1998). 83. For a historical reading of Huysmans’ Durtal within the context of contemporary French debates over the Gothic, see Elizabeth Emery, Romanticism the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001), 89–128, and more specifically, on this novel in particular, see Wojciech Balus, ‘La cathédrale of Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Symbolic Interpretation of the Gothic Cathedral in the 19th Century’, Artibus et Historiae, 29:57 (2008), 165–182. 84. J.-K. Huysmans, La cathédrale (Paris, Tresse & Stock, 1898), 7; The Cathedral, trans. Clara Bell (Sawtry, Dedalus, 1989), 1. 85. Quoted by Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, 229. 86. Huysmans, La cathédrale, 480; The Cathedral, 333. 87. Ibid., 479; 333.

Bibliography Baldick, Robert, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, Clarendon, 1955). Balus, Wojciech, ‘La cathédrale of Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Symbolic Interpretation of the Gothic Cathedral in the 19th Century’, Artibus et Historiae, 29:57 (2008), 165–182. Emery, Elizabeth, Romanticism the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001). Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1998). Hibbitt, Richard, ‘The Artist as Aesthete’, in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano Evangelista (London, Bloomsbury, 2010), 65–79. Huysmans, J.-K., À rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier (Paris, Imprimierie nationale, 1981). ———, Là-Bas, ed. Yves Hersant (Paris, Gallimard, 1985). ———, En Rade (Paris, Tresse & Stock, 1887). ———, The Cathedral, trans. Clara Bell (Sawtry, Dedalus, 1989). ———, La cathédrale (Paris, Tresse & Stock, 1898). ———, The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001). ———, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003).

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———, Stranded, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, Dedalus, 2010). Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia, F.A. Davis, 1921). Livi, François, J-K. Huysmans: À rebours et l’espirit decadent, 3rd edn. (Paris, La renaissance du livre, 1991). Lloyd, Christopher, J.-K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-siecle Novel (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990). Locmant, Patrice, J.-K. Huysmans, le forçat de la vie (Paris, Bartillat, 2007). Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). Pearson, Roger, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996). Sherry, Vincent, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, Dutton, 1919). Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Mervin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, Fourth Estate, 2000). ———, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). Zola, Émile, Thérèse Raquin, ed. Auguste Dezalay (Paris, Fasquelle, 1984). ———, Thérèse Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008).

The Supernatural Fourth Dimension in Lucas Malet’s The Carissima and The Gateless Barrier Kirstin A. Mills

Lucas Malet (pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley) was a celebrated, widely acclaimed and influential novelist writing at the Victorian fin de siècle who is today largely, though unjustly, forgotten. Critical scholarship on Malet is only recently emerging, despite her engagement with a wide range of contemporary concerns, from Aestheticism and the New Woman to social politics and the supernatural, not to mention her significant intellectual influence upon writers like Henry James and Thomas Hardy, whose own fiction Malet’s occasionally outperformed in London literary reviews.1 Among a swathe of popular novels, many of which draw on gothic elements to advance their otherwise realist plots, Malet produced two that fall more completely within the realm of the Gothic as a genre: The Carissima: A Modern Grotesque (1896), which revolves around a man’s demonic haunting by a spectral dog; and The Gateless Barrier (1900), which explores a man’s attempts to interact with the ghost of a past lover buried within the walls of his inherited family home. The few critics to address these novels so far have agreed in describing them as ‘male’ or ‘masculine’ and ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ gothic, respectively.2 These distinctions are based largely on the divergence between ‘masculine’ Lewisite horror (the demonic, spectral dog and the destruction it wreaks upon its victim) and ‘feminine’ Radcliffean terror, which is interpreted largely in terms of gendered power (the buried heroine who, through recourse to the supernatural, is able to gain her freedom and return a natural logic to the world). While these critics acknowledge Malet’s simultaneous adoption and interrogation of these conventions according to her fin-de-siècle context,3 the reasons underpinning Malet’s decision to work in such divergent gothic styles have not yet been explored. The answer, I suggest, lies in another element of Malet’s work that has yet remained unnoticed, but which sets both gothic novels firmly in dialogue with one another, and also with their historical moment: that is,

K. A. Mills (B) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_33

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Malet’s engagement with contemporary notions of the supernatural fourth dimension. Both novels hinge on an exploration of the physical and psychological conditions required to perceive the supernatural, which is constructed specifically in terms of crossing a physical and cognitive boundary that mirrors conceptions of higherdimensional space. The different psychological states that each novel suggests are required to cross this boundary, and the consequences of these spatial transgressions, I argue, explain why these novels adhere to apparently ‘male’ and ‘female’ gothic modes. While the fourth dimension has come to be associated with time following Einstein’s theories of relativity, in the late Victorian era, it signified a higher dimension of space existing beyond the three-dimensional realm of the everyday world. Much as a three-dimensional being can exist outside of and yet intersect with the two-dimensional plane of a pool’s surface, the fourth dimension was seen as a realm existing outside of, and yet able to intersect with, the three-dimensional space that humans naturally perceive. Originating in the distinct but overlapping mid-nineteenth-century mathematical concepts of non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometry, the fourth dimension had, by the 1890s, been adopted by occultists as a rational ‘scientific’ explanation for the invisible supernatural realm that had long captivated Victorian society. A. T. Schofield’s 1888 treatise Another World summarised these approaches, arguing, ‘the spiritual world agrees largely in its mysterious laws […] with what by analogy would be the laws, language and claims of a fourth dimension.’4 While the material universe extended ‘beyond the utmost limits of our vision,’ by virtue of existing in a fourth spatial dimension, ‘the spiritual world and its beings, and heaven and hell’ were paradoxically right ‘by our very side.’5 This seemingly scientific explanation for ghosts and other spiritual phenomena quickly dominated the public imagination, and questions naturally arose as to how such a realm, if it existed, was to be accessed and made visible from within the limits of ordinary three-dimensional space. Charles Howard Hinton’s A New Era of Thought, also published in 1888, aimed to answer this question, attempting to train readers how ‘to pass from the lower to the higher’ domain, to move ‘from one kind of intuition to a higher one, and with that transition’ alter ‘the horizon of thought’.6 Importantly, Hinton posits the supernatural as an extension of the natural world: ‘the right direction to look is,’ he argues, ‘not away from matter to spiritual existences, but towards the discovery of conceptions of higher matter, and thereby of those material existences whose definite relations to us are apprehended as spiritual intuitions.’7 Such interrogation of the border between natural and supernatural, and attempts to discover methods of altering consciousness to allow the perception of supernatural higher dimensions continued to fascinate the British public throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century.8 Malet’s gothic novels directly engage with this context by advancing two polarised but overlapping theories of how the supernatural dimension might be accessed, which explain the divergence of each novel into ‘male’ and ‘female’ gothic styles. For Malet, entering the fourth dimension requires the combination of an alternative state of consciousness resembling dream or trance, and a cognitive and physical journey across a threshold that is facilitated by one of two polar extremes

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of emotion: fear/horror or love/desire. These emotions accord with the opposite directions of travel that each protagonist takes across the boundary between dimensions: The Carissima’s journey outwards, beyond the limits of the known, rational world is characterised as a journey into a horrifying space of pure fear, whereas The Gateless Barrier’s journey inwards towards the infinite recesses of the self, though potentially terrifying, ultimately produces love. Further, these protagonists’ not only cross the boundary into higher-dimensional space, but their emotional responses of increasing fear or love draw the spectres increasingly into the material realm, where the contrasting results of this dual inter-dimensional crossing, and the way each novel resolves the science of the supernatural, reify the stylistic divergences into ‘male’ and ‘female’ gothic. For Anne Williams, the ‘male gothic’ plot involves an exiled protagonist facing a cruel and violent supernatural world without hope of salvation, whereas the ‘female gothic’ plot explores a realm in which the mysterious supernatural, though potentially terrifying, is ultimately resolved into the rational.9 In The Carissima’s ‘male gothic’ plot, the horror experienced by Constantine Leversedge in the face of the supernatural fourth dimension occasions a dissolution of the self: as his fear draws the spectral dog into increasing corporeality, his own body becomes progressively more spectral. When he finally destroys himself, committing himself entirely to the supernatural higher dimension, the demonic dog remains in his stead. Moreover, the tension between the narrator’s diagnosis of insanity, and the novel’s haunting by the indirectly experienced and thus never fully explained or resolved supernatural, produces a dialectic in which the supernatural remains at large, heightening the horror of this ‘male gothic’ plot. In contrast, while The Gateless Barrier also explores the terrifying potential loss of self amidst the vast supernatural fourth dimension, Laurence Rivers’s experiences of higher space ultimately reaffirm his selfhood by granting him an advanced state of consciousness that is able to perceive both lower and higher dimensions as one. The supernatural, which remains horrifyingly present in The Carissima, is thus rationalised by the end of The Gateless Barrier into a ‘scientific’ extension of the natural world to reaffirm rather than destroy its central logic. As such, The Gateless Barrier’s returning of the potentially terrifying to the realm of the rational evokes the natural or ‘explained’ supernatural characteristic of the ‘female’ gothic. The Carissima presents partly as a novel of social manners, revolving around the narrator Antony Hammond’s perceptions of the relationship between his friend Constantine Leversedge and Leversedge’s fiancé Charlotte Perry. It earns its subtitle ‘A Modern Grotesque,’ however, through the demonic haunting that underpins this central drama. Leversedge’s account of how he first came to be haunted by the spectral dog occurs early in the novel, and establishes the gothic atmosphere of horror that pervades the narrative. Described in terms of explicit horror evocative of the Lewisite ‘male’ gothic, Leversedge’s experience with the supernatural also draws on contemporary notions of the fourth dimension to establish the first of Malet’s theories about how to access this realm. Malet first establishes that Leversedge has journeyed to Britain’s outer colonial limits—the South African Veldt—to ‘savage regions’ that are described in brutal and nightmarish terms evocative of vast and inhospitable space:

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‘the endless roll of the treeless land, under the dome of the thick, tropic sky, both alike grey with the heavy, deadly heat’, combines with the ‘monotony’ and ‘the heat, the killing heat’ to infect Leversedge ‘with a sort of despair.’10 The sense of endless, torturous anguish in this inhuman, ‘Other’ landscape is compounded by the ‘fever’ that alters Leversedge’s mind, and in this trance-like state, suggestive of delirium and linked with the fear of insanity that later plagues him, he comes upon the novel’s most explicit scene of horror—a camp, entirely ‘dead’: ‘I shall never know quite all I did see’, says Leversedge; ‘Even in the night, which decently hides a good deal, it was a ghastly place’ littered with dead bodies, including ‘a little baby-child […], a white bundle of a thing in the gloom’, and driving Leversedge’s horse ‘half mad’ at ‘the death all round it, and the stench’ (14). The ‘only thing left alive’ is a dog, crouching over the baby, and as Leversedge leans closer, he ‘saw that the brute had torn the child’s throat—for—for the blood’ (14). Presenting a successive sequence of images in the manner of a dream or nightmare, Malet builds gradually towards the revelation of her most horrific image: the violent death of the baby, a symbol of both innocence and new life, which cannot exist in this demonically-charged landscape of death. The vampiric act of the dog’s blood-drinking foreshadows its demonic nature, while the combination of this nightmarish imagery with the feverish gaps in Leversedge’s memory emphasises the incomprehensibility of the horror that he witnesses in this ‘savage region.’ Importantly, this space is specifically likened to extensions of space beyond the known realm that mirror contemporary notions of the fourth dimension, here rendered terrifying, obliterating and horrific in its utter unknowability and its association with violent death. Additionally, this extended space is linked with the extreme emotion of fear. Leversedge tells Hammond, ‘In that dead camp I had seen the Thing-too-Much. For there is a Thing-too-Much, you know, in nature, in men and women, in what happens. And you may tell by the look in a person’s face whether they’ve seen it’ (17). Foreshadowing Leversedge’s later deteriorating appearance, this phenomena, so incompatible with the rational mind, is ‘Fear itself,’ infecting those who have ‘been “to the end of the world and looked over the wall,”’ and ‘got to the place from which there’s no way out’ (17). Leversedge’s characterisation of Fear not as an emotion but as a place, mappable against the ordinary world by being located beyond its limits in a space associated with death and nightmare, both evokes the fourth dimension and charges it with an atmosphere of gothic horror. Here is a space so incomprehensible and utterly Other that it becomes menacing, undermining the established logic upon which the rational, natural world is built. Leversedge later calls it ‘the land of Outer Darkness, where reigns the Everlasting Despair’, and tellingly believes that this space is something beyond even the Church’s understanding (136). Fittingly, then, the sense of demonic nightmare intensifies when Leversedge is pursued out of the dead camp by the dog, which he had tried and failed to kill, managing only to sever the rope that restrained it. As Leversedge flees in panic, the dog ‘kept pace with my horse. Those dreadful eyes looking up at me—two yellowishgreen discs galloping beside me […] mile after mile, all through the night. And the night seemed years and years long—’ (15). This sense of time and space extending to interminable limits compounds the earlier sense of the landscape’s eternity, and in

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combination with nightmare, delirium and the demonic recalls S. T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ with its similar endless and barren landscape under a deadly sun, its macabre imagery of dead corpses, and its powerful suggestion of demonically induced nightmare. A key Romantic–Gothic text exploring the tragic consequences of venturing beyond ‘the limit,’ Coleridge’s poem sets a useful spatial precedent for Malet’s evocations of a supernatural fourth dimension, and it is evoked even more explicitly at the crucial moment when Leversedge is forced to acknowledge the demonic spectrality of the dog that pursued him out of those regions of death and horror. Attempting to return, like the Mariner, from the Southern regions where he encountered this horror, Leversedge’s ship is beset, like the Mariner’s, by a storm ‘a couple of degrees south of the equator’ (15). At this liminal juncture—figuring in both texts the limit between natural and supernatural, life and death—Leversedge again sees the dog, with eyes like ‘two glowing green discs’ in the darkness (16). Though Leversedge retains hope for a natural explanation, this dog remains invisible to his companion, and when Leversedge’s outstretched hand passes straight through the creature’s body, he ‘knew something every evil was upon me’ (17). The fact that the explicitly Coleridgean spatial limit is the site where Leversedge is first forced to acknowledge the spectral, demonic nature of the dog emphasises the dimensional boundaries that Leversedge has crossed. From this moment onwards, Leversedge is irrevocably altered by his contact with the supernatural, deathly regions of the fourth dimension and the demonic spectre that pursues him. Significantly, Leversedge never makes it home but remains suspended at several stages of liminality, signifying his liminal positioning at the border between natural and supernatural realms: returning halfway back to England, he meets his fiancé Charlotte, and the narrator Hammond, at hotel in Geneva, positioned at the edge of the lake—a horizontal land border—and overlooking the mountains that represent the vertical borderland between earth and heavens. In this liminal position, pursued, possessed and ‘hag-ridden’ by the demonic spectre, he becomes an uncanny double of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, telling his horrific story to his own wedding guest, Hammond (who attends Leversedge’s doomed wedding). This is a doubling that Malet wished to emphasise: while Coleridge’s wedding guest describes the Mariner as ‘long, and lank, and brown,’11 Malet’s wedding guest likewise describes Leversedge as ‘long and lean and brown’ (3). Both are haunted by their encounter with a sublime, horrifying and supernatural space of death, and the effect of this intertextual doubling is to once more emphasise extreme limits and the tragic, ‘male gothic’ horror of Leversedge’s dimensional transgression.12 The Gateless Barrier also draws on Coleridge’s poem to indicate its protagonist’s crossing of dimensional boundaries, but while Leversedge encounters the supernatural outwards beyond England’s external, colonial limits, Laurence Rivers reverses this direction of travel, journeying from America towards England, and progressively further inwards through a series of successive thresholds and nested spaces, including his inherited manor, its secret inner room, the room’s locked compartments, and eventually the inner recesses of his own mind. Signalling its more central focus upon the spiritual higher dimension, the novel opens at the same Coleridgean limit— aboard a ship at night—in which Leversedge confirms his haunting. Standing at the

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ship’s ‘hand-rail’, Laurence is positioned, like Leversedge, at a liminal axis between multiple dimensions, suspended horizontally between America and England, and vertically between the depths of the ‘blue black’ ocean below and the ‘blue-black night sky’ above.13 The sense of movement across limits is emphasised as ‘the great ship lifted against the far, blue-black horizon’ (8) as ‘a horse lifts at a fence’ (1), while the repetition of ‘blue-black’ blends sky, sea and conjoining horizon into a single, vast, multidimensional space that evokes for Laurence ‘the ancient mysteries of Life and Death’ (9). This association with death is only compounded as he draws nearer to England, which, compared with the modern America, represents for Laurence ‘a savage little island’ steeped in the ancient, the past and the dead; a ‘mortuary landscape’ reflecting the impending death of his Uncle, through whom he will inherit the ancient family manor of Stoke Rivers (7–8). This combination of death and travel across dimensional boundaries, as well as the Coleridgean reference, sets The Gateless Barrier in dialogue with The Carissima, presenting Malet’s opposing theory that the higher-dimensional supernatural might be accessed within rather than without. Malet suggests as much when the house itself ‘seemed to call upon Laurence’ and woo ‘him to discovery. It cried to him out, as it seemed, of some unplumbed depth of experience within himself’ (140–141). This seemingly paradoxical positioning of the spiritual realm outside the limits of the material world in The Carissima and yet within the inner reaches of the self in The Gateless Barrier reflects contemporary writing on the fourth dimension. Schofield’s Another World, for example, argued that the voice of a higher-dimensional being would appear to a human ‘to come from his inner consciousness,’ while ‘[a]n eye in one’s inside would, according to analogy, look in the direction of the dimension above.’14 Anticipating a Lovecraftian horror in such spatial foldings, this transgression of thresholds towards the inner recesses of the self is continued through the nested, interior spaces of the manor, which is described in increasingly tomblike terms of enclosure and entrapment: infused with a ‘deadness’ and a ‘general sense of oppression’, the house’s ‘close atmosphere depressed his body. It was all so painfully narrow, barren, hungry, joyless, somehow’ (24–26). The suffocating, coffin-like spaces of the house funnel Laurence towards a tapestry, which conceals a secret drawing-room, haunted by the ghost of a woman who he later discovers is also buried within a coffin concealed in one of the room’s walls. The repeating spaces of coffins, corridors and thresholds create a multilayered enclosure of space that echoes the room’s liminal positioning between the material and spiritual realms. Indeed, Laurence later describes this room as the ‘borderland between those two worlds’ (262), and his entry into this space is described in terms that explicitly imagine the cognitive and physical effects of passing from the lower to the higher dimension. Behind the curtain is ‘a narrow, dark, cupboard-like space, closed by a door, of which it took him some stifling seconds to find the handle’: He felt as in dreams, when the place to be traversed grows more and more contracted, walls closing down and in on every hand, while the means of exit become more maddeningly impossible of discovery. To his surprise, he turned faint and broke into a sweat. (28)

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This nightmarish sense of claustrophobic, collapsing space combines with the mention of ‘dreams’ to introduce another element of Malet’s higher spatial theory: the need for a trance-like state of consciousness while transgressing a physical and cognitive boundary. To emphasise this connection, Laurence’s first interactions with the ghost of Agnes, in which she too appears at first as ‘a sleep-walker or a person in a trance’, slip seamlessly into a dream in the subsequent chapter (97). Laurence’s process of awakening from this dream is described in successive stages of liminality that suggest his mind has been journeying in vast regions of higher space: passing once more through the now somnial space of the ship at sea, ‘it appeared to Laurence that he returned—whence he knew not—across the most prodigious spaces ever traversed by the spirit of man’ (108). As well as reflecting contemporary notions of the fourth dimension, Malet’s exploration of Laurence’s cognitive spaces as paradoxically both infinite and yet confined within his mind accord with the journey he makes even further inwards when he enters this ‘borderland’ drawing-room. Both the room and its inhabitant—the spectral Agnes—seem at once strange and uncannily familiar, and he is met with a disorienting ‘sense of expectation’ and ‘longing which he could not explain’ (30-31). The reason, he later learns, is that Agnes is the ghost of his lover from a former life, lived one hundred years previously, and who causes his mind to gradually become inhabited by spectral ‘half-awakened memory’ so simultaneously strange and familiar that he occasionally fails ‘to distinguish where actuality ended and hallucination began’ (136–137). This dreamlike liminal zone between past and present realms at multiple dimensional axes creates a palimpsest of temporal, spatial and ontological positions that signals the higher spatial dimension Laurence has entered and which is now located, in contrast to The Carissima, within the innermost reaches of his being. Further, in both novels, the protagonist and spectre become linked in their mutual crossing of the boundary between dimensions; a transgression facilitated primarily by the emotional and mental conditions endured by the protagonists at this threshold. As Leversedge’s fear and Laurence’s love increase, so too do the spectres’ corporeality, and in turn, the protagonists themselves begin to resemble the spectres in this liminal zone. The Carissima employs a classic ghost-story convention to emphasise the severity of Leversedge’s emotional response to the spectral dog, explicitly contrasting it with his usual, rational demeanour: Hammond observes that even though Leversedge ‘was a quiet, steady, sensible fellow,’ his face now ‘expressed fear, and more than fear. It expressed downright terror and uncontrollable disgust’ (11). Operating at an extreme of the human emotional spectrum, Leversedge’s ‘more than fear’ is repeatedly signalled in terms that indicate his growing resemblance to the spectral dog: ‘His mouth was slightly open, while his lips curled back queerly from his teeth’ and Hammond ‘could almost swear that his hair bristled’ (11). In his moments of most extreme fear, Leversedge’s canine appearance signals not only his haunting, but more accurately, his demonic possession by the ‘diabolic dog’ (39) that ‘hunted’ and ‘tormented’ him (34). Moreover, as the narrative progresses and Leversedge’s mental, emotional and physical state deteriorates under the strain of his contact with the demonic realm, the dog itself seems to feed on his psychic energy, gaining increasing purchase in

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the material realm. Leversedge tells Hammond, ‘the thing’s growing worse’ and is ‘not merely more frequent in coming,’ but is ‘materialising […] more and more’ to the point where he can feel the weight and shape of its ‘cold and damp’ body pressing invisibly against him, and actually smell its ‘unspeakably filthy’ scent (36– 37). Malet here draws explicitly on the earlier supernatural tales of Sheridan Le Fanu: the psychic vampirism, deteriorating state of the victim, and icy sensation of spectral contact recalls the vampire tale ‘Carmilla’; while, even more closely, the dog’s increasing corporeality, its eyes like ‘two glowing green discs’ (16), its engendering of utter horror and disgust in its victim, and the narrator’s dismissive diagnosis of the ‘brute’ as ‘an optical or cerebral delusion’ (18) recall Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea.’ In this story, a spectral monkey, visible at first only by the glowing ‘discs’ of its eyes, and likewise attributed by those who cannot see the ‘brute’ to ‘optic nerves’ and ‘spectral illusions,’ haunts a man by increasing in corporeality until it drives him, consumed with ‘loathing and horror’, to suicide.15 These intertextual links affirm the demonic nature of the haunting and also deepen the horror, foregrounding the tragic ending that awaits Leversedge. They also establish a link with Le Fanu’s gothic style of the framed narrative in which the tales are presented as medical and scientific curiosities that accept the supernatural as real, a move that brings Leversedge’s demonic experience into dialogue with the contemporary interest in the science of the spiritual dimension. Malet also explicitly acknowledges this contemporary relevance when Leversedge’s fiancé Charlotte refers unfeelingly to his horrific experience as a ‘superb opportunity’ to ‘dominate society’ and ‘make an immense reputation’ (54). For Leversedge, and for Malet’s ‘male gothic’ plot, however, such profitable capitalising on the contemporary desire for ways to access the spiritual fourth dimension is out of the question, prevented by the all-consuming totality of the horror that this experience creates. In contrast, Laurence’s more positive experience of bringing Agnes into increasing corporeality via love also answers his desire to make his impact upon the British intellectual scene: in a specific reference to contemporary Theosophy, which was largely responsible for popularising the notion of the fourth dimension as a scientific explanation for the spiritual realm, Laurence believes ‘the Veil of Isis’ (a long-standing term for the divine secrets of the universe, but also a specific reference to Madame Blavatsky’s 1877 Theosophical treatise, Isis Unveiled) is ‘visibly confronting him and inviting […] his hand to lift it’ (178). This contemporary occult reference situates Laurence’s endeavours within the realm of fin-de-siècle scientists and psychical researchers, emphasising the philosophical, scientific and cultural importance of what he is about to discover. Realising that he can clothe ‘the soul with flesh’ and raise ‘the dead […] by no exercise of charlatanism, by no dabbling in old-world superstitions, or dealings in folly of White Magic or of Black; but simply by force of will, by the action of mind on mind, by the incalculable power of a great love’, Laurence’s drawing of Agnes from the spiritual fourth dimension into the material realm represents ‘the most magnificent experiment ever offered either to man of science, or to poet. Here was the opportunity he desired, had waited for. Here was his chance in life!’ (160–161). At once Romantic metaphysical poet and Victorian psychical researcher, Laurence distances his belief that ‘love is the language of the

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spirit, the only medium through which spirit can declare itself and be apprehended’ from superstition and casts it instead in scientific terms that assert the rationality of the spiritual realm as an extension of the natural world (200–201). In this way, Malet aligns the novel’s plot with the rational logic and ‘explained supernatural’ of the ‘female gothic.’ At first having ‘neither weight nor substance’ (100), Agnes gradually develops corporeal form over months of romantic interaction with Laurence in the drawingroom’s liminal ‘borderland between […] two worlds’ (262). Gaining the power of speech, then ‘a veritable shadow’, she becomes ‘less ethereal’ and gains ‘a certain substance, a greater opacity’ (267–268). This crossing into the material realm is characterised in explicitly spatial terms; Agnes has responded to Laurence’s exhortation to ‘cross the gulf which seems to lie between us’ (97), and later, she acknowledges that in traversing this limit, she has ‘broken all bonds of time and space, and defied all laws of life and death’ (303). This paradoxical spatial positioning, which echoes Schofield’s aforementioned contention that the fourth dimension is at once far-flung and yet invisibly close, is accompanied by the sense that such a crossing requires a heightened state of consciousness, fuelled primarily by love, to break boundaries that are at once physical, mental and spiritual. Sensing Agnes’s ‘tenderness’ which ‘yearned towards him from out some impassable distance’ (186), Laurence responds with ‘not only an answering tenderness, but an answering struggle’ with ‘every nerve, every faculty strained to attain and overcome’: with dimly apprehended powers of time and place, of death, of things spiritual and things material, which intervened between him and the love which sought to reach him […] his whole body ached with the effort to penetrate that resistant medium, to be face to face with that love, and […] read the riddle both of his future and his past. (187)

The suggestion of the mental effort required to perceive the higher-dimensional realm, present in the ‘strained’ nerves and faculties, and the cognitively challenging ‘riddle,’ draws explicitly on the attempts by writers like Charles Howard Hinton to train minds to perceive the fourth dimension. Likewise, Malet’s explicit construction of the boundary as not only ‘spiritual’ but also ‘material’ echoes Hinton’s claims that the supernatural realm was merely ‘higher matter’—a ‘material’ existence ‘whose definite relations to us are apprehended as spiritual intuitions.’16 This sense of exertion across a material boundary is repeated again when Laurence attempts to secure Agnes’s newly gained corporeal body by lifting her across the drawing-room’s threshold into the outer domain of the house, thus reversing his earlier crossing into this ‘borderland’ between ‘two worlds.’ Taxing ‘every muscle in his frame,’ and setting ‘his heart thumping like a steam hammer’, Laurence experiences ‘the very oddest sensation, suggesting that there was something very much more than a narrow piece of polished, oak flooring and deep-pile carpet to lift her across’ (289). Though Laurence does not yet understand the precise conditions of this invisible boundary, its characterisation in terms of the ‘science’ of the fourth dimension suggests the rational, natural logic behind its mysterious strangeness. The contrasting ‘male’ and ‘female’ gothic modes so far characterising the conditions Malet poses for crossing into or out of the supernatural fourth dimension are

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compounded by the consequences of this transgression for both protagonists. As a result of their interactions with the ghosts in their liminal state between lower and higher, and natural and supernatural realms, both protagonists experience the terrifying potential for loss of the self in the face of these vast and unknowable realms. The outcome, however, is different for each, determined by the guiding emotional impulse that has so far coloured their experience: for Leversedge, consumed by the horror of demonic possession, his increasing assimilation into this dimension results in his complete destruction; for Laurence, on the other hand, this potential loss of self is ultimately resolved, through his love of Agnes and desire to understand the conditions of the fourth dimension, into a higher state of consciousness capable of perceiving the unity of the universe, the self, and the natural and spiritual realms. Thus the supernatural, which aligns with the ‘male’ gothic to remain ambiguously present after the hero’s destruction within The Carissima, is resolved in The Gateless Barrier as a rational extension of the natural world in a Victorian fin-de-siècle twist on the Radcliffean ‘explained supernatural’ so characteristic of the ‘female’ gothic. Perhaps reflective of the broader familiarity with higher spatial thinking by the turn of the century, Malet’s later study thus provides a more encouraging antidote to her earlier Modern Grotesque’s depiction of the potential horrors posed by contemporary attempts to penetrate the fourth dimension. Leversedge’s loss of self, already underway through his gradual resemblance to the spectral dog in moments of extreme fear, is compounded by his increasing physical transformation towards the state of death that awaits him. As the spectral dog’s corporeality increases, signalling its growing hold on the material dimension, Leversedge seems to decrease in his, becoming more and more spectral and death-like, his physical body wasting as his mind and spirit are absorbed into the higher spiritual realm that he has so inadvertently stumbled into. At the same time, he is increasingly associated with the sublime space of the alpine lake, which Malet explicitly links with the supernatural dimension that haunts Leversedge, and in which his drowned body will later be discovered. Looking for Leversedge, Hammond discovers him standing ‘at the extreme end’ of the pier, gazing ‘down into the blue water’ in a trance-like state, ‘dazed,’ ‘half asleep’ and ‘absolutely still’, the ‘victim’ of ‘the strange torments of a fixed idea’ (133–134). At this liminal physical and cognitive axis, Leversedge appears ‘gaunt’ and ‘curiously unsubstantial looking’ as if he is already halfway towards the death that awaits him within this space (133). Moreover, ‘[h]is eyes were sunk in his head, and circled by a bluish-black stain’ and this wasted appearance creates the ‘ghastly effect’ that ‘the man’s hair alone was alive, the rest of him, though he moved and spoke, already dead’ (134). Approaching the undead, he is ‘cold, cold as a corpse’ (139), and the suggestive similes soon tellingly give way to the more concrete descriptor, ‘Leversedge’s dead face smiled pathetically upon me’ (136). The ‘dismally and infernally cold’ chill that has settled upon Leversedge is a result of contact with the spectral dog’s icy body, and signals once again the increasing similarities between the two (135). Moreover, Leversedge associates the cold with the image ‘of men and women frozen into a great sea of ice’, which he attributes to Dante (135), but which also evokes once more the Coleridgean imagery of death in the

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sublime and supernatural regions of ‘ice, mast-high’ in the Southern seas, recalling Malet’s earlier association of these regions with the higher dimension.17 These associations are increased later in the novel when Hammond observes Leversedge looking towards the lake in the darkness of night, ‘watching anxiously, unwillingly, yet with a sort of fascination something—something which I did not see’ (187). Affected ‘strangely’ by this attitude, Hammond senses ‘an abnormal, malign element in my surroundings’ which he interprets, against his better judgement, in supernatural terms: increasingly the Spirit of Fear—fear of I know not quite what—[…] seemed to haunt the whispering trees and dusky garden, to diffuse itself through the blue-purple abyss of the lake and mountains, and the clear, impassive, starlit night. (187–188)

This evocation of the sublime in conjunction with haunting heightens the gothic mood; through the suffusing element of Fear, elevated into a malignant, haunting spectre, the vast spaces of mountains, lake and night sky combine into a dark abyss that threatens to engulf the transfixed men. The capitalisation of Fear ensures that this higher-dimensional space is the very same that Leversedge encountered at ‘the end of the world’ and from which the spectral dog emerged (17). At the culmination of his mental and physical deterioration, it is into this abyss of death that Leversedge will commit himself, signalling his total absorption into the supernatural higher realm; his drowned body is found at the bottom of the lake the next morning. Standing on the pier above his lifeless body is a mangy dog with a scrap of rope about its neck, uncannily resembling the spectral ‘brute’ responsible for Leversedge’s destruction. While the dog’s nature remains unexplained, one potential interpretation is that the dual transition across the dimensional border is complete: the dog has gained its corporeal being at the same moment that Leversedge enters completely the demonic, spiritual realm. Such an interpretation is possible within the narrative because of the ambiguity that Malet is careful to weave around the reality of the supernatural. While the narrative hinges upon Leversedge’s haunting, it is told from the external perspective of the narrator Hammond, who relegates Leversedge’s experiences to the realm of insanity and ‘optical or cerebral delusion’ (80). Yet despite his diagnosis, Hammond’s narration continually privileges the supernatural: the fact that we do not directly experience it but only observe its effects adds to its horror; it invisibly haunts the text and the reader as much as it haunts Leversedge, erupting from beneath the layers of narration in which it is buried. Indeed, if Hammond cannot help but be drawn into the sense that ‘the Spirit of Fear’ haunts him—that he, too, might have ‘seen that Thing-tooMuch,’ and like Leversedge been ‘to the end of the world and looked over the wall’ at ‘the place from which there is no way out’—then the narrative as a whole also participates in this sensation (201). This ambiguity allows the supernatural to remain possible at the end of the text, all the stronger for Hammond’s attempts to rationalise it. Unresolved, it hovers as an invisible, predatory force over Leversedge’s now silent, unresisting corpse; the reader’s access to it has been destroyed before its ontological status could be determined. Whether real supernatural or the equally destructive

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threat of insanity, the representation of the spectral as a force that wreaks destruction on Leversedge, imprisoning him in eternal exile outside his homeland, draws on Lewisite ‘male gothic’ conventions to explore the unsettling horror potentially opened up by fin-de-siècle attempts to breach the supernatural fourth dimension—the total dissolution of the self within the ultimate Other. The Gateless Barrier also suggests the terrifying loss of self that crossing into the spiritual fourth dimension threatens. However, in line with its ‘female gothic’ style, and its more directly narrated supernatural (we experience it first-hand through Laurence’s perceptions), this loss of self is ultimately resolved into a higher state of consciousness capable of perceiving supernatural higher space as an extension of the natural world, and the previously terrifying magnitude of layered, enfolded spaces, times and identities as parts of a unified whole. Laurence’s first experience of the falling away of selfhood within the realms of folded space and time is occasioned by the gothic motif of an ancestor’s portrait, discovered in a secret locked drawer within the drawing-room, and which bears uncanny resemblance to himself. We later discover that this is not just an ancestor, but a previous incarnation of Laurence himself, and the portrait thus functions as both a portal into the past time and space in which he once lived, and a mirror into his own layered cognitive depths, dissolving the boundaries between Self and Other, and past and present, that secure Laurence’s selfhood. Laurence experiences this multiplied spatial, temporal and ontological positioning with ‘astonishment bordering very closely on alarm’ and ‘a sense of faintness as though his identity were slipping away from him, and his hold on actuality loosening as he imagined it might loosen in the moments preceding death’ (148– 149). This death of his autonomous selfhood is reiterated as Laurence becomes, like Leversedge before him, spectral in the face of such spatial dislocation: ‘a sense of great loneliness, almost of desolation, came over him; while the word spectre […] now occurred to him with a new and immediate meaning. Spectral—that this room was’ while, looking on the portrait, Laurence feels he can also locate the spectral ‘in his own person’ (151–152). Moreover, so complete is Laurence’s sense of spectrality that he experiences the complete dissolution and dispersal of the material atoms that constitute his mind and body: a hideous persuasion of his own nullity and emptiness took hold of Laurence. Individuality fled away, disintegrated, dissolved, and was not. The component parts of his physical being returned to their original elements—flesh to earth, gases to air, heat to fire, blood to water. While all the qualities of his mind […] suffered like dispersal, being claimed and absorbed by the members of those many generations, whose earthly existence had contributed to the eventual production of his own. And the terror of this was augmented, in that, although every atom of his being was thus scattered and appropriated, every smallest fraction of that which had gone to compose his personality was dispersed, yet annihilation of thought did not follow. He was reduced to absolute nothingness; but knowledge of disintegration, knowledge of loss, knowledge—rebellious and despairing—of that same nothingness remained. (185)

There is a DeQuincean horror at play in this phantasmagoric observance of the self’s own disintegration in the face of much larger and more incomprehensible forces. The sense of vast space implied by the higher-dimensional logic of the drawing-room and

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its multiple thresholds is here taken to its most horrific extreme, encompassing all space (a dissolution of corporeal form into sub-atomic elements) and all time (as his atoms are returned to all those who have lived before him). Laurence’s selfhood collapses into a palimpsest of infinite cognitive and material identities that are simultaneously Self and Other. In the face of such vast and unimaginable dimensions of existence, Laurence’s experience of higher space is very nearly like Leversedge’s ‘Thing-too-Much.’ However, fuelled by the anchoring emotion of his love for Agnes, Laurence is able to transcend his initial terror to gain an advanced state of consciousness that is capable of perceiving the spiritual realm of higher-dimensional space, thus returning the novel to the logical ending of the ‘female’ gothic. Having brought Agnes from the spiritual into the material dimension, Laurence discovers that she cannot stay: her process of transgressing ‘the borderland between those two worlds’ (262) has brought with it not only material being, but also awareness of her own present condition as ‘a ghost’ from another time, with ‘no right to any earthly dwelling-place’ (301). Once more evoking the spatial limits of the natural world, she states that ‘It would be monstrous, a thing abhorrent to nature, […] that I should force the barrier completely, and project myself, at once unburied and unborn, for a second time into the arena of earthly life’ (301–302). Evoking the suggestive horror of Frankenstein in her admonition of abhorrent monstrosity, of material life outside the laws of nature, Agnes signals the ‘Modern Grotesque’ horror that The Carissima indulges in, but which Agnes prevents by deciding to pass completely into the spiritual higher dimension where the other ancestral spirits reside. This crossing once more evokes the multidirectional aspect of the fourth dimension: Agnes tells Laurence, ‘I will go back too—yet rather go forward—reaching a fairer world than yours’ in which she ‘shall await [his] coming’ (304). As she departs completely from both the material realm and the liminal space of the drawing-room, the laws of nature are restored; the ‘fierce beast’ (183) of a storm that had earlier raged outside ‘was over’ (304). The world, previously strange, terrifying and on the brink of indulging in gothic horror, has been returned to logical and natural order; a sense of balance and closure that aligns with the ‘female’ gothic. While Laurence at first finds it hard to accept the ‘failure’ of his scientific experiment at the dimensional boundary, he eventually arrives at ‘a great conviction, a great discovery’, which is the ability to perceive the fourth dimension after all (345). This advanced state of consciousness occurs under the mystic influence of the moon, across the surface of which Laurence observes the passing of an ‘endless and mystic procession’ of shadowy, spectral beings, ‘strangely shaped, as though draped in dragging shrouds’ (341). In this ghostly procession Laurence sees ‘the unnumbered and unrecorded dead’, the ‘souls of all those generations of men and women’ who ‘had gone to generate his own constitution, mental and physical’ (340–341). Laurence is initially overcome once more with ‘a horrible sense of his own nullity and nothingness’ in the face of such supernatural forces beyond his comprehension, and a ‘terror of incalculable number, of unthinkable multitude’ in the face of the vastness of time and space suggested by the ‘interminable procession’ that crosses ‘the vault of the sky’ (341–342). Evoking the layered, folded, higher spaces of the fourth dimension, Laurence’s experience suggests the dawning of a new state of mind capable of

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perceiving this normally invisible realm, and, moreover, capable of perceiving it as a logical extension of the natural world. Indeed, ‘at length he too saw and understood. He perceived that his love far from being lost was his, close and intimately, as she had never been before, in either this life, or that other half-remembered life’ (345). His ‘experiment’ too, ‘far from being a failure, was on the high-road to a success hitherto undreamed of’, and ‘could he but keep faith with his present seeing, it would not end until he too had pushed back the heavy curtain, and finally crossed the threshold of so-called death’ (346). Malet here blends the natural and supernatural worlds into a unified, extended realm that mirrors contemporary notions of the fourth dimension as an invisible space suffused through the everyday world. Laurence’s discourse of ‘seeing’ here becomes especially pertinent, evoking once more the aforementioned contemporary ‘experiments’ in training the mind to ‘see’ the higher realm. Agnes’s earlier promise that she and Laurence would be one, which Laurence had dismissed while ‘his mind [was] still in bondage to human conception of time and space’, now feels ‘already accomplished, immediately present,’ and all that this elevated cognitive ability required was ‘just an attitude and habit of mind’ (347). The novel closes on Laurence’s newfound sense of unity at both the soul and dimensional levels, drawing on higher spatial thinking to resolve Laurence’s earlier terror and loss of self towards a happy ending and an ‘explained supernatural’ characteristic of the ‘female’ gothic. In resolving her gothic narrative this way, Malet brings her novel into sharp contrast with The Carissima. That Laurence’s ability to perceive the higher spiritual realm restores logical order to what was a previously mysterious and threatening universe suggests that the horror Leversedge experiences in The Carissima derives partly from his resistance against and unwillingness to understand this space and the altered frame of mind it requires. Where Leversedge’s mind and soul is consumed by the vast space of the supernatural dimension, Laurence has ‘found his soul’ in his new awareness of higher space as an extension of the natural world (347). As if to emphasise this contrast, where The Carissima leaves the supernatural dimension unexplained, and thus accentuates its gothic horror, the narrative of The Gateless Barrier itself becomes an instructive guide for its readers in training one’s mind to achieve the kind of higher-dimensional perception that Laurence gains by the narrative’s end. The novel’s Preface, which as Delyfer points out, exists as a linguistic threshold preceding the narrative space of the text, states that The Gateless Barrier ‘is one of the books especially studied by the Zen sect, or the sect of Dhyâna’ (v).18 Such texts ‘suggest’ questions, but do not provide answers because ‘Dhyâna represents human effort to reach, through meditation, zones of thought beyond the range of verbal expression’ (v–vi). The book is thus an exercise through which the reader’s mind might surpass the linguistic limits of the rational world—the usual limits of cognition—to perceive that which lies beyond it. Appropriating the occult mysticism within the British reception of Eastern philosophies, and thereby linking the novel with other Victorian occult philosophies like spiritualism, theosophy, mesmerism and psychical research, the Preface presents the narrative, which it states ‘is supposed to be true’, within the realms of the strange but possible; not only at the frontier of, but also a means to bypass, the limits of Victorian investigations into the higher spiritual realm (vi). Indeed, the Preface, in accordance with Malet’s

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theory of fourth-dimensional perception, asserts that reading the narrative will evoke a meditative state. The reader, then, by crossing the linguistic threshold of the Preface into the world of the narrative and adopting the trance-like state of reading, begins to embody Malet’s conditions for higher spatial perception. Overlapping neatly with texts like Hinton’s A New Era of Thought, Malet suggests that the mind might be trained towards a higher state of consciousness in which the usually inaccessible and invisible supernatural dimension—which exists so far outside the reach of human comprehension that it threatens the unity of the self and the soul—might be intuited, perceived and rationally understood. In this way, Malet doubly enshrines the supernatural within the ‘scientific’ theories of the higher fourth dimension both within and beyond the world of the narrative. By thus presenting the supernatural dimension as an extension of the natural world both within her narrative and the broader world of which the book itself is a material part, Malet underscores the ‘explained supernatural’ of her narrative’s ‘female gothic’ plot. Speaking to The Carissima’s narrator, Charlotte states that humans ‘must have some realm to conquer’ and in the face of the ‘strange fate’ of haunting across the higher-dimensional boundary, one ‘must either sink under it or find his romance in it’ (56). This statement, speaking to the contemporary desire to ‘conquer’ the new realms of the fourth dimension, summarises Malet’s contrasting approaches to how this might be achieved and with what results. While Charlotte’s fiancé literally sinks under—or into—the supernatural dimension, drowning himself to be rid of the demonic spectre, Laurence Rivers finds his romance in the intellectual and emotional pursuit of both his past lover and the higher state of consciousness required to perceive the supernatural space within which she exists. Diverging into the tropes of the wasted hero, consumed by the demonic supernatural on the one hand, and the romantic coupling within a world returned to rational understanding of the natural order on the other, the ways in which Malet engages with Victorian higher spatial thinking underpin the apparent ‘male’ and ‘female’ gothic styles of her two supernatural novels. While Malet’s complexity as a writer means that her engagement with the gothic in these novels extends beyond the representation of the fourth dimension, recognising Malet’s sophisticated response to contemporary higher spatial thinking not only illuminates the ways these novels may be read in dialogue with one another as opposing poles of ‘male’ and ‘female’ gothic, but also indicates the dual importance of Malet and the Gothic in responding to some of the most contentious ‘sciences’ at the Victorian fin de siècle. Notes 1.

See especially Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2000); Patricia Lorimer Lundberg, ‘An Inward Necessity’: The Writer’s Life of Lucas Malet (New York, Peter Lang, 2003); Catherine Delyfer, Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing: The Fiction of Lucas Malet, 1880–1931 (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2011), and the collection of essays titled Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays, ed. Jane Ford and Alexandra Gray (New

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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York, Routledge, 2019) (in particular, Alexandra Gray’s ‘Mad Dogs and English (New) Women: Grotesque Gender in The Carissima,’ 89–108). Lundberg, Inward, 184. The terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic have been variously defined in gothic scholarship, and also attracted criticism; for an account of differing treatments of these concepts see The Female Gothic: New Directions, ed. Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (Houndmills, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). I have retained these terms to reflect existing scholarship on Malet, but place them in inverted commas to signal their contentious nature as binary, essentialist and gendered descriptions of genre. Ibid., 204. A. T. Schofield, Another World (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1905), 81. Ibid., 86. Charles Howard Hinton, A New Era of Thought (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1888), xiv. Ibid. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983). Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995). Lucas Malet, The Carissima: A Modern Grotesque (London, Methuen and Co, 1918) 3, 13. All references are to this edition. S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1834), The Complete Poems, ed. Willam Keach (London, Penguin, 2004), 167–186, line 226. Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ is commonly considered the ‘male gothic’ to the ‘female gothic’ of its companion poem, ‘Christabel.’ That Coleridge’s writing is formative in the development of Victorian higher spatial thinking is established by Kirstin A. Mills, ‘Dreaming into Hyperspace: The Victorian Spatial Imagination and the Origins of Modern Fantasy in MacDonald and Carroll,’ Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, ed. Michael Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, (Hamden, Winged Lion Press, 2018) 129–147. For the relationship between Coleridge’s dimensional spaces and the Gothic see Kirstin A. Mills, ‘Imagined Worlds: the Role of Dreams, Space and the Supernatural in the Evolution of Victorian Fantasy’ (PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2014). Lucas Malet, The Gateless Barrier (London, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1922), 1. All references are to this edition. Schofield, Another World, 60, 62. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Green Tea,’ In a Glass Darkly (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), 5–40, 23, 24, 30. Hinton, New Era, xiv. Coleridge, ‘Mariner,’ line 53. Catherine Delyfer, ‘Visible/invisible/visuel: spectralité et hantologie dans The Gateless Barrier de Lucas Malet,’ Polysèmes, 13 (2015), http://journals.opened ition.org/polysemes/315 (accessed 11 August 2019).

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Bibliography Blavatsky, H. P. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. 2 vols. New York, J. W. Bouton, 1877. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1834), The Complete Poems, ed. Willam Keach. London, Penguin, 2004, pp. 167–186. Delyfer, Catherine. Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing: The Fiction of Lucas Malet, 1880–1931. London and New York, Routledge, 2011. Delyfer, Catherine. ‘Visible/invisible/visuel: spectralité et hantologie dans The Gateless Barrier de Lucas Malet,’ Polysèmes, 13 (2015). http://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/315. (Accessed 11 August 2019). Ford, Jane, and Alexandra Gray (eds.), Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays. New York, Routledge, 2019. Gray, Alexandra. ‘Mad Dogs and English (New) Women: Grotesque Gender in The Carissima,’ Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays, ed. Jane Ford and Alexandra Gray. New York, Routledge, 2019, pp. 89–108. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983. Hinton, Charles Howard. A New Era of Thought. London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1888. Le Fanu, Sheridan. ‘Carmilla,’ In a Glass Darkly. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 243– 319. Le Fanu, Sheridan. ‘Green Tea,’ In a Glass Darkly. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 5–40. Lundberg, Patricia Lorimer. ‘An Inward Necessity’: The Writer’s Life of Lucas Malet. New York, Peter Lang, 2003. Lundberg, Patricia Lorimer. ‘Dialogic Fiction of the Supernatural: “Lucas Malet”,’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 41.4 (1998), 389–407. Malet, Lucas. The Carissima: A Modern Grotesque. London, Methuen and Co, 1918. Malet, Lucas.The Gateless Barrier. London, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1922. Mills, Kirstin A. ‘Dreaming into Hyperspace: The Victorian Spatial Imagination and the Origins of Modern Fantasy in MacDonald and Carroll,’ Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, ed. Michael Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson. Hamden, Winged Lion Press, 2018, pp. 129–147. Mills, Kirstin A. ‘Imagined Worlds: The Role of Dreams, Space and the Supernatural in the Evolution of Victorian Fantasy,’ PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2014. Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2000. Schofield, A. T. Another World. London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1905. Wallace, Diana, and Andrew Smith (eds.), The Female Gothic: New Directions. Houndmills, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Victorian Vampires

The Steam Age Vampire Simon Bacon

The Victorian period is often typified as exampling the rise of the romantic vampire, from John Polidori’s Ruthven, through, the boisterous Varney, the sensual Carmilla and ending with the Uber Vampire Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. All of them constructed as aristocratic, decadent, transgressive, and highly sensual, Lady Killers that were as much sexual predators as they were blood-sucking serial killers. However, the multivalent qualities of the vampire, especially as seen in Stoker’s novel, were not just about how the undead can change form to gain access into and out of a victim’s bedroom but actually described the innate nature of the creature itself. Consequently, the vampire was just as much about its ability to transform into almost any shape whilst still maintaining its essential nature of surviving by feeding off a human’s life-force. Indeed, at the start of the nineteenth century the word vampire was not so clearly defined as we might think often denoting both a supernatural entity but also more naturally evolved monsters such as the vampire bat.1 This saw a surprisingly large difference in the representation of the vampire in popular culture in the Steam Age proper, many of which preceded Stoker’s aristocratic vampire and can be seen to have had wide ranging influence on texts up until the present day. This study will argue that whilst the romantic vampire is the popular conception of the what the undead in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was, in actuality it was a far more multifaceted creation that could be in the form of a cat, a flower, or a even a Martian from outer-space that could remain immortal through imbibing blood, energy, or even a scalp of youthful human hair. Before focusing on the main texts to be discussed here covering the Steam Age, it is worth looking at a few works that preceded it which are either extremely influential or touched on aspects of vampire lore that would subsequently be central to later narratives. The evolution of the romantic vampire is generally seen to begin with John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), not least as it is recognized as the first English language vampire story. However, and in keeping with the argument of this study, there were S. Bacon (B) Pozna´n, Poland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_34

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two other lesser known vampire stories at the start of the 1800s which highlight very different qualities of the undead and which would also inform later examples within the genre. Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was written sometime between 1805 and 1815—the first parts were written and published in 1805 with the remaining, if not complete, increments only released after the authors suicide in 1815. Potocki was Polish, but writing in French, and his story is a frame-tale work that purports to be the journal of a young officer in the Walloon Guard on his way to Madrid to take up his commission. He stops at an abandoned inn and whilst there many characters arrive and depart telling him their various, often disturbing, stories. Two of theses characters are Moorish Princesses who claim to be his distant relatives and persuade him to drink a mysterious draft so they might share each other’s dreams (dreams and dream-like states becoming important tropes in later vampire tales particularly those involving female vampires). The dream is about two hanged brothers who are in fact vampires that descend from the gallows every night. Upon waking the young officer begins to suspect that the two women are not what they seem, but they swear him to secrecy of their meeting (again an important feature of later tales particularly Polidori’s and its imitators). A later story he is told by a Cabalist gives more credence to his misgivings when it is explained that there are two types of vampires, those from Poland and Hungary, and those from Spain. The former are corpses that leave their graves at night to suck the blood of the living whereas the latter are evil spirits that assume the shape of the first dead body they encounter and can then later change into any form they like. It is further intimidated that this could have included the two hanged brothers from the earlier shared dream.2 It is never fully resolved whether the women are the two hanged vampiric brothers or not but the creation of different kinds of vampires is very interesting and something that is increasingly explored towards the end of the nineteenth century envisioning many alternatives to the romantic undead aristocratic favoured by Polidori, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker. The existence of different kinds of vampires is picked up again by the French author Pierre-Alexis Ponsin du Terrail in his 1860 serialized tale, Knightshade. Ponsin du Terrail made a similar division to Potocki’s where two Hungarian brothers are undead with one being a vampire, and the other an oupire, with the first drinking blood whilst the other eats flesh. The other tale worth considering before looking at The Vampyre is Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo (1819) which was very aware of Polidori’s tale, it was published later the same year, but does something quite different with it. The novel qualifies as both the first American vampire story as well as the first example of a black vampire. It tells of a slave, part of a group taken from Guinea to St. Domingo, that is resurrected as a vampire and who then plagues the plantation owner, Mr Personne, that killed him. Personne repeatedly kills the vampire to no avail until it absconds with the owner’s son. The trauma of this causes Personne’s death but leaves his wife free to remarry and husband number three just happens to be an African Prince, who just happens to be the original vampire. It is not to be forgotten that at this moment in history a mixed-race marriage would have been deemed extremely shockingly in its own right, never mind the later scenes calling for universal emancipation of slaves as the original slaves from Guinea are resurrected.

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At story’s end the vampires are all killed, and the original Mr and Mrs Personne are reunited. However, Mrs Personne is with child from the African Prince, who we then discover is the narrator that opened the story. Miscegenation and mixed-race children were anathema to early nineteenth-century society marking the offspring as naturally monstrous or vampiric, so it is not totally surprising that this theme would appear again, though almost 80 years later, in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, which will be discussed later. Potocki’s and D’Arcy’s tales have very different constructions of the vampire than one might have expected at the start of the 1800s, and certainly in comparison to Polidori’s tale. The Vampyre (1819) is understandably a seminal work within the vampire genre and along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—both stories being conceived on the same trip to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816, where Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician and Shelly (then Godwin) was the wife to be of Percy Bysshe Shelley—are recognized as pillars of the gothic horror genre. The Vampyre and its decadent, aristocratic, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ vampiric villain Lord Ruthven immediately resonated with the popular conception of Lord Byron himself, even to the point of the work being, wrongly, attributed to him. It is certainly possible to see Polidori’s vision of the heartless vampire as based on his own experience of being hired as Byron’s physician for his European tour and the troubled relationship between the two. Alongside this Bryon had already referenced the idea of the vampire in his epic poem ‘The Giaour’ in 1813, and even recited a partial vampire tale (later published as ‘a fragment’ in the Mazeppa Collection, 1819) at the ghost story evening at Diodati where Shelley first unleashed Frankenstein’s Monster. The confusion around The Vampyre was such that Byron himself had to deny he had written it, but the damage had already been done and by August 1821, Polidori weighed down by depression and debt committed suicide. A similar sense of despair haunts Polidori’s novel where the impressionable young man Aubrey enters London society only to come under the influence of the dapper and mysterious Lord Ruthven—something of Ruthven is echoed in the character of Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) though there the ‘vampire’ is a painting rather than a human. Aubrey embarks on a Grand Tour with Ruthven to Rome, where the pair split up but reunite in Greece just after a girl that the young man is fond of is killed by a vampire. Unsuspecting the true nature of Ruthven, Aubrey continues his journey with the older man, but they are attacked by bandits. Ruthven is mortally wounded and forces Aubrey to swear on his honour that he tells no one of what has occurred for a year and a day. Thinking him dead, Aubrey returns to London, only to find Ruthven alive and beginning to seduce the young man’s sister. Bound by his oath Aubrey suffers a nervous breakdown, but not before composing a letter to his sister explaining who her future husband, Ruthven, is. However, the letter does not arrive until after the couples wedding, which just happens to be the day the oath ends, and that night Aubrey’s sister is found dead, drained of blood and Ruthven is nowhere to be found. The oath is central to the story, and indeed most of the adaptations of Polidori’s story, and emphasizes not just the intimacy between the vampire and its victim—an ongoing trope of the genre is that the victim is the only one who knows who and what the vampire is but either they cannot reveal this or

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no one believes them—but also the breaking of the oath between the past (the old, pre-industrialization aristocracy) and the future (the younger generation). Yet this undead figure of the caddish, self-interested rogue gripped the popular imagination and adaptations of the story soon spread across Europe. An unofficial sequel by Cyprian Bérard, Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires appeared in 1820, and Charles Nodier, Achille Jouffrey, and Carmouche wrote a theatrical adaptation of Polidori’s story, Le Vampire, also in 1820.3 That play was so successful that in the same year James Planché adapted it as The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles. Both Nodier and Planché shifted the main location of the story to Scotland but retained features of Polidori’s tale such as the centrality of an oath made to the undead that cannot be broken, the regenerative powers of the moon and need of the vampire for the blood of the innocent (in the adaptations usually that of a bride). Nodier’s play was then adapted by the German composer Heinrich Marschner in his opera Der Vampyr in 1827. Marschner moved the location to Wallachia and emphasized the vampires connection to the devil, seeing it more inline with the German gothic tradition of Goethe’s Faust (1808) and Maria Von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (1821) and infernal deals with dark forces—though it should be noted that Nodier’s play had equally referenced German precursors such as the legend of The Flying Dutchman and the end of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) with the vampire being able to find redemption through true love but ultimately being dragged down to hell respectively. Moving into the Steam Age Alexandre Dumas adapted Nodier’s work in 1951, also named Le Vampire, and curiously added a female vampire Zizka to the tale who then goes against her own kind to bring about the downfall of Lord Ruthwen—as he was called here—but is subsequently rewarded in heaven for her good deed, introducing the idea of vampiric redemption which is now a main stay of the genre in the twenty-first century. Another adaptation of note in this period is The Vampire, A Phantasm in Three Drama’s by Dion Boucicault performed in 1852 and then again in 1861. It largely followed the conventions of the earlier adaptations of Nodier’s play but with a curious twist which was that the protagonist, Alan Raby, was turned into a vampire for betraying the Crown during the English Civil War and it is this curse that is re-enacted on his family into the nineteenth century—this might explain why Queen Victoria was said to like the play on first seeing it, though changed that opinion on a further viewing. Before turning to the Steam Age proper it is worth noting two intwined aspects of many of these earlier vampire tales, and particularly those coming out of The Vampyre, which is that of travel and conflict. Both of these become embodied in the figure of the rakish English or European aristocrat that represents the wealth to be able to travel but also as instigator of the ages-old war between the AustroHungarian Empire and the Ottomans. Many of the vampires in the stories from the early 1800s, and indeed historically in Eastern European folklore, are represented either as ‘damaged’ veterans returning home to spread contagion—something of an early representation of wartime PTSD—or symbolic of the death, destruction, and degeneration caused by nationalistic endeavour and/or colonialism.

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An important exception to this is Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood by James Malcom Rymer and/or Thomas Peckett Prest (1845–1847). Varney is a serialized tale that appeared in ‘penny dreadfuls’—cheaply produced weekly serializations of sensational stories—that featured a rakish, romantic vampire. The vampire, Varney, is closely linked to the power of the moon and also seems drawn to the blood of his wives—unlike Dracula who creates many ‘brides’—and even creates a female vampire. Unusually for serialized vampire stories that were dependent upon weekly sales (Férval and Terrail mentioned below did something of the same in France) Varney survived for a considerable time, accounting for much of the confusing or contradictory plots twists and details, but it also gave the vampire a form of emotional and intellectual depth, something largely missing from many of the undead villains of the period. Indeed, his growing feelings of remorse and guilt over his actions see Varney foreshadow the far more recent rise of the sympathetic vampire even up to the point where he decides to end it all and throw himself into the roiling lava of Vesuvius. However, despite his complexity Varney is largely only seen as a important in the chain between Polidori’s Ruthven and Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula who are popularly viewed as bookending the evolution of the figure of the vampire in the nineteenth century—though arguably much that is attributed to Stoker’s vampire often comes from later adaptations in particular Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula. In spite of that, there is often space in the chain for Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), not least as it bridges the large chronological gap between Varney and Dracula, but also because it examples a female vampire as it’s main protagonist. Le Fanu’s tale will be looked at in more depth later on but here it is worth noting its ‘romantic vampire’ credentials. Carmilla is seemingly a beautiful young woman, who once invited into a household latches on to its youngest, female inhabitant and, literally, loves them to death. As with Count Dracula she is a creature of the nighttime, and like him is not killed by sunlight. She can also can transform her shape— this is echoed by her name and its many anagrams in the story such as Mircalla and Millarca—appearing as a large cat in the dreams of her victims (Le Fanu also used the linkage between a cat and the vampire in an earlier story The Mysterious Lodger (1850) and something like it also appears in the vampire story Captain Vampire (1879) by Belgian author Marie Nizet where the undead protagonist has cat-like eyes. Like the Count, Carmilla comes from aristocratic stock being the Countess of Karnstein who has predicated on many young girls in the area. The implied decadence of old world aristocracy seems to make the transgressive sexuality of Carmilla and Dracula almost a given, though curiously lesbianism in Le Fanu’s narrative is used to reinforce the shocking nature of the story, whereas the homosexual nature of Dracula is largely ignored within Stoker’s novel. In many respects then Carmilla can be read as a female response to the male-dominated narrative arc of the nineteenth-century Romantic vampire, even though she achieves this by copying the mores of those very same vampires; attacking the power of ‘civilized’ (imperial) patriarchal society by praying on its most valued possession, its women and the future mothers of the nation. Following on from this Stoker’s Dracula is then often positioned as being the culmination, the last link in the chain of all that came before it, and indeed its

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importance in terms of the popularity of the undead in the public consciousness is difficult to overemphasize. Though it should be noted that the Counts Romantic propensities on Stoker’s narrative are not as pronounced as in the later cinematic adaptations, and for the first half of the story he is a rather arresting character to behold with his bushy moustache and eyebrows, Roman nose, and piercing eyes. However, once at his destination in England he changes his appearance and is noticeably younger, taking on the look of charming, if intense, foreigner who easily beguiles the younger women that enter his orbit. He can take on many forms—bat, mist, and wolf amongst many others—glamour his victims (as also seen in Marie Nizat’s Captain Vampire) and form an intimate, telepathic bond with his victims. In fact, Dracula’s romantic credentials are established by the desire he seems to arouse in the two young women that are central to the tale, Lucy and Mina. Lucy in particular emphasizes this as she is being pursued by three different men—a Lord, a wealthy American, and a doctor—but loses (gives willingly) her innocence to the mysterious foreign Count instead. Although Dracula is a substantial novel, many of the vampire stories from the Steam Age were serializations or short stories. Subsequently the vampire within them is almost inevitably not as complex as say Varney was, even though Count Dracula is only ever described by others constructing him as alien and unknown; a creature of surfaces as opposed to one of emotional or intellectual depth. Whilst this is true of the majority of vampire texts of the period, love, guilt, and remorse was not just the prerogative of Varney alone and was particularly seen in female vampires who enjoyed something of their own evolutionary arc alongside that of the romantic male. Female vampires have already been mentioned here, as seen in Varney the Vampire and in Dumas’ Le Vampire, but they were not the main focus/protagonist in those works, and it is those that will be considered here. Arguably, the female vampire had appeared even before Polidori had gone to the Villa Diadoti, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative ballad ‘Christabel’ (1806). Though unfinished, the tale tells of a young girl Christabel, the daughter of a wealthy Baron, who goes out into the forest at night to pray for her beloved. Once there, she comes across a mysterious woman, Geraldine, who has been attacked by a gang of men, and so Christabel invites her to go home with her. Apart from the necessity of an invitation, now well-known vampire tropes such as suddenly barking dogs, mysterious flames, and an inability to cross moving water all appear in the story and occur before the two girls reach Christabel’s room. Once there the girls undress and Christabel sees a dramatic, but never described, mark down one side of Geraldine’s body. The girls become very close and even Christabel’s father is charmed by the new arrival. The story ends there, but Geraldine seems to be something of a reflection or doppelgänger to Christabel and almost supernatural or demonic in someway. Although, Geraldine does not seem to suck life or energy out of Christabel by the time the story stops, the strong lesbian overtones and the gradual overshadowing of innocence by dark forces create a template that would be copied in later vampire tales such as Carmilla. A more explicit depiction of a female vampire is in the German tale Wake Not the Dead (translated into English 1823) by Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (often attributed to Johann Ludwig Tieck). The wife of a Lord dies leaving

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him absolutely bereft, and even though he gets remarried, his unending grief causes him to employ a necromancer to bring her back from the dead. This is successful but the resurrected wife is a vampiric fiend that feeds upon the young, even killing her husband’s children from his second marriage. She is able to use her breath to put her victims to sleep, and as with many vampires of this period she is linked to the moon seeing her most vulnerable in the dark of a full moon, which is when her husband kills her. This starts to describe the oppositional nature of male and female vampires; the romantic men cause others to love them too much whilst the female loves her mate to death. Something of this is shown in the next story which comes from France and although is technically pre-Steam Age it establishes the idea of the femme fatale, a central and persisting trope of a certain kind of female vampire more commonly called a ‘vamp.’ la Morte Amoureuse (The Dead in Love) from 1836 by Theophile Gautier describes how a monk named Romauld falls in love with a beautiful woman/courtesan called Clarimonde. The innocent monk is totally bedevilled by the woman, even after he learns of her past and reputation. Towards the story’s end when they have run off together, although he learns that she is a vampire he is willing to give her his own blood to sustain her. Romauld’s spiritual mentor, Father Sérapion is appalled by this and throws holy water over her body causing it to desiccate and crumble. Her spirit visits Romauld later that night scolding him for his betrayal and then vanishes, leaving him to pine for her for the rest of his life. In relation to the ongoing affects of encountering, and surviving a vampire it is worth mentioning The Pale Lady (1849) by Alexandre Dumas. Interestingly it is set in the Carpathian Mountains (one of the first examples before Dracula) and it features a now very common trope in twenty-first century young adult literature, that of a (human) woman pursued by two men—one of whom happens to be a vampire/demonic. The girl, Hedwig, survives the unwanted attention of the undead suitor but is left forever pale by the encounter—indeed Le Fanu similarly broached the idea of vampiric suitors in his story ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ from 1838 where a woman is betrothed to one of the undead, though she seems unaffected except for mysteriously wearing a silk scarf around her neck. France was fertile ground for the vampire in the nineteenth century and it is important to note the influence of the earlier work of Dom Antoine Augustin Calmet. Calmet was a Benedictine monk and historian that investigated the vampire panic that swept Europe at the start of the eighteenth century and published an influential tome regarding his findings on that and other supernatural matters called Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia and Silesia in 1751. Whilst trying to rationalize many of the reports of vampirism he investigated within the book, he provided much material for authors of later fictional works, including Le Fanu, who re-used the ideas of the dead rising from their graves and tormenting family members and the local communities. Continuing the development of the female vampire in the Steam Age, one must not forget the importance of serialized stories. Just as Varney proved highly popular in English ‘penny dreadfuls’ so too did serializations of stories in France and authors such as Pierre-Alexis Ponsin du Terrail and Paul Féval produced inventive vampire

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tales that often featured the female undead as their protagonists. The Vampire and the Devils Son (1852) by Ponsin du Terrail tells of a Baron being visited by a vampire in the form of his dead wife Hélène. On her nightly visits she bites and draws blood from the Baron, though later confesses to not being his wife, but that of the titular ‘Devils Son’ (whom the Baron had met earlier). The Baron follows her one morning and sees that she requires her shroud to re-enter her grave (a point mentioned in Calmet and used in Carmilla), and upon further investigation, he discovers that during the daylight hours she, quite literally is dead to life. As the story concludes, and very much in the fashion of Ann Radcliffe and the rationalizing of the supernatural—also known as Female (Feminine) Gothic—nothing is quite what it seems. Ponsin du Terrail also published The Immortal Woman (1852) which twists its tale of revenge and vampires into something more rational by its conclusion. But whilst the supernatural holds sway in the story the female vampire is shown to feed from the neck of her previous lover, and further suggests that immortality can be assured if one drains the blood from an old body and replaces it with the blood of the young (a detail replicated in Good Lady Ducayne mentioned below). Paul Féval was equally adept in writing about female vampires and his The Vampire Countess (1856 though possibly serialized the year before) is more overtly supernatural in nature and intent. The vampire Addhema would appear to require wealth as much as she does blood, though remains young by the curious procedure of scalping her victims and absorbing the life from a young head of hair4 —in the story she changes hair colour from brunette to blond (this idea appeared in The Immortal Woman and even in Stoker’s Dracula where vampire Lucy is blonde in life but dark haired as a vampire). Before looking at Carmilla, it is worth looking at the later novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Good Lady Duncayne from 1896 which also centres on the idea of consuming youth, as The Vampire Countess did. Here, however the vampire, Lady Ducayne does not remain eternally young but maintains something of a spritely old age through imbibing (or transfusing) the blood of her young travelling companions—indeed within the story the demise of the young girls in her company seem to act not unlike vitamin B injections for the elderly vampire. What is also interesting with the story is its explicit fore fronting of the idea of the elderly preying on the young above the more common trope, at least for the nineteenth century, of the vampire being a decadent aristocracy feeding off the lives of others, though as shall be discussed shortly, the thrust of the Steam Age seemed to refocus vampire narratives more sharply around different views of what constitutes the vampire and vampirism. Returning to Carmilla, it is rightly viewed as a seminal work within the genre, establishing the female vampire as a central character and using the transgressive sexuality of the undead, in this case lesbianism, as a means to resist patriarchal authority—a similar use of sexual transgression is also clearly seen in Karl Heinrich Ulrich’s Manor from 1885 which features an ancient Norse deity that resurrects a dead sailor who then returns to drain his gay lover of life. There is a caveat to such transgressions as often the rule of the fathers is re-established by stories end but much of the narrative in Carmilla describes spaces of female authority within a restrictive and often violent male environment. The story, set in Styria, tells of a mysterious house guest who befriends the young daughter, Laura, of her host.

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The guest, Carmilla, is in fact the Countess Karnstein, part of an aristocratic family who were largely hunted and killed for being vampires. Carmilla, quite literally, loves her victims to death and is as much a recurring nightmare as she is the manifestation of the psychological trauma of a teenage girl growing up. The story is recounted from the casebook of Dr Hesselius—the retelling of a story via the casebook/notebook/diary was not an uncommon device for gothic tales—and leaves the young girl affected ever after—not unlike The Pale Lady. The vampire is intimately linked to its ‘home,’ being compelled to wear its shroud to return to its grave and do never strays too far from its burial ground. This is unusual for vampires coming from the tradition of Ruthven and even more so in the Steam Age where Empire and travelling becomes increasingly important in vampire tales. An interesting example of this is Lauren Owen’s The Fate of Madame Cabanel (1873) which plays on the recurring theme of many earlier tales where the supernatural is shown to have all too earthly causes. Here a French landowner takes his English bride back to his home in Brittany. This attractive stranger in their midst soon arouses the suspicions of the locals who quickly decide she must be a vampire, or more specifically a, broucolaque, which is a Greek vampire variant—coincidentally Ruthven from Polidori’s tale reveals his true nature whilst in Greece. The locals, exampling a kind of mass hysteria, in line with Calmet’s writings, take it on themselves to kill the ‘vampire’ only to discover they were wrong. The imagined affects of the vampire here, very much manifests ideas around energy vampires that draw the life out of their victims purely via physical proximity. Something seen earlier in the cat in Le Fanu’s Mysterious Stranger but made explicit in Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire (1897) where a young girl unknowingly kills all those she loves. The girl, Harriet Brandt, is the monied and mixed-race daughter of a plantation owner (who is also a vivisectionist) and a voodoo princess, who is forced to flee Jamaica due to a slave revolt—not unlike that seen in The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo mentioned earlier. Harriet travels to Europe where she quickly garners the interest of fellow travellers, but it is not long before a young child the girl is particularly fond of becomes increasingly weak and eventually dies. Unaware she has anything to do with this, or the ill-health of others in her orbit, she later falls in love with a young man and similarly he begins to grow weaker. She realizes that she is the cause of these afflictions due to her blood heritage—her mixed race, her mother’s association to the occult, and her father’s vivisection of slaves—and so, racked with guilt and horror at what she might yet do, decides to do away with herself. Marryat’s book more explicitly deals with the topics of reverse colonialism, miscegenation, and the New Woman, that all underpin Stoker’s Dracula, showing the dangers of inviting in even the most innocent and harmless looking strangers. Of particular note is that not only does Harriet have no idea of the power she possesses but that she also embodies a very different kind of vampire than the blood-sucking kind more commonly thought of post-Dracula, the seductive, and life draining vamp. As noted earlier, the vamp was not an uncommon trope in the Steam Age, and particularly the turn-of-the-century being a seductive and highly sexualized woman that preys on unsuspecting men, draining them of their wealth and their lives. A curious example of this was written slightly before Marryat’s book, by Sabine

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Baring-Gould—Stoker has used Baring-Gould’s earlier publication, The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) in his research for Dracula—in Margery of Quether (1884). The tale is told by George Rosedhu a young man who offers to ring the bells at a nearby church in place of the elderly Sexton who normally does it. The Sexton warns him of Margery of Quether, but the young man takes no heed and whilst ringing the bells is surprised by a small creature that crawls down them and attaches itself to his chest by its single tooth. The baby-like/bat-like creature is Margery who intimately joins to George in a way that makes him protective of her, even though she is growing into a young woman whilst he gets increasingly old and withered. It appears she is not drinking his blood but rather drawing out his life energy, but in a way that makes him care for her even once she has left and vanished into the world.5 Whilst being something of a cautionary tale to young men, Margery also examples how the female of the species offered wider possibilities for the figure of the vampire within and beyond the Steam Age. In earlier nineteenth century tales the lead vampire hunters (slayers) were always male, but as the century progressed even this changed in another Paul Féval story Vampire City from 1875. Here, the lead slayer is none other than Ann Radcliffe, directly citing the writer of gothic fiction who gave rational solutions to supernatural mysteries. The vampires that Miss Radcliffe hunts are a curious mix of folklore, imagination, and scientific romance—although that term was not used at the time—that can ‘dividuate,’ meaning they can be multiple forms at any one time but all of these are their former victims. This is shown most clearly in Monsieur Goetzi, the main vampire protagonist, who is simultaneously a dog, a bald woman, a faceless innkeeper, and a child with a hoop seeing the vampire as almost a ‘hive-mind’ of all those it has consumed. The vampire can cross running water—often prohibited for vampires in folklore—but only by reconstituting all its disparate parts back into one body. It feeds, not with fangs, but a small needle-like tongue or stinger that it inserts behind its victims’ ear. The vampires are also extremely difficult to kill, and if injured can only heal by returning to the Vampire City, which is located in another dimension though has a physical location on Earth, not unlike that seen in faerie. However, if one finds an injured vampire, which can be identified by its pungent smell, one must remove and burn its heart to finally dispatch it, and usefully the ash can be used to cure the effects of vampirism—a cure-all very similar to that used in the vampire panics in New England during the nineteenth century.6 As mentioned earlier, the female vampire offered an alternative to the Ruthvenesque romantic undead, though both still retained connections to the demonic and/or supernatural. However, the Steam Age more lastingly saw a move away from the magical and tales like Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire made the vampire a far more earthbound entity, a product of evolution, if a rather spurious interpretation of it. In fact, the idea of evolutionary vampires or, what one might term, natural vampires became increasingly popular towards the end of the century, and unsurprisingly so given the influence of the work of Charles Darwin. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and by the 1870s the theory of evolution was popularly known, if rather influenced by the many pseudo-scientific theories that were also popular in Late Victorian society. Similarly, the idea of evolution became linked to the growth

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and degeneration of societies and particularly that of the British Empire and the associated colonization and exploitation of lands and peoples. Indeed, the degeneration of the Empire and reverse colonization—and the connected Invasion narratives—were quite popular as a thematic for novels during the mid-to-late Steam Age, and none more so than vampire related ones and particularly those by H. G. Wells. Wells, as one of the earliest proposers of scientific romance (science fiction) took a very different stance on the constructions/origins of his vampires linking them directly to human (British) evolution and the consequences of thoughtless colonization practices. The first story that Wells utilizes the idea of natural vampires is in The Flowering of the Strange Orchid from 1894. It very much follows the findings of Darwin where certain plants were found to knowingly use insects to spread their seeds/pollen. Wells envisioned an orchid that required human blood to survive, and more specifically to lay in wait for colonial explorers to disseminate its species across the world. The flower is located in the Andaman Islands and is ‘discovered’ by an English orchid enthusiast who quickly becomes the plant’s victim. The local inhabitants keep the enthusiast’s collection safe awaiting his colleague, who then takes the plants back to England to show off the exotic new blooms from the East. Of course, he too is preyed upon by the plant, leaving the exotic and soughtafter collection ready to be bought by another enthusiast. There is much of reverse colonialism here, with the dangers of bringing the unknown from the edges of the Empire back into the heart of England7 but also the further rationalization of the vampire changing it from a supernatural entity into an evolutionary one. This is also seen in The Last of the Vampires (1893) by Phil Robinson. Robinson’s tale sees a European merchant in South America coming across the bones of a mysterious large bat-like creature. Unable to sell them as he had hoped he donates them to a university in Germany—vampire bats were known to come from South America, and even if they were shown to be not much larger than flying mice the popular imagination and vampire texts such as Stoker’s saw them as being capable of draining the entire blood of a human. The bones cause much debate at the university as to whether they are from a real creature or a fabrication. Some time later a professor from the institution travels to the Amazon and discovers a cave where one of the creatures lives—it is described as a pre-diluvian reptile the size of a kangaroo with wings and the neck of a python. He manages to incapacitate it and load it onto a boat to take it down the river and try to get it back to Germany. However, many years later the bones of both the professor and the creature are found at the mouth of the river. Both The Flowering of the Strange Orchid and The Last of the Vampires see the vampire as an evolutionary life form that is equal to mankind, and even counter the notion that humanity is chosen by a God to hold dominion over the Earth. Equally inferring that the superiority of the British Empire over the world is also part of an evolutionary arc that will inevitably wain and be consumed by exterior forces. The next two stories, both by Wells, invert this idea, not seeing the vampire as a part of the evolutionary past that persists into the present, but the distant future where humanity has evolved into something monstrous. The first of these is The Time Machine (1895) where a gentleman scientist from the Late Victorian period, known only as the Time Traveller, builds a time machine that takes him into the distant future, 802,701 AD

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to be exact. Although the machine can move in time it remains in the same physical location and so as he has travelled he has witnessed the downfall and self-destruction of civilization to the point where he stops and world appears to be a continuous lush and verdant garden. He eventually comes upon some childlike and docile humans called Eloi, who seem carefree and indolent, who eat fruit and live in small groups in the slowly decaying ruins of the futuristic buildings that are sprinkled amongst the trees. The only thing that seems to concern the Eloi is darkness, which the Traveller later discovers is because of the world’s other inhabitants, the Morlocks, who only emerge from their underground lair once it is night-time. The Morlocks, are ape-like creatures who do not like sunlight and run huge machines underground to sustain the fecund world above ground mainly so that they can ‘farm’ and consume the Eloi— the first example of vampires farming humans. The Traveller theorizes that humanity divided into two groups; the leisured classes who stayed above ground and became increasingly indolent and dependent on the Morlocks to survive, and the Morlocks who were the workers that toiled to serve the wealthy, now consuming those that used to live off their labour. This creates a rather interesting inversion of the decadent aristocratic vampire who sucked the life out of the lower classes around them with the Morlocks being apish workers who literally eat their ‘betters.’ This evolutionary vampiric future appears to be one that humanity is unable to escape though the last story here, also by Wells, is possibly more hopeful, offering a glimpse of what the vampiric future might be for the British Empire if it does not change its ways. The War of the Worlds (1897) is almost more Steam Punk than it is Steam Age and sees futuristic vampires from Mars who have sucked their own world dry, greedily eyeing the Earth as their next meal. The Martians are constructed as future humans who are dependent upon machines and evolved to the point where they can only feed on liquid food (human blood) siphoned directly into their stomachs. The present-day humans are totally overwhelmed by the superior technology and weaponry of the invaders—purposefully mirroring British colonialism—until the outsiders encounter the bacteria of the common cold, to which they have no natural defence—this part reflecting the decimation of indigenous communities by diseases brought by European invaders as seen in Tasmania and which inspired Wells to originally write the story The Martians quickly succumb, their invasion thwarted by humanities evolutionary link to the Earth and its flora, fauna, and bacterial life. Here then, vampirism is not a condition that is supernaturally or spiritually defeated but one that can be intellectually avoided; a conscious real-word decision in the now that can redirect what appears to be evolutionary inevitability. The closing years of the Steam Age can then be seen to provide a very different legacy moving forward than popular conception of the inevitable evolution of the romantic vampire. In this sense Stoker’s Dracula provided something of its apotheosis, constructing a fin-de-siècle dark Lord that is inevitably outdone by science and technology. In contrast, the evolutionary vampire, and its becomingfemale counterparts, are the true children of the Steam Age inhabiting a world where natural selection will always favour the apex predators over the indolent colonizers. In this sense the later romantic vampires from Anne Rice to Stephanie Meyer are not an arc of evolution but a reiteration of a similar theme, the undead ghosts of Ruthven

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and Dracula; whilst the stories of D’arcy, Féval, and Wells reveal a multifarious future of vampiric possibilities. Notes 1. See Kevin Dodd, “‘Blood Suckers Most Cruel’: The Vampire and the Bat In and Before Dracula,” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts, 6, 2 (April 2019), 107–132. 2. See Andrew M. Boylan, The Media Vampire: A Study of Vampires in Fictional Media (Morrisville: Lulu.com, 2012). 3. Two years after Le Vampire Nodier published Infernaliana a volume that connected the vampire of folklore and that of popular culture through a collection of anecdotes and stories spanning the eighteenth century often reinterpreted through the author’s imagination. 4. See Adrian Party, “Postface,” Paul Féval: La Ville-Vampire (Ombres: Petite bibliothèque Ombres, 2000), 137–143. 5. A fascinating variation of this idea is seen in the 1907 story, The House of the Vampire by George Sylwester Viereck where an impresario invites emerging artists to stay at his London home and then drains of their talents and creativity making it his own. 6. See Michael Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). 7. See Daisy Butcher, Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic (London, British Library, 2019).

Bibliography Baring-Gould, Sabine, Margery of Quether [1884] (Norstadt: Hansebooks, 2017). Bell, Michael, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Bérard, Cyprian, Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires [1820], trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2011). Boylan, Andrew M., The Media Vampire: A Study of Vampires in Fictional Media (Morrisville: Lulu.com, 2012). Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, Good Lady Ducayne, in Glennis Stephenson (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women: An Anthology (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1997), 71–104. Butcher, Daisy, Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic (London, British Library, 2019). Calmet, Dom Augustin, Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia and Silesia [1751] (Scott’s Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “Christabel” [1806], in William Karachi (ed.), The Complete Poems (London, Penguin, 1997), 187–205. D’Arcy’s, Uriah Derick, The Black Vampyre: A Legend of Saint Domingo [1819], The Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, No. 15, Summer 2019. http://jto.common-place.org/ just-teach-one-homepage/the-black-vampyre. Accessed 1 October, 2019.

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Dodd, Kevin, “‘Blood Suckers Most Cruel’: The Vampire and the Bat In and Before Dracula,” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts, Volume 6, Issue 2 (April 2019), 107–132. Dumas, Alexandre, The Pale Lady [1849] (Redditch: Read Books, 2011). Féval, Paul, The Vampire Countess [1856], trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2003). ———. Vampire City [1875], trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2007). Gautier, Theophile, la Morte Amoureuse (The Dead In Love) [1836], Blackmask Online, 2001. http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/54/34.pdf. Accessed 1 October, 2019. Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter” [1838] (Redditch: Read Books, 2013). ———. The Mysterious Lodger [1850] (Mineola: Dover Press, 2013), 342–412. ———. Carmilla: A Critical Edition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013). Linton, Eliza Lynn, The Fate of Madame Cabanel (1873) in Graeme Davis (ed.), More Deadly Than the Male: Masterpieces from the Queens of Horror (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019), n.p. Marryat, Florence, Blood of the Vampire [1897] (London: British Library, 2010). Nizet, Marie, Captain Vampire [1879], trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2007). Party, Adrian, “Postface,” Paul Féval: La Ville-Vampire (Ombres: Petite bibliothèque Ombres, 2000), 137–143. Planché, James Robinson, “The Vampire; Or the Bride of the Isles,” in Donald Roy (ed.), Plays by James Robinson Planché (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45–68. Polidori, John William, “The Vampyre,” in Rochelle Kronzek (ed.), The Vampyre, the Werewolf and Other Gothic Tales of Horror (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2009), 1–21. Ponsin du Terrail, Pierre-Alexis, The Vampire and the Devils Son [1852] trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2007). ———. The Immortal Woman [1852] trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2013). ———. Knightshade [1860] trans. Brian Stableford (Tarzana: Black Coat Press, 2003). Potocki, Jan, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (London: Penguin, 1996). Raupach, Ernst Benjamin Salomo, Wake Not the Dead [1823], in Andrew Barger (ed.), The Best Vampire Stories 1800–1849: A Classic Vampire Anthology (UK: Bottletree Books, 2012), 41–71. Robinson, Phil, The Last of the Vampires [1893] (Redditch: Read Books, 2013). Rymer, James Malcolm, Varney the Vampire: The Feast of Blood [1845–1847] (Mineola: Dover Press, 2015). Stoker, Bram, Dracula [1897] (London: Signet Classics, 1996). Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, Manor [1885], trans. Michael A Lombardi-Nash (Los Angeles: Urania Manuscripts, 1982). Viereck, George Sylwester, The House of the Vampire [1907] (Teddington: Echo Library, 2007). Wells, H. G. “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” [1894] (Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014). ———. The Time Machine [1895] (London: Penguin Classics, 2005). ———. War of the Worlds [1897] (London: Penguin, 2018).

Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Transformation of Tradition Marius-Mircea Crisan and Carol Senf

Perhaps no single work embodies the ethos of Steampunk Gothic better than Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. Not only does it reveal Stoker’s fascination with science and technology, including travel by train and underground and modern methods of communication, such as the typewriter, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph, but it also reveals a distinct apprehension about the power of the past, which is common to most gothic literature. Indeed Stoker’s novel establishes the vampire as the paradigmatic gothic representation of an evil past, a figure often contrasted with opponents who are users of modern technology. Dracula and his brides serve as contrasts to the forward looking trends of the nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Stoker’s eponymous character is the result of Stoker’s careful research and his adaptation of an ancient figure of evil as a metaphor of the fears that were prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. Among these fears is a concern for the continued power of a moribund and exploitative ruling class, worries about sexual predation, awareness of mental illness, and worry that European countries might be invaded by residents of their colonies or by other equally primitive people, a metaphor moreover that has been appropriated by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, Dracula’s success is due to the fact that it creates a new mythic image of evil. Using the conventions of the gothic sublime, the novel creates a mysterious narrative that is open to endless adaptations and critical approaches addressing the eternal fight between good and evil, the ambivalent construction of human nature, the relationship between life and death, and questions of afterlife and eternity. The belief in vampires was evident in the ancient world, including the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament Lilith, and Homer’s Odyssey in which his M.-M. Crisan (B) West University of Timis, oara, Timis, oara, Romania e-mail: [email protected] C. Senf Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_35

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wandering hero placates the dead with blood in exchange for information. Neither Lillu (Gilgamesh) nor Lilith is dead, however, though both share the sexual predation common to more contemporary vampires, and all three are bloodsuckers. Vampires also appear in folklore, including Malaysia where a woman who dies in childbirth becomes a Langsuir and returns to suck the blood of infants, the Greek vyrkolakas, and the Polish upier. In most cases, the “vampire” is associated with a rise in unexpected deaths in a community, and a recently deceased individual is accused of these deaths. Protections against these vampires vary, though most cultures believed that people could protect themselves either by destroying it or by preventing it from leaving its grave. Protections include scattering mustard seeds over the grave of a suspected vampire, placing garlic either in the coffin or around the windows of potential victims to keep the vampire from entering, or mutilating the corpse to prevent its walking. More permanent solutions include decapitation, dismemberment, or burning. There’s no doubt that primitive people actually believed their ancestors returned from the dead to attack living relatives, but there was little attempt to explain why until the eighteenth century, when a number of well-publicized cases brought the creature to the attention of civil, religious, and scientific authorities and, because of the rise in inexpensive printing, the subject became an obsession in Europe. Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, attempted to stop the practice of exhuming the bodies of suspected vampires in 1755 and 1756 and sent her chief physician, Gèrard Van Swieten, to investigate. While Van Swieten and most eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury thinkers dismissed vampires as superstition, Dom Augustin Calmet, a biblical scholar and Benedictine abbot, argued for their existence and attempted to synthesize previous accounts in Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges des Dèmons et des Esprits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires du Hungrie, de Boheme, de Moravie, et de Silèsie (1746). While believers like Calmet (and Montague Summers in the twentieth century) continued to write, throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientific explanations were more common. An 1847 article in Blackwoods attributed vampirism to premature burial while an 1855 article in Household Words argued that vampirism would have been common during epidemics and in remote areas where bodies weren’t embalmed. Such rational explanations continue in the twentieth century with accounts by Ernest Jones (On the Nightmare, 1910) and Paul Barber (Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, 1988). Jones, one of Freud’s pupils, argues that belief in vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures stems from Oedipal fears. Barber, on the other hand, analyzes accounts of exhumed bodies and argues that people were unfamiliar with the normal appearance of bodies after death. For example, bodies sometimes appear bloated while teeth may appear prominent because the gums begin to shrink as the body decays. The movement from literal belief in blood sucking ghosts to scientific explanations indicates that writers consciously adapted the monster from folklore as a metaphor of what they feared, and the result is that the literary vampire is often a fully developed character with complex relationships to the people on whom s/he preys while the vampire in folklore is little more than a hungry corpse that seeks blood to sustain its existence. Some of the earliest literary adaptations appear in

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German poetry, including Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s “Der Vampir” (1748) and Goethe’s “Die Braut von Korinth” (1797), but it was England, which had no native vampires, that adopted the creature as a distinct literary character. The Romantic poets were particularly fascinated by the creature, with Coleridge and Keats depicting seductive and mysterious female figures in “Christabel,” “Lamia,” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and Southey and Byron presenting aristocratic male predators in “Thalaba the Destroyer” and “The Giaour.” It was John William Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, who in “The Vampyre” (1819) linked the supernatural figure with the Byronic hero when he depicted the vampire as a dissolute and seductive aristocrat supposedly modelled on his employer and established an erotic attachment between vampire and victim. Thus the literary vampire often resembles the gothic villain though the vampire is supernatural rather than human. While there are more supernatural vampires in nineteenth-century literature (including the eponymous Carmilla in Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella and Sir France Varney in the penny dreadful, Varney the Vampire, 1845–1847), nineteenth-century literature tended to use the vampire as a metaphor for human malfeasance. Marx in Das Kapital (1867) describes capital as vampire like; Dickens in Bleak House (1852– 1853) characterizes two economic predators, Krook and Vholes, as vampires; Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë compare two human characters to vampires in 1847 (Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre); and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) uses the vampire to examine race, heredity, and gender. What distinguishes Dracula (1897) from most of its immediate predecessors is Stoker’s return to the supernatural monster of folklore but with a twist that is appropriate for the technologically savvy late nineteenth century. Vampires from folklore were residents of either primitive cultures or remote locations (and Stoker’s successors often return to this tradition), but Stoker brings his monster to London, a centre of science and learning as well as the capital of the empire on which the sun never set. Indeed the novel opens with Jonathan Harker’s commenting on the contrast between England and the archaic East. Harker, who imagines himself a representative of modernity, enters Transylvania and finds that the residents are superstitious and the trains are rarely on time, and this contrast between the medieval past and the technological present is reinforced on almost every page. Going to Dracula’s castle, Harker is forced to use older forms of transportation, including coach and carriage, and Stoker conflates history and geography by having Harker travel from the British Museum to Dracula’s ruined castle, a literal embodiment of the feudal past. Harker is surprised when Dracula describes historical events as though he had actually been present and prides himself for being a hunter and a warlord. It takes some time for Harker to realize that Dracula is an actual predator, however, and he is initially pleased that Dracula is delighted with his purchase of the medieval Carfax Abbey for Dracula’s London residence. After encountering Dracula’s three brides and seeing the vampire’s merciless character when Dracula gives them a baby to eat and allows the infant’s mother to be devoured by wolves, Harker realizes that Dracula and his minions are not just primal but evil. Harker soon experiences Dracula’s blood lust personally when he cuts himself shaving and is saved only by the presence of

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the crucifix. At that point, Harker understands what it means to transport Dracula to London where he will create “a new and ever-widening circle of semidemons to batten on the helpless.” Later the vampire hunters come to realize that Dracula has purchased property throughout England, including Piccadilly, a location close to Buckingham Palace and therefore to the very heart of England’s modern empire. Largely because of Dracula’s popularity, people today tend to associate the vampire with Eastern Europe. Stoker’s notes for the novel that eventually became Dracula indicate that his initial intention was to set the novel in Styria, a region of contemporary Austria where le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) was set. The construction of the vampire in Dracula is the result of Stoker’s research over seven years (Illustration 1). During this period he read “Transylvanian Superstitions” (Nineteenth Century, 1885) by Emily Gerard, who lived in Transylvania for two years. Starting from the idea that “Transylvania might well be termed the land of superstition,”1 Gerard focuses on Romanian peasants’ funeral customs which “are based upon a totally original conception of death,”2 and distinguishes between two sorts of undead, the strigoi and nosferatu. Speaking about the former, she writes that when the funeral customs “are not exactly complied with, the soul thus neglected is apt to wander complaining about the earth, and cannot find rest. These restless spirits, called Strigoi, are not malicious, but their appearance bodes no good, and may be regarded as omens of sickness and misfortune.”3 The second sort of undead is “the vampire, or nosferatu” […] Every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised.”4 Gerard identifies two ways of exorcizing the spirit of a vampire: “either by opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing a pistol shot into the coffin. In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave.”5 A neologism, the word vampir “vampire” was rarely used in the Romanian language in the nineteenth century,6 and it was written for the first time in Romanian in a poem by Costache Negruzzi, in 1872. Thus, the word vampir should have been completely unknown to the Transylvanian peasants encountered by Gerard, who was not an anthropologist and thus interpreted information from folklore according to her own intuition. The word nosferatu does not exist in Romanian. Gerard probably refers to necuartu’ / n˘acuratu’ (the Unclean one, also meaning the Devil), nefârtatul (the enemy) or nesuferitul (the insufferable).7 After changing the location to Transylvania, Stoker researched this province by reading four travel memoirs about Transylvania, as well as William Wilkinson’s book on the neighbouring provinces: An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820). Stoker’s notes show that he initially intended to name the bloodsucker Count Wampyr but changed the name after reading Wilkinson on Voivode Dracula. This voivode had three reigns (1448, 1456–1462, and 1476). In the first reference to him, Wilkinson confounds Vlad Dracula with his father, Vlad Dracul (who ruled Wallachia two times: 1436–1442, and 1443–1447). Thus, Wilkinson’s

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Illustration 1 Bram Stoker’s working notes for Dracula: A list of characters for the novel (Source Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum)

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first reference is to Vlad Dracul (not to Dracula), who made an alliance with King Ladislas of Hungary in 1444. Voivode Vlad Dracul was a member of the chivalric Order of the Dragon, who aimed to protect Christian Europe against the Ottoman invasion, and the sobriquet “Dracul” indicates this affiliation (meaning, in this context, “the dragon”). The name of his son, Dracula, means “the son of the dragon.” Wilkinson creates confusion when he refers to a second voivode having the name Dracula, as there was a single Wallachian voivode with this name. From Wilkinson Stoker learned only a few things about Voivode Dracula: that “with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few Turkish troops that were stationed in his neighbourhood,” but the Sultan Mahomet, “having turned his arms against him, drove him back to Wallachia, whither he pursued and defeated him.” The last detail in Wilkinson’s book was that “the Voivode escaped into Hungary, and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus [Radu] to be named in his place.”8 The detail that made Stoker choose the name Dracula for his vampire is Wilkinson’s footnote that explains “Dracula in Wallachian language means Devil.” While this information is not accurate (in Romanian the word dracul means “the devil”), Stoker emphasized the words DRACULA and DEVIL by writing them with capital letters,9 to indicate a character who represents the forces of evil. The notes indicate that Wilkinson’s book was the only source Stoker consulted about Voivode Dracula. Thus, Stoker did not know that the prince was born in Transylvania, that his nickname was the Impaler, that his first name was Vlad, or that the medieval German pamphlets emphasized his cruelty (Illustration 2). Although the novel contains a few references to historical events mentioned in Wilkinson’s book, history is a pretext to the construction of a mythical world. The Irish writer invents a mythical history, in which Dracula is a Szekler count whose roots go back to beginning of evil, having connections with Attila, Thor and with the “old witches who had mated with the devils in the desert” (41). Stoker’s Dracula is a character beyond history10 , as he has no age, and he participated in several medieval fights: “In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all” (40). All these elements lead to the construction of a mythical character with fantastic characteristics. The novel frequently emphasizes the meaning of the name Dracula (as “the Devil”). One of the plays that the Lyceum Theatre frequently and successfully played was Faust, and Dracula resembles Mephistopheles, Goethe’s representation of the Devil. Like Goethe’s demon, Stoker’s evil character uses cunning to deceive his victims. That Dracula is a symbol of the Devil is frequently suggested in the novel. The Transylvanian inhabitants Harker meets offer the English traveller objects to protect him. Dracula can be faced only by the use of weapons of the Christian faith such as crucifixes or holy wafer. In Christian imagery, the Devil is frequently associated with animals. Dracula’s physiognomy has animal-like features: his face is “very strong” and “aquiline,” “with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere,” and his face is “cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth.” His

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Illustration 2 Stoker’s notes on Voivode Dracula, from William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia (Source Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum)

ears are “pale, and at the tops extremely pointed,” there are “hairs in the centre of the palm,” and the nails are “long and fine, and cut to a sharp point” (28). The physical manifestations of the vampire also indicate his evil nature. During the attack on Harker, the English guest observes that the count’s “eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury” (37), and only the crucifix can protect him from the vampire’s anger. Harker’s diary compares Dracula to “the great torturer of hell”11 : “But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires” (52). Having a demonic “smile that Judas in hell might be proud

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of” (66), Dracula is perceived by Harker as the creator of “a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (67), and his brides “are devils of the Pit!” (69). The first character to encounter the vampire count, Harker depicts him as a fantastic being who can command the wolves, climb walls like a lizard, transform himself into wolves, bats, and rats and control nature, including some meteorological phenomena (such as the storm that led to the shipwreck of Demeter). He lives isolated in his ruined Transylvanian castle, and the inhabitants of the region warn Harker that the count is undead. Both the landlady of the inn in Bistrit, a and the carriage driver try to avoid Harker’s meeting the Count, either by convincing him not to go to the castle or to arrive at a different time at the meeting point in the Borgo Pass. The vampire’s merciless character is shown when Dracula gives a baby to his brides to eat, and allows the infant’s mother to be killed by the wolves around the walls of the castle. His animal features are shown when he wants to attack the English lawyer who cuts his face while shaving, and his instinct can only be stopped by the presence of the crucifix. The undead count leaves for England, to conquer the whole world, by transforming his victims into vampires. Mina’s friend, Lucy, is transformed into a vampire, and the men drive a wooden stake into her heart and cut off her head to return her to human condition and allow her normal death. The madman Renfield is another victim, and Dracula attacks Mina too, but she is finally cured of the vampiric bite. Since Dracula becomes a threat for the whole world, his opponents led by Van Helsing make him return to his Transylvanian soil, where he is killed under the battlements of his castle. In the 1890s, Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but, instead of reflecting the reality of the province at that time, Stoker depicted it like an exotic theatrical background when Harker describes what he sees from his train. The women seem to wear ballet clothing, the Slovak peasants are distinguished through their “big cowboy hats,” and, in Harker’s view, “on the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental brigands” (11). The final fight between the members of the Crew of Light and Dracula resembles an American Western. Although there were several maps of Transylvania in the books Stoker consulted, Harker emphasizes the impression of a mysterious location when he writes that he “was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey Maps” (10). In a symbolical way, the Castle of the Szekler Count Dracula is located in the region of Bistrit, a, close to the border of the province, not in the region inhabited by Szeklers. Instead of being represented by clear ethnic characteristics, Stoker’s Transylvania is described as a “whirlpool of European races,” (41) populated by Romanians (“Wallachs”), Hungarians, Szeklers, Germans, Gypsies, Czechs, and Slovaks. Harker speaks German in the inn at Bistrit, a and English with Count Dracula, but on the coach to the Borgo Pass he uses his polyglot dictionary to understand words in Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, and Hungarian. This multiethnic structure of the region leads to the interpretation of Stoker’s Transylvania as a symbol of Europe.12 More significant, it is also a mythic space where the fight between the forces of good and of evil occurs, and whose geography contains reflections of heaven and hell.

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God’s presence is manifested in nature,13 his influence evident in the light of the sun. Alternately, evil is represented by darkness: Dracula manifests his power at night, and the vampire is usually associated with the moon. On his way from Bistrit, a to the Borgo Pass, Harker perceives the landscape “as an earthly paradise”.14 His carriage is driven through “a bewildering mass of fruit blossom,” and, all around, “the green grass under the trees” is “spangled with the fallen petals” (15). The scenery receives a symbolic dimension: “In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the ‘Mittel Land’ ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame” (15). Gothic fiction suggests God’s presence by the majesty of the mountains, and Stoker’s Transylvania is dominated by “the lofty steeps of the Carpathians […] with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of the beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks … till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly” (16). The association of the scenery with the transcendent is a mark of the sublime, and “mountains … are sublime because their grandeur manifests the glory of God.”15 One of Harker’s companions points to “lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain” and worships God in a Christian way: “‘Look! Isten szek!’ - ‘God’s seat!’ - and he crossed himself reverently” (16) (Illustration 3). The same worshiping attitude is manifested by the other companions in the coach, who cross themselves as they pass the crosses by the roadside. The spiritual atmosphere is also marked by the people who pray in the middle of nature: “Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world” (17), evidence of their Christian devotion. Harker is surprised to discover a world replete with spiritual symbols: “There were many things new for me” (17). For Harker, Transylvania is the place of his spiritual initiation, where he learns how to fight against the forces of evil. The emphasis on the conflict between Good and Evil continues when Dracula enters England, and several puns in Chapter XX reinforce this contrast. Dracula’s Piccadilly house had been purchased by a “foreign nobleman, Count de Ville” (which echoes devil) in contrast to one member of the group that opposes him, Arthur Holmwood who becomes Lord Godalming with the death of his father. Dracula is one of the main works in world literature which recreate the image of hell16 (along with Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Goethe’s Faust). Like the Devil in Christian imagery, Dracula is associated with death. His castle has a graveyard, a ruined chapel, coffins, and hidden vaults. The castle and its surroundings are described by Harker as a “cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet!” (69). When Dracula appears at the Borgo Pass, one traveller utters the sentence “for the dead travel fast” (20), and other travellers perceive him as an evil spirit: all travellers start screaming, cross themselves and make the sign against the evil eye, while the horses snort and plunge. When Harker shakes hands with the count, he notices that it is “cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man” (26).

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Illustration 3 Illustration in Major E. C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent…, p. 263. Bram Stoker consulted the following travel memoirs on Transylvania: Transylvania: Its Products and Its People by Charles Boner (1865), Round About the Carpathians by Andrew F. Crosse (1878), Magyarland…by A Fellow of the Carpathian Society [Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli] (1881), and On the Track of the Crescent… by Major E. C. Johnson (1885)

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After Harker meets Dracula, they depart from the people’s roads and “sweep into the darkness of the Pass” (20), entering the land of the undead. Harker’s entrance to this territory is progressive: first he passes through the labyrinthic forest, where he hears the howling of dogs and later the baying of wolves. In Christian imagery, hell is described as a prison of heat devoid of light.17 The vampires in Dracula have fiery red eyes: Dracula’s eyes blaze with fury, and his brides’ eyes are “blazing red with passion” (53). Castle Dracula is described as a prison. Located far from the world of ordinary humanity, and surrounded by forests inhabited by wolves, it is isolated from the outer world by a “terrific precipice” (38). The castle has many locked “heavy doors” (26) and numerous hidden passages, and Harker’s impression is that “the castle is a veritable prison” and he is “a prisoner” (38). Harker fears being vampirized because Dracula informs his bride that Jonathan is his victim: “Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours!” (66). Harker feels he is on the point of living “the moment and means of his doom” (65). The wolves which kill the woman who came to get her baby back also behave as torturers, and by their presence around the castle are the most ferocious prison warders. The fear that Harker experiences in the castle, where he feels like “a rat… in a trap” (39), is a psychological torture. Stoker reinforces that Dracula embodies an ancient past by contrasting him to his thoroughly modern opponents. The group that opposes him are either professional men or the women with whom they are romantically linked: Jonathan Harker is a lawyer while the medical specialists John Seward and Abraham Van Helsing represent the scientific movement of the nineteenth century. Of the heroes, Dr. Seward and the Harkers are identified by their enthusiasm for modern skills and technology, Jonathan by his love of travel and shorthand, Seward by his scientific methodology and use of the phonograph, Mina by her appreciation of the portable typewriter. In fact, the exceptions prove the rule, with Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming) the only aristocrat except Dracula and Quincey Morris, an American frontiersman. Stoker thus suggests that Arthur and Quincey are, like Dracula, associated with the past. Unlike Dracula, however, his youthful opponents are familiar with modern science and technology. Arthur is important mostly because he provides funds for the venture, and Harker, Seward, and Van generally ignore his suggestions while the impulsive Morris often jeopardizes his fellow vampire hunters with his careless use of firearms. Indeed, Stoker identifies Quincey with the American frontier, an area that is rapidly being conquered by modern technology. Evidence from Stoker’s notes suggests that he revised Quincey’s character over the years that he worked on the novel. Originally imagining Quincey as an inventor, Stoker ultimately identified him simply as a Texan. That Quincey is the only member of the group to die in the final battle with Dracula provides additional proof that there is nowhere in the modern world for a hunter/frontiersman. Arthur, on the other hand, reappears at the conclusion along with Van Helsing, the Harkers and Seward and their families, a nod to the future for these young couples. While Van Helsing is familiar with strategies that primitive people used to protect themselves against vampires, he is also recognized as an expert in modern medicine, and he is brought in as a consultant by his former pupil, Dr. John Seward, to treat

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Lucy Westenra. Not yet thirty years old, Seward is already responsible for a mental asylum, where he longs to distinguish himself in the relatively new field of mental illness, and Stoker reinforces Seward’s modernity by his initial reluctance to believe in supernatural forces. Van Helsing is even more distinguished as an expert in both obscure diseases and in the evolution of the brain. Initially brought into treat Lucy, he remains to coordinate the battle against Dracula, and he persuades the other modern characters both that vampires exist and that they must assemble an entire arsenal of modern and traditional tools to protect themselves and their modern culture from the primitive forces that threaten it. Even though Van Helsing isn’t ashamed to use traditional protocols such as garlic, he also introduces the other characters to new medical procedures, such as the blood transfusion, which he convinces Arthur, Seward, and Quincey to try to save Lucy, and hypnosis, which he uses with Mina Harker to track Dracula home. Their enthusiasm for various modern technologies, including medicine, identify Dracula’s opponents as representatives of the modern world, and his women characters are linked to the progressive New Woman of the fin de siècle. For example, Lucy secretly dreams of having three husbands even though she knows such promiscuity is unacceptable, and Dracula’s brides are associated with the unbridled sexuality of which the New Woman was sometimes accused. Of the women in the novel, only Mina Harker distinguishes herself as genuinely new, for she is capable of understanding the modern world even though she remains deferential to her husband. Nonetheless, she works behind the scenes to assemble materials that allow his opponents to understand Dracula, and she chafes at their desire to protect her. Ultimately she convinces the men that she doesn’t need protection, and she becomes a full participant in all the group’s struggles against Dracula. Early in the novel, Mina compares herself to a modern journalist, and the materials she assembles provide additional evidence that Stoker thought of Dracula as a uniquely modern work. Indeed the early chapters allow readers to participate in the same detective work as the characters. Perusing various media (including the journals, letters, newspapers, diaries, and the ship’s log from the Demeter), along with the transcriptions of phonographic records, telegrams, and telephone calls, both characters and readers piece together Dracula’s movements to understand him. If people in the eighteenth century had learned of vampire epidemics by reading newspaper accounts and pamphlets, Stoker understands that the more literate people at the fin de siècle have many more opportunities by which they can acquire new information. No longer must they rely only on folk wisdom since they have an arsenal of scientific, spiritual, and technological tools at their disposal along with their ability to work together to defeat the evil they identify with Dracula. Reinforcing their ability to synthesize various forms of knowledge is their use of religion to which Stoker makes multiple references. One of the first references to Christian symbolism is the rosary given to Jonathan Harker by the innkeeper’s wife, a gift that makes the Anglican Harker nervous. He and the other vampire hunters will come to accept Van Helsing’s Catholic practices just as they will accept the assemblage of archaic methods with science and law. What Dracula seems to suggest is that the modern world is free to choose the most efficacious methods instead of

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being forced to return to old practices. In fact, what most distinguishes Dracula from his opponents is that he always reverts to familiar modes of travel and practices while his opponents rely on the tools of the modern world. Many adaptations of Dracula continue to focus on the same issues that concerned Stoker: the conflict between Christian virtue and the vampire’s evil predation, the vampire’s perverse sexual appetites and the modern characters’ chastity, the vampire’s primitiveness with the modernity of the Western Europeans, and the vampire’s physicality with the Europeans’ science and law. Like Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” which was adapted for the stage shortly after its publication, Dracula was almost immediately adapted for the stage and the new medium of film as well as translated into every major foreign language. Stoker was involved in one early version, Hutchinson’s Colonial edition, which was printed from the same plates as the first edition and intended for circulation in British colonies. Editions, translations, and annotated editions continue to this day, with every major publisher feeling the need to reissue Stoker’s master work, often with substantial critical introductions and significant critical essays. The proliferation of editions and adaptations suggests that subsequent readers find much that is inspiring in the work. Indeed, Dracula has never been out of print. The first dramatic version, initiated by Stoker himself ostensibly to protect the novel’s dramatic copyright, was Dracula: or The Un-Dead. Hurriedly put together, it was read at the Lyceum Theatre in London on May 18, 1897 about a week before the novel was published and featured members of the Lyceum Company. Stoker’s adaptation was performed only once, and there’s little evidence of additional dramatic adaptations until after his death in 1912, when several distinctly different dramatic versions appeared in England and the United States. One version, authorized by Stoker’s widow, was first produced by Hamilton Deane in 1924 and ran through 1927. It introduced the now-familiar caped vampire and emphasized Dracula’s aristocratic origins. Rewritten by John D. Balderston, Dracula debuted in New York in 1927 and ran through 1931 with Bela Lugosi as Dracula. Another stage version also authorized by Florence Stoker was adapted by Charles Morell and briefly performed in the UK. The screen rights to both the Morrell version and the Deane/Balderston versions were sold to Universal Pictures, which released the first authorized film (directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi as Dracula) in 1931. The first film to use the name of Stoker’s eponymous hero is a lost Hungarian film, Drakula halala—“The death of Drakula,” which was released in the early 1920s but bears little resemblance to Stoker’s novel. The film is rather a reinterpretation in the Sezession spirit of rebellion against canonical values. The Hungarian film director Lajthay Károly (1885–1945) was born in Transylvania, at Târgu Mures, . In this film, Dracula is a well-known composer and music teacher who believes he is immortal (“He lives for a thousand years and will always live”18 ) but is shot by a madman during his speech about immortality. More closely aligned with Stoker’s Dracula is F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens or Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). Even though Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen changed the primary setting from London to Bremen and also changed the names of the central characters, the perceptive

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Florence Stoker recognized similarities and successfully sued Prana-Film for copyright infringement. The settlement required the destruction of all prints, but at least one print escaped. As a result, subsequent viewers can see this excellent adaptation, which is also a critically acclaimed example of German Expressionism. In addition to altering the setting and the names of characters, Nosferatu emphasizes the vampire’s primitive nature and connects his arrival with the plague that attacks Bremen. Nosferatu retains Stoker’s xenophobia, racism, and fear of contamination by the residents of Eastern Europe as well as the courage of Mina (who has several names depending on the version one sees) who sacrifices herself to destroy the vampire. Even though the film does give a nod to Stoker’s interest in science and technology by including several scientists, it emphasizes Mina’s sacrifice rather than the contrast between the modern world and the primitive. The earliest authorized film adaptations Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and the Spanish language Dracula (George Melford, 1931) were shot on the same set and use virtually the same script. Like Murnau’s Count Orlock, Dracula is an aristocratic inhabitant of a past world, and all three versions emphasize Dracula’s animalism, Count Orlock in particular with his rat-like teeth and pointed ears. Creatures of physical appetite rather than the seducers of later films, they echo folklore though the emphasis on appetite rather than seduction may stem from the fact that the Motion Picture Production Code (adopted in 1930 and enforced by most major studios until 1968) limited the extent to which films could present sexuality or violence. Even when the code was relaxed, Hammer Studio’s Dracula, played in seven films by Christopher Lee (Horror of Dracula, 1958, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, 1966, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, 1968, Taste the Blood of Dracula, 1970, Scars of Dracula, 1970, Dracula A.D., 1972, and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, 1973), retains the appetites of the folklore vampire. At the same time, Lee reintroduces the more sexualized vampire of Stoker’s novel. The figure of the vampire as a creature solely of physical appetites will change dramatically in the 1970s with films that present a more sympathetic vampire. At the same time many of them also return to Stoker’s fascination with technology and his exploration of the conflict between modernity and primitivism. Directed by Dan Curtis and written by Richard Matheson, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1974) stars Jack Palance in a made-for-TV movie that depicts Dracula as a warlord who desires only to be reunited with his lost love. Count Dracula, directed by Philip Saville in 1978 for the BBC’s Masterpiece Theatre focuses on Louis Jourdan’s sexuality, and so does Dracula (directed by John Badham, 1979) with Frank Langella. The first film adaptation to emphasize the contrast between the modern world and the ancient, the Badham film features numerous scenes in Dr. Seward’s insane asylum as well as a scene in which Jonathan Harker is shown driving an automobile. On the other hand, if Stoker’s novel suggests that the representatives of modernity will ultimately triumph over the forces of the past, Badham’s version has a very feminist Lucy Seward choose Dracula over her mundane fiancé and her scientific father. The film concludes with Lucy smiling enigmatically as a sun-blistered Dracula appears to escape as a bat.

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Two more adaptations were released in 1979. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht was written and directed by Werner Herzog while Love at First Bite (1979) is a comedic retelling. Directed by Stan Dragoti and written by Robert Kaufman Love at First Bite suggests that Dracula is more appealing than the representatives of the modern world (the Communist government of Romania and the psychiatrist boyfriend of Cindy Sondheim, the woman with whom Dracula falls in love). The final scene of this film has Dracula and Cindy flying off together as bats. Dracula continues to be adapted in film, video, graphic novel, and video games, with some recent versions such as Dracula Untold (2014) choosing to focus on the historical Vlad and others such as the 2013 TV series examining the romantic relationship between Dracula and a former lover. Of these romantic versions, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (directed by Frances Ford Coppola, 1992) is one of the most interesting because it is faithful to Stoker’s novel in many ways. Not only does it depict two very different kinds of fin-de-siècle women, it also weaves in Stoker’s fascination with technology (travel on the Orient Express, the transfusion paraphernalia that Van Helsing uses to attempt to save Lucy’s life, and early cinema) and his xenophobia. It also emphasizes Dracula’s past as a medieval warlord. Stoker’s xenophobia is depicted when Dracula appears as a Chinese potentate, and his animalism is made clear when he turns into a wolf to attack Lucy in the Whitby cemetery. However, Coppola also emphasizes Dracula’s humanity when Mina joins him in London at the movies and embraces him before he crumbles into dust. Despite the frame tale that emphasizes the love that Dracula feels for his wife, which is nowhere evident in Stoker’s novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula provides a critical commentary on Stoker’s novel and reinforces its relationship to the fears of its day. Adaptations in other media continue to demonstrate that Dracula remains a locus for contemporary fears. In the years since Dracula was published, readers and critics have found much to explore in the original novel and the works it has inspired. Literary criticism has examined the multiple dimensions of Dracula, including the relationship between past and present, with Dracula generally representing the mysterious gothic past, primitive culture, and unbridled sexuality while his opponents are identified with the forces of modernity, including law, science, and restraint. Another subject of interest has been the relationship between Dracula and the historical voivode whose name Stoker “borrowed.” Criticism in the twentieth century did not refer to this relation until 1958 when Bacil Kirtley published “Dracula the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folklore,” which suggests that Stoker based his vampire on the historical Vlad. This connection was further developed in Grigore Nadris, ’s article “The Historical Dracula. The Theme of His Legend in the Western and in the Eastern Literatures of Europe” (1966), a connection explored convincingly by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu in In Search of Dracula (1972). Published before the analysis of Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula, it contains several speculative conclusions regarding the relationship between the voivode and the vampire. McNally and Florescu argue that Stoker based Dracula on the Wallachian voivode and that the novelist was aware of the life of Vlad Tepe¸ ¸ s and of his depiction in the German pamphlets (which they assume Stoker consulted).

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The connection between Stoker’s eponymous character and Vlad Tepe¸ ¸ s was deconstructed by Elizabeth Miller in the 1990s (Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, 2000, 2006), the Canadian researcher suggesting readers need to deemphasize the connection between the fictional vampire and the historical voivode because Dracula is a work of fiction not history and because Stoker was intent on exploring the period in which he was living. The approach focused on Stoker’s sources on Dracula was also developed in several books, such as Clive Leatherdale, The Origins of Dracula (1986), Sir Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991), Marius-Mircea Cris, an, The Birth of the Dracula Myth: Bram Stoker’s Transylvania (2013). The publication of Stoker’s notes in 2008 led to new discoveries in the field of Dracula studies, such as a new possible location of Castle Dracula, suggested by Hans de Roos, “Count Dracula’s Address and Lifetime Identity” (2017). Besides the association of Castle Dracula with real locations in Romania (also discussed by Cris, an, “The Models for Castle Dracula in Stoker’s Sources on Transylvania”, 2008, “The Old and New Dracula Castle: The Poienari Fortress in Dracula Sequels and Travel Memoirs,” 2016, “Castle Hunedoara and the Dracula Myth: Connection or Speculation?” 2017), the complex relationship between the Dracula myth and Romanian tourism has been discussed in Duncan Light’s volume The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania (2012). While tourists are intrigued to visit the places where the historical Dracula slept, contemporary literary criticism has a more nuanced attitude, with most scholars accepting that the vampire is rather a Western construct which Stoker adapted to comment on his own time. From an anthropological perspective, the Dracula myth has been addressed by Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Rituals, Poetics and Popular Culture in Transylvania (1998), Otilia Hedes, an, Strigoii (2011), Sabina Ispas, “Dracula, an occidental mask” (2010). Other studies discuss philosophical, spiritual, or religious aspects developed in the novel (Stephan Schaffrath, “Orderversus-Chaos Dichotmoy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” (2002), Patrick R. O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (2006), Beth McDonald, The Vampire as Numinous Experience: Spiritual Journeys with the Undead in British and American Literature (2004), Noël Montague Étienne Rarignac, The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as a Sacred Text (2012), Marius-Mircea Cris, an, “Bram Stoker and Gothic Transylvania” (2016). The discovery and publication of The Dublin Years: The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker, edited by Miller and Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great grand-nephew, reveals the extent to which his roots were in Ireland, where he was born and educated and where he spent his first 31 years. Other critics have been eager to explore Stoker’s Irish roots. Among them are Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne in The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula (1997), Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (2002), William Hughes, “The Casework Relationship: Le Fanu, Stoker and the Rhetorical Contexts of Irish Gothic” (2017), and Jason McElligott, Bram Stoker and the Haunting of Marsh’s Library (2019). Even more recently Mike Shepherd, who lives in Cruden Bay (Scotland) where Stoker spent a number of holidays, writes about the influence of that location on Dracula in When Brave Men Shudder: The Scottish Origins of Dracula (2018).

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Taking a dramatically different approach is Catherine Wynne who examines the influence of the theatre, particularly Shakespeare, on Stoker’s writing. Not only did Stoker serve as business manager for The Lyceum Theatre for 27 years, he also wrote theatre reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail from 1871 to 1877. Wynne compiles much of what Stoker wrote on the theatre in Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays and Fiction (2012), a two-volume collection of Stoker’s writings and analyses the influence of the stage on Stoker’s writing in Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (2013). Wynne devotes one entire chapter to the connection between the Lyceum’s Macbeth and Dracula. Problematizing the relationship between Dracula and his hunters, Carol Senf’s essay “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror” (1979) opens new directions in the study of the novel, by emphasizing the complexity of the plot and characters. Even though Dracula rarely mentions contemporary history, scholars and literary critics agree that Stoker was thinking about the problems of his own day and using Dracula and his vampire minions to present these dangers. Among these dangers are the New Woman and the increasing power of women and other marginalized groups; the threat that colonies might rise up against their former conquerors; and the increasing power of science and technology. The following critical studies explore gender issues: Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, “Feminism, sex role exchanges, and other subliminal fantasies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1977), Gail B. Griffin, “‘Your girls that you all love are mine’: Dracula and the Victorian male sexual imagination” (1980), Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), Marie Mulvey-Roberts, “Dracula and the doctors: bad blood, menstrual taboo and the New Woman” (1998), Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly sexual women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1977), Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde desire took me’: the homoerotic history of Dracula” (1994), Carol Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s response to the New Woman” (1982), Kathleen Spencer, “Purity and danger: Dracula, the urban Gothic, and the late Victorian degeneracy crisis” (1992, Judith Weissman, “Women and vampires: Dracula as a Victorian novel” (1977), Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (2005), Keridiana Chez, “‘You Can’t Trust Wolves No More Nor Women’: Canines, Women, and Deceptive docility in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (2012), Tabitha Sparks, “Medical Gothic and the Return of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Stoker and Machen” (2002), John Allen Stevenson, “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula” (1988), Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1984). Xenophobia and the fear of the primitive are examined by Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1988), Jimmie E. Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud (2006), Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (2006), Attila Viragh, “Can the Vampire Speak? Dracula as Discourse on Cultural Extinction” (2013), Duncan Light, “Tourism and Travel in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (2017), and Anne DeLong, “Communication Technologies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Utopian or Dystopian?” (2018).

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Other critics approach Dracula from an imagological perspective. For instance, Vesna Goldsworthy interprets the construction of Stoker’s Transylvania as a typical case of fictional colonization, deconstructing the stereotypes associated with the Balkans in British literature, in Inventing Ruritania, The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). The geopolitical stereotypes associated with Romania are discussed by Carmen Andras, , “The Image of Transylvania in English Literature” (1999) Pia Brînzeu, Corridors of Mirrors. The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and Romanian Fiction (1997), Marius-Mircea Cris, an, Impactul unui mit. Dracula s, i reprezentarea fict, ional˘a a spat, iului românesc (“The Impact of a Myth: Dracula and the Fictional Representation of the Romanian Space” 2013). Other studies explore Stoker’s treatment of science, medicine, and technology: Joel Feimer, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the challenge of the occult to science, reason and psychiatry” (1994), John L. Greenway, “Seward’s folly: Dracula as a critique of ‘normal science’” (1986), and Rosemary Jann, “Saved by science? The mixed messages of Stoker’s Dracula” (1987). Because of the novel’s unconventional narration, it is appropriate that scholars and critics also examined Stoker’s approach: Alison Case, “Tasting the original apple: gender and the struggle for narrative authority in Dracula” (1993), David Seed, “The narrative method of Dracula” (1985), Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric typewriting: Dracula and its media” (1992), Matthew Beresford, From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth (2008). Almost all studies of the Gothic as a way of approaching the world, such as David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1996) Fred Botting, Gothic (1996), Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (2010), Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (1987), touch on Stoker’s Dracula as a significant example of both late nineteenth-century Gothic and as a novel that has inspired other works in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The technological development is one of the main motifs of the novel, as the characters are always ready to appeal to new inventions and to find modern solutions for traditional activities, such as recording writing and speaking, for travelling, for medical reasons, or even for hunting vampires. This is, of course, one of the features which make Dracula a paradigmatic story for the Steampunk Gothic, as well as its openness to various readings from different approaches. Maybe the most successful mechanism of the novel consists in creating a fascinating, mysterious, and invisible system, which opens the creativity of generations of readers, finding the most adequate response for each epoch, and leading to countless sequels and adaptations. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Emily Gerard, “Transylvanian Superstitions.” The Nineteenth Century 101 (July 1885), 130–150, 130. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 142.

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

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Ibid., 142. Otilia Hedes, an, Strigoii (Cluj-Napoca, Dacia, 2011), 15. Sam George, “Spirited Away: Dream Work, the Outsider, and the Representation of Transylvania in the Pied Piper and Dracula Myth in Britain and Germany.” In Dracula: An International Perspective, ed. by Marius-Mircea Cris, an (Cham, Palgrave, 2017), 69–93, 79. William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia… (London, Longman, 1820), 19. Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller (editors). Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula. A Facsimile Edition (Jefferson and London, McFarland, 2008), 244. Marius-Mircea Cris, an, The Birth of the Dracula Myth: Bram Stoker’s Transylvania (Bucharest, Pro Universitaria, 2013), 81. For the representation of history in Dracula, see 97–107. Ibid., 249. Eleni Coundouriotis, “Dracula and the Idea of Europe.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 9:2 (1999–2000), 143–159. Cris, an, The Birth, 224. For mythical Transylvania in Dracula see 213–226. Ibid., 217. Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York, Routledge, 2006), 28. Cris, an, The Birth, 250. For the representation of hell in Dracula, see 239–253. Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson, Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture (Toronto and Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 2004), 81. Jen˝o Farkas in Marius Cris, an, Dracula s, i reprezentarea fict, ional˘a a spat, iului românesc “Dracula and the fictional representation of the Romanian space” (Bucharest, Pro Universitaria, 2013), 260.

Bibliography Andra¸s, Carmen Maria. “The Image of Transylvania in English Literature.” Journal of Dracula Studies 1 (1999): 38–47. Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago University Press, 1995. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Bloom, Clive. Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. Boner, Charles. Transylvania: Its Products and Its People. Londra: Longmans, 1865. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Brînzeu, Pia. Corridors of Mirrors. The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and Romanian Fiction. Timi¸soara: Amarcord, 1997. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “Dracula and the Idea of Europe,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 9:2 (1999–2000): 143–159. Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me With Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” In Dracula by Bram Stoker, edited by John Paul Riquelme, 577–599. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

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Cris, an, Marius-Mircea. “The Models for Castle Dracula in Stoker’s Sources on Transylvania.” Journal of Dracula Studies 10 (2008): 10–19. https://kutztownenglish.com/journal-of-draculastudies-archives/. ———. The Birth of the Dracula Myth: Bram Stoker’s Transylvania. Bucharest: Pro Universitaria, 2013. ———. Impactul unui mit: Dracula s, i reprezentarea fict, ional˘a a spat, iului românesc (“The Impact of a Myth: Dracula and the Fictional Representation of the Romanian Space”). Bucharest: Pro Universitaria, 2013. ———. “Vampire Narratives as Juggling with Romanian History: Dan Simmon’s Children of the Night and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.”In Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture, edited by Katarzyna Bronk and Simon Bacon, preface by Sir Christopher Frayling, 59–84. Oxford, Bern, Berlin etc: Peter Lang, 2014. ———. “Bram Stoker and Gothic Transylvania.” In Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, edited by Catherine Wynne, 63–76. Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ———. “The Old and New Dracula Castle: The Poienari Fortress in Dracula Sequels and Travel Memoirs.” In Dracula and the Gothic in Literature, Pop Culture and the Arts, edited by Isabel Ermida, 45–68. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016. ———, ed. Dracula: An International Perspective. Cham: Palgrave Gothic, 2017. ———. “Castle Hunedoara and the Dracula Myth: Connection or Speculation?” In Dracula: An International Perspective, edited by Marius-Mircea Cris, an, 157–178. Cham: Palgrave Gothic, 2017. Crosse, Andrew F. Round About the Carpathians. Edinburgh s, i Londra: Blackwood, 1878. Eighteen-Bisang, Robert and Elizabeth Miller, eds. Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula. A Facsimile Edition. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2008. Ermida, Isabel, ed. Dracula and the Gothic in Literature, Pop Culture, and the Arts. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Rodopi, 2016. Frayling, Cristopher Sir. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Gibson, Matthew. “Bram Stoker and the Treaty of Berlin (1878).” Gothic Studies. 6, no. 2 (November 2004): 236–251. Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Griffin, Gail B. “‘Your Girls That You Love Are Mine’: Dracula and the Victorian Male Sexual Imagination.” In Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, edited by Margaret L. Carter, 137–148. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. Haining, Peter and Peter Tremayne. The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula. London: Constable, 1997. Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Studies 36 (1993): 333–352. Hede¸san, Otilia Strigoii. rev. Cluj-Napoca, Dacia XXI, 2011. Hughes, William “The Casework Relationship: Le Fanu, Stoker and the Rhetorical Contexts of Irish Gothic”. In Dracula: An International Perspective, 21–38. Cham: Palgrave Gothic, 2017. Ispas, Sabina. “Dracula, o masc˘a occidental˘a” („Dracula, an occidental mask”), Anuarul Muzeului Etnografic al Moldovei, X. In honorem Prof. univ. dr. Ion H. Ciubotaru(Ia¸si, 2010): 411–428. Johnson, Major E.C. On the Track of the Crescent: Erratic Notes from the Piraeus to Pesth. Londra: Hurst and Blackett, 1885. Kirtley, Bacil. “Dracula the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folklore.” In Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, edited by Margaret L. Carter, 11–17. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. Kligman, Gail. The Wedding of the Dead: Rituals, Poetics and Popular Culture in Transylvania. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988. Leatherdale, Clive. The Origins of Dracula. London: William Kimber, 1987. Light, Duncan. The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania. Surrey, Burlington, 2012.

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Mazuchelli, Nina Elizabeth. A Fellow of the Carpathian Society. “Magyarland”: Being the Narrative of Our Travels Through the Highlands and Lowlands of Hungary. 2 vol. Londra: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle s, i Rivington, 1881. McDonald, Beth E. The Vampire as Numinous Experience: Spiritual Journeys with the Undead in British and American Literature. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 2004. McNally, Raymond T. and Radu Florescu. In Search of Dracula. New York: Greenwich, 1972. Rev. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. McWhir, Anne. “Pollution and Redemption in Dracula.” Modern Language Studies 17:3 (Summer 1987): 31–40. Melton, J. Gordon and Alysa Hornick. The Vampire in Folklore, History, Literature, Film and Television: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015. Miller, Elizabeth. Dracula: Sense and Nonsense. Westcliff-on-Sea, England: Desert Island, 2006. Miller, Elizabeth and Dacre Stoker. The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker. London: The Robsson Press, 2012. Nandris, , Grigore. “The Historical Dracula: The Theme of His Legend in the Western and in the Eastern Literatures of Europe.” Comparative Literature Studies 3 (1966): 367–396. O’Malley, Patrick R. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2nd edn. London, New York: Longmans, 1996. Rarignac, Noël Montague-Étienne. The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as a Sacred Text. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2012. Roth, Phyllis. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” In Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, edited by Margaret L. Carter, 57–68. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. Schaffer, Talia. “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula.” ELH 61:2 (Summer 1994): 381–425. Schaffrath, Stephan. “Order-versus-Chaos Dichotmoy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 43:1 (Spring 2002): 98–112. Senf, Carol. “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror.” In Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, edited by Margaret L. Carter, 421–431. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988. ———. “Bram Stoker: Ireland and Beyond,” in Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays, edited by Jarlath Kileen, 87–1012. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. ———. “Invasions Real and Imagined: Stoker’s Gothic Narratives” in Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, edited by Catherine Wynne, 92–104. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Wilkinson, Esq., “William, Late British Consul Resident at Bukorest.” In An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia. Including Various Political Observations Relating to Them. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820. Wynne, Catherine, ed. Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations. Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2016.

Uncanny Humans

Freaks and the Victorian Imagination John Woolf

The Gothic is a nebulous genre manifest in fiction, poetry, architecture, art, fashion and film. The Gothic is historically contingent and historically expansive: originating in twelfth-century French architecture, the Gothic proliferated throughout Europe in churches and cathedrals until the sixteenth century, re-emerged in fiction in the mid-eighteenth century, experienced a heyday in the 1880s and continues to inform contemporary culture. The Gothic is a ‘liminal genre’ which designates a space to explore sex, gender, race and queer identities amongst others.1 The Gothic incorporates a litany of subgenres including horror stories, ghost stories and ‘techno-gothic’.2 In the dark liminality of the Gothic there lurks spirits and sprites, vampires and ghouls; the Gothic represents a nexus of motifs as fears are projected onto the presence of darkness with recurrent uses of objective correlatives and pathetic fallacy: dark nights, storms, lightening and shadowy castles symbolising malevolent emotions and worlds. The Gothic is concerned with contemporary fears, the dark potential of science, technology and medicine: the vampire swelled with monstrous potency in response to AIDS; the mutant and zombie gained credence from new destructive technologies like the atom bomb. The Gothic explodes onto the page, onto the stone or onto the canvass in a cacophony of clashes between animalism and humanity, life and death, ancient and modern, self and other. The Gothic is a nightmarish space that allows sexual taboos and monstrous beings to roam freely, engendering horror, terror and wonder in the eye of the beholder. The Gothic is transgressive and sensationalist, challenging the boundaries of the normal and respectable; it is, as Jarlath Killeen wrote, a ‘monstrous genre’ because like the monster itself the Gothic cannot be neatly contained: interpretations are always open, meanings are never absolute; subsequently, the Gothic represents a ‘discourse of ambivalence’.3 J. Woolf (B) Hult Business School, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_36

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Into the discursive terrain of the Gothic, I want to suggest that freakery has a place. By freakery I mean ‘the intentional performance of constructed abnormality as entertainment’.4 The term encompasses the popular phenomenon of the freak show defined as the ‘formally organized exhibition of people with alleged and real physical, mental, or behavioural anomalies for amusement and profit’, usually associated with the burgeoning commercial entertainment industry from the mid-nineteenth century.5 The freak show was enjoyed by everyone from Queen Victoria to the average man, woman and child. It was a popular form of entertainment that emerged from the medieval travelling fairs to become a commercial form of entertainment, intimately connected to the burgeoning entertainment industry. The freak show thrived on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1840s to the First World War, featuring the ‘freak’ as the star attraction and turning staple gothic emotions—horror, fear and wonder—into a respectable form of entertainment that shocked, titillated and awed.6 The ‘freak’ was a socially constructed identity which was different to the freak performer: the individual offstage who brought to life the ‘freak’ onstage. The historian Robert Bogdan defined the word perfectly when he wrote: ‘“Freak” is not a quality that belongs to the person on display. It is something we created: a perspective, a set of practices – a social construction’.7 The freak of nature was as much a ‘freak of culture’ crafted by the context in which it was created and the show in which it was displayed.8 The freak, in short, was a creation and a presentation; it designates a persona, an identity, a performance which exists onstage. The freak functions as a useful analytical category, which has been deployed in numerous pieces of scholarship within the tradition of Freak Studies.9 In the following essay, I seek to outline some of the ways in which freakery and the Gothic intertwine. This is a brief survey of interconnections that demonstrate how the gothic discourse was embedded in the lived experience and textual representations of freakery. I begin with an overview of the means by which gothic motifs manifest in Victorian freak shows, followed by a closer reading of freak shows, science and the Gothic. I proceed by exploring how an encounter with freaks can be read as a gothic experience, before concluding with neo-Victorian representations of freakery that rely on a gothic discourse. All this suggests the presence of a gothic freakery that is worthy of further academic exploration. Thus far scholars have tended to skirt around the interconnections between freakery and the Gothic, although the monster has certainly featured in critical readings. Judith Halberstam noted the centrality of the corporeal in gothic fiction, exploring how gothic novels produced the monster.10 David Punter discussed ‘Gothic pathologies’, citing the body as a topos within the Gothic.11 Others have read the Gothic as an inherently somatic genre, parasitic on the vulnerabilities of the reader’s own body, and always transgressive, excessive and grotesque in form.12 Marie Mulvery-Roberts drew attention to the interconnections between flesh and the text, highlighting how the existence of Otherness is exemplified through corporeality.13 Still others have explored the correlation between degeneration theory, the fin-de-siècle, bodies deemed different and the Gothic.14 Yet the freak is conceptually different to the monster albeit connected. The monster is a medical concept reflective of the anomalous body, while the freak is constructed

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through performance and spectacle. Nonetheless medicine and freakery were often mutually dependent. Both reflected and contained the fears of a given moment, they problematised binary categories, generated meaning, signalled an interpretive occasion and were historically contingent cultural productions based on deformed bodies. This proximity between the discourses suggests some of the value in considering the interrelationships, while highlighting an existent theoretical framework. Indeed, psychological perspectives and Freudian-inspired analysis focus on repressed fears in gothic texts and the ‘primordial fears’ aroused by the freak: scale (in the case of dwarfs and giants), sexuality (hermaphrodites), our need to transcend the state of bestiality (animal-human hybrids) and our precarious individuality (conjoined twins).15 And the role of fear in both discourses transcends the personal to become a collective, contextual response to broader social developments: fin-de-siècle gothic texts responded to contemporaneous concerns of degeneration; conjoined twins disrupted the boundaries of the autonomous self as modernity and the premise of individuality advanced.16 Gothic representations and freak constructions centralise the corporeal, the textual and the performative. Scholars have highlighted how the Queer and the Gothic interrelate: both are performative, both designate beings that are Other yet are also connected to the norm.17 Similarly, freakery stands at the boundary of the normal and the abnormal, wrapped in a performance of physiological difference. Freakery and the Gothic create Otherness in their texts: early gothic writing, for example, was replete with anti-Catholic messages suggested through wayward nuns, abbots and monks, while freakery functioned to produce the socially constructed freak, be that the giant, dwarf, skeleton man, fat lady or human-animal hybrids who were marked by their deviation from the norm. These constructions of performed identities were formulated by performance and texts, such as exhibition pamphlets, newspapers and images. Yet freakery, like the Gothic, was not a hermeneutic container. The Gothic impacted social realities, as L. Andrew Cooper argued, while freak constructions had a tangible effect on the lived experience of freak performers.18 They came to embody their freak identities, which were ever shifting presentations informed by experiences offstage. When the dwarf General Tom Thumb (real name Charles Stratton) was married in 1863, for example, this private development in his life informed how he was seen and presented onstage: he went from being presented as a rogue and a bachelor to becoming a respectable, family man. Life and text, realities and representations, intermingled in freakery as they did in the realm of the Gothic, which manifested in the everyday through architecture, penny dreadfuls, graveyards, the ‘Victorian cult of death’, magic shows and spiritualism.19 Similarly, the freak show was not a contained form of entertainment but a discourse that seeped into the streets, the home and even contemporary interactions between people with disabilities and ‘normates’.20 Furthermore, the constructions in both discourses strike similar notes. Gothic identities were liminal and disruptive: Lady Gragam in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) or Luda Dwilt of Willkie Collins’ Armadale (1864–1866) disrupted their bourgeoise façade with bigamous and murderous intent. This was the Victorian

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Gothic as domesticated disruption produced concurrently with the freak show as a domesticated, sanitised and respectable entertainment venue that peddled disruptive freaks onstage. Freaks imperilled categories and dichotomies common in Western thought (male-female, animal-human, for example); an ‘intolerable ambiguity’ that turned freaks into beings who were ‘considered simultaneously and compulsively fascinating and repulsive, enticing and sickening’, as the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz argued.21 Gothic texts arguably went further in subverting dichotomies—the vampire, for example, caught between the realms of life and death—although as we will see the freak show could also promote exhibits that hovered between the living and the dead, whether in the exhibition of Skeleton Men or in embalmed displays. Collectively, this disruptive potential of freak identities and Gothic creatures produces a profusion of analytical opportunities as both resist categorisation and thus interpretation. A corollary concerns ambivalence. The Gothic is a prime example: the product and discourse is ambivalent because uncertainty results from the resistance to closed meaning. Therein lies a further connection with the monster which represents moral ambiguity and ambivalence derivative from fusion, merger, subversion and reversion of ontology, dualisms and distinctions.22 Similarly, the freak encapsulates ambivalence in the collapsing of categories onstage, which leads to a problem of language. As the sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued, ambivalence signals a ‘language-specific disorder’ in which an object can be assigned to more than one category.23 This creates a linguistic dilemma: how to contain and explain an object that transcends structural dualisms? One Victorian freak show pamphlet expressed the dilemma: ‘Language fails us when we attempt to depict the mingled sensations that filled our minds’.24 Another pamphlet proclaimed that one dwarf, as neither child nor man, monster nor human, meant he was ‘not easily described, partaking of that class of mixed emotions which are felt, but which language has not been able to explain’.25 Finally, in the ‘discourse of ambivalence’ which is the Gothic, certain motifs become manifest in sights of freakery. The supernatural that haunts the Gothic through goblins, whether in Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) or George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1870–1871), finds expression in the freak show where the display of dwarfs functioned in a similar manner to the Gothic goblin: racially other, conflated with children, grotesquely diminutive, and remnants of species supposed to be extinct.26 This was certainly true in the case of Maximo and Bartola, billed as ‘The Last of the Ancient Aztecs of Mexico’, who were thrust onstage from 1849. Maximo the boy was around seven or eight years old and 33 inches tall; his sister was between four and six, and around 291/2 inches tall. Gothic motifs are not hard to detect in their freak show publicity. The ‘Aztecs’ hailed from a mythical, strange and dangerous place: the secret city of Iximaya where, the publicity stated, they were discovered squatting on an altar being worshipped as idols. As John Bowen argued, strange locations appear in gothic fiction, from Jonathan Harker’s entrapment inside Castle Dracula through to Ann Radcliffe’s settings in distant Southern Europe.27 For the Aztecs, the setting was Central America in the fortified city of Iximaya where intrepid explorers had lost their lives in search of the secret city. This was pure fiction, of course, but it set the scene and contributed

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to their presentation as relics of the Ancient Aztecs, ‘forbidden, by inviolably sacred laws, from intermarrying with any persons but of their own caste’ (when the siblings legally married in 1867 the gothic preoccupation with sexual taboo and transgression was similarly manifest).28 Moreover, presented onstage at the height of Victorian optimism and a belief in civilisation’s advancement, the Aztecs evoked the Gothic’s preoccupation with time: clashes between the ancient and the modern, or transitions between the medieval and the Renaissance, aroused the familiar and the distant, the ghost of the past matched with the technological potential of the future. Clashes abound with the known and the unknown, the natural and the supernatural, shades of light and dark. And this, as Sigmund Freud was aware, could ignite the uncanny which in turn could be frightening.29 No wonder, then, that Queen Victoria expressed a terrified disgust when she stared at the Aztecs at Buckingham Palace in 1853, writing in her diary that ‘they quite give one the creeps’.30 But this was the raison d’être of the freak show: like the Gothic, horror could be appealing. The Gothic was replete with the harrowing potential of science and its monstrous creations, as seen in the fiction of Shelley, Stevenson and Stoker, and the relationship was reciprocal with medical textbooks often relying on the romantic discourse of the Gothic to portray case histories.31 Similarly, a reciprocal relationship between freakery and medicine was long established, creating a space for Gothic motifs to manifest. From at least the eighteenth century, exceptional bodies were preyed upon by men of medicine. In the 1780s the body of Charles Byrne, displayed as the Irish Giant, was secured by John Hunter the anatomist-surgeon. In 1824 the corpse of Caroline Crachami, the nine-year-old Sicilian Dwarf, was acquired by the Royal College of Surgeons. Medical men were all too eager to befriend freak performers and attend their shows. When the original ‘Siamese Twins’, Chang and Eng Bunker, first came to London in 1829, members of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians flocked to see, inspect, touch the twins and endorse their show.32 Judith Halberstam argued that the Gothic cemented broader social hierarchies, with corporeality a central component of the Gothic, while Michel Foucault suggested that gothic narratives reflected abuses of power and unjust sovereigns.33 These analytical perspectives are confirmed in the case of Chang and Eng’s relationship to science: the twins were subject to the gaze of medical men; they were objects of interpretation, with labels ranging from United Twins, lusus naturae, double living child, Siamese Twins and double monstrosities; they were, in other words, monsters akin to doctor Victor Frankenstein’s monster, subject to experimentation from the world of medical science.34 Indeed, the London physician Dr. George Buckley Bolton was designated the personal doctor of the twins shortly after their arrival in London in 1829. Bolton conducted intrusive experiments: he tested the sensitivity of the twins’ connecting band by poking it with a pin. Both boys shrieked, so Bolton concluded that the ligament carried nerves, arteries and veins that connected the pair.35 Bolton inspected their genitals and fed Chang an asparagus to decipher their ‘sanguineous communication’. Chang’s urine had ‘the peculiar asparagus smell’ but not Eng’s which,

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Bolton concluded, ‘tends to corroborate the opinion I entertain of the possibility of effecting a separation of the twins by a surgical operation’.36 Interest in the living Chang and Eng was compelled in part to fathom the nature of their remarkable physiology but also for a desire to own the dead Chang and Eng. Indeed, the twins’ protectors carried embalming fluid in case of the twins’ sudden death. In the month they arrived in London, November 1829, another pair of conjoined twins were dissected in the amphitheatre of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. At this dissection was Georges Cuvier the comparative anatomist, who had previously dissected Sara Baartman in 1815. A Khoekhoe woman from South Africa, Sara Baartman (spelt ‘Saartjie’ in Dutch) was dubbed the ‘Hottentot Venus’. She was renowned for her steatopygia (fat around the hips and buttocks) and macronymphia (large labia). Many believed she was a mixture of ape and human, another category of human, ‘a kind of Frankenstein’s monster scarcely capable of emotion and intelligence yet also a reminder of the primitive living deep within the self’, wrote her recent biographers.37 Like the creatures in gothic text, she was perceived to exist within a realm beyond the human. Baartman was born in the 1770s in the Eastern Cape and transported for exhibition purposes in 1810, the year she arrived in London. She was in her thirties and had mothered three children; all died in infancy, their names unrecorded. Baartman ended up at 225 Piccadilly, where it cost two shillings to see her display. Male and female spectators rubbed shoulders as they observed and prodded her. She wore a tightfitting costume to highlight her large buttocks and to give the impression that she was naked. She sang onstage and one reporter, for the London Times, noted how she was ‘produced like a wild beast’, placed in a ‘cage’ on a raised platform and ‘ordered to move backwards and forwards’ by her manager.38 Her exhibition was akin to that of a performing animal, although some historians have also noted that she was treated like a celebrity: carried on a chair and presented to a duke; riding in a carriage on Sundays and visited by many of London’s fashionable, with songs and poems composed in her ‘honour’.39 It is even possible that Mary Shelley visited Baartman as Shelley lived close to 225 Piccadilly. Baartman could not speak English but, as the London Times noted, her manager ‘was seen to hold up his hand to her in a menacing posture’ until she obeyed his command.40 Baartman’s display was challenged in October 1810 when abolitionists objected to the exhibition. The case eventually went to court and hinged on the question of whether she was a free agent at liberty to make her own decisions. But a dubious contract between Baartman and her keepers was produced, and the show continued. She was displayed in Manchester, Bath and Limerick before being paraded in Paris where, in the spring of 1815, she spent three days at the Jardin des Plantes, under the observation of professors at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. Here she posed for images that appeared in Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Frederic Cuvier’s Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères (1824). She was pictured alongside mammals, apes and monkeys. A few months later, in December 1815, Baartman was dead; no one was interested in the cause of death, but she most probably died of pneumonia.41

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Now science could claim the ultimate prize: Cuvier dissected her body, decanted her brain and genitalia and made a cast of her body. In the name of science Cuvier immortalised Baartman as a biological and racial specimen. Evoking the image of the mad scientist in gothic texts, Cuvier eroded the dichotomy between god and man as he recreated Baartman as a pathological specimen. He took his time dissecting her body, particularly focusing upon her buttocks and genitals, which Baartman had refused to show him when she was alive: ‘science as rape, institutionalized’, wrote her biographers.42 This was another evocation of the Gothic where, particularly in the figure of the vampire, male perpetrators inflict bodily damage onto female victims in a sexually charged abusive encounter. After Cuvier dissected her corpse, Baartman’s genitals were preserved in a separate jar, her skeleton joined Cuvier’s collection and he reached his ‘scientific’ conclusion: the Hottentot was closer in lineage to apes than humans. As Baartman’s biographer argued, ‘European racism made Saatjie a Frankenstein’s monster of its own invention’.43 Baartman was perceived in the realm of the apes and her genitals marked her monstrous femininity. In life and death, she was configured into a gothic monster and, in the act of dissection, Cuvier himself became the living embodiment of doctor Victor Frankenstein. Moreover, embedded in her sad story were gothic elements: science and the performative, science and the spectacle, science and the monstrous, science and the unethical; curiosity, discovery, passion, malignity—these were all prevalent in her life and especially her death and dissection, which occurred in the same decade that Shelley penned Frankenstein (1818). Baartman’s life resurrects other gothic motifs too: a young woman in danger echoed the orphan Emily St Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or Lucy Westenra in Dracula (1897). Threatening such innocence was the gothic criminal: Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Count Dracula or Baartman’s keepers and Cuvier. In the Gothic these struggles with satanic forces were often propelled by lust, power and coercion which could border on the pornographic as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796).44 This is starkly illustrated in the display and dissection of Baartman whose monstrosity focused on her genitals; sexual taboo, another gothic staple, was manifest in her freakery. And just as the ghost haunts the Gothic, so death lingers in the presence of freakery: Baartman was destined to be picked in a jar, just as Chang and Eng were destined for the anatomist’s table. When they finally died in 1874, their bodies were sent to the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, for dissection. Their conjoined livers can still be seen at the Mütter Museum today. There was another prominent freak performer who captured the interest of scientists. Julia Pastrana was allegedly born in Mexico around 1834. She suffered from two rare congenital disorders that meant her face and body were covered in dark hair and her gums were so overgrown it looked as if she had a second set of teeth. She was first thrust onstage in America in 1854 and made her London debut a few years later as The Baboon Lady who could sing and dance onstage. Like the gothic genre, or the monsters produced in gothic fiction, Pastrana represented instability. Rosemary Garland Thomson argued that five cultural oppositions were disrupted in Pastrana’s exhibitions: human/animal, civilised/primitive, normal/pathological,

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male/female and Self/Other.45 Similarly, much like the Gothic’s provocation of contemporary fears, Pastrana’s body operated as a site of cultural anxiety.46 In the realm of lived experience, Pastrana performed under the management of a showman named Theodore Lent, who married Pastrana in 1855 to exact control over her body. She performed across America and Europe before dying shortly after childbirth in Moscow in 1860. The bodies of Pastrana and her boy, who was born with the same congenital deformities and died shortly after entering the world, were sold and sent for embalming at Moscow University. The initial idea was to preserve their corpses in the University’s Anatomical Museum but, on realising the profit potential of the embalmed bodies, Theodore Lent offered £800 as a repurchase.47 He then continued touring Europe with the embalmed corpses, confirming the argument that life and death were ultimately irrelevant in the spectacle of exceptional bodies: it was merely the possibility of existence that titillated spectators (much like the ghostly creatures in gothic fiction, we could add).48 In 1862 Lent returned to London to exhibit Pastrana as ‘The Embalmed Nondescript’. Her display captured the attention of Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin who included Pastrana in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). Darwin used Pastrana in this scientific text to discuss her abnormality as it related to other mammals.49 But while she was enwrapped in a scientific discourse, confrontations with the Embalmed Nondescript constituted a gothic encounter as expressed by two Victorian spectators. Arthur Munby, a seemingly respectable uppermiddle-class gentleman, visited Pastrana’s live display in 1857 and her embalmed display in 1862. Munby was a graduate from the University of Cambridge, a civil servant in the Ecclesiastical Commission from 1858 and an occasional poet. He also harboured a secret life: a sadomasochistic marriage to his working-class servant Hannah Cullwick and an obsessive lust for working-class women. His fixation was ‘all-pervasive’, as one contemporary academic suggested, and intimately connected to male pleasure.50 Munby gained a thrill from transgressions, so it was hardly surprising that he headed to Pastrana’s freak show. In 1862 he paid his shilling and stepped inside the darkened room: … there, on a pedestal in the middle of the floor, stood ‘The embalmed Nondescript’, as they call her now, looking exactly as in life. Wearing a short ballet-dress, which I was told she made for herself; her legs cased in pink stockings, her feet planted wide apart, just as she used to stand – like an animal painfully reared on its hindlegs; her coarse black hair wreathed with flowers; bracelets on the bare and hirsute arms; and a wedding ring upon the hard dead hand!51

He felt a strange mixture of emotions when staring at Pastrana. On the one hand he ‘felt scarcely more affected by it than by an ordinary museum specimen’, but there was also horror: ‘the hideous hairy face of this dead Julia Pastrana, staring at you with great glass eyes, & crowned with a ghastly contrast of gay flowers, is enough to fill your fancy with nightmares. It is like seeing a stuffed ape in woman’s clothes, & knowing that it is a woman after all’.52 In Munby’s words, Pastrana engendered a ‘hideous fascination’.53 This reaction mirrored what Eve Sedgwick described as the ‘aesthetic of pleasurable fear’ that was central to gothic conventions: fear and desire.54 Munby’s ‘hideous fascination’

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was additionally marked by horror and disgust: an aesthetic emotion which ignites a physical reaction and a desire to achieve distance while, paradoxically, containing what theorists have described as the ‘macabre allure’, the ‘paradoxical magnetism’ or the ‘demonic pull’ in which, just like the Gothic, aversion is married to attraction, a pleasurable fear.55 So, in a truly gothic response, he was compelled by curiosity and sexual titillation to return to Pastrana’s embalmed exhibition. This time he purchased a photograph of Pastrana and minutely examined her body, stroking her skin and even fondling her breasts: ‘The hairy skin of her arms and bosom resembles, to the eye and touch, the hide of a Chinese pig’.56 The Gothic and horror are almost synonymous.57 The emotion was ignited by gothic nightmares, the hybrid creatures such as The Dog-Man, The Leopard-Man and The Ape-Man in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), characters who were also staples of the Victorian freak show and marked for their bestiality, much like Pastrana’s billing as The Baboon Lady. Munby’s reaction was akin to the pleasurable fear of the Gothic where horror compels and averts the eye of the beholder in equal measure. There was gothic potency in Munby’s encounter too: the hairy mother and child displayed behind a glass case echoed the trade and fashion for funeral and mourning ephemera, the Victorian cult of death that manifested the Gothic in the everyday. Mourning jewellery commonly included hair from a loved one, enshrined beneath glass in a silver or gold frame, which was not dissimilar to the embalmed Pastrana encased in glass.58 Munby also mused on the implication of Darwin’s theory of evolution when staring at Pastrana: ‘She proved her humanity (unless Darwin’s views be correct) by producing a child’, as he wrote in his diary.59 Munby’s bracketed reference to Darwin rooted his horror in the context of the time, responding to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) which confused the problem of the separation between man and ape. The power of these new ideas enforced Munby’s ambivalence: giving birth to a child did not necessarily prove Pastrana’s humanity because apes and humans were possibly connecting species. Munby was thus actively responding to contemporaneous thought at a time when ‘missing links’, evident in literary and scientific writing of the 1860s, posited a belief in the interconnection between humans and monkeys and the possibility of discovering the species that linked the two on the evolutionary scale.60 Munby’s response to Pastrana echoed and embraced these broader cultural concerns and bolstered his sense of horrified disgust. Again, parallels with the Gothic can be discerned: audience fears were not merely individual psychological responses, but emotive reactions generated by contemporaneous concerns. Amidst the plethora of readings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the text was part of a literary and historical context, enmeshed in broader concerns involving imperialism, degeneration, the purity movement, the New Woman, and debates between materialist medicine and Spiritualism.61 These had a bearing on the response to Dracula which in part reflected social fears regarding immigration, sexual perversion and moral degeneration.62 But audience reactions were never homogeneous. In the case of Julia Pastrana, while Munby reacted with horrified pleasure, another upper-middle-class gentleman, Francis Buckland, responded very differently, although he still tapped into the gothic imagination, this time concerning

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wonder. As Dale Townshend argued, wonder was a pillar of the reader’s response to the Gothic; wonder was connected to a sense of terror and horror which underpinned an aesthetic of pleasure concerned with the sublime.63 Yet in Buckland’s response to Pastrana wonder trumped terror: wonder stood alone. Francis Buckland, an eccentric naturalist, surgeon and zoologist first saw the living Pastrana in 1857 and then returned to her embalmed exhibition in 1862. On approaching the glass case, Buckland immediately exclaimed, ‘Julia Pastrana!’, and the recollections of seeing the living Pastrana flooded back into his mind: ‘the huge deformed lips and the squat nose remained exactly as in life: and the beard and luxuriant growth of soft black hair on and about the face were in no respect changed from their former appearance’.64 Buckland could not believe that this was the same Pastrana he saw when she was alive. He struggled to comprehend ‘that the mummy was really that of a human being, and not of an artificial model’. He was awestruck at this ‘most wonderful specimen of the art of preserving’ and was ‘at a loss to know the means which have been employed’.65 Buckland was also struck by Pastrana’s beauty. In life, as in death, ‘her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and well-turned ankle, bien chaussé, perfection itself’.66 Her arms and chest retained ‘their former roundness and well-formed appearance’, and despite the black hair protruding from her face, as he wrote, ‘there was no unpleasantness, or disagreeable concomitant about the figure’.67 Moreover, despite her label The Baboon Lady, and despite Darwin’s prevalent theories, Buckland never referred to Pastrana in these terms. Instead, Buckland merely noted that ‘an idea was also attempted to be promulgated that she was not altogether human’.68 But he gives this no credence as Buckland consciously avoided raising the spectre of Darwin because, as he stated in 1875: ‘I am not a disciple of Darwin or the development theory. I believe in the doctrine – I am sorry to say now old fashioned – that the great Creator made all things in the beginning, and that he made them good’.69 Buckland was versed in the tradition of natural theology, or physico-theology, which found expression in the Bridgewater Treatises (1833– 1836), to which Buckland’s father, William Buckland, contributed.70 These treatises, which built on William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), asserted the ‘truth’ of God’s design in nature, and Buckland junior was ‘a staunch upholder’ of this view.71 As a result, Buckland was confident that man and monkey were separate: there was no origin in apes merely God’s Creation, and this was the lens through which he viewed Pastrana. It meant, in direct opposition to Munby, that he saw her as ‘wonderful’.72 Wonder is based on the conceptualisation of the world as transcendent of the purely physical: a perception of the ‘more-than-physical order of reality’ usually associated with divinity.73 Buckland was propagating a pre-modern notion of wonder, rooted in the Augustinian framework of thought, in which all creations, including monsters, portents, prodigies and wonders, were within the realm of God’s creation.74 Buckland, like his American counterpart John Burroughs, wrote in the tradition of ‘literary natural history’: he presented natural sciences in aesthetic terms, centralised the experience of the naturalist in opposition to the dispassionate observer, painted pictures of the natural world and, crucially, played to the emotional experience of wonder.75

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For both Buckland and Munby their encounter with the embalmed Pastrana was Gothic: the emotions of wonder and horror that defined the gothic experience moved into the realms of freakery. And Pastrana continued to haunt the Gothic imagination. Years later Munby wrote a poem entitled Pastrana (1909): ‘Twas a big black ape from over the sea’, he began, ‘And she sat on a branch of a walnut tree,/ And grinn’d and sputter’d and gazed at me … Such a monstrous birth of the teeming East,/ Such an awkward ugly breed:/… Yet still as I look’d I began to doubt/ If she were an ape indeed …’ The narrator struggled to categorise Pastrana: ‘a being in woman’s clothes’ but with ‘shapely’ hands and feet but with a ‘bestial appearance’. He also perceived ‘faunlike’ features in her ‘tuft ears’ and ‘faunlike beard’, weaving together two descriptive references: one literal and animalistic (‘the face of an ape’) and the other a mythological simile (‘faunlike’).76 Returning to Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that ambivalence represents a ‘language-specific disorder’, one response to the dilemma was to place freakery within a realm beyond the ‘real’, within the realm of the supernatural, within the realm of the Gothic.77 Hermann Waldemar Otto took Pastrana’s death into an explicitly gothic terrain. He was a nineteenth-century German circus owner and journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Signor Saltarino. His description of Pastrana in Fahrend Volk (1895) was steeped in a stylised narrative; describing his encounter with the embalmed Pastrana Otto wrote: I came with positive feelings before that glass case, that coffin, where that lifeless body was shown […]. She stood before me in a red, silk-like harlot’s dress with a frightening rictus across her face, with her child in a similar costume on a pole beside her like a parrot. The rain streamed down outside the show-booths […] and a heavy wind howled round the tent, and I felt a deep, deep sympathy for that poor corpse who could not see and hear, nor feel pain and sorrow. I remembered her saying once with a happy smile, ‘He loves me for my own sake’.78

Pathetic fallacy is used to describe the encounter, the rain pouring down outside signalling his terror, and Pastrana’s alleged words emphasised the pathos of the silenced ‘mummy’. The supposed meeting between Otto and the living Pastrana has been asserted by many contemporary scholars but Otto was born in 1863, the year after Pastrana was embalmed and he published his account in 1895. He never met Pastrana, so this alleged recollection of meeting her alive was a product of his gothic imagination. Nonetheless, what his writings demonstrate is a broader dialectic between the Gothic and freakery: encounters with freaks, themselves presented with gothic motifs, generated a response that mirrors the gothic emotions of wonder, terror and horror, while the subjects of freakery moved into gothic texts. Neo-Victorian representations of Pastrana continued to rely on the Gothic. In a 2003 biography, the authors wove biographical ‘facts’ with literary flourishes to present a gothic-inspired account of her life. They opened their biography with a gothic narrative that had Pastrana’s mother, a ‘Root-digger Indian’ from the Mexican forest, realising: something is terribly wrong. This child will bring much sorrow, and nothing will remain the same. ‘Naualli’, she murmurs with fear in her voice, while the baby girl turns its grotesque face towards her.79

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Gothic imagery filled the space of the unknown as there were no birth, baptism or early year records enabling a reconstruction of Pastrana’s formative years, so with this uncertainty the literary imagination could create Gothic scenes. The same process happened to Joseph Merrick (1862–1890) known as The Elephant Man. The real Joseph Merrick suffered extreme deformities, which included abnormal growths around his feet, legs and left arm. His back and face were covered with lumps of protruding tissue and, due to an injury the young Merrick sustained to his hip, he was left permanently lame. Following the death of his mother in 1873, and the subsequent cruel torments of a stepmother, Merrick struggled to find work and was forced to check himself into the Leicester Union Workhouse in December 1879. He was eventually released to join the freak show until he was robbed and abandoned in Europe. Returning to London in 1886, Merrick was housed at the London Hospital under the ‘care’ (some argue control) of the eminent surgeon Frederick Treves (1853– 1923). Merrick spent the remainder of his days at the London Hospital, dying on 11 April 1890. A funeral was held in the hospital chapel and his body was handed over to Treves who dissected Merrick and arranged his skeleton for the private college museum. Although there were gothic undertones in Merrick’s life and death—the bestiality of his monstrosity and the power of science to contain and dissect his body—the Gothic became explicit in later representations. In The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923), published at the end of a successful career, some thirty-three years after Merrick’s death, Frederick Treves reconstructed Merrick into a creature born from gothic nightmares. Treves described him as ‘repulsive’, ‘degraded’ and a ‘thing’; he was a ‘creature’, a ‘dog’ and an ‘Indian idol’. His bestial deformities reflected his bestial treatment: He was taken about the country to be exhibited as a monstrosity and an object of loathing. He was shunned like a leper, housed like a wild beast, and got his only view of the world from a peephole in a showman’s cart.80

Treves claimed the ‘Vampire Showman’ treated Merrick like a ‘dog’. He was ‘the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen’. In a similar manner to Arthur Munby’s response to Pastrana, Treves claimed that people reacted to ‘the creature’ with ‘horror and disgust’.81 Treves utilised a gothic discourse in order to present Merrick as a composite being who lurked in the shadowy corners of London’s East End. According to Andrew Smith, Treves relied on a gothic discourse because medical language was incapable of fathoming or describing Merrick’s deformity.82 In the space of the unknown, gothic potential was unleashed. But Nadja Durbach noted that gothic and medical discourses were not distinct but interconnected. Medicine and science borrowed from the gothic lexicon, using terms such as ‘foetal monsters’, ‘double monsters’ and ‘monstrosity’ into the late nineteenth century. Treves was not simply articulating a gothic discourse based on limits to his medical understanding, he was expressing the symbiotic relationship between the Gothic and medicine.83 The result, nonetheless, was a gothic freakery that wrapped the realities of Merrick’s life and condition within a discourse that straddled freakery and Gothic.

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In David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980), Treves’s gothic narrative was recapitulated onto the screen. London was reconfigured into a gothic space where dark secrets, mystery and vice lurk in labyrinth alleyways drowned in the fog of industry. The film evoked the dangerous urban environment created in contemporaneous gothic fiction: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and Dracula (1897), which were published when the film was set. The 1880s was also a period when degeneration provoked anxieties and when the freak show as a popular form of entertainment reached its commercial apex. Furthermore, in Lynch’s film there is something of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ as Merrick is kept contained in the London Hospital, and the title The Elephant Man played to the fears of the bestial human transgressing boundaries. Thus, the film promoted and existed within the Gothic horror cinematic genre which, by the 1980s, had a long history. Indeed, the centrality of the freak performer in neo-Victorian representations was found in the adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), which was made into the film The Island of Lost Souls (1932), and included characters like The Dog-Man who mirrored the real life freak performer Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew better known as Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy (and later Man). Freakery was co-opted into twentieth-century gothic horror cinema from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) to The Hands of Orlac (1924), and from Freaks (1933) to The Black Cat (1934), which saw people physically transformed against their will, while The Old Dark House (1932), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Mad Love (1935) continued to peddle disability as an element of horror.84 Deformity remained a central component of the ‘Gothic body’: grotesque, excessive, destabilising and there to engender horror. Moreover, in Tod Browning’s Freaks, or even in Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love (1989), it is the freak body which exemplifies the gothic pathology: freaks as monsters yet there to destabilise the normal.85 As Olympia—the albino, hunchback dwarf—proudly declares in Geek Love: ‘… I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born’.86 What is noteworthy in neo-Victorian representations of the Gothic and the freak, whether in film or literature, is how the Victorian age itself is reconfigured into a gothic era where Jack the Ripper lurched, fog engulfed the streets, and sexual perversions were practised in a Victorian underbelly wrapped in a veneer of respectability and propriety. Yet the Victorians never perceived their age as Gothic; rather, this was the age of optimism, an era of civilisation in ascent.87 And the freak show was not perceived as a barbaric practice but a form of respectable family entertainment that enthralled the working, middle and upper classes. But the interconnections between freakery and gothic discourses helped in creating a Victorian Gothic Age where monsters lurked in gothic texts and freak shows. What was created, and what currently exists, is a gothic freakery where the two discourses met, theoretically and practically, bringing wonder, horror and terror as they destabilised the boundaries of the normal through performance and monstrous bodies.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2012), p. 3. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford, Blackwell, 2004), pp. xvIII–XX. Jarlath Killeen, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature, 1825–1914 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 168–171. Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 24. Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 10. John Woolf, The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age (London, Michael O’Mara Book, 2019), pp. 5–15. Ibid., p. xi. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, John Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 109. For a helpful overview of Freak Studies see Michael M. Chemers, ‘Introduction Staging Stigma: A Freak Studies Manifesto’, Disability Quarterly Studies, 25:3 (2005), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/574/751 [accessed 9 January 2019]. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (London, Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 1–27. David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998), p. 211. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014), pp. 1–27. Marie Mulvey Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016). Andrew Smith, ‘Gothic and the Victorian fin de siècle, 1800–1900’, in Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, ed. by Dale Townshend (London, The British Library, 2014), pp. 124–149; Stephan Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1981), p. 27. Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010), pp. 63–66. Queering the Gothic, ed. by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009). L. Andrew Cooper, Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture (London, McFarland, 2010). Alexandra Warwick, ‘Gothic, 1820–1880’, in Terror and Wonder, ed. by Townshend, pp. 94–123.

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20. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 13. 21. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York, New York University Press, 1996), pp. 55–66, 56. 22. David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 18. 23. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Oxford, Polity Press, 1991), p. 1. 24. Anonymous, Account of Miss Pastrana, The Nondescript; and the DoubleBodied Boy (London, E. Hancock, 1860), p. 5. 25. Anonymous, An Account of the Life, Personal Appearance, Character, and Manners, of Charles S. Stratton, The American Man in Miniature, known as General Tom Thumb, Twelve Years Old, Twenty-Five Inches High, and Weighing Only Fifteen Pounds. With Some Account of Remarkable Dwarfs, Giants, and Other Human Phenomena, of Ancient and Modern Times. Also, General Tom Thumb’s Songs (London, T. Brettell, 1845), p. 9. 26. Killeen, History of the Gothic, pp. 71–73. 27. John Bowen, Gothic Motifs, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/art icles/gothic-motifs [accessed 12 July 2019]. 28. Anonymous, Illustrated Memoir of an Eventful Expedition into Central America: Resulting in the Discovery of the Idolatrous City of lximaya, in an Unexplored Region; And the Possession of Two Remarkable Aztec Children Maximo (the Boy), and Batola (the Girl) (London [publisher not identified], 1853), p. 25. 29. Citied ibid. 30. Queen Victoria’s Journals (QVJ), 4 July 1853, www.queenvictoriasjournals.org. Queen Victoria’s Journals can be accessed online through a partnership between ProQuest, the Royal Archives and the Bodleian Libraries. 31. Meegan Kennedy, ‘The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren’s “Diary of a Late Physician”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32:2 (2004), pp. 327–351. 32. James W. Hale, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers, from Actual Observations, Together with Full Length Portraits, the Only Correct Ones, Permitted to be Taken by Their Protectors (London, Turner, 1830), p. 3. 33. Roberts, Dangerous Bodies, p. 4. 34. M. Sauvage, ‘The Period of the First Union of the Siamese Twins’, Lancet, 29:735 (1837), pp. 29–30. 35. Hale, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers, p. 181. 36. Ibid., pp. 180–182.

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37. Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 2. 38. London Times, 26 November 1810. 39. Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais, ‘Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London’, Journal of British Studies, 47:2 (2008), pp. 301–323, 316. 40. London Times, 26 November 1810. 41. Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, pp. 138–9. 42. Ibid., p. 140. 43. Cited in Roberts, Dangerous Bodies, p. 81. 44. John Bowen, Gothic Motifs, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/art icles/gothic-motifs [accessed 12 July 2019]. 45. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ‘Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana’, in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. by Jeffrey Cohen and Gail Weiss (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 129–144; Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, pp. 70–78. 46. Lillian Craton, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction (Amherst, Cambria Press, 2009) pp. 1–3, 6–7, 121–123. 47. G. Van Hare, Fifty Years of a Showman’s Life; or, The Life and Travels of Van Hare by Himself (London, W. H. Allen, 1888), p. 46. 48. Stewart, On Longing, p. 111. 49. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1868), p. 328. 50. Angela V. John, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, Routledge, 1984), p. 104. 51. Trinity College Library, Cambridge, Papers of A. J. Munby (TCLC, MUNB), 12, pp. 208–209. 52. TCLC, MUNB, 12, pp. 209–210. 53. TCLC, MUNB, 12, p. 207. 54. Cited in Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 13. 55. Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust (Illinois, Carus Publishing Company, 2004), p. 42; Carolyn Korsmeyer, Savouring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 3; Colin McGinn, The Meaning of Disgust (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 48. 56. TCLC, MUNB, 13, p. 192. 57. Clive Bloom, ‘Introduction’, in Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers, ed. by Clive Bloom (Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–24. 58. Marcia R. Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 293–314. 59. TCLC, MUNB, 12, p. 207. 60. A. Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4:2 (1999), pp. 228–251.

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61. Kathleen L. Spencer, ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH, 59:1 (1992), pp. 197–225. 62. Greg Buzwell, Dracula: Vampires, Perversity and Victorian Anxieties, https:// www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/dracula [accessed 12 July 2019]. 63. Dale Townshend, ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’, in Terror and Wonder, ed. by Townshend, pp. 10–37. 64. Francis T. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History: Fourth Series (London, Richard Bentley, 1888), p. 41. 65. WLL, Oversize Ephemera EPH+33:4; The John Johnson Collection, Human Freaks 3 (8), http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com (Accessed via the Senate House Library Catalogue). 66. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History, pp. 42. 67. Ibid., p. 41. 68. Ibid., p. 40. 69. Francis T. Buckland, Log-Book of a Fisherman and Zoologist (London, Chapman & Hall, 1875), p. xii. 70. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 171. 71. Buckland, Log-Book of a Fisherman and Zoologist, p. xi. 72. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History, p. 41. 73. Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 13. 74. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750 (New York, Zone Books, 2001), pp. 39-48. 75. Michael G. Buckley, ‘“The Footsteps of Creative Energy”: John Burroughs and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Natural History’, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 21:4 (2007), pp. 261–272. 76. A. J. Munby, Relicta: Verses (Bertram Dobell, London, 1909), pp. 5–13. 77. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 1. 78. Christopher Gylseth, and Lars Toverud, Julia Pastrana: The Tragic Story of the Victorian Ape Woman, trans. by Donald Tumasonis (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2003), pp. 75–76. 79. Ibid. p. 1. 80. Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (London, W. H. Allen, 1980 [1923]), p. 11. 81. Ibid. 82. Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-De-Siècle (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 49–50. 83. Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity, pp. 38–39. 84. Adam Scovell, In Profile: Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), http://www.thedou blenegative.co.uk/2015/04/in-profile-tod-brownings-freaks-1932/ [accessed 12 July 2019]. 85. Reyes, Body Gothic, p. 5. 86. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (New York, Knopf, 1989), p. 20. 87. Killeen, History of the Gothic, pp. 3–13.

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Bibliography Archival Documents Trinity College Library, Cambridge, Papers of A. J. Munby (TCLC, MUNB), MUNB, 12–17, Diaries of A. J. Munby. Welcome Collection, London, Oversize Ephemera EPH+33.

Electronic Archives John Johnson Collection: http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com (Accessed via the Senate House Library Catalogue). Queen Victoria’s Journals: http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org.

Primary Materials Anonymous, Account of Miss Pastrana, the Nondescript; and the Double-Bodied Boy (London, E. Hancock, 1860). Anonymous, An Account of the Life, Personal Appearance, Character, and Manners, of Charles S. Stratton, The American Man in Miniature, Known as General Tom Thumb, Twelve Years Old, Twenty-Five Inches High, and Weighing Only Fifteen Pounds. With some Account of Remarkable Dwarfs, Giants, and Other Human Phenomena, of Ancient and Modern Times. Also, General Tom Thumb’s Songs (London, T. Brettell, 1845). Buckland, Francis T., Log-Book of a Fisherman and Zoologist (London, Chapman & Hall, 1875). ———, Curiosities of Natural History: Fourth Series (London, Richard Bentley, 1888). Darwin, Charles, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1868). Dunn, Katherine, Geek Love (New York, Knopf, 1989). Hale, James W., An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers, from Actual Observations, Together with Full Length Portraits, the Only Correct Ones, Permitted to Be Taken by Their Protectors (London, Turner, 1830). Hare, G. Van, Fifty Years of a Showman’s Life; or, The Life and Travels of Van Hare by Himself (London, W. H. Allen, 1888). Matthews, Mrs. Anne Jackson, The Life and Correspondence of Charles Matthews the Elder, Comedian (London, Warne and Routledge, 1860). Munby, A. J., Relicta: Verses (London, Bertram Dobell, 1909). Sauvage, M., ‘The Period of the First Union of the Siamese Twins’, Lancet, 29:735 (1837), pp. 29– 30. Treves, Frederick, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (London, W. H. Allen, 1980 [1923]).

Newspapers London Times, 26 November 1810.

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Secondary Materials Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and Ambivalence (Oxford, Polity Press, 1991). Bloom, Clive, ‘Introduction’, in Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers, ed. by Clive Bloom (Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–24. Bogdan, Robert, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988). Bondhus, Charles Michael, ‘Gothic Journeys: Imperialist Discourse, the Gothic Novel, and the European Other’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2010). Buckley, Michael G., ‘“The Footsteps of Creative Energy”: John Burroughs and the NineteenthCentury Literary Natural History’, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, 21:4 (2007), pp. 261–272. Chemers, Michael M., ‘Introduction Staging Stigma: A Freak Studies Manifesto’, Disability Quarterly Studies, 25:3 (2005). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/574/751. Accessed 9 January 2019. ———, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Crais, Clifton, and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009). Craton, Lillian, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th -Century Fiction (Amherst, Cambria Press, 2009). Cooper, Andrew L., Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture (London, McFarland, 2010). Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, Zone Books, 2001). Durbach, Nadja, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010). Fiedler, Leslie, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1981). Fuller, Robert C., Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Gilmore, David D., Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Gylseth, Christopher, and Lars Toverud, Julia Pastrana: The Tragic Story of the Victorian Ape Woman, trans. by Donald Tumasonis (Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2003). Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2012). Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (London, Duke University Press, 1995). Harrison, Peter, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998). Hodgson, A., ‘Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4:2 (1999), pp. 228–251. John, Angela V., By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, Routledge, 1984). Karschay, Stephan, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Kennedy, Meegan, ‘The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren’s “Diary of a Late Physician”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32:2 (2004), pp. 327–351. Killeen, Jarlath, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature, 1825–1914 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2009). Kolnai, Aurel, On Disgust (Illinois, Carus Publishing Company, 2004). Korsmeyer, Carolyn, Savouring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).

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McGinn, Colin, The Meaning of Disgust (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011). Pointon, Marcia R., Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009). Punter, David, and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford, Blackwell, 2004). Punter, David, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998). Queering the Gothic, ed. by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009). Reyes, Xavier Aldana, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014). Roberts, Marie Mulvey, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016). Scully, Pamela, and Clifton Crais, ‘Race and Erasure: Sara Baartman and Hendrik Cesars in Cape Town and London’, Journal of British Studies, 47:2 (2008), pp. 301–323. Smith, Andrew, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-De-Siècle (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004). Spencer, Kathleen L., ‘Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis’, ELH, 59:1 (1992), pp. 197–225. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, John Hopkins University Press, 1984). Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, ed. by Dale Townshend (London, The British Library, 2014), pp. 124–149. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997). ———, ‘Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana’, in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. by Jeffrey Cohen and Gail Weiss (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 129–144. Woolf, John, The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age (London, Michael O’Mara Book, 2019).

Websites Bowe, John, Gothic Motifs. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs. Accessed 12 July 2019. Buzwell, Greg, Dracula: Vampires, Perversity and Victorian Anxieties. https://www.bl.uk/romant ics-and-victorians/articles/dracula. Accessed 12 July 2019. Scovell, Adam, In Profile: Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/ 2015/04/in-profile-tod-brownings-freaks-1932/. Accessed 12 July 2019.

Victorian Stage Magic, Adventure and the Mutilated Body Catherine Wynne

As Marlow views Kurtz’s compound in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) through his field glass he realizes that human heads rather than wooden knobs adorn the top of the compound’s fence posts. This ‘nearer view’ forces him to ‘throw’ his ‘head back as if before a blow’ when he sees his ‘mistake’, as these ‘knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing’.1 Downplaying his abrupt recoil as a ‘moment of surprise’, Marlow nonetheless describes the first head, the only one facing him, as horrific. It is ‘black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber’.2 The ‘smiling’ head is uncanny—‘sunken’ and ‘shrivelled’ it seems both dead and alive. Brutally dismembered, its display serves to showcase both Kurtz’s power and his madness. Turned outwards this gothic display is designed to provoke fear in the audience, while the remaining heads facing inwards towards the compound, expose to Kurtz his own journey to madness, depravity and genocide. These heads and their positioning on the posts signal the moment in the text when Gothic meets modernism in this adventure fiction of empire. While acts of physical brutality were frequently enacted in adventure fictions of late nineteenth-century empire and in the empire itself, performances involving the severing of heads or dismemberment of body parts were simultaneously flourishing on the magic stage. Indeed, as European empires expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, magic acts responded by performing illusions that were increasingly violent. On the magic stage the body became uncanny: whole bodies or body parts disappeared, bodies floated in the air and severed heads (often smiling and speaking) lay on tables or were held up by their hair. Both the stage magic heads and

C. Wynne (B) University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_37

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Kurtz’s heads are designed to provoke an effect. They are concomitantly displaying imperial power and the dark side of technological modernity. While the revelation of Kurtz’s heads exposes to the viewer (Marlow views them from a distance through binoculars much like the audience members of a theatrical magic show in which the ‘horrors’ are framed by the proscenium) the ‘horror’ of Kurtz’s enterprise in the Congo and the concomitant horror of empire, the heads of the contemporaneous magic stage are designed to produce awe and horrific pleasure. They also showcase the advanced technologies of stage magic which could produce such violently horrific effects. While Kurtz’s heads come from real victims, the dismembered heads on the magic stage are produced by illusion, yet stage magic only works if the audience suspends its disbelief in order to believe. At the heart of both ‘shows’ is the power of performance. Performance is at the heart of Kurtz’s display of heads and performance underpins the operation of empire from the late nineteenth century onwards. As Simon During argues, cruelty was magic’s ‘core component’.3 Empire perpetrates, and even depends for its power, on cruelty to bodies. The period of high imperialism coincides with the Golden Age of Magic: they simultaneously interpolate and reflect each other. This essay considers the relationship between gothic adventure fictions and stage magic in relation to notions of performance. Imperial adventure texts of the period are traditionally designated ‘imperial Gothic’ following Patrick Brantlinger. These narratives typically demonstrate an encounter with the occult, regression, or ‘going native’ and the depletion of opportunities for adventure.4 My focus here, however, is to examine the deployment of ‘technologies’ of magic, distinguished by During as ‘secular’ rather than ‘occult’ or ‘mystical’ forms.5 Both stage magic and imperial narratives certainly deploy the occult (or, in the case of imperial narratives, encounter the occult) but my interest lies in how the occult is used or invoked as part of a performance of imperial power. Magic performance and imperial narrative revel in bodily cruelty, and both are bound up with notions of progress: the ‘civilizing mission’ of Heart of Darkness and the showcasing of technological advancements in stage magic. The late century’s ‘civilizing’ agenda is revealed as illusion and the link between technology and progress is severed. From its literary origins in The Castle of Otranto (1764) Gothic revelled in bodily dismemberment and in the power of performance, harnessing it to the struggle for state control. In Horace Walpole’s novella the disjointed body occupies the centre of this struggle. Otranto commences with the awful spectacle of a gigantic helmet crashed in the castle’s courtyard, killing the unlawful heir to the throne of Otranto. The helmet smashes into the foundations of the castle, the symbol of Manfred’s illegitimate rule. The ghost appears as enormous body parts clothed in armour throughout the course of the story until he becomes re-assembled towards its end, after his dismantling of Manfred’s regime is complete with the death of Matilda, the last surviving heir. The ghost then proclaims Theodore as the rightful heir to Otranto, completes the destruction of the castle by smashing it with his enormous feet and then rises into heaven. The ghost’s purpose, however, is to right the wrongs of Otranto and he is only integrated bodily once he has annihilated Manfred’s descendants. The dismembered Alfonso is ‘re-membered’ as he reinstates his legitimate heirs to the throne: he is returning the state to a condition of order and stability. While this is

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certainly a supernatural text, Alfonso’s trick is to appear as body parts to instil fear in order to fulfil his political purpose. Those who see these dismembered and disjointed pieces of body and armour over the course of the story are terrified. The performance of the body invokes terror, generating political change and ultimately restoration. In adventure texts of the late century it works to discipline and control other cultures. By the end of the nineteenth century dismembered bodies serve empire as they showcase European technological and, by implication, racial superiority. In advertising posters for magic acts magicians are seen dressed in genteel evening clothes (a signifier of ‘progress’) harnessing and controlling the occult practices of nonEuropean magic (with posters featuring, for example, Indian fakirs and Egyptian mummies as well as gothic imps and devils) to produce modern ‘imperial’ magic. Forays into empire brought imperialists and their technologies into contact and conflict with local populations who were represented as superstitious and occultist. The magic of Western technology was deployed to mystify other cultures and at the same time travellers were fascinated by the magic of non-Europeans, transporting it in the case of stage magicians, like the mummies wrested from their tombs by explorers, back to Europe for display. Stage magic deployed the mysticism of the Orient, defined by Edward Said’s seminal 1978 Orientalism as a space of exoticism and degeneration in the European imagination, to engender a sense of the arcane and mysterious.6 The display of violence and its association with biopolitical domination recalls Michel Foucault’s archaeology of power in Discipline and Punish (1975).7 The imperial fictions in this period use magic tricks to display imperial strength, or ultimately depravity in the case of Kurtz, and they speak to late Victorian magical performance. This discussion takes Heart of Darkness, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falseá” (1892) to the stage to reveal the relationship between the use of illusion (or trickery) in these narratives of empire and the stage magic of contemporaneous magicians. Decollation as a stage trick is first recorded in Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) which featured the beheading of John the Baptist illusion.8 Professor Krosso brought the ‘Harmless Guillotine’ to London in 1852; his advertising poster shows Krosso with a sword in one hand and holding a platter with the head of his victim in the other.9 By the 1860s developments in technology made this illusion more visually effective.10 Alexander Hermann invented the ‘Marvelous Decapitation’. Hermann’s promotional poster features the decapitated body sitting in a chair, its head located on a nearby box. In a further gothic touch a skeleton, presumably the victim’s, runs towards the magician who holds a curved sword in his hand.11 Charles de Vere’s magic act brought empire and magic together. In his advertising poster de Vere (he styled himself as Professor de Vere) is dressed in an evening suit, a sartorial innovation pioneered by the French magician Jean RobertHoudin. In his right hand de Vere holds a kukri knife (a knife of empire) and in his left he holds up the severed head of a woman. She, too, is dressed in evening wear and the composure of her seated body is at odds with her dismembered head and its pained expression.12 The disjunction between head and body, between her sartorial perfection and her mutilation, is uncanny. Even her pearl necklace resting an inch or so below her severed neck is untouched. Aside from the head held in the air and

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Fig. 1 Advertisement for Charles De Vere, reproduced from Milbourne Christopher, Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962), 108

her companion’s knife, this is a genteel image. Empire also plays on this veneer— the accountant in Heart of Darkness is impeccably dressed as Congolese imperial workers die around him of starvation and disease. Empire also dresses up; under the guise of its progressive agenda, it engages in extreme violence to bodies (Fig. 1). From the mid-Victorian period, women were frequently dismembered or cremated on the magic stage as performers responded to the late Victorian rise of the New Woman.13 The notion, of course, of land as female is long-standing. Gothic fiction brings the mutilated woman and land together in Otranto when Matilda, the last of Manfred’s heirs, is mistakenly stabbed by Manfred who thereby completes his own destruction. Her dying body then takes ‘centre stage’ as all the characters converge

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around it. Matilda sets the kingdom to rights before she dies by forgiving her father and giving her blessing to the marriage of her lover Theodore to Isabella, ensuring the continuity of the legitimate line. On the magic stage female mutilation reached its climax when the trick of sawing a woman in half was produced by Percy T. Selbit in 1920. Christopher Milbourne observes in Panorama of Magic (1962) that when a newspaper cartoonist depicts a magician sawing a lady in two, she often symbolizes a country.14 In King Solomon’s Mines the map to Kukuanaland depicts the terrain as shaped like a recumbent woman, complete with breasts. Haggard’s She (1887) inspired the ‘She’ illusion whereby a woman disappeared leaving only a handful of dust behind. The magicians drew on the climax of Haggard’s novel when the immortal Ayesha enters the fires of life and is reduced to dust. Her imperial ambition to take over Victoria’s England is destroyed by the very fires that first gave her eternal life.15 The home of British magic in the late Victorian period was the Egyptian Hall in London’s Piccadilly. Built in 1811 the Hall, adorned with carved sphinxes and Egyptian goddesses, became inextricably associated with magic after John Nevil Maskelyne and George Cooke leased it in 1873. In the trick borrowed from Hermann, Cooke was decapitated twice a day at the Egyptian Hall in a playlet in which his body opened a chest from which emanated a skeleton, while his head looked on from a nearby cabinet.16 Victorian magicians liked to invoke Pharaonic practices—indeed the period’s excavation of Egyptian tombs added an occult frisson and contemporaneity to their rituals. For Henry Ridgely Evans, ‘[f]ar back in the shadowy past, before the building of the pyramids, magic was a reputed art in Egypt, for Egypt was the “cradle of Magic”’.17 In a 1920 poster the American magician, the Great Raymond, brings the ‘mummy of the Princess Osiris’ to life as the image shows the princess rising from her sarcophagus and, in another poster, his fellow American ‘Carter the Great’, complete with pith helmet (the dress of empire), is depicted astride a camel with a red devil on his back against the backdrop of the Sphinx monument and with an Arab figure below him.18 The latter poster, which also references the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb four years earlier, shows the magician as imperial master. In Old and New Magic Henry Ridgely Evans presents the Egyptian Hall as transporting ancient Egypt to London: ‘What is the meaning of this Egyptian Temple, transplanted from the banks of the Nile to prosaic London? … No Sphinxes guard its portal … See the long line of worshippers waiting to obtain admission to the Mysteries. Has the cult of Isis and Osiris been revived?’19 The exciting illusion which the quotation is building towards is Colonel Stodare’s Sphinx trick, which astonished the public on its first appearance in October 1865. The Times observes how Stodare placed a box on an uncovered table. Inside the box was a head ‘attired after the fashion of an Egyptian Sphinx’. Stodare ‘calls upon the Sphinx to open its eyes, which it does, to smile, which it does also, though the habitual expression of its countenance is most melancholy, and make speech, which it does also, this being the miraculous part of the exhibition’.20 The disembodied head is unusual in itself; its ability to speak without any obvious mechanical contrivances marks it as astonishing. At the same time the magician is represented as imperial master as Stodare

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Fig. 2 ‘The Sphinx’, reproduced from M. Young, Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic: The Art of Conjuring Unveiled (New York: M. Young, 1880), p. 8

commands the Sphnix to speak. Regina Janes argues that as culture and technology develop decapitation becomes more violent.21 The severed head spoke directly to technological advancement: an advertising poster from the turn of the century shows a smiling severed head on a table and on the shelf underneath is a ‘mechanical apparatus’ as magicians ‘adjust[ed] their illusions’ in line with ‘scientific discoveries’.22 Technological advancement goes hand in mutilated hand with the illusion of cruelty and bodily violence (Fig. 2). Magicians also directly serviced European empire. The most famous example of this is the performances of Jean Robert-Houdin in French-controlled Algeria. The Marabouts were fomenting trouble and the French government instructed him to demonstrate the superiority of European ‘magic’ to the practices of the tribes. Houdin’s ‘The Light and Heavy Chest’ deployed electricity to change the weight of the chest at the flick of a switch. Houdin asked an Algerian volunteer to lift the chest and, on his first attempt, he lifted it with ease but then the weight was changed making it impossible to lift. To complete his effect Houdin jolted the volunteer with an electric shock which was passed through the chest’s handles.23 Houdin had accomplished what he had set out to do: to demonstrate the superiority of French magic, and hence of French imperial rule. French imperialism in North Africa was safeguarded through the power of magical performance.

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Richard Marsh’s gothic novel The Beetle (1897) evokes similarities with this incident. When a foreigner, described by the narrator of this episode in the novel as a North African, infiltrates the laboratory of an English scientist, Atherton uses his advanced magic of electricity to subdue the foreigner. The foreigner has occult powers (‘it’ can transform from man to woman to beetle) but Atherton’s electricity is superior. While the foreigner tries to mesmerize the scientist, Atherton reaches for a lever to release a spark of electricity from a machine and after this ‘little exhibition’ the visitor ‘shook with terror’ and ‘salaamed down to the ground’.24 Atherton proclaims: You may suppose yourself to be something of a magician, but it happens, unfortunately for you, that I can do a bit in that line myself, - perhaps I’m a trifle better at the game than you are. Especially as you have ventured into my stronghold, which contains magic enough to make a show of a hundred thousand such as you.25

Atherton sprinkles phosphorous bromide on the floor creating a vapour but, in the mist generated by the chemical, the intruder changes shape before his eyes and seems to disappear, leaving Atherton to wonder: ‘If the thing had been a trick, I had not the faintest notion how it had been worked; and, if it was not a trick, then what was it? Was it something new in scientific marvels?’26 He manages to temporarily capture it under a canister until it escapes and assumes the shape of a naked and attractive woman, although in its male form the beetle is hideous. In any case the metamorphic creature is a monster, a sexualized and demonized gothic Other.27 On the magic stage women were transformed into spiders and moths, allied creatures to the beetle. One particularly uncanny trick from 1899 shows a woman’s head on a spider’s body as she is posed on the steps outside a genteel home. The magician, unperturbed by the creature, stands behind her.28 In the early twentieth century David Devant invented the ‘Mascot Moth’ in which a woman appears as a moth and is attracted to a flame.29 As she approaches the flame she disappears, much like Marsh’s dematerializing beetle. The Beetle does not simply play out the imperial fantasy of Western technological superiority in contrast to non-Western magic; while the Beetle is certainly othered, Atherton is simultaneously revealed as dangerous and immoral. Shortly before his electrical performance with the Beetle Atherton experiments on a cat, showing off his scientific powers to his friend Woodville. Atherton has invented a ‘magic vapour’ which he demonstrates to Woodville: ‘I am going to demonstrate on a small scale, the action of the force, which on a large scale, I propose to employ on behalf of my native land.’30 Atherton claims that his glass pellets will ‘work more mischief than all the explosives man has fashioned’.31 To demonstrate he shoots a pellet into a glass box containing the cat which he believes belongs to his love rival, Paul Lessingham. The brutality makes Woodville ill and he accidentally becomes a victim of another of Atherton’s glass pellets containing the vapour. Ultimately, it is the Beetle who saves Woodville through hypnotism. The threat posed by the foreign magician in The Beetle is a threat to the state as the beetle comes to England to seek revenge on Lessingham. Lessingham had been kidnapped by the beetle twenty years previously and escaped only after he strangled it. At the novel’s opening Lessingham is a Member

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of Parliament and leader of the opposition party in Westminster, so the beetle’s magic represents a threat to England. Magicians appropriated the tricks of cultures that came under the imperial control. Stodare, of the decapitation trick, was successful in transporting the Indian Basket trick to the European magic stage. As a contemporary points out: ‘It is not a pleasant trick to witness, but, like the “Decapitated Head”, it drew immense crowds, its fictitious horror being apparently its chief attraction.’32 In the trick an empty basket is revealed to spectators, a child or woman gets into the basket and the performer pierces the basket with a sword. Screams and blood issue forth until there is silence. Finally, the victim is revealed safe and well in the audience. Maskelyne relates an eye-witness account of the trick by an English vicar in which the illusionist thrust an eight-year-old girl into a thin wicker basket: ‘an interesting little girl, habited in the only garb which nature had provided for her, perfect of frame and elastic of limb.’33 The child’s naked appeal is an added attraction for this spectator, underlining a libidinal frisson in certain magic acts, particularly those involving women and children. The vicar confirms that the child in the basket answered the magician’s questions and there was no evident deception. He heard her beg for mercy before the juggler plunged his sword into the basket ‘withdrawing it several times and repeating the plunge with all the blind ferocity of an excited demon’ to the vicar’s ‘absolute consternation and horror’.34 The child’s ‘shrieks were so real and distracting’ that the vicar’s ‘first impulse was to rush upon the monster, and fell him to the earth’, but the juggler was ‘armed’ and the vicar ‘defenceless’.35 He further notes the effect on his companions: ‘they appeared to be pale and paralysed with terror.’36 Maskelyne relates this account to debunk the magic of the Indian juggler: ‘[T]he modern juggler of the East, with his incantations, his “mantras”, and gesticulations, is very much the same sort of person that he that he has always been … The conservatism of the Oriental races precludes the possibility of much change.’37 Invested with a sense of imperial superiority magicians, like Maskelyne, could not concede that the magic of other cultures was equal or superior to their own.38 For Maskelyne, ‘many tricks of Eastern origin … have been introduced into the repertoire of the Western conjurer’ and have been ‘vastly improved’.39 The Indian jugglers are ‘poor degraded beings’ and Maskelyne urges his readers to ‘give them a helping hand … But give sparingly or the money will be spent in debauchery and excess’.40 In Indian Conjuring (1920), L. H. Branson further underlines Western superiority as the aim of his volume is ‘to uphold the reputation of the Western conjuror against the spurious ascendency held by his Eastern confrere’.41 Branson dismisses the ‘superior education’ of the ‘European conjuror’ as the reason for ‘the gains in skill’ and ‘inventive genius’, proclaiming that ‘the interest the European takes in his hobby has more to do with his superiority than education and large fees’.42 Branson advises that if ‘readers doubt this explanation, let them offer the Jadoo-wallah, at this stage of the game, two thousand rupees to be allowed to fire a No. 8 cartridge from a 12 bore gun from a range of thirty yards at the empty basket’ but he ‘will not accept the offer unless he values’ the child in the basket ‘less than two thousand rupees and has a good chance of escaping arrest for murder’. He has, he notes, ‘offered it twice with impunity’.43

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Knowing that the trick is merely an illusion, Branson nonetheless is prepared to shoot the child in the basket to prove his point. Like the fictional case of Atherton in The Beetle, European tricks of technological superiority reveal deep-seated racism and extreme violence. In Stodare’s version of the trick, the magician, with ‘fury’, plunges his sword into the basket amidst the piercing screams of his victims and the ‘horror’, of the audience, who is ‘half inclined to call in the police’.44 After wiping the blood off his blade, Stodare assures the audience that the lady in the box is unhurt: ‘She disobeyed me, and I therefore determined to punish her.’45 Stodare’s comment sums up the operation of empire as the relentless punishment of bodies in the service of imperial illusions of grandeur. In her seminal study, Mary Louise Pratt describes the ‘contact zone’ where cultures come into contact, usually with unequal levels of power.46 Magic operates in the contact zone. By the late nineteenth century, British domination had extended to Egypt after the 1882 suppression of Egyptian nationalism. Victorian Britain’s leading war painter, Elizabeth Butler, who was in Egypt in the 1880s with her officer husband, relates an anecdote about Sir James Dormer, who held high military posts in Egypt. Butler reveals how Dormer used his glass eye trick on the Bedouins. He took ‘out his glass eye, which they of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in the air and replacing it’. Dormer ‘had great power over them … for ever after’.47 But he was killed in ‘India by the wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side’.48 Clearly, the trick did not work on the tiger that he had shot. The story recalls the scene near the start of King Solomon’s Mines when Good, the novel’s comic figure, is interrupted by Kukuana warriors in the middle of his ablutions, having just shaved ‘the hair off the right side of his face and chin’.49 This is the first moment of contact between the two groups. The sight of Good removing his false teeth surprises the warriors. When the warriors’ leader questions how the teeth ‘move of themselves, coming away from the jaws and returning of their own will’, Quatermain, the group’s most experienced African explorer, uses Good’s teeth to reverse the power dynamic.50 At Quatermain’s instruction, Good performs magic with his teeth. By revealing his gums, and then replacing the false teeth with a flourish, he provokes terror in his audience. Their leader calls the group ‘spirits’ and asks for ‘pardon’, similar to the Beetle’s reaction to Atherton’s ‘magic’ tricks.51 Imperialists’ magic tricks service their fantasy of the right to rule other cultures. Quatermain pardons them with an ‘imperial smile’, alleging that the group ‘come from another world’.52 They proclaim themselves as gods, prefiguring Kurtz’s mad illusions of divine grandeur in Conrad’s novel. Quatermain capitalizes on the group’s status, founded in trickery, by informing the warriors: ‘We come to stay with you a little while, and to bless you by our sojourn.’53 Imperial ‘magic’ conjoins with imperial violence when Quatermain demonstrates the ‘magic tube that speaks’.54 Using his ‘express rifle’, he shoots an antelope, first setting up the occasion like a magician on stage: ‘Ye see that buck,’ I said, pointing the animal out to the party before me. ‘Tell me, is it possible for man born of woman to kill it from here with a noise?’ ‘It is not possible, my lord,’ answered the old man.

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‘Yet shall I kill it,’ I said quietly. The old man smiled. ‘That my lord cannot do,’ he answered. I raised the rifle … I drew a deep breath, and slowly pressed on the trigger … The antelope sprang into the air and fell on the rock dead as a door nail. A groan of simultaneous terror burst from the group before us.55

To capitalize on his magical performance, Quatermain invites a member of his audience to stand upon the rock to be shot. The Kukuana warriors, presented as a formidable force in their own right, are subdued by Western technological magic. The narrative also replays Otranto. The rightful heir to the throne of Kukuanaland is part of the English group and, in an imperial fantasy still played out in twenty-first century geo-politics, Ignosi is placed on the throne after the ruthless and dictatorial Twala is killed. In Otranto the intervention of a gigantic ghost restores the rightful line; in King Solomon’s Mines the state is set in order by the gigantic figure of the English Sir Henry Curtis who fights Twala in a duel. After a prolonged struggle, Curtis snatches the axe from Twala’s waist and decapitates him, provoking excitement in the audience. Haggard even deploys the language of the magic stage: ‘[B]ehold! Twala’s head seemed to spring from his shoulders: then it fell and came rolling and bounding along the ground’, stopping at Ignosi’s feet, as if in obeisance to the rightful king.56 The explorers have a powerful adversary in the witch Gagool, who is Twala’s ally. She constantly challenges their alleged supernatural powers. The group harness her ancient knowledge to force her into revealing the way to the diamond mines. In the mines they discover an ancient chamber ‘some forty feet long, by thirty broad, and thirty high’ which contains a ‘massive stone table running down its length, with a colossal white figure at its head, and life-sized white figures all around it’.57 This is a ‘ghastly’ sight: ‘at the end of the long stone table, holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear, sat Death himself, shaped in the form of a colossal human skeleton, fifteen feet or more in height’.58 Surrounding him at this gothic banquet are the former kings of Kukuanaland, turned into stalactites by the cave’s dripping waters. Amongst them is their latest king: Presently [Gagool] stopped and pointed at the brown object seated on the table. Sir Henry looked, and started back with an exclamation; and no wonder, for there, quite naked, the head which Curtis’ battle-axe had shorn from the body resting on its knees, was the gaunt corpse of Twala, the last king of the Kukuanas. Yes, there, the head perched upon the knees, it sat in all its ugliness, the vertebrae projecting a full inch above the level of the shrunken flesh of the neck.59

The illustration of this scene by Russell Flint in the Cassell’s 1907 revised edition of the novel recalls the severed head illusions of Hermann and Cooke, which also featured skeletons. Here a muscular Twala sits on the table with his severed head in his hands. Looming above the table, with a knife ready to plunge into a victim, is the skeleton.60 Although the rightness of Twala’s brutal decapitation is never questioned, the explorers’ greedy pursuit of diamonds, which takes them into this cave, is evident. Ignosi is aware that the only way to shield his country from imperial avarice is to prevent further incursions into his kingdom. After offering the explorers a home,

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which they refuse, Ignosi declares: ‘ye love the bright stones more than me, your friend. Ye have the stones … sell them, and be rich, as it is the desire of a white man’s heart to be.’ He orders: ‘No other white man shall cross the mountains … I will see no traders with their guns and gin. My people shall fight with the spear, and drink water, like their forefathers before them.’61 Published six years after the Anglo-Zulu war in which British ambitions to control Southern Africa resulted in the defeat of the Zulus and their king Cetshwayo, Ignosi’s determination to resist the imperial incursions of the white man is futile. Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of Falesá’ is a further ‘stage’ in the use of gothic magic. While Haggard offers a ‘benign’ imperialism brought about through European stage tricks, magic is used by Case, the European trader, to control the inhabitants on Stevenson’s fictional South Sea island, and to frighten and ruthlessly destroy rival traders. Case is a degenerated version of Good and Quatermain. Unlike King Solomon’s Mines, in which Gagool’s occult powers are not questioned, Stevenson’s story works within an ‘explained supernatural’ favoured by Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s. Here supposed supernatural effects are revealed as tricks, but Case’s magic tricks service brutal economic exploitation and provide a shield for murder. Case wants to remove rival copra traders from the island and abuses the superstitions of the indigenous population, the Kanakas. Stevenson had moved to Samoa a few years earlier for his health and drew inspiration for the European trickery in his story set on the fictitious island of Falesá from his wife Fanny. To prevent locals from stealing their livestock, Fanny invented a deterrent in December 1890: I took the round top of a small meat cask and painted on it a hideous head with great wide eyes and a wide, open mouth displaying a double row of pointed teeth. Instead of hair, flames radiate out from the head. These flames, the iris of the eyes, and the pointed teeth I have painted in luminous paint. It almost frightens me.62

The story was first serialized in the Illustrated London News from July to October 1892 with the title Uma; or the Beach of Falesá. An illustration of an eroticized Uma, naked from the waist up but with her legs demurely crossed under a long skirt and holding a large leaf umbrella-like over her head whose tip is sharpened in a spear, appears at the commencement of the story. The image conjoins Victorian feminine domesticity with foreign exoticism.63 However, Uma is tabooed in her culture, so when the new English trader Wiltshire marries her he also becomes ostracized. The marriage and exclusion of Wiltshire are orchestrated by Case. Case also instigated Uma’s taboo by spreading some ‘report against’ her ‘in order to isolate and have his wicked will of her. Failing that, and seeing a new rival come upon the scene, he uses her in a different way’ by marrying her to Wiltshire.64 Case controls the island; indeed, his magical machinations are sufficiently effective to cause Wiltshire’s immediate predecessor to run away, declaring that he was ‘fairly frightened of his life’.65 The second trick played on Uma is the false marriage to Wiltshire. The marriage certificate states that the she is ‘illegally married’ and that Wiltshire is ‘at liberty to sell her to hell when he pleases’.66 She is not so much complicit in her own commodification but aware that, as the traders commodify her, she must safeguard herself with what is, in fact, a worthless piece of paper. It is Wiltshire’s later description

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of the paper which renders it significant in terms of magic. Guilty at the trickery he has colluded in with Case he asks Uma to show the paper to the missionary Tarleton before he arranges a second legal marriage with her. Wiltshire describes the paper’s ability to ‘jump into [Uma’s] hand … like that Blavatsky business’.67 The association with Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy and debunked as a fraud, is pertinent. It underlines the trickery of the marriage business, but the fact that Wiltshire references Blavatsky also draws the text into alignment with the practices of Victorian stage magicians, many of whom like Maskelyne, spent much of their time debunking spiritualists and theosophists by re-staging their supernatural ‘feats’ as stage tricks. The revelation of the ‘Blavatsky’ paper also prefigures Wiltshire’s later revelation of Case’s jungle ‘shrine’ as a trick. Stages abound in the text. Wiltshire becomes a spectacle for the islanders. On the morning following his first fake wedding, crowds gather round Wiltshire’s house to gaze on the tabooed trader. Wiltshire draws on a different stage here to articulate his reception: ‘they stared at me, dumb and sorrowful, with their bright eyes; and it came upon me things would not look much different if I were on the platform of the gallows, and these good folk had come to see me hanged’.68 The sense of the theatrical is underlined by Wiltshire who, as he walks down the stairs on the verandah, generates ‘a short buzz’ in the audience ‘like what you hear in theatres when the curtain goes up’.69 The Kanakas converge near the house waiting for the ‘show, whatever that was – fire to come down from heaven, I suppose, and consume me’.70 Seeing himself through others’ eyes, Wiltshire compares himself with the devil. Not only does Wiltshire become a spectacle, no one will trade with him. The missionary Tarleton reveals that Case had murdered a previous trader by burying him alive, having stirred up superstitions against him. To undermine Tarleton, Case also resorts to trickery by ‘making a snatch at [Tarleton’s] head, he made believe to pluck out a dollar, and held it in the air’.71 The Kanakas see him as a ‘prodigy’, while Tarleton is ‘amazed’, not by the trick but by Case’s use of it: ‘The thing was a common conjuring trick which I have seen performed at home a score of times; but how was I to convince the villagers of that. I wish I had learned legerdemain … that I might have paid the fellow out with his own coin. But there I was; I could not stand there silent, and the best I could find to say was weak.’72 He acknowledges that the trick was well done. The discarded dollar remains untouched on the beach, underlining the power of Case’s performance and underscoring the economic exploitation he engages in through gothic means—the live burial of a paralytic and magic. Case’s ‘shrine’ in the jungle is the stage of his magic operations. Case is perceived as a ‘tiapolo’ or devil.73 He cultivates similar powers to the stage magicians whose posters also display little imps and devils. He is heard ‘speak with the dead and give them orders’, much like the spiritualist performers.74 Yet, as Wiltshire ventures towards this place of gothic sublimity, he, too, comes under a spell. Greeted by strange and unidentifiable singing, he is discomposed. He perceives a kind of square, the effect of which causes him to fall on his knees and pray, and all the while ‘the strange sounds came out of the tree, and went up and down, and changed, for all the world like music, only you could see it wasn’t human’.75 Climbing the tree with great reluctance, he perceives it is merely a candle-box with banjo-strings. Case’s compound is

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surrounded by a wall on top of which is a ‘line of queer figures, idols or scarecrows … They had carved and painted faces ugly to view, their eyes and teeth were of shell, their hair and their bright clothes blew in the wind’.76 The magic has a two-fold purpose for Case—he forges these figures to sell to visitors and simultaneously uses them to frighten visitors away. In Case’s cave Wiltshire finds a ‘shining face. It was big and ugly, like a pantomime mask, and the brightness of it waxed and dwindled, and at times it smoked.’77 Case uses luminous paint, like Stapleton, the criminal in Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902), who uses phosphorus on his fake demon-hound to instil fear and eradicate the Baskerville family. Like Atherton, who uses technological violence against the Beetle (and Watson who shoots the hound in Doyle’s story), Wiltshire deploys dynamite to blow up Case’s magic theatre and kills Case by cutting his throat. Case is subsequently buried in the hole where he had placed his magic head. The magician is buried on his stage. Stevenson’s story underlines the relationship between magic and the economic exploitation undertaken under the name of empire. While Case is clearly a criminal, Wiltshire is also morally compromised. Never a sympathetic character, he uses his own form of brutality to gain trading dominance of the island. Case’s gothic magic, and its exposure, reveal layers of exploitation at the heart of white colonial incursions into non-European space. At the end of King Solomon’s Mines Curtis informs Quatermain in a letter from his English estate that the axe that severed Twala’s head is displayed above his writing table. In the same year that King Solomon’s Mines was published, General Charles Gordon was killed at Khartoum by the forces of the Mahdi. Thirteen years later General Henry Kitchener revenged Gordon and Khartoum by annihilating the army of the Mahdist’s followers in battle at Omdurman. Kitchener exhumed the Mahdi’s body (he had died of disease months after Gordon) and claimed his skull as a trophy. But public outcry in England forced him to rebury the skull.78 The dismembered head is joined to empire both in narrative and in history. The heads on Kurtz’s posts expose the extremities of imperial exploitation, which was played out in reality in the Congo Free State under the auspices of King Leopold II of Belgium who controlled this key central African territory as a personal fiefdom from the 1885 Conference of Berlin until 1908, when Leopold ceded the country to the Belgian government and it became the Belgian Congo, a paramilitary state that today persists as the Democratic Republic of Congo, amongst the planet’s most egregiously failing states.79 Under Leopold’s tenure the Congo became synonymous with imperial greed, violence and inhumanity. Limbs of the Congolese were chopped off for the offence of not collecting sufficient rubber. The Crime of the Congo (1908), which Arthur Conan Doyle wrote as part of the exposure of the Congo abuses, relates eye-witness accounts. The testimony of the ‘cutting off of living hands … is amply proved by the Kodak’ and Doyle’s text has accompanying photographs of individuals with missing body parts.80 The body certainly occupies the centre of imperial performance in Heart of Darkness. A body part (the heart) features, after all, in the title of the text. Marlow’s appointment fills the post of the previous captain of the boat who had been killed in a ‘scuffle with the natives’.81 Marlow, months later, attempts to recover his remains and in the process discovers that the cause of Fresleven’s death was a quarrel over some

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hens. Fresleven had assaulted a village chief and the chief’s son jabbed him with a spear. The result is that the villagers abandon their homes ‘expecting all types of calamities to happen’, and the crew of Fresleven’s steamer, leaving in a ‘bad panic’, failed to think of Fresleven’s remains until Marlow ‘stepped into his shoes’.82 What he finds is that the grass had grown through the skeleton which was still intact—‘the supernatural being had not been touched after he fell’, and the village was decayed with its huts black and rotting.83 The people had ‘vanished’.84 Fresleven’s story, like Kurtz’s later one, represents the culmination of European magic. Houdin’s tricks on the Marabouts, the amateur magician Danvers’s glass eye trick on the Bedouins, Good’s and Quatermain’s tricks on the Kukuanas and Case’s inventions in the jungle are in the service of European economic exploitation under the guise of progress. The calamities that the villagers in Fresleven’s story expect are both physical, in terms of retribution, and supernatural. Like early gothic novels, much of Heart of Darkness relies on unfinished utterances, generating an aura of mystery. Kurtz is first described by the Company Accountant as a ‘first-class agent’, remarkable for sending in as much ivory as all the other agents put together.85 Furthermore, he will be ‘somebody’ because ‘they, above – the Council in Europe, you know – mean him to be’, and later Kurtz is presented a ‘special being’ by the Company’s brickmaker: ‘To-day he is chief of the best station, next year he will be assistant manager, two years more and …. But I dare say you know what he will be in two years’ time.’86 The irony is that we know what Kurtz becomes. Marlow is identified with Kurtz so he is perceived by the brickmaker as something he is not. Marlow perceives himself as a pretence but lets the brickmaker ‘think what he pleased about the powers that were behind’ him.87 He too performs, like the magician on the stage, knowing that ‘there was nothing behind’ him except a broken old steamboat.88 Kurtz is presented as a series of body parts. For Marlow, before he meets him, he is a voice. It does not matter that Kurtz had ‘collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen’ ivory, his gift for Marlow is his ability to talk. Like Stodare’s Sphinx trick in the Egyptian Hall, it does not matter what he says.89 ‘He was’, for Marlow, ‘very little more than a voice’.90 Marlow reads Kurtz’s report for International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs which is ‘vibrating with eloquence’ and ‘high-strung’, but he tells us very little of its contents.91 In the first paragraph Kurtz proclaims that ‘whites’ must ‘appear’ to the local population ‘in the nature of supernatural beings’, and by the ‘exercise’ of ‘will’, ‘whites’ can ‘exert a power for good’.92 Good is the ‘supernatural being’ of Haggard’s novel, and Good plays tricks. Ultimately, Kurtz’s eloquence gives way to the most extreme violence to bodies. His scrawled message on his manuscript reads: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’93 Kurtz is propagating genocide, which he is enacting on a smaller scale with the heads on his posts. As Marlow approaches the compound immediately after he sees the heads on sticks, he views Kurtz through his field glass. Kurtz is a ‘thin arm extended commandingly’ and a ‘lower jaw moving’.94 A perversion of Alfonso’s ghost in Otranto, Kurtz institutes annihilation. His name Marlow tells us means ‘short in German’ but Kurtz is ‘at least seven feet long’ and his body, emerging from its ‘winding-sheet’, is an ‘animated image of death carved out of old ivory’.95 He opens ‘his mouth

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wide’, giving it a ‘weirdly voracious aspect’.96 On his deathbed in the steamer Kurtz discourses—he is again a voice consuming and voracious. The purpose of empire is to consume: ‘My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas.’97 Kurtz is both gothic monster and magical illusion. His most profound and obscure pronouncement is: ‘The horror! The horror!’98 Kurtz is frightening and frightful, but Marlow is the imperial magician who can work wonders with what remains of Kurtz. Marlow returns to Europe, tears off Kurtz’s postscriptum advising mass extermination from the manuscript. Rather than expose Kurtz’s barbarities, he invests his memory in the body of a woman: Kurtz’s Intended. She seems to float before Marlow like the floating female bodies on the magic stage: ‘She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk.’99 Kurtz’s last words, he tells her, were her name. Kurtz is preserved in the body of a woman. Heart of Darkness is the gothic fictional culmination of King Solomon’s Mines, via Stevenson’s ‘Beach’. In Heart of Darkness the Congolese villagers who flee when Fresleven is killed see the traders as supernatural entities because Western imperialists have consistently deployed and performed magical technologies against them. Kurtz performs an illusion with severed heads and then comes to embrace it, crossing over from reason to madness as he comes to believe in the trickery of his own magic. The endpoint of the trick, if one believes it, is violent death: the head is severed and the body in the wicker basket is mutilated. The heads on the posts are real. In a New York Times article in 2007, H. D. S. Greenway discusses how a severed head arrived in Washington from Kabul supposedly containing the head of Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant. The head was sent by tribal chiefs in Kabul after President George Bush allegedly said he hoped that they would bring it to him. It was not the correct head, and no one knows to whom it belonged. Unlike Kitchener’s treatment of the Mahdi’s skull there was no public outcry.100 In a culture of violence we are immune to the severed head. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw a multiplicity of severed heads used by Islamic State to demonstrate and perform power. The severed head is Gothic. For Frances Larson, it is a boundary disrupter. It is a person but not a person. It invites viewing and is compelling to look at but it is simultaneously horrific.101 In the fictions under discussion here, empire is performed on and through bodies in different ways. Bodies become spectacles to establish imperial and economic dominance in Haggard and Stevenson. Kurtz’s body and the severed heads underline the dark and rebarbative values of European progress and commerce—the endpoint of Kurtz’s ruthless pursuit of ivory and imposition of white European rule in the Congo. The height of magic performance on stage converges with this stage of imperial expansion. Stage magic reflected and refracted the gothic violence of imperial culture, making it palatable and consumable for a mass audience. In our digital age the means of mass communication and digital reproduction are very different to those of the magic stage, but the story of the gothic skull from Kabul compellingly reminds us that the message remains the same. Notes 1.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 164.

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2. 3.

Ibid. Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 130. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 230. During, Modern Enchantments, 1. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1979). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991). Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Ed. Brinsley Sheridan (London: Elliot Stock, 1886), 286–287. www.archive.org. Accessed 1 March 2019. Milbourne Christopher, Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962), 52. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 131. Ibid. 108. See Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 17–60; for a discussion of magic on the Victorian theatrical stage, see Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 41–77. Christopher, Panorama, 107. Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography. Intro. Henry Ridgely Evans (New York: Dover), 72–74. Mike Caveney, ‘From Black Magic to Modern Magic’, in Noel Daniel, ed. Magic: 1400s to 1950s (Cologne: Taschen, 2009), 205–206. Henry Ridgely Evans, Introduction, Magic: Stage Illusions, 1. Caveney, ‘The Great Touring Shows’, Magic, 350, 336. Henry Ridgely Evans, The Old and New Magic (London and Chicago: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906), 356. M. Young, Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic: The Art of Conjuring Unveiled (New York: M. Young, 1880), 63. Regina Janes, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4. Christopher, Panorama, 74. Michael Bailey, The Magic Circle: Performing Magic Through the Ages (London: The History Press, 2007), 45-6. Richard Marsh, The Beetle (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), 131. Ibid. Ibid., 132. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–123. Jim Steinmeyer, ‘Conjuring Life and Death’, Magic, 75. Caveney, ‘From Black Magic to Modern Magic’, Magic, 204. Marsh, The Beetle, 118. Ibid., 119. Young, Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic, 69.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

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J. N. Maskelyne, ‘On Oriental Magic, Spiritualism, and Theosophy’, in Lionel A. Weatherly, ed. The Supernatural (Bristol and London: J. W. Arrowsmith and Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1891), 168. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 172–173. During, Modern Enchantments, 108. Maskelyne, ‘On Oriental Magic, Spiritualism, and Theosophy’, 174. Ibid., 180. L. H. Branson, Indian Conjuring (London: Routledge, 1920), 2. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 74. Young, Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic, 70. Ibid. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2007), 7. Elizabeth Butler, From Sketch-Book and Diary (London: Burns & Oates, 1909), 41. Ibid., 42. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, n.d), 117. www. archive.org. Accessed 28 January 2019. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid. Ibid., 122. Ibid. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 294. Ibid., 295. Russell Flint, ‘This Wicked Old Creature Pouring Out Supplications, Evil Ones, No Doubt, to the Arch Enemy of Mankind’, in King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, 1907), 256. www.visualHaggard.org. Accessed 1 September 2019. Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 339. Quoted in Roslyn Jolly, ‘Stevenson’s “Sterling Domestic Fiction”, ‘The Beach of Falesá”, The Review of English Studies, 50 (November 1999): 465–466. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Uma; or the Beach of Falesá.’ Illustrated London News, 6 August 1892, 269. Historical Archive, 1842–2005. www.galegroup. com. Accessed 1 August 2019. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Beach at Falesá’, in The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1895), 317. Ibid., 267.

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Ibid., 274. Ibid., 308. For Maskelyne’s analysis of Blavatsky’s trickery, see The Supernatural, 215–229. 68. Stevenson, ‘The Beach at Falesá’, 279. 69. Ibid., 279. 70. Ibid. 281. 71. Ibid., 316. 72. Ibid., 316. 73. Ibid., 323. 74. Ibid., 324. 75. Ibid., 331. 76. Ibid., 333. 77. Ibid., 334. 78. H. D. S. Greenway, ‘Meanwhile: The Curious Case of the Severed Head.’ New York Times, 3 April 2007. www.newyorktimes.com. Accessed 1 December 2018. 79. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). 80. A. Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo (New York: Doubleday, Mcmix), 61. 81. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 109. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 110. 85. Ibid., 120. 86. Ibid., 121. 87. Ibid., 130. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 152. 90. Ibid., 173 91. Ibid., 155. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 166. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 176. 98. Ibid., 178. 99. Ibid., 183. 100. Greenway, ‘The Curious Case of the Severed Head’. 101. Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (London: Granta, 2014), 9.

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Bibliography Bailey, Michael. The Magic Circle: Performing Magic Through the Ages (London: The History Press, 2007). Beckman, Karen. Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Branson, L. H. Indian Conjuring (London: Routledge, 1920). Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). Butler, Elizabeth. From Sketch-Book and Diary (London: Burns & Oates, 1909). Caveney, Mike. ‘From Black Magic to Modern Magic’, in Noel Daniel, ed. Magic: 1400s to 1950s (Cologne: Taschen, 2009), 146–215. Christopher, Milbourne. Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962). Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Doyle, A. Conan. The Crime of the Congo (New York: Doubleday, Mcmix), 61. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Evans, Henry Ridgeley. The Old and New Magic (London and Chicago: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906). Flint, Russell. ‘This Wicked Old Creature Pouring Out Supplications, Evil Ones, No Doubt, to the Arch Enemy of Mankind’, in King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, 1907), 256. www.visual Haggard.org. Accessed 1 September 2019. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991). Greenway, H. D. S. ‘Meanwhile: The Curious Case of the Severed Head.’ New York Times, 3 April 2007. www.newyorktimes.com. Accessed 1 December 2018. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, n.d), 117. www.archive.org. Accessed 28 January 2019. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Hopkins, Albert A. Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography. Intro. Henry Ridgely Evans (New York: Dover). Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Janes, Regina. Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Jolly, Roslyn. ‘Stevenson’s “Sterling Domestic Fiction”, ‘The Beach of Falesà”, The Review of English Studies, vol. 50 (November 1999): 463–482. Larson, Frances. Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Found (London: Granta, 2014). Marsh, Richard. The Beetle (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920). Maskelyne, J. N. ‘On Oriental Magic, Spiritualism, and Theosophy’, in Lionel A. Weatherly, ed. The Supernatural (Bristol and London: J. W. Arrowsmith and Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1891). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2007). Said, Edward. Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1979). Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Ed. Brinsley Sheridan (London: Elliot Stock, 1886). www.archive.org. Accessed 1 March 2019. Steinmeyer, Jim. ‘Conjuring Life and Death’, in Noel Daniel, ed. Magic: 1400s to 1950s (Cologne: Taschen, 2009), 48–99. Stevenson, Robert Louis. ‘Uma; or the Beach of Falesá.’ Illustrated London News, 6 August 1892, 269. Historical Archive, 1842–2005. www.galegroup.com. Accessed 1 August 2019. ———. ‘The Beach at Falesá’, in The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1895).

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Wynne, Catherine. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Young, M. Secrets of Ancient and Modern Magic: The Art of Conjuring Unveiled (New York: M. Young, 1880).

The Spectral Child Jen Baker

If the spectral child of literature and culture is isolated from its vampiric, zombie, and living-monstrous brethren, a substantial gothic subgenre is revealed. The development of the figure can be traced to the cultural construction and obsession with ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ and the battle over innocence that dominated philosophy and pedagogy from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: emerging as a dichotomous emblem of the undesirable child. Yet while this plagues all versions of monstrous child, the ghostly spectral version was troubled by a much older ambiguous relationship with deviant child deaths and is inexorably entwined with the cult of the ‘dead child’ that proliferated in the nineteenth century. This chapter will concentrate on providing an overview of the emerging literary figure of the ‘revenant child’ in its spectral form in Anglo-American literature and culture of the period c.1847–1920. It will begin by briefly placing this figure within an older context as a hybrid of lay and theological beliefs pertaining to the child that remained a central component of many of the literary tropes and plot structures employed in the long nineteenth century. Finally, following a discussion of key literary examples of the ‘Steam Age’, this chapter offers a brief consideration of the figure’s lasting impact. During a research trip to Iceland in 1860, as part of which he collected folklore and sagas from various regions, Church of England clergyman and Scandinavian scholar Frederick Metcalfe was told by a guide that ‘[s]ometimes at night-fall, when the doors are shut, a strange piercing cry, as of loud wailing and lamenting, is borne upon the ear’ and this is believed by many locals to be the ‘spirits of “utburdir” (exposed infants)’ haunting the earth. The guide then relayed the following story: Once on a time, a girl, who had exposed her infant, was milking her ewes in the sheepfold. “Alas!” she said […] “What shall I do? I am invited to a party to-night, and I haven’t a proper dress to go in.”

J. Baker (B) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_38

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“Oh! yes, you have though,” muttered a voice from the top of the sheepfold wall. “Be easy on that score. I will lend you my swaddling-clothes to dance in.” It was the voice of the girl’s own child, which she had deserted. At the same moment, an arm darted down from the wall, and stabbed the mother dead.1

This tale is one of a number of particularly violent-versions of Dead-Child spirit which is housed under the wider folkloric tale-type concerning the dead without status in the afterlife.2 While a few records of beliefs and burial practices came from learned sources (generally the Church), the cultural corpus pertaining to this spirit is predominantly found in purportedly long-standing oral folk tales. From the early nineteenth century, these tales and beliefs were transcribed and collected in American and European compendiums and journals as a means of preserving traditions of the past and providing comparative studies between cultures. When compared across countries and regions, such tales offer various recurring motifs in which the reason for the child’s death and subsequent haunting is their physical neglect or murder, coupled with the fact that they were often unbaptized and therefore had not received a holy burial (their bodies being discarded and hidden). Topographically and spiritually, these child spirits are placed outside the community and so exist in a celestial limbo; haunting their place of death, or thresholds such as windows and doors into their parents’ home (a metaphor for heaven), or areas separated from the community (moors, forests, marshlands). They are described as possessing varied physical and behavioural characteristics depending upon the region. In various Scandinavian and Eastern European lore, for instance, the spirit is malevolent and dangerous and is said to have a distinct corporeality (in that they can touch and hurt the living), or appear in the guise of strange creatures such as bristly pigs, birds, balls of wool. In the English, Welsh, and Irish traditions, they are generally sad, lonely, passive, and ethereal entities (sometimes lights or wispy ghosts) who cry and wail and are related to, but distinct from, changelings. Scottish traditions reveal ambiguous portrayals somewhere between the softer English versions and harsher mainland European tales which corresponds with the dominant theologies of the country, and its history of trade and invasion. Across cultures, these spirits often require naming (i.e. baptism) and/or proper burial to escape their liminal status and pass over from the purgatorial state, but a number require vengeance and justice to achieve peace. What is also consistent, is a distinct amount of mother-blame, as they are generally identified as responsible for the child’s death in some manner, but many spirits will haunt strangers for help or vengeance or both. The impetus for such folktales may be attributed to a response by ordinary people to the uncertain or cruel theological positions and burial practices of their community/church in relation to the fate of the souls of the unbaptized and of those who died a ‘bad death’ (of which these spirit children were often both). The theological conception of limbus infantium, in which the child’s unbaptized or tainted soul could reside without torment but also without God’s grace, there was an identifiable debt to Virgil’s pre-Christian imagining of the Underworld in which Aeneas hears ‘Loud shrieks’ and ‘wails of the distrest […] souls of babes, that on the threshold cry’ because they are ‘early plunged in bitter death’.3 This was reimagined in Dante’s

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Divine Comedy (1320) where ‘the air is full of frequent sighs’ of little innocents bitten by ‘early and untimely death’.4 There are also clear alignments with the linguistic imagery and fears as expressed in oral folk tales. The teachings of the Church not only represented problematic abstract concepts relating to the soul but also affected the pragmatics of burial customs: By 1400 AD the Church had denied parents the right to bury stillborn and unbaptised children within consecrated ground and so, as a popular antiquary of the early eighteenth century explains, ‘Burial in the Church Yard North of the Church “is the part appropriated for the Internment of unbaptized Infants, of persons excommunicated, or that have been executed, or that have laid violent hands upon themselves”’.5 Those desperate for the salvation of their unbaptized child might plead with the Priest to secretly perform posthumous baptism, or, like Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) bury the body of the infant in the churchyard after dark, or secrete it into another coffin (of which there are a number of scandalised reports in the nineteenth century), but many—especially those who deliberately caused the death of the child—would need to dispose of or hide the body elsewhere. In cases of unnatural death, whether the child was baptised or not, there was further cause for concern because the corpse would be classified as the ‘deviant dead’—a status was ascribed generally to those who died by criminal or suspicious means and were believed able to rise after death.6 As a result, measures were often taken (sometimes with the support of the Church, at others contrary to ecclesiastical dogma) to prevent the ‘deviant dead’ from rising by burying them at crossroads, weighing the corpse down with stones, mutilating the body, or burying it face down.7 In Decretum [c.1023] by the Holy Roman Bishop Burchard of Worms, he recorded the practices of local people in which, ‘“When any child has died without baptism they take the corpse of the little one and place it in some secret place and transfix it with a stake […] lest it rise up and injure many.”’8 This is confirmed, to some extent, by archaeological findings pertaining to the ‘deviant dead’ as discussed in works by Gardeła and Duma (2013), Millett and Gowland (2015), Eriksen (2013 and 2017) and Hausmair (2017). If preventative methods were not implemented, then either the body itself, the soul, or the soul in other, sometimes monstrous, corporeal manifestations, might return to haunt or harm the living. However, although there are accounts detailing adult revenants, testimony and documentation of the child’s body actually rising from the dead is extremely rare in wider Europe, and absent in Britain. There are only glimmers of the distinctly corporealised version (as body raised from the dead) in literature of the long nineteenth century. For instance, Henry Glassford Bell’s short story ‘The Dead Daughter’ (1831) and the uncannily similar (although distinctly more philosophical) ‘Morella’ (1835) by Edgar Allan Poe, both court the line between the revenant child body, the spectral, and the possessed; but to my knowledge there are no literary child-vampires or child-zombies in Western culture until the post-War period. Yet, with the increased importance of the child as a powerful agent—an idea honed by the preoccupations of the Romantic movement—came a darker conception of the child, which was imagined in death to be increasingly tangible, angry, and capable of harm.

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In the nineteenth century, the dominant liberal denominations of Britain and the New England counties of America in particular, rejected infant damnation (or at least repositioned themselves) and championed a beatific afterlife for all children. This has bearing on the literary incarnations of dead child spirits, which were still very much connected with religious views of the afterlife, but also retained and subverted a number of the aforementioned folkloric traits connected with the cause, characteristics, and resolution of the tales. There is a very specific form to this literary child however: it is the spectral ghost child. They are not shapeshifting animals, or disembodied lights, but sometimes examples played with the tangibility of the spirit. Many stories featuring ghost-children are deliberately sentimental and not remotely gothic—these offer a simple tale of the acceptance of the loss and an attempt to make the child happy by joining it or helping it. In the stories I will discuss below, however, there are various elements that render the child spirit’s visit terrifying or uncanny, and the tales are distinctly more ‘gothic’ in a manner that establishes the undead-child figure as a staple figure in later Horror and Supernatural fictions. Nina Auerbach claims that ‘Victorian child-ghosts are not the satanic monsters on which our own Gothic literature feeds. They are something subtler, innocent, admonitory, and terrifying at the same time’, and that the spectacle of the child-ghost’s appearance, coupled with their vulnerability, ‘enhances their spectacular power’.9 In the Anglophone tradition, this permits a clear transition from the benevolent and ethereal lost souls of unbaptised infants in folklore to the increasingly malevolent and corporeally substantial revenant children in later twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film. The next section identifies and examines some of the key examples of the period, firstly as they respond to, or depart from, the traditions of folklore, with a closer look at the corporeality of the child and the part that plays in creating darker and fleshier tones. We may begin the examination of the long nineteenth century with one of the most famous literary ghost child scenes—Cathy’s ghost at the window in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847). This scene (as with the wider novel) offers hybridised folkloric and Christian imagery that characterised earlier oral tales, and in doing so demonstrates the fragile line between pity and terror that such a spirit evokes. Heavy evangelism and local customs meet to produce a child ghost that is complex, fraught, and laden with competing ideologies and imagery, many of which set it apart from the wider pattern of literary ghost-children in this period. For instance, although the narrator Lockwood refers to it as a child, the ghost is not a literal imprint of the recently deceased; Cathy died in her twenties, and, among the various ambiguous age-related terminologies used to describe her in the wider passage, she refers to herself using her married name. Another key difference is the uncertainty expressed by the narrator as to the reality of what he encountered. In folktales, it is accepted, without question, that the spirit seen is real, and many of the narrators in the literary stories discussed ahead declare (usually at the outset or the conclusion) that, while the reader may not believe the events to be true, and while the narrator can never fully understand what occurred, what they experienced is valid and real. Despite these differences, there are significant correlations between the ghost child scene of Wuthering Heights, the existing folkloric tradition, and the subsequent

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literary one. For instance, on hearing a rapping at the window, and attempting to stop it, Lockwood finds that he is unable to open the window, for the ‘hook was soldered into the staple’ which prevents, therefore, anything supernatural getting across this threshold. He breaks the glass, thus potentially permitting entrance to external elements. To his ‘intense horror’, rather than a tree branch, his ‘fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice-cold hand!’10 He attempts to withdraw but ‘a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in—let me in!”’ Cries which are salient to the dead-child tradition because they signify the denial of entry into home (heaven). He shouts in response ‘“Begone!” […] “I’ll never let you in”’ and has thus disregarded the rules of folklore and by not performing the necessary act of appeasement. He asks the ghost who she is, and she provides her own name—which does not fulfil the criteria of baptism—and tells him that she has ‘“come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!”’ He suggests that Cathy has been ‘“walking the earth these twenty years”’ as penance for her ‘“mortal transgressions”’, thus offering a hybridised secular interpretation relating to Satan’s wandering of the earth in the Book of Job and to the influential conceptions of the child spirits movements in folklore. For instance, in one of the many editions of Brand and Ellis’ Observations on Popular Antiquities (1841), it is said that, ‘In Scotland, children dying unbaptized […] were supposed to wander in woods and solitudes lamenting their hard fate, and were said to be often seen’.11 In William Henderson’s Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England (1866), he talks of a creature called a ‘Gabble retchet’ in the region of Leeds, which is: held to be the souls of unbaptized children doomed to flit restlessly around their parents’ abode. Now it is a widespread belief that such children have no rest after death. In North Germany they are said to be turned into the meteors called Will-o’-the-wisp, and so to flit about and hover between heaven and earth.12 [my emphases]

Cathy’s ghost wanders about in the air across the moor, as the restless spirits of unbaptised children do in British and some other folklores, repeating its ‘lamentable prayer’ and ‘doleful cry’ (WH, 25)—an image which is strengthened in Catherine’s death bed scene (recounted later on in the text), in which Nelly describes the feverish Cathy lying on her death bed as ‘no better than a wailing child!’ (WH, 123). Despite Cathy having been baptised, Joseph, the strict Calvinist servant, refers to her and Heathcliff in childhood as ‘heathens’. Considered within the context of evangelism that governs Lockwood’s first dream, and the stricter, puritanical forms of Christianity (that persisted in the regions where the Brontës lived) in which baptism did not guarantee the child’s salvation, there is the suggestion that because of her wild behaviour Cathy is damned. It is also suggested that adult-Heathcliff has long been awaiting her spirit since he cursed and pleaded with her spirit while at her death bed, naming himself responsible for her death; ‘I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe’ (WH, 167). It is not, however, her reluctance to see Heathcliff, as he suspects, that prevents her seeing him—she is seemingly barred from entry to the house and to his

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side by some higher order, a separation that can only be rectified by Heathcliff’s own death. This ghost child also possesses a strong tangibility as evidenced in the description of the hand’s temperature, the strong grip of Lockwood’s arm, and her ability to bleed. This insistent, yet ambiguous physicality, complicates a straightforward cultural alignment with the more ethereal and benevolent folklore of Britain and disrupts the status of the apparition as living or dead, but aligns with empirical and scholarly debate about the composition of ghosts at the time.13 It also corresponds with the early nineteenth-century preoccupation with the child’s corporeality, as well as in the later literary ghost stories, and with the Brontë family’s medical preoccupation with children’s physiology.14 Among the many available readings, the ghost being a ‘child’ may be read as an imprint of Cathy’s wildness in youth, the time when her relationship with Heathcliff was at its strongest and less complicated than it became in adulthood, and the translation of her soul from life to afterlife. Following Wuthering Heights, a sub-genre of stories about child-ghosts emerged which favoured the short form, and a great number of examples retained the ‘oralstoryteller’ narrative style of layered time frames. Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), Anna Hoyt’s ‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’ (1863), Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost’ (1903), Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘The Little Silver Heart’ (1906) and ‘The Children’ (1909), Ellen Glasgow’s ‘The Shadowy Third’ (1916), and Bessie Kyffin-Taylor’s ‘Two Little Red Shoes’ (1920), are all examples in which a female narrator of various classes controls the narrative, with both Gaskell and Freeman’s stories framed by a narrator telling other characters their story, while the narrators in the other tales are in conversation with the reader. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ ‘Kentucky’s Ghost’ (1868) is narrated by a male lower-class sailor, but Amelia Edwards’ ‘Was it an Illusion? A Parson’s story’ (1881), Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’ (1882), and M.R. James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ (1895), and H.D. Everett’s ‘Anne’s Little Ghost’ (1920) all use professional or upper-class male homodiegetic narrators (i.e. that take part in the plot), with only James’ narrator not having witnessed the events first-hand. Very few examples use a heterodiegetic narrator (i.e. one who does not take part in the plot) with notable exceptions being Charlotte Riddell’s novelette ‘Walnut-Tree House’ (1878) and Elia W. Peattie’s ‘The Child in the Rain’ (1898). Topographically, there are various examples of folkloric thresholds (windows, doorways), remote locations (moors, cellars, abandoned houses), and denial of entry into a desired location (that is heaven, or home): in Gaskell’s story the ghost child beats at the windows to be let in; the eponymous boy of Phelps is lost at sea and his spirit returns to the same spot; the youth of Oliphant cries night after night, as if stuck in a temporal loop, at an invisible door of some ruins on a large country estate for his mother to let him in; in a subversion of the trope the boy-ghost of Riddell’s is trapped within the house (always stopping at the threshold) repeatedly searching for a missing will and his sister; while the child-ghosts of Kyffin-Taylor’s are trapped in the house and grounds and the narrator hears ‘distinctly, unmistakably, the whimpering cry and the soft tapping of tiny baby fingers on the window pane, tapping as if they could scarcely reach, but tapping insistently and clearly, and always, always, the same little,

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wailing cry’.15 Like Oliphant’s boy, however, at certain times of day and depending on the weather, their abuse is re-enacted in the spaces it took place and the narrator cannot interact with them. So too, the ghost-children of James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ are bound to the house of their death and its grounds—scratching at thresholds of doors, clothing, and bodies, while outside they comprise ‘the mysterious population of the moonlit woods [which] was not yet lulled to rest. From time to time strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers sounded from across the mere’.16 Hybridised lay and establishment references proliferate through these tales in various forms. For instance, in Edwards’ ‘Was it an Illusion?’ there are allusions to the preventative burial practices discussed earlier. On a visit to Northern England, the parson twice sees a ‘“tall, thin boy, in a grey suit, with a fishing-rod over his shoulder”’, as well as unexplained shadows, but other people cannot see anything.17 A collapsed mine that drains the river on his friend’s estate reveals an ‘unburied corpse’ (25) with the initial appearance of a ‘shapeless object’ (26). Local men recover what ‘they thought, from the slenderness of the form, […] must be the body of a boy’ (27) of about fourteen or fifteen years of age, whose features ‘were decomposed beyond recognition’, but enough of his hair and clothing remained to help identify him. The coroner discovered a ‘fracture three inches long at the back of the skull, evidently fatal’ and it is revealed that the boy was the schoolmaster’s illegitimate son, whom the man had presented as his nephew, and who was ‘“as backward as a child of five years old”’ (28). The schoolmaster had taken ‘“a dislike to the poor brute”’ and, in a fit of rage at the boy skipping school to go fishing, had sought him out, and beaten him to death. The schoolmaster had attempted to hide the body in a marsh, by pinning it ‘“down by a pitchfork, the handle of which had been afterwards whittled off, so as not to show above the water”’ (27). It is this detail that holds a particular resonance with European folklore in which the child was staked or weighted down. In this case, the body does not rise until discovered, but the spirit returns as an ‘invisible Presence’, and the father cannot hide from its silent persecution. Coupled with the hellish imagery used in the tale to describe the mines and the drained landscape, and the relentless pursual of the perpetrator by the silent and shadowy figure, is an echo of the darker folk tales reported in journals and compendiums. The literary tales shifted the class and age boundaries of folklore considerably however—focusing not on the impoverished infant, but both working-class waifs and middle- and upper-class children of either sex aged generally between 4 and 7, or boys in their mid-teens. As such, the corpus emphasises that it is not only the factory children, or poor orphans who are mistreated, but such abuse happens behind the closed doors of apparently respectable households. There are both emotional and practical reasons that might explain this: It might firstly seem too horrific to use very small infants in detailed tales of murder, but it also links to the more realistic abilities of the child ghost to walk, run, speak, and in some instances possess the strength to hurt others, corresponding with the emerging scientific configurations and understandings of ‘the child’ and its development. Where the spirits are often androgynous in folktales, in the literary tales this feature is sometimes given

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some (limited) import: the male child ghost tends to represent financial and inheritance issues (Riddell, Kyffin-Taylor), and female ghosts may represent the further powerlessness of women, who have fewer legal and cultural rights. Many of the stories feature rather grim deaths for the children—manslaughter (by neglect, beatings, starvation) in Gaskell, Phelps, Edwards, Riddell, Kyffin-Taylor, and H. D. Everett’s ‘Nevill Nugent’s Legacy’ (1920), and murder in Hoyt (poison), James (removing hearts while alive), and Glasgow (unverified but likely with medicine). Many of these works detail the violence done to the child in life through sound, as already indicated in the cries, but also in the form of vocal silence which characterizes the child-ghosts in the tales by Gaskell, Hoyt, Edwards, Riddell, and James, while others, such as Oliphant’s and Wilkins-Freeman’s repeat a call for their mothers. In wider cultural depictions of child death, particularly in elegies, there is an emphasis on the sound of pattering of feet that is now missing from the bereaved household, and this absence is either actualised or the sound returns in the ghost stories. For instance, a former servant in Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’ declares that she often wakes in ‘a fright, fancying I still hear the patter, patter of his poor little feet upon the stair’, of the boy’s ghost.18 Gaskell’s narrator Hester, however, draws attention to the lack of footprints made by the phantom child. In fact, her depiction of the childspirit’s features and behaviour offer an important commentary on the powerlessness of the child: She seemed to sob and wail […] I remembered me that, even in the stillness of that dead-cold weather, I had heard no sound of little battering hands upon the window-glass, although the Phantom Child had seemed to put forth all its force; and, although I had seen it wail and cry, no faintest touch of sound had fallen upon my ears.19 [my emphases]

The significance of the child’s silence is emphasised through its contrast with the ghostly sounds of a domineering organ in the house which belonged to, and was played by, the tyrannous Lord Furnivall in life, and which, despite being broken, emits powerful and dour music when this ghost child appears. The organ’s lingering and domineering presence even after his earthly death—a metaphor for the elderly patriarchal body as externally respectable but inwardly defective—is contrasted against the smallness and unclear tangibility of the ghost child. The dominating sound thus indicates an attempt to eternally silence the child in death as he did in life. This imprint of a child who was marginalised and oppressed by the patriarch(y), can only get justice from the living, however. As suggested then, sound is key, but secondary to the main indicator of violence, which is written on the child’s body and coupled with a keen emphasis on its diminutive size. Sometimes this is achieved through a contrast between a description of the child’s body in life, or pre-harm, and sometimes through a contrast with a living child, which was a particularly common literary feature. It is found in Phelps’ tale, as the narrator Jake looks at the beaten stowaway and empathises with him by conjuring up an image of his own baby boy, and in Oliphant’s tale where the apparition itself has no physical form but the narrator’s son Roland imitates the cries as if possessed and becomes increasing ill and pale, suggesting a palpable and dangerous connection with the spirit. So too, in James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ the orphaned Stephen (who is to be

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the final victim) is both polarised against and aligned with the gypsy boy and local girl already murdered. In Gaskell’s, the physical presence of the five-year-old living child, Rosamond, is said to breathe new life into the stagnant household occupied only by ailing and miserable old women: ‘The hard, sad Miss Furnivall, and the cold Mrs Stark, looked pleased when she came fluttering in like a bird playing and pranking hither and thither, with a continual prattle of gladness’ (ONS, 13). As such she is the foil to the phantom child which is described by the narrator Hester as, ‘a little girl, less than my Miss Rosamond dressed all unfit to be out-of-doors’ (ONS, 17). The unnamed girl bears the mark on her shoulder where, in life, her grandfather struck her with a cane before sending her out into the cold with her mother to die. Rosamond also nearly dies in the snow having been lured out there by the phantom child, and when a shepherd finds her and carries her towards the house, Hester remarks, ‘I saw my wee bairnie lying still, and white, and stiff in his arms, as if she had been dead’ (ONS, 15). This creates a mirror impression of what the ghost child’s body must have looked like when found, and strengthens a sense of pity for it, despite its malevolent intentions. Phelps’ narrator Jake says that the stowaway Kentucky ‘was a little fellow, slight for his years, which might have been fifteen […] He was hungry, and homesick, and frightened’20 and this emphasises the horror of the brutality inflicted on him by the First Mate: I’ve seen him beat that boy till the blood ran down in little pools on the deck; then send him up, all wet and red, to clear the to’sail halliards; and when, what with the pain and faintness, he dizzied a little, and clung to the rat-lines, half blind, he would have him down and flog him. (628)

The gypsy-boy and impoverished girl who are victims of a scientist’s quest for immortality in James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ are not offered pitiful descriptions but ones that inspire acute fear. The boy, in particular, is ‘a thin shape, with black hair and ragged clothing’ and is described by the narrator as possessing ‘an appearance of menace’ and disclosing ‘a terrifying spectacle’, for ‘On the left side of his chest there opened a black and gaping rent’ (646). In contrast, the narrator of Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost’ describes first seeing the ghost of a five-year-old girl who was locked in a room and abandoned by her mother with pathos: I saw a little white face with eyes so scared and wistful that they seemed as if they might eat a hole in anybody’s heart. It was a dreadful little face […] but it was so pitiful that somehow it did away a good deal with the dreadful-ness. And there were two little hands spotted purple with the cold, holding up my winter coat and a strange little far-away voice said: “I can’t find my mother.”21

The narrator uses ‘little’ four times to emphasise vulnerability, demonstrates the ambivalent effect of this sight upon the narrator, but also points to a tangibility (in the ability to hold a coat) that is contrasted by its movement: She did not seem to run or walk like other children. She flitted, like one of those little filmy white butterflies, that don’t seem like real ones they are so light, and move as if they had no weight. (215)

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Fig. 1 Peter Newell’s illustration for ‘The Lost Ghost’ (1903)

This juxtaposition of ethereal and tangible, pitiful and dreadful, is captured in the illustration (Fig. 1) but it cannot quite convey the full effect; instead this is achieved when the narrator provides an inventory of the eeriness and physical precarity of the child body through her movement, composition, and character. In Kyffin Taylor’s ‘Two Little Red Shoes’, a woman exploring a seemingly abandoned house gushes over the beauty of two children she sees in the garden:

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a tiny boy in a sailor suit, bareheaded, with clustering curls round a pale, resolute little face— and by his side, a dainty wee girl in white, bare headed, as he was, but with a golden, silky down covering her tiny head. He wore sturdy little brown shoes—she was barefooted—and at times, as I watched them, she pointed with tiny, dimpled fingers to her little bare toes, and seemed half inclined to cry. They were so sweet and lovely, I wanted to run to them, catch them in my arms, and cover them with kisses. (76)

Like Wilkins-Freeman, there is an exaggerated cuteness and vulnerability signified by ‘tiny’, ‘little’, ‘dainty’, ‘wee’, and the emphasis on the bare limbs, coupled with the woman’s sentimental reaction, which provides a heightened juxtaposition with one of the most harrowing and extensive depictions of child abuse of such tales: I stared horror-stricken, aghast—the two little figures were my sunny smiling children of the garden; but oh! the pity of it, their little faces smiled no longer, tears coursed down each baby face, as they stood clinging together, tremblingly; their lovely, little bodies covered with marks as of a lash or stick, weals and cuts which showed like blood; even across their wee legs were hideous marks. (76–80)

Even though the tales ultimately objectified and mediated the child, by providing extensive physical detail and by recording the circumstances of the child’s death, many nevertheless centralise the child to a much greater extent that many folktales did—not as a simple motif, but with attempts to offer more dimension to the figure in order to place their welfare in the spotlight; not as an inevitability, but a tragedy. Roxanne Harde suggests that in nineteenth-century women’s writing, in particular, there is an identifiable ‘transatlantic conversation about suffering children’ and a growing trend to ‘combine the Gothic mode and the child ghost into a discourse of social critique’.22 Literary ghost child texts sustain the need for appeasement to stop the haunting and bring peace and demonstrate the consequences of this having been ignored. As mentioned earlier, in folktales it is generally the mother who is to blame, and where there is punishment, it is death or maiming for the perpetrator or anyone who passes the ghost’s haunting-ground and fails to help. In a complete subversion from the folk tales—the lead villain is a male guardian in the majority of literary tales, with the wicked mother found in Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost’ being a rare figure. Among the darkest punishments administered to the living person deemed directly responsible for the child’s death, are that of the jealous Grace of Gaskell’s narrative, who betrayed her sister’s secret marriage and child to their fierce father, and is left ‘death-stricken’ by the ghostly reenactment of the event; the cruel first-mate of Phelps story who falls to his death in the sea, having been lured up the mast (and possibly pushed) by Kentucky’s ghost, thus mirroring the boy’s own death; Riddell’s villain is said to have gone insane from the haunting before he died, Edwards’ perpetrator commits suicide, as does Hoyt’s and Kyffin-Taylor’s; James’ perpetrator is found with his heart torn out to reflect the mode in which he murdered his victims, and Glasgow’s villain breaks his neck tripping on a skipping rope that the narrator sees is drawn across the stairs, and which belongs to the step-daughter he murdered. Some are ambiguous about the ending—for instance, in Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost’ the wicked mother has been shot dead by her husband prior to the main narrative, and the motherless ghost child requires a mother to be appeased. Mrs Abby Bird, one

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of the narrator’s two landladies, seemingly chooses to pass away in order to join the child, as also happens in Bates’ ‘Wither Thou Goest’ mentioned earlier, while the mother Hildegarde Hawthorne’s ‘Perdita’ (1897) is reunited with and hugged by the ghost of her baby girl and falls down dead. The self-sacrificing women are happy in both, but the narrators and other characters are horrified. In Riddell’s narrative, the death of the perpetrator does not bring peace. As in a number of the stories, this involves a case of physical abuse and/or severe neglect that leads to the child’s death by a male relative, and the reason is one of inheritance greed. Local rumour has it that the boy, Georgie, was made the main heir in a new will that was never found, and when the boy died, his guardian was driven mad by its ghost. Protagonist and new owner of the house Edgar declares that when he sees the child ghost, and is in the house with it, the child does not frighten him. However, when he is away from the house, and has left the child behind and the mystery unresolved, he feels plagued by the boy: ‘“If I cannot lay that child [to rest] I shall go mad” […] And then a terrible fear took possession of him. The horror of that which is worse than death’ (17). The child does not mean harm, however, and Edgar becomes the saviour of the child’s spirit, discovering that the child continuously searches for something which turns out to be a missing will, and his twin sister, Mary, from whom he was parted as a child. When the honourable Edgar finds the missing will which disinherits him but restores Mary to her rightful place, and then they get married, he sees the child looking at them with ‘no sorrow or yearning in his eyes […] only a great peace, a calm which seemed to fill and light then with an exquisite beauty’ (47). In many cases, the punishment is suggested to be divine, or at least, has a distinctly religious flavour. For instance, when Grace of Gaskell’s tale falls down at their feet ‘death-stricken’ she is carried to her bed muttering the concluding lines, ‘“What is done in youth can never be undone in age!”’ (ONS, 32). Gaskell was a Unitarian— a denomination which refuted the immortality of the soul, hell, and the idea of the last judgment—but in this tale she uses purgatorial and folkloric imagery to make this trapped liminal soul of the child seem pitiful, and yet, in the final scene, powerful in punishing the sins of the living. The child, and its mother, are presumably then at peace—although, like the majority of these stories, there is no definitive vision of the afterlife provided. In Phelps’ ‘Kentucky’s Ghost’ the boy’s retention of his Bible fragment (even after the First Mate destroys the book for gun wadding) potentially exonerates him from any demonic characterisation for his revenge, and in fact suggests it is divine, not diabolic punishment that motivates him. After a conversation with Kentucky about God and prayer, narrator Jake muses that perhaps the sea is not a Godless place, but one kept in balance by Him. However, Kentucky’s act has more in common with Old Testament retribution (and Phelps’ Calvinist upbringing) than New Testament forgiveness. A fellow sailor foreshadows the events by declaring ‘“when Job Whitmarsh’s time comes to go as straight to hell as Judas […] Dead or alive that boy will bring his summons”’ (628), affording the boy some sort of prophetic status. Christine, the narrator of Hoyt’s ‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’, discovers that it was her male employer, and not his first wife as she initially suspected, who had poisoned his son, and confronts him. Frequently characterised as a rational and philosophical

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man, he confesses to Christine, without shame; reasoning that if the child had lived he ‘would have lingered in misery and imbecility’ owing to his illness, and so he had euthanised him out of love.23 He states a belief that Jacques is now better off in heaven where he is undoubtedly playing the harp, and where he does not have to endure the ‘drudgery of life’. Yet, despite characterising herself as a philosopher too, Christine cannot reconcile herself to his reasoning. Neither, however, can she bring herself to take action. She declares to the man, ‘“leave it to God to fill his heaven as he thinks best. He has not invited your assistance, neither has he invited me to avenge him. Since He does not punish, dare I invade his prerogative?”’ (205). To the reader, however, she declares this to have been an ignorant statement, for ‘destiny hold always in store its retribution. God suffers no dropped stitches in the web of his universe’ (206). Attempting to flee, they both see the shadowy spectre of the boy, and, as it fades, the previously sceptical man declares to Christine, ‘“It is the warning of death. There is no future and no escape for me. The retribution is at hand […] I have an errand elsewhere”’ (207) and commits suicide by drinking a cup of poison. The suggestion, then, is that the boy could not have been playing his harp in heaven, for despite the apparent mercy in the father’s actions, the child’s death was deemed ethically transgressive and, although the police arrived for the father, he was ‘arrested by a Higher Power’ (207). The boy is presumably now at peace but again no confirmation of the afterlife is provided. While many of the literary adaptations appear to avoid direct reference to baptism, they utilise the related metaphors of their folkloric predecessors, such as naming, as in Oliphant’s, or lack of naming, which is the case in Gaskell’s tale, or finding and identifying the body, as in Edwards’ ‘Was it an Illusion?’ and Everett’s ‘Nevill Nugent’s Legacy’. In Oliphant’s tale, the narrator refers to the boy’s existence as purgatorial, and when a local minister joins the expedition to discover the source of the haunting, he recognises it as a wayward youth from many years back. The minister commands ‘“ye wandering spirit! Go home!”’ and find your mother in heaven, the Lord will ‘“let you in, though it’s late”’.24 Performing a ceremony of the last rites, he compels the child’s spirit to leave, and although the term ‘exorcism’ is not explicitly used, there are various connections between this blessing of the heathen youth by the minister and old theological traditions and folklores pertaining to baptism. As historian Bodo Nischan explains, exorcism had been a central component in early formations of the baptismal liturgy and had survived in practice until the Reformation but lingered in various regions.25 Frederick Metcalfe’s account from his travels in Iceland, for instance, tells of an inscription he found in the parsonage of a priest who ‘was called to baptize an infant’, and explains that ‘[i]n those days, before performing the ceremony, it was usual to exorcise in Latin whatever evil spirit might have taken possession of [the child]’ and so the priest began his rituals and received a response from ‘an unearthly voice from a corner of the church’, which was Satan.26 Sometimes the deaths are natural or accidental, as in Oliphant’s where the spirit is an imprint of the boy’s grief for his dead mother. In Josephine Daskam Bacon’s ‘The Little Silver Heart’ (1906), a girl had hidden in a haybarn cellar, could not get out, and was not discovered. Her family believed she had ran away, but decades later a young female relative comes to stay with them and encounters a ghost-girl who shows

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her where to find her body, so that it may be buried. Such deaths tend, however, to belong to the more sentimental and benevolent versions mentioned earlier. A rather interesting, and unique version, can be found in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s ‘A Pair of Hands: An Old Maid’s Story’ (1900) in which the narrator encounters ‘the most harmless ghost in the world’.27 She expresses her fears to the housekeeper that the child was murdered, hence her presence, but learns that the girl, named Margaret, had died of diphtheria aged seven. However, it was as a ghost that the child experienced atrocities—seeing previous tenants who were constantly drunk and fighting, and secretly feeding two children who were tortured and starved by their parents. The housekeeper laments ‘think what her innocent ears and eyes must have took in’ (81). Elia W. Peattie’s ‘The Child in the Rain’ (1898) is another anomalous example— although with many correspondences in legend and lore—in which the spectral-child is a portent of its own ensuing death and the representative of others unrecorded. The omniscient narrator tells the reader about a tram conductor, John, who keeps seeing a ‘miserable little wretch’ in the tram car during a particularly stormy bout of weather, and which the driver says he cannot see.28 When John tries to get near the girl to ask if she is alright, she disappears. One night, ‘the car was spinning along at its limit, when there came a soft shock […] he had felt something of the kind once before’ (87) and the driver gets out and is holding the body of the girl in his arms wailing that ‘She ran under the car deliberate!’ (88). Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, child death was predominantly depicted as preferable to the miseries and horrors of life, and the dead child itself as beautiful, innocent, and even beatific. Nevertheless, as demonstrated, the cultural imaginary was haunted by the traditional consignment of the child’s soul to a miserable, liminal afterlife, and by folklores of the vengeful dead that Victorian culture attempted to suppress. Consequently, as a result of the conjunction between the rise of gothic and sensational literatures, the fashion for collecting folklore, and scientific examinations of the child, more palpable, active, and monstrous forms of dead children emerged from behind the romanticised façades. It might be expected that advancements in medical care, living conditions, and social welfare which led to the rapid decrease of child mortality rates, and the proliferation of child-centred spaces, institutions, and commodities which reinforced the cult of childhood, would lead to the disappearance of monstrous dead-child figures—but far from it. In fact, the comparative rarity of child death served to strengthen the trope, for the more preventable the death appears (when there is sufficient access to food, medicine, legal and social protection) the more the horror and singularity of such a death seems to prey on the conscience and the imagination. In popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first century there are a notable number of vampire children, and a sporadic but increasing number of zombiechildren, but it is child-ghosts and revenant spirits that comprise the biggest portion of undead children. These can be found in examples from the Casper the Friendly Ghost franchise (1939–1995), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1984), the Ringu franchise (1991– 2002), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007), Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) adapted for cinema in 2018, Susan Hill’s The Small Hand (2010),

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and Nick Murphy’s The Awakening (2011). Many of these contemporary examples retain traces of the themes and imagery outlined above: for instance, The Devil’s Backbone (2001), the dead-child spirit haunting a Spanish orphanage is referred to by the boys as ‘the one who sighs’.29 Unbeknownst to them, it is the ghost of fellow orphan Santi who ‘disappeared’ last year having been killed by the caretaker, who weighed the dying but not dead body in a pit of water, but as in Edwards’ tale, the spirit—and this a very tangible one—escapes. Santi asks his playmates for help seeking revenge however, and, like Kentucky’s ghost, Carlos and the other living orphans lure the caretaker down to the pit and push him in, where Santi grabs hold of him and keeps him under and is seemingly appeased. In Susan Hill’s The Small Hand (2010), the hauntings begin for narrator Adam when loses his way on a journey home, and happens upon an old House in the middle of nowhere, which draws him back repeatedly despite (or because of) the ghostly presence of a ‘small hand’ in his that grows increasingly malevolent and insistent. Distracted by a freak storm, for instance, he pulls over, looks over the edge and nearly falls down a sheer cliff drop, regains his balance but, [a]s I did so, I felt quite unmistakably the small hand in mine. But this time it was not nestling gently within my own, it held me in a vicious grip and as it held so I felt myself pulled towards the edge of the precipice. […] The strength was that of a grown man although the hand was still that of a child30

Adam manages to escape but as he shuts the car door he hears a distinct noise; ‘It was a howl of pain and rage and anguish combined, and without question the howl of a furious child’ (61). When Adam later sees the child reflected in a pool of water that emulates the pity/dread juxtaposition found in Gaskell and Wilkins Freeman’s tales: It was not easy to guess at his age, but he was perhaps three or four. He had a solemn and very beautiful face and the curls of his hair framed it. […] It was not a dead face, this was a living, breathing child, though I saw no limbs or body, only the face. […] The child’s eyes had a particular expression. They were beseeching. (77)

In a letter written by the narrator’s brother Hugo, it is revealed that in their childhood Hugo pushed a small boy into a pool at the old House and ran away, leaving the toddler to drown. He pleads, ‘“Please remember that we were children. I was a child. At eleven years old one is still a child. I tell myself so”’ (165). Yet being a child does not excuse his actions, and as with many of the perpetrators discussed, Hugo realises the toll must be paid and so he drowns himself, finishing his letter, ‘“You are reading this in the knowledge that I have paid my debt and please God that it is enough. That is an end to it all. The small ghost and I are at peace”’ (166). The ghost-children on contemporary times is far less benevolent or ambivalent than its predecessors; only atonement will suffice. Notes 1.

Frederick Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Iceland: Or, Notes of Travel in That Island in the Summer of 1860, with Glances at Icelandic Folk-Lore and Sagas (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 203.

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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Juha Pentikainen, ‘The Dead without Status’, in Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies, ed. Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf (Indiana University Press, 1989), 129–136 (134). E. Fairfax Taylor (trans.), ‘Book VI, Canto LII’, The Aeneid of Virgil (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1907), 505. Dante Alighieri, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Patrick Bannerman (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1850), canto Vii, 190. John Brand and Henry Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, vol. 2 (London: Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1813), 196. Cf. Andrew Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47–49. Cf. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, ‘Crossroads’, in The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters (New York: Visionary Living, 2005), 89. Quoted and translated in Medieval Handbooks of Penance, eds. Helena M. Gamer and John T. McNeill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 339. Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 44. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 25. John Brand and Henry Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, vol. 2 (London: Charles Knight and Co, 1841), 44. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (London: Longmans Green, 1866), 10. Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and GhostSeeing in England, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93. Janis McLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69. Bessie Kyffin Taylor, ‘Two Little Red Shoes’, in From Out of the Silence: Seven Strange Stories (London: Books, 1920), 59–86 (67). M.R. James, ‘Lost Hearts’, Pall Mall Magazine, 7:32 (1895), 639–647 (645). Amelia B. Edwards, ‘Was It an Illusion? A Parson’s Story’, in Thirteen at Dinner and What Came of It; Being Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual (London: Griffith and Farran, 1881), 9–30 (24). Charlotte Riddell, ‘Walnut Tree House’, in Weird Stories (London: James Hogg, 1882), 1–47 (33). First published in the Illustrated London News. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, Household Words, 6:144 (1852 Christmas edn.), 11–20 (17). Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, ‘Kentucky’s Ghost’, The Atlantic Monthly, 22.133 (November 1868), 624–633 (626). Mary Wilkins Freeman, ‘The Lost Ghost’, in The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co, 1903), 201–231 (214). Further references marked LG.

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22. Roxanne Harde, ‘“At Rest Now”: Child Ghosts and Social Justice in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing’, in Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Monika Elbert Goodwin and Bridget M. Marshall (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013), 189–200 (190). 23. Anna Hoyt, ‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’, Atlantic Monthly, 11 (1863), 213–227 (205). Further references marked Jacques. 24. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Open Door’, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 131:795 (January 1882), 1–30 (26). 25. Bodo Nischan, ‘The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 18:1 (1987), 31–52. 26. Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Iceland, 235–236. 27. Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘A Pair of Hands: An Old Maid’s Story’, in Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories (London: Cassell, 1900), 65–84 (78). 28. Elia Wilkinson Peattie, ‘A Child of the Rain’ [1898] The Shape of Fear, and Other Ghostly Tales (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 79–88 (86). 29. Guillermo del Toro, dir., The Devil’s Backbone (2001). 30. Susan Hill, The Small Hand: A Ghost Story (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2010), 60.

Bibliography Alighieri, Dante, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Patrick Bannerman (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1850). Auerbach, Nina, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Bacon, Josephine Daskam, ‘The Little Silver Heart’, Harper’s Magazine, 111.673 (October 1906), 762–769. Baker, Jen, ‘Spectral Stowaways: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s’ “Kentucky’s Ghost” (1868)’, Gothic Studies, 19.2 (November 2017), 45–57. Baker, Jen, ‘Traditions and Anxieties of (Un)Timely Child Death in Jude the Obscure’, Thomas Hardy Journal, 33 (Winter 2017), 61–84. Brand, John, and Henry Ellis, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, vol. 2 (London: Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1813). ———, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, vol. 2 (London: Charles Knight and Co, 1841). Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin Books, 2000). Everett, H.D., The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts (London: P. Allan, 1920). Gamer, Helena M., and John T. McNeill (eds.) Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). Gardeła, Leszek, & Paweł Duma, ‘Untimely Death: Atypical Burials of Children in Early and Late Medieval Poland, World Archaeology, 45.2 (2013) 314–332. Gaskell, Elizabeth, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, Household Words, 6.144 (1852 Christmas edn.), 11–20. Glasgow, Ellen, ‘The Shadowy Third’, Scribner’s Magazine, ed. Robert Bridges, 60:6 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916). Goodwin, Monika Elbert, and Bridget M. Marshall, eds. Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013).

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Guiley, Rosemary Ellen, (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters (New York: Visionary Living, 2005). Henderson, William, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (London: Longmans Green, 1866). Hill, Susan, The Small Hand: A Ghost Story (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2010). Hoyt, Anna, ‘The Ghost of Little Jacques’, Atlantic Monthly, 11 (1863), 213–227. James, M.R., ‘Lost Hearts’, Pall Mall Magazine, 7.32 (1895), 639–647. Kyffin Taylor, Bessie, From Out of the Silence: Seven Strange Stories (London: Books, 1920), 59–86. Metcalfe, Frederick, The Oxonian in Iceland: Or, Notes of Travel in That Island in the Summer of 1860, with Glances at Icelandic Folk-lore and Sagas (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861). McCorristine, Shane, Spectres of the Self: Thinking About Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). McLarren Caldwell, Janis, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Nischan, Bodo, ‘The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 18:1 (1987). Oliphant, Margaret, ‘The Open Door’, Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, 131:795 (January 1882), 1–30. Pentikäinen, Juha, The Nordic Dead-Child Tradition: Nordic Dead-Child Beings. No. 202–203 (Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1968). ———,‘The Dead without Status’, in Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies, ed. Reimund Kvideland, Henning K. Sehmsdorf, (Indiana University Press, 1989), 129–136. Quiller-Couch, Arthur, Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories (London: Cassell, 1900). Riddell, Charlotte, Weird Stories (London: James Hogg, 1882). Reynolds, Andrew, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth, ‘Kentucky’s Ghost’, The Atlantic Monthly, 22.133 (November 1868), 624–633. Taylor, E. Fairfax, (trans.), ‘Book VI, Canto LII’, The Aeneid of Virgil (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1907). The Devil’s Backbone, dir., Guillermo del Toro (2001). Thirteen at Dinner and What Came of It; Being Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual (London: Griffith and Farran, 1881), 9–30. Wilkins Freeman, Mary, The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co, 1903). Wilkinson Peattie, Elia, The Shape of Fear, and Other Ghostly Tales, (New York: Macmillan, 1904).

Gothic Music

Eerie Harmonies, Ghostly Melodies, Uncanny Symphonies Maria Giakaniki

From the ethereal sound of Gregorian chants echoing magnificently inside medieval cathedrals—this religious, almost mystical, music genre with the atmospheric, hypnotic vocals in combination with the impressive buildings that enclose it, could be said to express the ‘gothic’ spirit possibly more than any other kind of music—to such ‘dark’ baroque masterworks as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor or Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral for Queen Mary, to today’s experimental, avant-garde soundscapes of contemporary classical composers, the classical music genre has always been distinguished by sombre, melancholy, funereal themes, tone and atmosphere. Moreover, most music composers from the renaissance to classicism employed supernatural and fantastic motifs in the stage works they created—operas or ballets; some of these tropes, such as sorcery, spirits of the Underworld or other mythical creatures, can be considered as particularly ‘dark’ and uncanny, anticipating unworldly emblematic figures of the Gothic such as the Devil, demons, witches, apparitions and vampires, all of whom are featured in nineteenthcentury classical music. In this respect, we will have to reach the end of the eighteenth century when classicism has started to fade regarding music, in order to come across a regular production of classical music works that can be said to depict more explicit gothic and dark supernatural tropes than in the previous eras, by composers who were, naturally, influenced by the Romantic movement, as well as the fascination with death and the supernatural that prevailed among authors and artists during the long nineteenth century. Thus, it was with the Romantic era that the classical music motifs became more prominently Gothic and numinous (the term ‘classical music’ used in this chapter not being created until 1829), influenced mainly by the literature of that period. Indeed it seems that “a vibrant tradition of terror in music does exist, one roughly parallel and contemporaneous to the gothic tradition in literature”.1 In this context, and despite the fact that, during the nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival in architecture and the M. Giakaniki (B) Athens, Greece © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_39

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decorative arts also played a significant role regarding the reinforcement of gothic aesthetics and motifs, it was primarily through literature that classical music could associate with the Gothic,2 either directly, that is by adaptations of usually popular literary works, or by reproducing themes and tropes of the Gothic in new, original compositions. Before exploring the Gothic in works of the romantic movement in classical music (which is preceded by Romanticism in literature and it expands throughout the whole nineteenth century, being usually divided in early and late romantic), it is essential to take a look at the classical music output of the eighteenth century, which constituted the basis for later developments regarding uncanny motifs and themes in classical music compositions. During the classical era and the Age of the Enlightenment (which lasted the greatest part of the eighteenth century), the rigid artistic forms that prevailed in music and the arts, lay emphasis on the notions of symmetry, clarity, moderation and formality, thus not leaving much room for the gloomy and the extravagant (with certain exceptions, mainly in the field of opera, which has traditionally derived inspiration from the realm of the marvellous and the fantastic as well as myths and exotic adventures); nonetheless, even in the early and middle eighteenth century, when Romanticism had not yet cast its long enchanting shadow in the fields of art and literature, one can trace disperse gothic and dark supernatural motifs in classical music works. Thus, we will have to reach the last decades of the eighteenth century and the pivotal point where the influence of classicism has started to fade and the shadowy landscapes of Romanticism and the Gothic become more and more prominent, first in literature and art and subsequently in music (that is during the early nineteenth century), in order to recognize a concrete analogy between gothic/romantic thought and aesthetics and uncanny/dark supernatural motifs in classical music works. In this respect, Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini’s iconic Sonata for Violin in G Minor or the Devil’s Trill Sonata (possibly composed during the 1740s although published almost fifty years later), is one of these works that seem to anticipate the Gothic, numinous themes of nineteenth-century classical music, as it centres on the figure of the ‘Devil’, an emblem for the Romantics as well as the authors of (early) gothic novels. Tartini had famously insisted that he saw the Devil himself, during a preternatural incident which supposedly inspired him to compose that particular piece. The Devil Trill also prompted, much later, the Italian composer Cesare Pugni to compose a 1849 ballet entitled Le Violon du Diable, which was based on Tartini’s sonata. Another work of that era which features the figure of the ‘Devil’, is Luigi Bocherini’s Symphony No. 4 or La Casa del Diavolo (The House of the Devil) in 1772, while, a decade earlier, Gluck’s seminal opera Orfeo and Euridice, staged in 1762, included the famous sulfurous scene “Dance of the Furies”, with its alternative version, “Dance of the Spectres and the Furies” being part of Gluck’s ballet Don Juan (1761), a tale which is marked by the protagonist’s descent into hell. However, and as Romanticism had already started to leave its mark in the field of art and thought and gothic novels became more and more popular in the 1770s and the 1780s, it is with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), based on Don Juan’s legends, that we officially come across a fascinating portrayal of the proto-gothic villain in

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classical music, in a story characterized by supernatural horror and an impressive, infernal ending scene, in a work more emblematic than Gluck’s operatic version of the same story. The protagonist, the sinful libertine Don Giovanni, an almost Byronic figure, is distinguished by certain typical characteristics of the romantic villain: “he is damned, and he is going against the social order of things”.3 Furthermore, the terrifying yet enthralling Queen of the Night from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) can be very well considered as the predecessor of the scary, ghastly witches in many operas and ballets of the nineteenth century that focus on uncanny, supernatural themes and otherwordly scenery. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the early gothic novel genre was well established and the Romantic movement was at its height regarding literature and art, primarily in Germany and Great Britain, there is a unprecedented surge of operas, characterized by themes that seem to reflect the gothic sensibilities of that period, mostly by composers who have been long forgotten today, at least for the mainstream audience of classical music. Thus, the bloody and violent year of the French Revolution, that is 1789, saw the staging of such works as The Haunted Tower, an opera by the English composer Stephen Storace (1762–1796) and BarbeBleue (Bluebeard) by the French composer André Grétry (1741–1813), which was loosely based on Perrault’s eminent gothic horror fairy tale about the legendary and notorious wife murderer. Grétry’s musical approach of the work “stresses the gothic element in a score that exploits the horrific, violent aspects of the text”.4 In general, the composers of the operas of that era used rapid music scales in order to suggest various emotional states, animal or demonic sounds, the clang of swords, extreme weather (storms, lightning), inner turmoil, and terror of the supernatural5 in an attempt to create the perfect ‘soundtrack’ for a gothic novel. Moreover, Lodoiska (1791) by Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), a work that is considered pre-romantic in the history of classical music, features the motif of female incarceration in a castle and it is a typical sample of the ‘rescue-opera’ genre of that time, revealing the considerable impact of gothic novels that were written during that same period. In this respect and regarding the rescue opera subgenre and its thematic affiliations with the plots of novels by such authors as Ann Radcliffe, it is interesting to mention that some of these early gothic literary texts, which were very popular at the end of the eighteenth century, were actually staged. In 1798, François B. Hoffman and Nicolas Dalayrac adapted Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as the opera Léon ou Le Château de Montenero; while M.-C. Cammaille-Saint-Aubin and César Ribié adapted Lewis’s The Monk in 1797, “causing a sensation and fostering a continuing obsession with the gothic on the Boulevard stage”.6 And of course, this newly-founded tradition was followed by many other, less prominent French opera composers, who dispersed “bleeding nuns, doppelgängers, evil Dukes and eventually vampires” all over the French stage.7 At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the fascination with the Gothic continued to thrive and excite the imagination of writers and artists. This is an era when gothic novels kept on attracting readers, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) had already puzzled English critics with its obscure content and gloomy atmosphere, soon to be followed in the years to come by the sombre poetry of

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Byron and Shelley, while in Germany, apart from the already established works of Goethe and Schiller, which were often distinguished by uncanny tropes, there were publications of supernatural/fantastic tales by such authors as Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Likewise, the classical music of that era gave even more prominence to the realm of the dark fantastic and its various preternatural entities, among which was, naturally, the infernal figure of ‘the Devil’, entering officially its Romantic period. After all, these are the years that led to some seminal literary works of the history of the Gothic, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820), which both depicted agents of demonic or ‘demonized’ forces. In this respect, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the plots of operas and ballets did not cease to be distinguished by supernatural terror tropes; on the contrary, the latter were enriched, since composers derived inspiration from the literature of that era, which sometimes enabled them to produce uncanny works of the first rank, endowed with greater depth than those of the previous period. Thus, the German opera Der Freischütz (The Fatal Marksman, 1821) by Karl Maria von Weber, which is notably considered “the most popular and representative Romantic opera of that entire age”,8 is based on a German horror tale by Johann Apel and it revolves around an unusual faustian pact; its plot is distinguished by the central role of the Devil and the sense of guilt that eventually leads to madness.9 Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), on the other hand, is loosely based on the medieval legend of “Robert the Devil” and it is probably most memorable for its particularly spooky, unworldly scene of the ‘ballet of the dead nuns’. While those two works of German origin (both reworkings of old folk legends) examine the theme of the Devil each in its own manner, two other works by French composers of the same era, focus on the significance of female ghostly presences. The opera La Dame Blanche (The White Lady, 1825) by Francois-Adrien Boieldieu, is a typical representation of the Gothic, including a Scottish castle, a mysterious apparition and a lost heir; it is based on five different novels by Walter Scott, and was very much admired by Mendelssohn, Weber and Wagner.10 Adolph Adam’s Giselle (1841), on the other hand, was an extremely popular romantic ghostly ballet emphasizing on spectral femininity. Théophile Gautier, a leading figure of French Romanticism and author of fantastic tales, was one of the librettists, while the plot of Giselle was partly based on Victor Hugo’s poem “Fantômes” (1829). There is a feminist subtext in Adam’s opera as, according to the plot, the spirits of betrayed and wronged young women appear ethereal and charming, yet their purpose is to exact revenge towards their seducers by dancing them to death by exhaustion.11 It is interesting to note that there is an almost uncanny analogy between the scene of the spectral nuns in Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable and the scene of the disembodied spirits of the young women in Adam’s Giselle, as a collective expression of repressed female despair through the numinous and the otherworldly. Finally, Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr (1828) is considered a minor opera which nevertheless has an almost cult status today; it was based on Charles Nodier’s play Le Vampire (1820), itself a dramatic adaptation of The Vampyre (1819) by John Polidori, one of

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the seminal gothic horror works that were conceived in the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816. As it is generally acknowledged, death was a source of fascination in the Romantic era—in eighteenth century England, the Graveyard Poets (such as Thomas Grey and Robert Blair), who are considered forerunners of Romanticism, expressed their profound preoccupation with the subject of death through funereal and sepulchral poetic images, preparing the ground for later English poets such as Byron, Keats and Shelley, who also explored death and mortality, diving into metaphysical worlds of the afterlife; nevertheless, in the realm of classical music it was mostly composers from continental Europe who would become haunted by the notion of death throughout the nineteenth century. In this respect, several renowned composers of early and late Romanticism in classical music, such as Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Mahler and Mussorgsky, were death-obsessed, as it is demonstrated in their works; these composers expressed their existential and metaphysical anxieties with sombre, gloomy and deeply melancholy compositions often inspired by literature. While certain works by Ludwig van Beethoven had already been associated with ‘the sublime’,12 and with the notions of exaggeration and irregularity, Franz Schubert’s (a main representative of early romanticism in classical music) compositions revealed, from the early stages of his short career, a strong penchant for dismal and forlorn themes, which he also embellished with supernatural tropes. One of these was the doppelgänger motif, which was musically explored by the great Austrian composer in his exquisite, mournful lied “Der Doppelgänger”—the musical setting of a Heinrich Heine poetic composition—written in 1828, the year of his death. Schubert is also eminently the composer of the quartet Death and the Maiden (written in 1824, while there is also the song version of 1817), based on a poem by the German poet Matthias Claudius. The composition of this quartet was immediately preceded by the composer’s grave illness which was considered terminal (eventually leading to his demise, a few years later), thus it seems to have had a particular significance for him regarding the idea of death13 —which is described as a repulsive skeleton in the poem—and how to deal with it. “Erlkönig” (1815), an early Schubert lied endowed with numinous atmosphere and scenery (a rustic landscape at night), was based on a strange, enigmatic poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, regarding the death of a child attacked by an unspecified creature of supernatural origin. Finally, the lieder “Auf der Donau” (On the Danube, 1817) “Totengräbers Heimweh” (Gravedigger’s Longing, 1825), “Fahrt Zum Hades” (Journey to Hades, 1817) and “Die Stadt” (The Town, 1829), all based on verse by German or Austrian poets of that period, are reflective, esoteric but also dramatic in tone, while their imagery (romantic gothic ruins, cemeteries and cypresses), recalls the solemn, mournful motifs of the Graveyard Poets and the Romantics. Another romantic composer of the first half of the nineteenth century who often employed bleak, shadowy motifs in his music was the German Robert Schumann. Interestingly, Schumann was also the author of a fragmentary novel with the title Selene, which was distinguished by gothic elements, influenced by other writers of his era such as Jean Paul and E. T. A Hoffman; thus, it is natural that some of these elements recur in his music.14 Schumann’s Night Pieces (1839) were inspired

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by the death of his brother, while the imposing and profoundly intense overture Manfred, a Dramatic Poem (1849), based on Lord Byron’s gloomy poetic composition with the same name, a work characterized by a brooding, ‘damned’ anti-hero, incestuous references and the supernatural, has been a notable contribution to the Gothic. Moreover, a particular movement from his Symphony No 3 or The Rhenish Symphony (1850) was inspired by his visiting with his wife, Clara Schumann, also a composer and a pianist, the great gothic cathedral in Cologne,15 an iconic destination for the Romantics—once again recalling the association of the greatness of imposing (gothic) buildings and equally impressive natural landscapes with the sublime.16 Whereas Schubert began to feel more and more melancholy towards the end of his life, Schumann became mentally unstable. The peculiar dissonance of the piece “Verrufene Stelle” (Haunted or Cursed Place) from Forest Scenes (1848–1849) has invited speculation about “the composer’s increasingly unbalanced mental state at the time of its composition”.17 Tragically, Robert Schumann composed his Ghost Variations (1854) for piano, which was inspired by his auditory hallucinations, just before he was willingly admitted to the asylum for the insane.18 Both these composers, Schubert and Schumann, contributed their own version of Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust. The archetypal story of Faust, which is based on a traditional German legend and was immortalized by Goethe in two parts (1808 and 1831), is famously distinguished by bleak atmosphere and gothic imagery (e.g. Faust’s gloomy medieval castle and the chthonian, fiendish figure of Mephistopheles) and such themes as the influence of satanic forces upon an individual with the purpose of deception, moral corruption and sin, as well as the battle between good and evil, retribution and divine punishment; themes which we also come across in primary gothic novels like The Monk (1796), Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820) and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In this context, Goethe’s seminal literary work of Romanticism inspired, throughout the nineteenth century, a plethora of major and minor classical music composers, who had a penchant for supernatural themes and gloomy representations. Franz Schubert’s settings of Faust include five dramatic lieder, which were written during his youth (1814–1817), after having been enchanted with Goethe’s poetical works19 and having read the first part of Faust which was published in 1808.20 Schumann’s version of the myth, on the other hand, was the oratorio Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. Curiously, Schumann, in his imposing but also melodious version, which was written between 1844 and 1853 and is often considered the epitome of his romantic spirit, did not emphasize on the dark supernatural tropes but on the more philosophical and abstract elements of the play.21 In contrast, French composer Hector Berlioz’s Huit Scenes de Faust, a series of songs published in 1829, lay more stress on the extremity of feelings and the notion of the grotesque,22 with the first scene, “Le Roi de Thule” (King of Thule) being headed as “Chanson Gothique”; yet in this case ‘gothic’ signifies for simplicity and directness, reminiscent of a medieval rustic society.23 Berlioz’s later major adaptation of the legend, named La Damnation de Faust (1846), a larger, dramatic orchestral work, sometimes staged as an opera, is characterized by mellow but also infernal moments, in particular the emblematic scene of the hero’s descent to hell.

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Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony, published eleven years later, in 1857, sounds particularly sombre and sinister, while it is significantly more suggestive and ominous in mood and tone than the previous adaptations. Somewhat representing the New German School in classical music (like Wagner), the influential Hungarian composer often used chromatic dissonance, thus endowing his compositions with a demonic or gloomy edge, bringing them closer to gothic aesthetics,24 which defied the sense of harmony and regularity. Nonetheless, his four Mephisto Waltzes for piano (composed between 1859 and 1885) were lighter in tone since, in this case, “diabolism was not of an austere or macabre nature but of a more flirtatious and ecstatic one”.25 In the 1850s and the 1860s, two operas on the archetypal story of Faust also came to light: Charles Gounod—whose playful and creepy Funeral March for a Marionette (1872) has been used as the opening theme in the television mystery and horror series Alfred Hitchcock Presents—has possibly created the most dramatic, intense and emotional version of the myth, the opera Faust (1859), loosely based on the first part of Goethe’s play, a sample of the ‘grande opera’ type which was very popular in its time; yet this work was scorned by the Italian composer Arrigo Boito, who also happened to be the author of some superb dark fantastic tales.26 Boito’s operatic version of Goethe’s play was Mefistofele (1868), and it aspired to be a more modern and innovative adaptation than the previous ones; yet the audience did not appreciate the composer’s claims to originality27 and his Wagnerian tendencies. Moreover, Richard Wagner himself paid his own tribute to Goethe’s work with a Faust overture, which was finalized in 1855. The German composer had already written operas which derived elements from medieval legends and the supernatural: The Flying Dutchman (1843) referred to a ghostly ship and its mysterious cursed captain and the notion of redemption through love, while in Tannhäuser (1845), which takes place in medieval times, we come across the female double, the goddess Venus for sexuality and the mortal Elizabeth for Christian purity,28 who signal for the dual nature of the hero, a prominent motif of the Gothic. Furthermore, Lohengrin (1850) is a medieval drama about the conflict of pagan and christian forces, also featuring a mysterious knight with supernatural abilities. It is interesting to mention that Wagner’s approach to Faust shared affiliations with Liszt’s (whom Wagner admired and consulted) tumultuous Faust Symphony.29 Two nineteenth-century Russian composers also contributed their own adaptations of Faust: Modest Mussorgksy with “The Song of the Flea” (1879), a version of the song that Mephistopheles sings in a scene from the play, and Anton Rubinstein (also composer of the opera The Demon, in 1871, based on a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, which was considered sacrilegious) with his tone poem Faust in 1854. Furthermore, a special mention should be made to the contributions of two women composers: Louise Bertin, who composed the rare opera Esmeralda (1836), adapted from Victor Hugo’s gothic-hued novel Notre Dame de Paris (1830), also paid her own tribute to Goethe’s play with the opera Faust in 1831,30 as well as the underrated German composer Emilie Meyer with her commanding Faust overture (1880) almost fifty years later. Finally, in 1906, another great German composer, Gustav Mahler, would create his famous 8th symphony (The Symphony of a Thousand), whose second part is a setting of the closing scene of Faust. The subtly eerie opening of this composition

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soon gives way to a dramatic development in mood and tone, which sounds funereal, melancholy, mysterious and rather emotional; this is possibly the ‘darkest’ and, naturally, the most modern adaptation of all the classical music versions of Faust, until the beginning of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the figure of Mephistopheles, the notorious demon of the German folklore, has inspired composers even beyond the influential work of Goethe. In this respect, Mephistos Höllenrufe (Summons of Mephistopheles from Hell or Cries of Mephistopheles from Hell) is a 1851 waltz by Johann Strauss, which is distinguished by a both playful and sinister character. We also come across the figure of the Devil in an early nineteenth-century work, Paganini’s Caprice No. 13, nicknamed Devil’s Laughter or Devil’s Chuckle (written between 1802 and 1817), and also in the Irish composer Michael Balfe’s opera Satanella, premiered in 1858, based on Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable Amoureux (1772), which constitutes a rather original and unusual approach to the theme of the Devil. Some decades later, two Czech composers, Bedˇrich Smetana and Antonin Dvoˇrák, will offer their own versions of dark, infernal forces and places: the first with the opera The Devil’s Wall (1882), based on an old Czech legend quasi serious in nature, and the second with the opera The Devil and Kate (1899), where there is a visual depiction of Hell. In this context, similarly with the Faustian pact and the figure of the Devil, there are other prominent dark supernatural motifs which have artistically motivated composers after the first decades of the nineteenth century, as the preoccupation with the supernatural endured and the Gothic knew continuous renewals through fiction and art: the representations of witchcraft and witches, as well as the timeless ‘Dance Macabre’ or ‘Dance of Death’ motif, where “grinning skeletons invite the living… into the equalizing democracy of death”.31 The middle nineteenth century was an era when France had already been marked by the gothic and supernatural works of Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier and Charles Nodier, while in Great Britain, the Victorian Gothic started to dawn through the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and later those of Wilkie Collins. Liszt’s Totentanz (1849)—‘Danse Macabre’—for piano and orchestra, is alternately majestic—almost ceremonious—and elegiac, and it is characterized by a tempestuous, revelatory finale. Liszt had an obsession with death and was knowingly depressed during his youth, a mental state which transformed into religious piety in his late years. Thus, several mournful and brooding pieces such as “Funérailles” and “Pensée des Morts” from the piano cycle Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies, 1847) suggest his profound preoccupation with the notion of death. Furthermore, his tribute to the apocalyptic vision of the Latin poet Dante includes Dante Symphony (1857) and Dante Sonata (1849): in the first work, hell is depicted through fiendish “stormy music”,32 while the latter is distinguished by similarly tumultuous as well as sombre parts. Unstern! Sinistre, disastro (1887) is a piano piece whose title “indicates misfortune”33 and it “is often cited for its ominous tone”,34 while La Lugubre Gondola (1882) is an almost dissonant composition, particularly disquieting and ill-boding, signifying for the decay and decline of old Europe.35 Both these late romantic works are considered to be radical and proto-modern. However, and notwithstanding Liszt’s merits, the most popular

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perhaps classical music work inspired by the ‘Dance of the Dead’ motif, is French composer Saint Saens’s symphonic poem Danse Macabre, published in 1874. This is a peculiar piece distinguished by the strange, otherworldly sound of a xylophone, which corresponds to the rattling of bones while skeletons dance. It is a very characteristic work of nineteenth-century classical music that expresses in a unique, subtle way the notions of the macabre and the grotesque. Witches and sorcery have long been featured in classical music, mostly in operas, since the era of phantasmagorical works of such baroque masters as Purcell and Vivaldi. However, in the obsessed with all things dark nineteenth century, representation of witches becomes significantly grimmer. In Berlioz’s iconic “Songe d’ une Nuit du Sabbat” from Symphonie Fantastique (1830), one of the most emblematic early romantic compositions, the hero-artist, after having taken opium and experienced his own execution in a hallucinatory dream, has another bizarre vision in which he finds himself amidst a diabolical nocturnal gathering of witches and monsters. The ill-boding, haunting toll of the bell in the middle of the piece, is succeeded by a powerful music climax and an extremely fiery finale. Berlioz, who was also a writer of fantastic fiction, was among those composers who were particularly keen on the marvellous and used to embrace numinous subjects: “Chorus of Shades” from Lelio (1831), a sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, is a solemn, otherworldly work which depicts the ghost scene from Hamlet,36 while Le Ballet des Ombres (The Ballet of Shadows) in 1829, is a withdrawn work whose title obviously suggests the theme of spectrality. Moreover, Grand Messe des Morts or Requiem (1837) and Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale (1840) apparently focus on the theme of death, while “Le Spectre de la Rose”, “La Mort d’Ophélie” and “Au Cimetière” from the song cycle Les Nuits d’ Été (1841) adapted from six Théophile Gautier poems, also dealt with numinous and funereal subjects. The motif of the night assembly of infernal spirits and supernatural beings is also part of the German composer Felix Mendelssohn’s—who was a friend of Berlioz— orchestral work First Walpurgis Night, based on a poem by Goethe on the conflict between christian religion and pagan beliefs, which was premiered in 1833. Furthermore, Paganini’s “Le Streghe” (Witches Dance), the first movement from Violin Concerto No. 5 (1830) also deals with the subject of witches’ dance but in an elegant manner—with minimal elements of terror, mostly resembling a graceful waltz dance. Witches also have guest appearances in such Italian operas of the middle nineteenth century as Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth (1847) and Il Trovatore (1853). In general, nineteenth-century Italian operas were mostly non-supernatural, yet they were distinguished by certain gothic/sensational motifs, such as madness and murder: Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851), Gaetano Donizzetti’s Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Maria Stuarda (1835) and Anna Bolena (1830) and Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani (1835), they all portray female, often victimized, figures in extreme emotional states while also depicting incarceration, poisoning, beheading and other forms of violence and murder. Donizzetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), based on Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), also features a female apparition. Returning to the motif of witches, Mussorgsky’s monumental Night on Bald Mountain or Night on the Bare Mountain (finished in 1867, but completed and

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arranged for orchestra by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov after Mussorgsky’s death), another great composition inspired by the Witches’ Sabbath motif, is a work saturated with sulfurous moments, expressing the monstrous and the ludicrous. Moreover, Smetana’s Macbeth (and the Witches) in 1859 is a brilliant almost diabolical piano piece, while many years later, in 1896, The Noon Witch, a symphonic poem by Antonin Dvoˇrák, is a dark fairy tale regarding a demonic female entity of the Slavic folklore; its music is characterized by an idyllic beginning, whereas it soon becomes majestically dark, with its mysterious sounds entangling the listener into an enchanting melodious web. Apart from the nocturnal figure of the witch and its various representations, another eerie female supernatural figure, which was depicted in a traditional German supernatural tale, has also been portrayed in classical music of the second half of the nineteenth century: “The Bloody Nun”—which constitutes a particularly creepy episode in Matthew Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk. “The Bloody Nun” was adapted into Gounod’s La Nonne Sanglante (1852–1854), a five act opera with Berlioz having written a part of the libretto (Berlioz himself had started an opera on the same subject that remained unfinished). The music of this work is characterized by eeriness, suspense, the element of the unexpected and an intense, chilling climax, when the protagonist, instead of eloping with his beloved, runs off with the ghost of a nun that haunts an old castle. In some cases, Gounod’s La Nonne Sanglante, with its vivid imagery and visual effects, was considered as part of a gothic revival which anticipated the horror cinematic genre.37 Similarly with “The Bloody Nun”, the traditional gothic ballad Lenore, written by the German poet Gottfried August Bürger, features the theme of the demon lover/fiancé returning from the underworld to take his bride with him. In German– Swiss composer Joachim Raff’s 5th symphony Lenore (1870–1872), the atmosphere of the first and second part does not perfectly correspond to the poem’s sinister elements, except momentarily. It is the third section that really “sticks to Burger’s poem”38 regarding tone and mood. Henri Dupark’s significantly shorter symphonic poem with the same name (1875), which was transcribed for two pianos by Saint Saens in 1884, evokes more sorrowful emotions and seems to be more compatible with the eerie content of the ballad. Liszt, already well-known for his penchant for dark themes and tropes, was also inspired by Bürger’s poem; his version is a melodramatic work for solo piano and voice, that is, a theatrical recitation accompanied by music, written in 1858. Last, Maria Theresia von Paradis, an eighteenth-century pianist and composer from France who was famously blind, had also composed a piece for voice and piano inspired by the Lenore tale, as early as 1789. The second half of the nineteenth century was an era marked by ghost stories and morbid tales such as the seminal novella Carmilla (1871–1872) by the Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, while in countries of the Continent such as France, the erotic, morbid tales of Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly along with the vampiric, decadent poems of Charles Baudelaire constituted one more version of the Gothic. This is also a time when E. A. Poe’s worlds of the macabre had long come to light in the United States; nevertheless in Europe, they became known later, through Baudelaire’s translations; thus, classical music adaptations of works of the American master of

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horror appeared towards the end of the century. In this context of recurrent renewals and reinventions of the Gothic, a plethora of both major and minor composers of the second half of the nineteenth century continued to be intrigued by the realm of the numinous and the marvellous in various and, often, idiosyncratic ways. Austrian composer Anton Bruckner had written symphonies from 1863 to 1893, which have been paralleled to gothic cathedrals39 due to the feelings of solemnity and religious mysticism40 these imposing buildings often evoke. We even find some gothic elements in Wagner’s mature operas or Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera-ballet Mlada (1872), set in the Slavic dark ages and featuring a murder, spirits, Witches’ Sabbath and the act of retribution. Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, on the other hand, is a song cycle about different ways of death, written in the 1870s, while his seminal piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) includes certain movements that fully embrace the Gothic and the grotesque: “The Gnome”, sinister and particularly ominous, the unsettling and gloomy “The Old Castle”, “Catacombs” and “Baba Yaga”; the latter is a supernatural creature of the Slavic folklore portrayed as an old hag-witch of ambivalent character,41 who lives in a forest hut. The figure of Baba Yaga has inspired other Russian composers as well: Anatoly Lyadov, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Furthermore, the figure of the maternal-villainous old witch who lives alone in the woods, is a prominent motif in the fin de siècle opera Hänsel und Gretel (1896) by the German composer Engelbert Humperdinck. Local myths and tales were a source of inspiration for composers all around Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s “In The Hall Of The Mountain King”, part of the Peer Gynt opera (1875), is an emblematic piece featuring scary supernatural beings, mostly trolls, from Scandinavian folklore; this piece has also been used as the soundtrack of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and the horror film Dead Snow (2009), and it is generally related to the morbid theme of uncontrollable paranoia.42 Moreover, “The Goblins’ Wedding Procession at Vossevange” from Grieg’s 17 Norwegian Dances is also a work that deals with supernatural creatures of the Northern European folklore, while “Trolltog” (March of the Trolls, 1891) is an iconic solo piano composition from his Lyric Pieces (published from 1867 to 1901). In general, ‘goblins’ and other grotesque and usually malicious little beings with supernatural powers, seem to have been employed as a typical uncanny motif by numerous composers of that period: Antonio Bazzini’s The Dance of the Goblins (1852), Dvoˇrák’s “The Goblin Dance” from Poetic Tone Pictures (1889) for piano and the symphonic poem The Water Goblin (1896). Moreover, three women composers of the same era paid their tribute to various types of bizarre, supernatural little beings with works for solo piano: American Julie Rivé-King with March of the Goblins (1879), German Josephine Lang with Danse Infernale (1879) and Venezuelan Teresa Carreño with Danse de Gnome (1875). The last quarter of the century is a period marked by quintessential late Victorian gothic novels such as Robert L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), but also Guy de Maupassant’s supernatural horror tales, Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s sinister contes cruels and the demonic, decadent worlds of Joris Carl Huysmans; however, late

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romantic classical music composers would mostly draw inspiration from literary works of the Romantic era, being faithful to the (now late) nineteenth-century obsession with the past. In this respect, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881) by Jacques Offenbach is an ‘opéra fantastique’, featuring as the main hero E. T. A. Hoffman himself, the German author of gothic horror tales and also composer of the early nineteenth century. It is based on three short stories by Hoffman, one of which is “Der Sandman”, the seminal doppelgänger story also examined by Sigmund Freud in his essay The Uncanny (1919); some years earlier, Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia (1870), also based on Hoffman’s story, is a mad science tale featuring a diabolical inventor and the experiment of soul transference. Furthermore, traditional spectral tropes continue to appear in the works of this period, yet endowed with new depth and character; Dvoˇrák’s Spectre Bride (1885) is a dramatic cantata or a ghostly opera, an adaptation of a tale written by the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben in 1773; it is a variation of the demon lover motif already explored in the ballad Lenore. Spirits and ghosts also appear in Manfred Symphony by Tchaikovsky (1885) and, naturally, in his overtly dramatic and intense Hamlet Overture-Fantasia (1888). Furthermore, Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades (1887), which is based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s (the most prominent Russian romantic author) horror novella with the same name, features the avenging ghost of an old countess, while Ruddigore or The Witch’s Curse written by the English composer Arthur Sullivan also in 1887, is an opera about an old ancestral curse. Approaching the end of the century, which was marked by the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1894) and George Mac Donald’s Lilith (1896), and since the vampiric femme fatale constituted a prevailing fin de siècle motif, there are certain classical music works of the turn of the century that reflect and rework this particular trope. Thus, American composer Edward MacDowell’s Lamia, based on John Keats’s acclaimed romantic poem about a seductive demonic entity (published in 1820), was completed in 1888–1889. This work starts with a mysterious, menacing theme, which is recurrent until the very end. Another piece of that era which features a female vampire is Thalaba, The Destroyer by the British composer Granville Bantock, almost a decade later (1900), based on Robert Southey’s romantic poem with the same name (1801). Moreover, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s The Wood Nymph (1895) is a tone poem about a dangerous, seductive female entity of the Scandinavian folklore who lives in the forest—somehow resembling Lamia or Rusalka from the Slavic folklore; the latter is a water spirit who leads men to their death, as she was violently killed herself; thus, in Dvoˇrák’s Rusalka (1901), the water-nymph who falls in love with a human, becomes a demon of death after being cursed. Furthermore, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, apart from compositions exploring the female vampire motif, classical music composers contributed a great diversity of works inspired by other gothic tropes, both traditional and non so traditional: Pietro Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff (1895), an opera based on the Heinrich Heine play William Ratcliff (1822), abounds with stereotypical gothic horror patterns such as gloomy castles, banditti attacks, apparitions, a forbidden romance, secret elopements and duels (the Russian composer Cesar Cui, member of the New Russian

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School and The Five, had also written an opera based on the same play, with the title William Ratcliff , several decades earlier, in 1868). Moreover, the opera The Maiden in the Tower (1892) by Jean Sibelius, also deals with the theme of female incarceration, while Raymonda by the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, in 1898, features a spooky yet benevolent spectral entity called ‘The White Lady’. Edvard Grieg’s eerie, melancholy “Phantom” is a late romantic solo piano composition (published in 1895) from his Lyric Pieces, while Dvoˇrák’s orchestral poem The Wood Dove (1896) is based on a tale in which the spirit of a poisoned man returns as a forest bird, in order to haunt his unfaithful widow, who eventually commits suicide. Furthermore, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Christmas Eve (1895–1896) features the figure of the Devil, Edward Elgar’s The Black Knight (1889–1993) depicts the archetypal motif of the intrusion of an evil stranger into a medieval castle, while The Dream of Gerontius (1900) by the same composer, a work for orchestra and voices based on a poem by John Henry Newman—a Roman catholic priest and theologian of the nineteenth century—is a Dante-esque tale of a soul’s journey from death to Purgatorio distinguished by the characteristically fiery part “Demon’s Chorus”. Lastly, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) by Paul Dukas is a playful composition which depicts dark sorcery, while a one-act opera based on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, which was written in 1896 by the Russian composer Mikhail Andreyevich Ostroglazoff, is one of the works of this period based on Poe’s macabre literary output, along with British Stanley Hawley’s melodramas The Raven (1894), The Bells (1894) and Lenore (1898). Two more fin de siècle compositions are noteworthy, partly due to their titles: Danses Gothiques (Gothic Dances) is a 1893 piano piece by the French composer Erik Satie, one of the works of his ‘mystic’ period, which were influenced by Gregorian chant43 ; while Suite Gothique, a bizarre, almost pompous piece composed for organ by Léon Boëllmann in 1895, somehow sounds like the creepy soundtrack of an old horror movie. Also, a special mention needs to be made to an Asian contribution at the dawn of the new century: The Japanese pianist and composer Rentar¯o Taki (1879–1903), who died tragically young of tuberculosis, composed Kojo No Tsuki (1901), which means ‘Moonlight Over The Ruined Castle’, a dusky late romantic piece for violin and piano. Finally, Gustave Mahler is possibly the greatest composer of the turn of the century who wrote several works that can be considered as particularly bleak and disquieting in theme, mood and tone: Todtenfeier (Death Celebration, 1888) is a symphonic poem alternately ill-boding and chiming, with a very gloomy and thundering conclusion; while Songs on the Death of Children (1901–1904) is a song cycle, the musical setting of poems by Friedrich Rückert, regarding the perishing of children and the notion of solace. But the most distinguished compositions by Mahler which are marked by ‘gothic’ sensibilities, are Symphony No. 2 or Resurrection (completed in 1894), with its Biblical grandeur and the much celebrated “Death Shriek” part, Symphony No. 8 with its “complex gothic polyphony”44 composed in 1907 and Symphony No. 6, the Tragic one, completed in 1904 with “its brutal hammershlag death-knells”, considered as one of the most fearsome works of classical music.45

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In this respect, crossing the threshold of the twentieth century, and due to the radical tendencies of impressionism, expressionism and modernism which became more and more prevalent in the field of classical music of this period, many of the uncanny themes and tropes that were employed in works of the previous century, would be reworked through less traditional music forms and new musical directions, once again reinventing the genre. Also, it could be claimed that the less harmonious and non-symmetrical, chromatic and atonal/dissonant musical structures explored by the new artistic movements are more compatible not only with the modern developments of the new century in the field of gothic literature, but also with the nature of the Gothic itself, which embraces the unfamiliar and the bizarre, irregularity and ambivalence. Moreover, this is a period marked by the weird cosmic horror tales of H. P. Lovecraft and the modern, mundane ghost stories of M. R. James; yet the composers of the early twentieth century are still stimulated by works of the previous eras, which have already left their imprint on the conscience of audiences and critics: classic and romantic gothic literature but also the enchanting eccentricities of fin de siècle literary texts motivated the early twentieth-century classical composers to produce a wide range of ingenious, haunting works of music. In this context of early twentieth century renewed interest in influential gothic texts in the field of classical music, there is a plethora of compositions that were based on E. A. Poe’s stories, such as Claude Debussy’s incomplete (due to the composer’s death in 1918) operas La Chute de la Maison Usher (1908–1917), based on the much distinguished gothic horror short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and Le Diable dans le Beffroi (1902–1912), based on the tale “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839)—for both these works Debussy also wrote the libretto. The first is a one-act opera which blends the lyrical with the mysterious and the dramatic element, in a tale where the composer himself “identified with neurasthenic Roderick Usher” often “feeling gloomy and suicidal”46 ; from the second, only two fragments have survived, where the element of the grotesque is rather distinct. Debussy had a penchant for dreamy, unearthly soundscapes and themes: this is evident from such works as La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral, published in 1910), an impressionistic piano prelude of ghostly nuances also part of a late gothic revival in arts where medieval religious architecture was symbolically significant.47 Moreover, Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) was adapted by four different composers of that period: Cyril Scott, André Caplet, Nicolai Tcherepnin and Joseph Holbrooke. The latter was an English composer enthralled with the works of the master of dark romanticism, thus he wrote a great deal of music based on different Poe writings, receiving, at first, unfavourable reactions from critics; among his early twentiethcentury works inspired by Poe’s grim literary universe are the symphonic poems The Bells and The Raven, both finalized in 1903. His Ulalume, also completed in 1903, is an orchestral composition about which several critics claimed that it “failed to match the unsettling atmosphere”48 of the verses that sparkled its creation. Poe’s “The Bells” (1844) and “The Raven” (1845) also inspired two Russian composers of the same era: Sergei Rachmaninoff, who wrote the symphony The Bells, based on a loose translation of the original poem, and Nikolai Myaskovsky, with his symphonic poem called Nevermore (1909), based on “The Raven”. Finally, The Conqueror

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Worm for tenor and orchestra, which was founded on the short story “Ligeia” (1838), was written by another Russian composer, Mikhail Gnessin, in 1913, while Florent Schmitt composed the atmospheric orchestral piece Étude pour Le Palais Hanté in 1905, inspired by the poem “The Haunted Palace” (1839). Another significant figure of the Gothic and the fantastic who has been an inspiration for twentieth-century classical music was the Welsh author Arthur Machen, whose horror works in the 1890s were strongly associated with Decadence and aestheticism: thus, English composer Granville Bantock’s Great God Pan, inspired by Machen’s influential horror novella with the same name published in 1894, was written in 1920, while John Ireland’s The Forgotten Rite was composed in 1913, having been enlivened by Machen’s decadent, mystical novella The Hill of Dreams (completed in 1897) and the novel The House of Souls (published in 1906). Ireland’s The Forgotten Rite was “part of a wider movement of ritualistic and Pan-inspired works”49 of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century period, such as the symphonic poems Prélude à l’ Après-midi d’ un Faune (1894) by Claude Debussy and Pan og Syrinx (1917–1918) by Danish composer Carl Nielsen—in an interesting contrast with the employment of the Devil motif that was predominant during the greatest part of the nineteenth century. The ‘demonic’, Bacchic and barbaric side of paganism is also demonstrated in Bantock’s Pagan Chants (1917), Sergei Prokofiev’s imaginative and exotically fearsome “Dance of the Pagan Monster” and “Pursuit of the Evil God” from Scythian Suite (1914–1916) and of course by the dark, violent grandeur of The Rite of Spring (1911–1913) by Igor Stravinsky. Another instance of the latter’s inclination towards dark themes and tropes is the particularly mournful and suggestive Chant Funèbre (1909). Furthermore, the archetypal Bluebeard motif also triggered the creative imagination of early twentieth-century classical composers, with such works as Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) by Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók, which is an alternative version of the original tale by Charles Perrault, and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907) by French composer Paul Dukas, based on the play of the same name (published in 1899) by the Belgian symbolist author Maurice Maeterlinck. Other notable early twentieth-century classical music settings of gothic/uncanny literary works of the Romantic period is Gaspard de la Nuit (1908), a suite of dreamy, unsettling piano pieces by Maurice Ravel, based on French poet Aloysius Bertrand’s medieval gothic phantasmagorie Gaspard de la Nuit, Fantaisies à la Manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, published in 1842; Vathek (1903) by Horatio Parker, based on the eighteenth-century oriental gothic novel by William Beckford, published in 1786, with its music being distinguished by exoticism and unusual rhythms,50 Granville Bantock’s mysteriously eerie and expressive Witch of Atlas (1902), a tone poem inspired by Percy Shelley’s fanciful, poetic text with the same name, written in 1820; also, the atmospheric work for solo piano The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan (1912, revised in 1915 and orchestrated in 1917) by Charles T. Griffes, based on the seminal poem of English Romanticism “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Cesar Cui’s one-act opera A Feast in Time of Plague (1900), based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s one of Four Little Tragedies (1830), regarding the theme of death.

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Apart from literature, art has also been a source of inspiration for sombre, uncanny classical music works of this period. The symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead (1909) by Sergei Rachmaninoff, remarkable for the grandiose sense of gloom it provokes, was inspired by the famous funereal, elegiac painting with the same name by the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin; this same painting, which was extremely popular at the turn of the century, also stimulated the creativity of several other late romantic composers, among whom Andreas Hallén and Heinrich Schulz-Beuthen, who each composed a symphonic poem with the title Die Toteninsel (The Isle of the Dead), in 1899 and 1909, respectively.51 Moreover, in Richard Strauss’s tone poem An Alpine Symphony (1915), which may have been “the culmination of the German obsession with sublime, Pantheistic nature, which, via German cinema in the 1920’s, paved the way for later gothic horror films”,52 the natural landscape itself is the source of inspiration instead of art or literature. Furthermore, two more notable mentions should be made regarding uncanny classic music compositions of this period, first to Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909), a one-act atonal drama, in which a terrified woman discovers her dead lover’s body in the midst of the night and, second, to the Norwegian composer Hjalmar Borgström, and his fierce and solemn yet melodic symphonic poem Die Nacht der Toten (The Night of the Dead, 1905). Finally, a special tribute should be made to the early modernist Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, an eccentric visionary influenced by theosophy, who had a special inclination towards dark and occult themes as “he burdened his late works with all manner of satanic titles and epigraphs in an attempt to ‘resurrect all monsters and visions of the past’”53 ; thus, his piano pieces Sonata No. 9 (1913), and Sonata No. 7 (1912) were subtitled The Black Mass and The White Mass, respectively, while other piano works included in this singular ‘category’ are “Poème Satanique” (1903) and “Flammes Sombres No. 2” (Dark Flames, 1914) from 2 Danses. Moreover, he initially gave the subtitle “Gothic” to his Sonata No. 3 (1898) for piano, though he changed the name afterwards. Scriabin’s compositions were mystical, complex, inventive and groundbreaking and his style very idiosyncratic, evoking the strangest, most abstract emotions of mysterious, metaphysical wandering, preparing the ground for the modernist works of the first half of the twentieth century. In the following years and up to the present, from Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw (1954), based on the gothic horror novella of the same name (1898) by Henry James, and György Ligeti’s dissonant soundscapes which echoed unsettlingly in Stanley Kubrick’s iconic horror film The Shining (1980), to recent experimental Nosferatu (2014) and futuristic Frankenstein (2019) operas, by contemporary composers Dmitry Kurlyandsky and Mark Grey respectively, it is rather evident that the preoccupation of classical music with the Gothic and the uncanny is as timeless as it is contemporary. Nevertheless, it all started back in the early nineteenth century, when apparitions and demons were still believed to exist, thus the eerie harmonies and ghostly melodies of their music, sent real chills to the spines of their audience, similar to those they felt while they were reading their favourite gothic novels.

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Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

John C. Tibbetts, The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 275. Julian Rushton, “Berlioz, Faust and the Gothic”, in The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, eds. Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 67. Thomas S. Grey, “The Gothic Libertine: The Shadow of Don Giovanni in Romantic Music and Culture”, in The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera, eds. Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 75. David J. Buch, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 147. Ibid., 75. Diane Hoeveler, Sara Davies Cordova, “Gothic Opera in Britain and France: Genre, Nationalism, and Trans-Cultural Angst”, in Romanticism on the Net, vol. 34–35 (May 2004), 13. Ibid. Simon Karlinsky, The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 33. Patrick Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (New York: Editions Rodopi, 2004), 55. Francis Claudon, The Concise Encyclopedia of Romanticism (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1980), 276. David Huckvale, The Occult Arts of Music: An Esoteric Survey from Pythagoras to Pop Culture (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2013), 150. Marjorie Hirsch, “Schubert’s Reconciliation of Gothic and Classical Influences”, in Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style, eds. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 163. John M. Gingerich, Schubert’s Beethoven Project (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 98. Monika Schmitz-Emans, “The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann’s Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann’s Writings”, in Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000, eds. Andrew Kusack and Barry Murnane (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 146–160. Donald Sanders, Experiencing Schumann: A Listener’s Companion (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 23. Cecelia Hopkins Porter, The Rhine as Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music (Boston, MA, Northeastern University Press, 1996), 192.

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17. Ivan Raykoff, “Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife”, in Rethinking Schumann, eds. Roe-Min Kok and Laura Turnbridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 172. 18. H. Bazner and M.G. Hennerici, “Syphilis in German-Speaking Composers— ‘Examination Results Are Confidential’”, in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 3, eds. J. Bogousslavsky, M.G. Hennerici, H. Bazner, and C. Bassetti (Basel-Switzerland: Karger, 2010), 74. 19. John Michael Cooper, “Faust’s Schubert: Schubert’s Faust”, in Music in Goethe’s Faust: Goethe’s Faust in Music, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 101. 20. Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Schubert’s Goethe Settings (New York: Routledge, 2016), 332. 21. Laura Turnbridge, “Schumann’s Struggle with Goethe’s Faust”, in The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, eds. Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 88. 22. Rushton, ‘Berlioz’ in The Oxford Handbook of Faust, 67. 23. Ibid., 66. 24. Derek B. Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology on Liszt’s Demonic and Gothic Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 131. 25. Shay Loya, Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 217. 26. Remo Ceserani, “The Boundaries of the Fantasti” (trans. Jonathan Hensher), in The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions, eds. Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sullis (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2010), 42. 27. Alessandra Campana, Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late NineteenthCentury Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15–16. 28. John Louis DiGaetani, Wagner and Suicide (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2003), 49. 29. Kenneth Hamilton, “Wagner and Liszt: Elective Affinities”, in Richard Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 49–50. 30. Rushton, “Berlioz”, in The Oxford Handbook of Faust, 76. 31. Alison Milbank, “The Macabre”, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2016), 408. 32. Paul Merrick, Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 283. 33. Ben Arnold, “Piano Music: 1861–1886”, in The Liszt Companion, ed. Ben Arnold (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 168. 34. Dolores Pesce, “Expressive Resonance in Liszt’s Piano Music”, in NineteenthCentury Piano Music, ed. R. Larry Todd (New York: Routledge, 2004), 443. 35. Michael Saffle, Franz Liszt: A Guide to Research (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 384.

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36. Francesca Brittan, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 191. 37. Thomas Grey, “Music, Theatre and the Gothic Imaginary: Visualizing ‘The Bleeding Nun’”, in Art, Theatre and Opera in Paris, 1750–1850, Exchanges and Tensions, eds. Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 97. 38. Helene Raff, Joachim Raff: Portrait of a Life, trans. Alan Howe (www.raff.org, 2012), 180. 39. Stephen McClutchie, “Bruckner and the Bayreuthians; or, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Anton Bruckner”, in Bruckner Studies, eds. Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115. 40. John Williamson, “Introduction: A Catholic Composer in the Age of Bismarck”, in The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, ed. John Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 13. 41. Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 169. 42. Ben Cooyman, “Snow Nazis Must Die: Gothic Tropes and Hollywood GenreFication in Nazisploitation Horror”, in War Gothic in Literature and Culture, eds. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke (New York, Routledge, 2016), 123. 43. Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie (London: Scholarly Press, 1948), 94. 44. Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32. 45. Tibbetts, The Gothic Imagination, 273–282. 46. Robert Orledge, “‘Destiny Should Allow Me to Finish It’: The Problems Involved in the Reconstruction and Orchestration of The Fall of the House of Usher (1908–17)”, in Rethinking Debussy, eds. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 204. 47. Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-deSiecle French Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 164. 48. John Lucas, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 89. 49. Fiona Richards, The Music of John Ireland (New York: Routledge, 2017), 69. 50. Bill F. Faucet, Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918 (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016), 172. 51. Tuija Wicklund, “Sibelius and Symbolist Paintings”, in Jean Sibelius’s Legacy: Research on His 150th Anniversary, eds. Daniel Grimley, Tim Howell, Veijo Murtomäki, and Timo Virtanen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 202. 52. David Huckvale, Touchstones of Gothic Horror: A Film Genealogy of Eleven Motifs and Images (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010), 85. 53. Tibbetts, The Gothic Imagination, 277.

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Bibliography Arnold, Ben. “Piano Music: 1861–1886”. In The Liszt Companion, edited by Ben Arnold, 139–178. London: Greenwood Press, 2002. Bazner H., and M.G. Hennerici. “Syphilis in German-Speaking Composers—Examination Results Are Confidential”. In Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 3, edited by J. Bogousslavsky, M.G. Hennerici, H. Bazner, and C. Bassetti, 61–83. Basel-Switzerland: Karger, 2010. Bodley, Lorraine Byrne. Schubert’s Goethe Settings. New York: Routledge, 2016. Bridgwater, Patrick. De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2004. Brittan, Francesca. Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Buch, David J. Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Campana, Alessandra. Opera and Modern Spectatorship in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Ceserani, Remo. “The Boundaries of the Fantastic”. Translated by Jonathan Hensher. In The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions, edited by Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sullis, 37–45. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2010. Claudon, Francis. The Concise Encyclopedia of Romanticism. Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1980. Cooper, John Michael. “Faust’s Schubert: Schubert’s Faust”. In Music in Goethe’s Faust: Goethe’s Faust in Music, edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, 101–116. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017. Cooyman, Ben. “Snow Nazis Must Die: Gothic Tropes and Hollywood Genre-Fication in Nazisploitation Horror”. In War Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke, 117–135. New York: Routledge, 2016. DiGaetani, John Louis. Wagner and Suicide. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2003. Emery, Elizabeth. Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siecle French Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. Faucet, Bill F. Music in Boston: Composers, Events, and Ideas, 1852–1918. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016. Gingerich, John M. Schubert’s Beethoven Project. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Grey, Thomas. “Music, Theatre and the Gothic Imaginary: Visualizing ‘The Bleeding Nun’”. In Art, Theatre and Opera in Paris, 1750–1850, Exchanges and Tensions, edited by Sarah Hibberd and Richard Wrigley, 77–106. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Grey, Thomas S. “The Gothic Libertine: The Shadow of Don Giovanni in Romantic Music and Culture”. In The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera, edited by Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, 75–106. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Hamilton, Kenneth. “Wagner and Liszt: Elective Affinities”. In Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 27–64. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Hirsch, Marjorie. “Schubert’s Reconciliation of Gothic and Classical Influences”. In Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style, edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton, 149–170. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Hoeveler, Diane, and Sara Davies Cordova. “Gothic Opera in Britain and France: Genre, Nationalism, and Trans-Cultural Angst”. Romanticism on the Net, vol. 34–35 (May 2004): 1–40. https:// www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2004-n34-35-ron824/009435ar/. Huckvale, David. Touchstones of Gothic Horror: A Film Genealogy of Eleven Motifs and Images. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010. Johns, Andreas. Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Johnson, Julian. Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Karlinsky, Simon. The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Loya, Shay. Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition. New York: University of Rochester Press, 2011. Lucas, John. Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008. McClutchie, Stephen. “Bruckner and the Bayreuthians; or, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Anton Bruckner”. In Bruckner Studies, edited by Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw, 110–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Merrick, Paul. Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Milbank, Alison. “The Macabre”. In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 408. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2016. Myers, Rollo H. Erik Satie. Scholarly Press, 1948. Orledge, Robert. “‘Destiny Should Allow Me to Finish It’: The Problems Involved in the Reconstruction and Orchestration of The Fall of the House of Usher (1908–17)”. In Rethinking Debussy, edited by Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon, 203–222. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pesce, Dolores. “Expressive Resonance in Liszt’s Piano Music”. In Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, edited by R. Larry Todd, 395–451. New York: Routledge, 2004. Porter, Cecelia Hopkins. The Rhine as Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Raff, Helene. Joachim Raff: Portrait of a Life. Translated by Alan Howe. https://www.raff.org. Raykoff, Ivan, “Schumann’s Melodramatic Afterlife”. In Rethinking Schumann, edited by Roe-Min Kok and Laura Turnbridge, 157–180. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Richards, Fiona. The Music of John Ireland. New York: Routledge, 2017. Rushton, Julian. “Berlioz, Faust and the Gothic”. In The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight, 65–86. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Saffle, Michael. Franz Liszt: A Guide to Research. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Sanders, Donald. Experiencing Schumann: A Listener’s Companion. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann’s Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann’s Writings”. In Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000, edited by Andrew Kusack and Barry Murnane. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Scott, Derek B. From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology on Liszt’s Demonic and Gothic Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Tibbetts, John C. The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Turnbridge, Laura. “Schumann’s Struggle with Goethe’s Faust”. In The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music, edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles McKnight. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Wicklund, Tuija. “Sibelius and Symbolist Paintings”. In Jean Sibelius’s Legacy: Research on his 150th Anniversary, edited by Daniel Grimley, Tim Howell, Veijo Murtomäki, and Timo Virtanen. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. Williamson, John. “Introduction: A Catholic Composer in the Age of Bismarck”. In The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, edited by John Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, and the Schauerroman Daniel Sheridan

The prevailing wisdom holds that Der fliegende Holländer (1841) represents Richard Wagner’s artistic breakthrough. Certainly, the fact that the work is the earliest of his thirteen operas to be included within the offerings of the annual Bayreuth Festival devoted to his work lends credence to its typical positioning as the first “canonical” Wagner opera (his first three operas—Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi—are seldom performed or recorded in general).1 Wagner’s own autobiographical writings—keeping in mind his propensity for what can charitably be called mythmaking when it comes to his life story—situate the work as a turning point in his creative growth. His 1851 A Communication to My Friends in particular singles out Holländer as pivotal in his development as a musical dramatist, in one notable passage even going so far as to claim that Senta’s famous second-act Ballad was a germinal seed out of which the entire work grew.2 Holländer’s status as Wagner’s first “mature” work can be attributed to multiple reasons. While Wagner’s claims that the opera is a proto-“music drama” that lays the groundwork for the various innovations found in the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, etc., this should be regarded with scepticism, as there are numerous elements that demonstrate marked advances in Wagner’s musical and dramaturgical technique: the increasing mastery of orchestral colour to create atmosphere, depict action, and to reveal psychological states; the attachment of musical motives and themes to characters and concepts which are then woven into the orchestral fabric; the increasing importance of musical continuity, with each of the three acts (the opera also exists in a configuration where it is performed as a single, continuous act) performed without a break. These are all techniques that Wagner will develop with increasing sophistication in subsequent works. Nevertheless, as Lydia Goehr maintains, Holländer is a “hybrid” work, occupying a space between the “music drama” to come and the traditional opera from which it D. Sheridan (B) Hamilton, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_40

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still derives influence.3 It displays many of the hallmarks of the “German Romantic Opera” ubiquitous in the first decades of the nineteenth century and practised by such figures as Spohr, Marschner, Lortzing, and Weber. Despite the lack of breaks in the music, the score is nonetheless divided into discrete “numbers” (arias, choruses, ensembles, etc.), consistent with operatic convention. It traffics in the kind of subject matter favoured by early nineteenth-century German opera: archaic settings (in this case, a Norwegian fishing village of an unspecified—but presumably past—time period), “rustic” folk-like characters, and supernatural occurrences. Although the opera is, in Thomas Grey’s words, “anything but a throwback,”4 it shows a clear lineage to its operatic forebears. It is reasonable to speculate that it is that integration of old and new concepts that in part accounts for the opera’s status in the Wagnerian canon. Of Holländer’s various adoptions of the conventions of Romantic Opera, it is the incorporation of the supernatural that is of particular interest to this essay. The plot’s employment of ancient curses, prophecies, premonitions, and spectral sailors in an archaic setting is reminiscent of the gothic fiction prevalent from the late eighteenth century onwards. More specifically, the German form of the Gothic, generally known as the Schauerroman (“shudder novel”; the German Gothic also encompasses the Ritter- and Räuberroman, “chivalry” and “robber” novels, respectively). Indeed, Grey notes that the opera’s surface stylings represented “an apparent return to the outdated, provincial Schauerromantik of the Weber-Marschner-Spohr variety.”5 Here, Grey uses the specific terminology associated with German Gothic. Equally notable is that he does not further pursue this point, merely employing the phrase to underscore the notion that Holländer’s conception owes a debt to the operatic style of Wagner’s predecessors. This chapter will endeavour to ameliorate this by contextualizing Wagner’s work within the Schauerroman’s—the following discussions will not limit themselves to novels, but will include stories as well, despite the -roman suffix—presence in nineteenth-century German culture. The chapter accounts for the background of the genre, focusing on authors specifically known to have influenced Wagner such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine. From there, the world of Romantic Opera that Wagner would have known during his early years and its linkages with gothic trappings will be established before exploring select passages from Holländer and their debt to the Schauerroman; the intent will be to demonstrate that the Gothic, and the Schauerroman in particular, is built into the opera’s dramatic and musical construction. There is scarcely space to comprehensively catalogue the history of the German Gothic. With that said, it is important to establish what the Schauerroman is and what kind of foothold it had in German culture in the nineteenth century. As is wellestablished, gothic literature is accepted to have originated in late eighteenth-century England, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764).6 It was the English contributions that essentially codified the components that we typically associate with the Gothic: among them castles (in various stages of repair), ghosts, necromancy, secret societies, and an overall fascination with feelings of horror and terror, among others.7 It was also the Gothic’s preoccupation with the sublime that originates from England, as influenced by Edmund Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the

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Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). The Burkeian sublime prizes awe and transcendence, that which is of such immensity that it cannot be fully accommodated into human experience, meaning that the sublime can be terrifying precisely because of the ineffability of its magnitude. The Gothic, according to Jerrold Hogle, protects readers from the existential threat of sublime terror by “blunting” it through fictionalized representations that provoke the feelings of terror without the commensurate threat of any sort of harm (physical, psychological, existential).8 The German form of gothic writing followed, according to William Hughes, a “parallel rather than intimate” track with the British tradition.9 The similarities between the two led scholarship, in the estimation of Barry Murnane, to too often define German Gothic simply as an offshoot of the British form, effectively framing the German literature as one “colonized” by the English discourse.10 For example, in tracing the etymology of the terms Räuber-, Ritter- and Schauerroman, Michael Hadley finds their coining by Johann Wilhelm Appell in 1859.11 However, as Murnane observes, the German terms were in relation to English, not German works.12 This suggests that it has been historically difficult to disentangle the German Schauerroman from the English Gothic. Despite cultural cross-pollination between Gothic and Schauerroman, the latter has undeniable antecedents in specifically German culture. The genre’s fascination with the darker side of affairs obviously finds concurrence with the Sturm und Drang movement of the latter eighteenth century.13 Murnane further argues that the Schauerroman’s fascination with such gothic conventions as necromancy and secret societies reflects prominent cultural anxieties over such prevailing Enlightenment principles as reason and the mind/body duality; in other words, giving voice to an undercurrent of worry over reason and rationality’s sufficiency to bring about humanity’s salvation.14 Murnane suggests that the eighteenth-century literature’s exploitation of irrational fears and superstitions gives voice to societal tensions over increasing modernity and prefigures Romanticism’s move towards subjectivity. While German gothic writing retains its interest in the sublime from the British writings, James Landes argues that the Germans put their own stamp on it: he maintains that Immanuel Kant “shifted the sublime’s locus from sense experience to the imagination.”15 For Kant, it is the lack of physical form that is intrinsic to the sublime, meaning that it is the responsibility of the imagination to grasp it, a task that even the imagination must be overwhelmed by. This results in what Landes identifies as the Kantian “dynamical sublime,” where “one is overwhelmed by fear resulting from one’s inability to resist a force more powerful from oneself….”16 Under this framework, the sublime terrorizes the imagination due to its very imperceptibility. Therefore, it can be postulated that the German Gothic achieves sublime terror as much through suggestion as through the observable. For these reasons, it is thus reasonable to position a work like Friedrich Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer (1789), according to Jürgen Barkhoff one of the prototypes for the Schauerroman,17 to be borne as much of German cultural concerns as a Teutonizing of an English form. Of course, the literary currents of the nineteenth century would have a more immediate influence upon Wagner. Murnane clarifies that in the years from about 1830 onwards, the Schauerroman experienced a marked decline as gothic fiction

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was essentially absorbed into works of dubious quality.18 Hughes similarly points to the varying quality of nineteenth-century works of Schauerroman, the authors of which are in many cases forgotten.19 It is the work of the first decades of the century that we must look to for lasting impact, especially into Wagner’s lifetime. The works of E. T. A. Hoffmann were exemplary examples of the use of the macabre in early nineteenth-century German literature. His novel The Devil’s Elixirs (1815) continues to enjoy an (after)life as a prominent nineteenth-century Schauerroman.20 Wagner’s—a voracious reader—admiration of and influence by Hoffmann’s work is well-documented. In the early pages of My Life, he recalls his initial exposure to “this master of fantasy” that at age thirteen “conceived an interest which over the years grew to a mania….”21 In recounting his early musical education at sixteen, he attests to the intoxicating quality that the supernaturalism permeating Hoffmann’s work (prose and musical compositions) held for him.22 Hoffmann’s influence on Wagner continued into his work as a dramatist; he recalls that Hoffmann’s “tales of certain satanic love intrigues” informed his work on his unfinished opera Die Hochzeit (1832).23 Linda Siegel specifically compares the known aspects of the plot to Hoffmann’s stories “Der Magnetiseur” (The Magnetizer) and “Der unheimliche Gast” (The Uncanny Guest).24 Following the completion of Der fliegende Holländer, Wagner created a prose sketch in March 1842 for an operatic treatment of Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (“The Mines of Falun”) at the request of an aspiring composer named Josef Dessauer.25 I will make further references to the influence of Hoffmann’s work in the following pages when I turn attention to the content of Der fliegende Holländer, but the preceding examples are enough to indicate that Hoffmann’s predilection towards literary terror cast a long shadow over Wagner’s thought and his work. As is well-known, Wagner’s primary source for the story of the Flying Dutchman was Heinrich Heine’s Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (“From the memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski,” 1834), the seventh chapter of which recounts the legend in the context of the narrator’s witnessing a play based upon this story.26 Heine’s synopsis of the legend is for the most part replicated by the opera’s plot. The principal difference is that Wagner eschews Heine’s ironic tone in favour of a redemptive mood. Joachim Köhler makes note of Wagner’s appreciation of Heine’s writings and his fruitful interactions with the poet in Paris.27 Despite that apparent admiration, in his “Autobiographic Sketch” (1843), Wagner made efforts to minimize Heine’s role in the opera’s conception, attributing his initial inspiration to a turbulent sailing voyage from Riga to London in Summer 1839, and then later coming across Heine’s treatment in Paris.28 Despite Wagner’s efforts at revisionist history, scholarship continues to assign Heine a central role in Holländer’s conception, to the extent that the relevant passages from “Schnabelewopski” can be seen quoted at length by those studying the opera.29 It would not be accurate to call “Schnabelewopski” a Schauerroman, but the importance of ghost stories to the piece fit into what Jörg Kreienbrock observes to be Heine’s consistent practice of framing his writings on German intellectual history through the discourses of ghosts, the uncanny, and horror.30 In that sense, the Schauerroman occupies a significant place in Heine’s thought. As such, one might suppose that in taking inspiration from Heine

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for Holländer, Wagner in a sense tacitly (and as we have already seen, unwillingly) acknowledges the debt his opera owes to the culture of the Schauerroman. Beyond the literary realm, gothic notions also made their way into the musical world that Wagner knew while conceiving and composing Holländer. The genre conventions of what is known as romantische Oper (romantic opera), one of the dominant forms of German opera in the first decades of the nineteenth century, display many of the same cultural fascinations as those that make up the Schauerroman. As John Warrack notes in his history of German opera, early Romantic thought at the end of the eighteenth century privileged such concepts as mythologized views of the medieval past and a commensurate captivation with the ostensible simplicity of agrarian life. In addition to that was a pronounced reverence for the power of Nature, but with “an absorption in the realm of night, where dreams reigned and thoughts unuttured in Enlightenment day were set free, led to the admission of the irrational into art…the thrill of terror touching the thrill of beauty.”31 Nature’s autonomy renders it as mysterious as it is awesome, as frightening as it is inspiring. By the 1820s, notions of the German “character” continued to express a connection to folk culture and country life even as an increasing modernity was displayed by the burgeoning middle class; that apparent contrast possibly manifested itself in the veneration of nature being shaded by an appreciation of its “mysterious, awesome, irrational, threatening aspects….”32 Such was the culture from which romantische Oper arose. As previously stated, the German Romantic Opera typically incorporates pastoral settings and common, even peasant-like characters taking part in plots with supernatural occurrences. The most enduring romantische Oper is almost certainly Der Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber, to the degree that it has been frequently thematized as the quintessential German “national” opera.33 In its famous “Wolf’s Glen scene” that closes the second act, a sinister forest populated by unseen, but heard, spirits, is the backdrop for a demonic ritual as Kaspar calls upon the malevolent Samiel to assist him in casting a series of magic bullets.34 In this scene, we are treated to a number of gothic trappings: ghosts, damned souls, haunted forests, occult rituals, and a secret conspiracy. In exploiting the menacing aspects of the wild as a stage for a supernatural plot, the Wolf’s Glen scene aims for a sublime terror wholly consistent with gothic aesthetics. Not for nothing does Meyer specifically identify the opera as a Schauerromantik.35 Der Freischütz is hardly the sole example of the imposition of the fantastic into German Romantic Opera. I underline it not just because of the long shadow it casts over the genre, but for Wagner’s own reverence for it and the composer in general. Indeed, during the same year he completed Holländer, Wagner wrote an essay in anticipation of a Parisian performance of Freischütz rhapsodizing about its distinctly “German” character.36 As shall be demonstrated, Wagner’s work drew upon an operatic legacy that had seized upon many of the traits endemic to German gothic literature; Der fliegende Holländer was thus well-positioned to carry on Grey’s notion of the “Weber-Marschner-Spohr” variety of Schauerroper. A gothic atmosphere pervades the opera as early as the opening measures of the overture. Wagner’s own explanatory programmes for the piece makes clear the desired aural image: that of the Dutchman’s cursed vessel buffeted by relentless storms.37 Wagner depicts these oceanic gales through the striking musical gesture of a rapid string and woodwind tremolo alternating open fifths and octaves. Over the

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top of this is the main theme for the Dutchman, similarly making use of the most “elemental” of intervals: fourths, fifths, and octaves, with only B-flat grace notes to decisively establish the tonality as D minor. The rapidity of the passage combined with the aggressiveness of the instrumental attack creates a sense of agitation; the prominence of “pure” intervals evokes the natural world. Combined, they render nature dangerous and frightening, a feeling only further emphasized by the chain of diminished-seventh chords making up the orchestral tutti mere measures later. Right from the outset, Wagner creates an atmosphere of sublime terror, consistent with gothic sensibilities. Furthermore, his adoption of tremolo strings to underscore nature’s fearsomeness is not dissimilar to the types of musical gestures that Weber employed to depict the eerie calm of the Wolf’s Glen in Der Freischütz (with Wagner obviously opting for loud instead of quiet), thus implicitly emphasizing its lineage to musical Schauerromantik ideas. Existing under an eternal curse placed upon by the Devil, the Dutchman himself is the character with the most obvious link to the Gothic and the Schauerroman. As Heine recounts, the legend of the Dutchman is that in vowing to the Devil that he will not yield in his efforts to traverse a stormy cape, he is doomed to sail the seas for eternity, only being allowed to go to shore every seven years, where the love of a woman can redeem him by remaining true to him until death. The presence of the Dutchman himself is what allows the opera to be classified as Gothic, as he and his crew of ghostly sailors are the supernatural elements in the story. What makes the Dutchman an especially disturbing figure is his indeterminacy: what sort of being, precisely, is he? Referring to him as any one of a ghost, an immortal human, or undead does not seem sufficient. The Dutchman as an individual is a “hybrid” figure, just as Goehr considers the opera a hybrid work: just as the piece lies somewhere between “opera” and “music drama,” the Dutchman is “unsettled” and “refuses to sit comfortably in any predetermined space.”38 He exists in a liminal state, between living and dead, neither fully one nor the other. The Dutchman’s uncertain classification emphasizes his uncanniness. It also allows him to be interpreted through the lens of several Gothic and Schauerroman conventions. His eternal alienation from society and his commensurate yearning to be freed from his state of perpetual torment situates him within the category that Simon Williams calls the “romantic hero.”39 Taking things a bit further, the Dutchman also qualifies as a “Gothic Hero,” which as Hughes points out is typically more akin to a villain than an aspirational figure, one who “is associated with some breach of moral, theological, or social convention that effectively separates him from regular humanity…his punishment often being not to die, but to live on, unfulfilled and occupied only with a past that cannot be atoned for.”40 This definition fits the Dutchman’s plight rather comfortably, although Wagner’s treatment is altogether more sympathetic to the Dutchman, avoiding making him into an outright rogue, even though the libretto makes clear that his curse has led many a woman who failed to uphold their oath of fidelity to eternal damnation. Gothic Heroes are naturally prevalent in German literature, with the monk Medardus (and his murderous doppelgänger) in The Devil’s Elixirs being the most enduring example. However, in Williams’ estimation, the “hero” that has a particular

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influence on Wagner’s Dutchman is Ruthven, the titular character from Marschner’s opera Der Vampyr (1828), an opera that Wagner conducted in 1833 (a performance for which Wagner added an allegro to one of the arias).41 In both Ruthven and the Dutchman, Williams sees two characters “who are demonic” and “yearn for redemption by women,” although the Dutchman’s more fleshed-out inner life renders him a less monstrous figure.42 John Deathridge takes the vampire comparison further, positing that the Dutchman and Senta are de facto vampires: they feed on each other’s narcissistic self-pity.43 Not for nothing, as Deathridge observes, does Wagner refer to Senta as “seemingly sickly and pale,” aligning herself with the “pale man” as described in her ballad about the Dutchman.44 The “pale” quality of the Dutchman thus seems to portray him as bereft of life, a creature of the undead that “feeds” upon the living to satiate his appetite for self-torment. Under this reading, that both are “pale” adds an unseemly edge to their courtship, one that provokes a “shudder” from the spectator. In any case, given the Gothic’s established fascination with revenants, the comparison of the Dutchman to a vampiric character helps situate him within milieu of the transgressive Gothic Hero. Heine’s offhand reference to the Dutchman as the “Wandering Jew of the ocean” provides a mythological component to him as a Gothic Hero, and one that potentially spoke to Wagner’s own biases.45 The “Wandering Jew,” (often named Ahasuerus) according to legend, mocked Christ’s suffering en route to the Crucifixion and was condemned to walk the earth until Judgement Day. As Dieter Borchmeyer observes, Heine and Wagner were not alone during the nineteenth century in framing the Flying Dutchman legend as a palimpsest of the Ahasuerus myth.46 However, it is almost obligatory within Wagner scholarship to note the similarities between the two when discussing the opera. Wagner himself wrung more material out of the myth: Kundry from his final opera Parsifal is an adaptation of Ahasuerus’ distaff counterpart Herodias.47 Certainly, being an itinerant outcast is consistent with some of the qualities of the Gothic Hero (and Hughes references the Wandering Jew as an example).48 But the reading of the Dutchman as a metaphorical Jew may have been of significance to Wagner: his well-documented anti-Semitism may well have found a degree of expression in the Dutchman’s status of abjection, at once a blasphemer, a demon, a pariah, and a harbinger of death. Granted, as Stephen McClatchie makes clear, it is overly reductive to frame Wagner’s Dutchman as purely an expression of Jew-hatred, especially since in A Communication to My Friends, he places the Wandering Jew alongside Odysseus as part of his self-mythologizing of his artistic development.49 Even so, the issue of anti-Semitism cannot be fully suppressed given what is known about the composer and as a consequence must implicate itself, if only as a disquieting thought, into the consideration of the Dutchman’s gothic lineages.50 Musically, the Dutchman’s introductory aria (No. 3, “Die Frist ist um”) provides the map for just about every aspect of his character. In it, he expresses his despair that he will once more engage in a (he believes) futile effort to find the faithful woman to redeem him and free him from his curse.51 As Grey writes, the piece is structured according to the principles of introductory accompanied recitative followed by a multisectional aria common to contemporaneous French and Italian opera.52 The sectionality of the formal plan allows the aria to traverse through contrasting textures

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and emotional states. As such, the aria is permitted to build up a significant degree of intensity as it progresses through the formal design. The accompaniment to the Dutchman’s introductory recitative as he arrives onshore provides a hint of gothic horror: the chromatic sextuplets in the violas and cellos instantly create an atmosphere of unease, an implication of threat to the Dutchman’s arrival. As he moves into the first section of the aria, describing his endless wanderings on the seas, the persistent sixteenth-note churn of the string accompaniment provides a musical sketch of the turbulent waves and storms endured in his travels. The C minor tonality of this section, along with the Dutchman’s ascription of monstrosity to the oceans (“How often into the sea’s deepest maw have I longingly hurled myself”)53 assigns a terrifying quality to the natural world consistent with gothic writing in general, and with the practices of the German Romantics in particular. In that sense, although the musical construction is distinct, the overall goal is not overly removed from the Wolf’s Glen scene in that both aim to elicit a musical “shudder” from nature, the earlier example through subtle suggestion, the latter more confrontational. The final section of the monologue gives voice to the Dutchman’s longing for his own destruction, lamenting that it will not come until Judgement Day in what amounts to “a kind of operatic Dies irae.”54 The sustained fortissimo octave-Gs in the brass anticipating the Dutchman’s eschatological yearnings come off as the sounding of Gabriel’s horn. The C major orchestral tuttis at the conclusion of his oration underscore the immensity of what the Dutchman desires (“Worlds, end your course! Eternal destruction, take me!”). It is here, arguably where the Dutchman’s plight takes on sublime, gothic terror: he is sympathetic in his torment, but he is also a figure of horror because his presence brings potentially grave threat, and not just to the female “victim” he is obligated to seek out (not for nothing does Senta’s nominal fiancé Erik proclaim more than once that she is being snared by Satan). The words he conveys, and the music through which they are transmitted suggest that potential apocalypse is imminent wherever this accursed figure goes. It is only through Wagner’s intervention that this time the Dutchman achieves redemption and transfiguration. These mere minutes of stage time are thus sufficient to characterize the Dutchman as a Schaueroper “hero.” The opera’s second act displays several more gothic traits. Much of its events are centralized around the portrait of the Dutchman that Senta obsesses over, which has precipitated her desire to redeem him. Mary Cicora points out that the opera’s motif of “the picture somehow doubling reality” owes a debt to E. T. A. Hoffmann, as does the opera’s clashing of two separate worlds (the supernatural realm of the Dutchman and the everyday world of the Norwegian fishing village).55 Recalling that Wagner sketched out a scenario for an operatic treatment for “The Mines of Falun” roughly contemporaneously with his work on Holländer, we can find a number of similarities that emphasize Cicora’s point. In Hoffmann’s story, the sailor Elis Fröbom traverses two worlds: the “normal” life of his seafaring expeditions for the East India Company, and the haunted mineshafts of Falun. That journey is precipitated by his meeting with (what is eventually revealed to be) the spectral Torbern, who suggests that Elis’ malaise may be ameliorated by pursuing mining at Falun. Elis is subsequently drawn to Falun by a dream depicting the mine’s depths as a world of

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untold treasures, presided over by its mysterious Queen. The fantasy doubles reality when Elis’ dreams beckoning him to the mine in the end prove to foretell his grisly death. This finds some affinity with Erik recounting his premonitory dream of Senta’s death during their second-act duet; in noting the similarity, Siegel emphasizes the significance of it being the only major addition Wagner made to Heine’s rendition of the Dutchman legend, the implication being that Wagner turned to Hoffmann for inspiration.56 Additional instances of uncanny doublings in the opera are similar to the events of Hoffmann’s story: during his initial dream, an angelic woman breaks the Queen’s spell, momentarily “rescuing” him from her clutches. When he later meets Ulla Dahlsjö, she is a perfect likeness for the benevolent woman in his dream. As both Siegel and Weiner observe, the redemptory power of the love of a beatific woman, who can save the hero from damnation, is a common theme for Wagner, which they both trace back to Ulla’s role in “Falun.”57 Ulla obviously resembles Senta in that they are both portrayed as prophesized brides who will save their beloveds from a supernatural curse, but Ulla also is reminiscent of Elisabeth in Tannhäuser where the invocation of her name ultimately pulls the titular knight away from the beckoning call of Venus, ensuring his salvation.58 Where Hoffmann and Wagner diverge is in the possibility of redemption: Senta’s sacrifice releases him from his curse, whereas Elis is ultimately unable to resist the Queen’s lure and returns to the mine where he is killed in a cave-in. These examples effectively underline the Holländer plot’s gothic flavourings. But I wish to draw further attention to the Senta/Erik duet briefly mentioned. In it, Erik recounts to Senta a dream he had where over a high cliff he observed two men arrive on shore: Senta’s father Daland and the sailor depicted in the portrait of the Dutchman. The dream concluded with Senta sailing away with the mysterious stranger. Erik’s dream is uncanny in that it matches events that the audience is not sure he personally witnessed (Daland’s meeting with the Dutchman) and anticipates occurrences yet to come, specifically Senta’s fatal plunge into the waters, which will ultimately release the Dutchman from his damned state. An especially interesting detail of this scene lies in the stage directions. An 1844 piano-vocal score inserted the following instructions: “Exhausted, Senta sits down in the armchair. From the beginning of Erik’s narration she sinks as if into a magnetic sleep, so that it appears as if she is dreaming the dream she is being told.”59 The reference to magnetic sleep naturally invokes the practice of animal magnetism/mesmerism popularized in the late eighteenth century by German doctor Franz Mesmer.60 This progenitor of hypnotism involved a “magnetizer” who would manipulate the “magnetic fluid” supposedly existing in all living things in order to (supposedly) bring about sundry curative effects. According to contemporary studies of magnetism, the “mesmerised” subject ostensibly passed through various stages of sleep; as the subject progressed further, s/he was said to display heightened awareness and insight, even clairvoyance.61 Certainly, magnetism’s alleged capacity to act as a conduit to forces unavailable to everyday experience makes it ideal fodder for gothic writing; considering Mesmer’s German heritage, it was also bound to appear in Schauerromane. Indeed, Hoffmann’s aforementioned story “Der Magnetiseur” (1814) bears this out. In that tale, two of the three magnetizers, the Danish Major and Alban are malevolent figures, who abuse

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magnetism to manipulate and control their victims.62 Immediately after completing it, he began sketching out “Der goldne Topf” (“The golden flowerpot,” 1814), which takes a more optimistic view of magnetism, where it is a “predominately positive force, capable of elevating an individual to a higher level of existence.”63 The point here is not to identify specific concurrences between these stories and Wagner’s opera, but to establish that it is likely that Wagner read them, given his affection for Hoffmann’s writing, and thus may have been an influence on Erik’s dream narration. With Senta drifting into a magnetic sleep after Erik announces “I had a dream! Heed its warning!”, he in effect seeks to become a magnetizer, guiding Senta’s consciousness away from what he sees as the demonic hold over her. For that reason, as Syer writes, Erik endeavours to use mesmerism as a means towards exorcism (she notes that a study undertaken in 1775 sought to compare the curative potentials of mesmerism and exorcism, with Mesmer opposing supernatural concerns).64 From his perspective, his efforts fail as the conclusion of his narrative breaks Senta out of her sleep: Erik’s attempt at mesmerism brings about a flash of insight, but it is seemingly a confirmation to Senta that it is her destiny to sacrifice her life for the sake of the Dutchman’s redemption, leading to the act’s concluding duet between her and the Dutchman where she pledges her fidelity. This section of the score (No. 5, mm. 241–293) does much to musically suggest the state of magnetic sleep. It is significant that the dream narration is communicated by declamatory arioso vocal lines: it “emphasizes the monotone repetitions often characteristic of oracular, visionary speech in opera.”65 More than that, the eschewal of aria-like phrase structure and melodic contour creates a greater sense of stasis, a comparative lack of forward momentum indicative of a dream-like state. Complimenting this is the orchestration of the passage: much of it is subtly and sparsely scored, as though the orchestra were at rest, providing a sedate instrumental stage for Erik to magnetize Senta and guide her perceptions away from her supernatural preoccupations. Another way to observe the musical construction is that Erik’s declamatory tone situates him as the “analyst” treating the “patient” in a psychoanalytic session. However, as the narration progresses, we hear several iterations of the Dutchman motive in the bass, each statement either a half-step or full-step higher than the previous one, as though it were an omnipresent spectre haunting the proceedings. Tellingly, several of these entries of the motive occur during Senta’s brief interrogative interjections (in essence “talking in her sleep”), as both parties’ emotional states become intensified. As Erik’s narration closes on an F, seemingly setting up a cadence in B-flat minor, Senta dramatically emerges from her sleep, as a rapid chromatic ascent in the violins/violas marks her assertion over the harmonic progression, using the F to pull the tonality towards C major as she proclaims “in extreme rapture” that the Dutchman seeks her for his salvation. Senta’s magnetic sleep failed to “exorcise” the “demons” from her, but rather further bound her to the fate she had prophesized for herself. As Erik “rushes away in horror and despair,” the orchestra scores his retreat with rapid figures that continually outline an E diminishedseventh chord, the musical “shudder” conveying his terror over what he now sees as confirmation of her possessed nature.

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Secret societies are no stranger to Wagner’s work. The most obvious example of this is the Grail Knights inhabiting Montsalvat, alluded to in Lohengrin’s third-act monologue, and depicted in Parsifal (recall that Lohengrin identifies Parzival as his father in the earlier work). As Gurnemanz explains to Parsifal, this community is accessible only to those deemed worthy. Other examples of societies existing away from conventional culture are depicted in Wagner, even if they are not “secret” per se: the Venusberg in Tannhäuser, or even the gods of Valhalla in the Ring who orchestrate the world’s laws and organizing customs and myths away from human sight. As previously established, secret societies are a long-standing gothic convention, and a frequent concern of the Schauerroman. As Daniel Hall notes, gothic fiction in general finds its origins in and reflects the massive social upheavals of the late eighteenth century, particularly “the uncertainties of the French Revolution.”66 The difficulty in coming to terms with such immense changes lead to fear and paranoia over the manipulation of society by unseen forces.67 Murnane posits that the German Gothic expressed similar anxieties over the spreading Enlightenment discourse throughout Europe, especially as it pertained to the presence of secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati in German culture.68 As such, the Räuber-, Ritter-, and Schauerroman set out to provide a culture uneasy about the increasing modernity it was facing a stage to work through its fears about changes they did not fully understand.69 Disquiet over cultural turmoil certainly would not have abated in nineteenthcentury Germany. Wagner’s birth year of 1813 saw the German lands embroiled in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, with the Battle of the Nations in October of that year an event of particular gravity. As Syer makes clear, these conflicts were some of the central reasons that 1813 was such a formative year in terms of the burgeoning nation-consciousness of the German people.70 It is therefore plausible to speculate that the Gothic’s interest in revenants and secret societies was equally adept at giving voice to the German people’s uncertainties about their cultural identity; as the decades wore on, the German people encountered a number of antagonists threatening the formation of a national character, from the foreign threats of Napoleon to the monarchial and aristocratic authorities standing in the way of the revolutionaries’ push for republican reforms. As Wagner states at the conclusion of his “Autobiographic Sketch,” upon his return from Paris, his first site of the Rhine led him to swear lasting fidelity to his homeland.71 This was the Wagner that had recently completed Holländer and was only a few years away from participating in the 1848–1849 Revolutions. I am admittedly going out on a limb with these preceding suppositions, but I make them to surmise that the “secret society” in the form of the chorus of the Dutchman’s crew might convey some degree of political undercurrents as the societies of the eighteenth century, although to clarify I am not going so far as to specifically allegorize them for any specific issue.72 The ghostly sailors that man the Dutchman’s vessel are not strictly a “secret” society in that their legend clearly precedes them and their vessel is visible to all and sundry in the village. Nonetheless, one can thematize them as a variant of the convention: they are a separate community from that of the village, operating independently. They remain invisible to the villagers until they

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are roused for their most significant number (No. 7, “Johohoe! Johohoe!”), and even then, stay aboard their ship and have no direct contact with the human population. Most importantly, the spectral crew are regarded with trepidation by the villagers, and then outright fear as their choral “duel” reaches its climax. If they are not wholly unknown to everyday society, the Dutchman’s crew are nonetheless a shadowy group that exists outside of the boundaries of accepted culture, their abnormality is seen as a threat to the villagers’ well-being. After some joshing from the villagers, the supernatural sailors are finally stirred. The stage directions are of interest: at the beginning of the act, they make clear that the Norwegian and Dutch ships are docked next to each other, but that the Dutch vessel is “shrouded in unnatural gloom and deathly silence.” When the “invisible crew is…roused to life” a spontaneous churning of the waters around the vessel (remaining calm everywhere else) takes place and a blue watch-fire erupts to illuminate the ship. The directions appear to confirm the Flying Dutchman’s status as a cloistered community that operates away from “normal” society. That they are cloaked in “gloom and silence” adds an air of mystery to them as does their persistent intangibility to the village denizens. The Dutch crew seem to be able to alter the forces of nature, either by command or just as a symbol of their haunting presence. Taken together, their “society” is one of inscrutability and strangeness that inflames the fearful wings of the imagination; their “secrecy” is enough to provoke feelings of sublime terror through their manifestation. The Dutch chorus announces themselves through a statement of the Dutchman theme (along with the tremolo figure in the accompaniment), which leads into a macabre travesty of a wedding song in mockery of yet another anticipated failure of their captain to find a faithful bride. Shrill piccolos punctuate the texture, adding an abrasive, unsettling edge to the music. Wagner’s score also calls for a wind machine to depict the “gale howling in the rigging,” an exploitation of orchestral machinery to give an aural image of the ship’s uncanny ability to localize extreme variations of weather solely around itself. The crew’s demonic shanty comes off as brazen, a challenge to the bravado of the Norwegians. Yet, the fact that they never disembark from their ship, never directly interact with the villagers keeps them enigmatic. The Norwegians, hearing the crewmen’s song and witnessing the watery and windy tumult around the ship, react to all of this “first with astonishment, then with terror.” In an endeavour to purge their fear, the Norwegians resume the songs they teased the Dutch crewmen with in an (ultimately vain) attempt to drown out their opponents. From a dramaturgical standpoint, this is certainly an example of what James Parakilas demonstrates as one of the persistent traits of nineteenth-century opera: the use of the operatic chorus to stage political and social conflict through contrasting vocal groups.73 For Cicora, the “stand-off” functions as a dual occurrence of the Dutchman legend: all participants on stage know of the legend and thus “know that a legend is taking place again, but a second time, and on another level from that…on which it originally…existed.”74 Cicora suggests that this is an example of romantic irony, as the characters become momentarily aware that they are in a nineteenth-century retelling of the legend.75 I would add that it is that underlying suspicion that they are in the midst of a new iteration of the Dutchman mythology that drives the Norwegians’

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terror and motivates them to endeavour to exorcise it. The effort ends up futile, as the Dutch crew’s song “reaches a pitch of Berlioz-like pandemonium” as the Norwegians become overwhelmed with fright and make the sign of the cross, provoking a burst of laughter from the wandering spirits.76 The dread brought about by this incorporeal society is too much for this rustic fishing village; in a conflict between two cultures, the one bringing terror prevails. The retreating shudder of the Norwegians reveals underlying anxieties that destabilize their sense of cohesive communal identity. As such, it suggests that the sinister societies of the Schauerromantik continued into the nineteenth century to speak to persisting tensions about the ongoing efforts to construct and fortify a distinctive cultural character. Der fliegende Holländer’s incorporation of the gothic tropes of the Hero and the secret society and its debt to the Schauerromane of E. T. A. Hoffmann effectively demonstrate just how wide a net Wagner cast in terms of gathering influences for his ideas about the integration of music and drama. Beyond his well-known reverence for myth as the foundation of society and the idealized driving force for drama, he was clearly not content to limit himself. The German literary world and the operatic output of his early years weighed upon him to a significant degree and made their way into his musical practices. For that reason, passing references to the Schauerromantik influences on Holländer sell short a rich source of inquiry into the literary and cultural heritage of Wagner’s work for the stage, of which I hope the preceding pages have rectified to at least a small degree. It is not sufficient to perfunctorily classify this earliest of Wagner’s canonical operas as a “ghost story” or a “romantic opera” or even a Schaueroper without pursuing the implications of such terms. In short, it is important to more closely examine why it is important that the Dutchman elicits a shudder. Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

As Stephen McClatchie observes, Holländer’s “canonical” status was fully solidified only upon its debut performance at the Festival in 1901 (nearly eighteen years after Wagner’s death). Even then, McClatchie notes, Wagner aficionados and commentators continued to assign the opera a comparatively marginal position in the pantheon. See “Canonizing the Dutchman: Bayreuth, Wagnerism, and Der fliegende Holländer,” Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer, ed. Thomas Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume I: The Artwork of the Future (1895), trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 371. McClatchie notes that this language portrays the opera in terms of the ideas about “music drama” that he developed for the Ring cycle. See “Canonizing the Dutchman,” 152. Lydia Goehr, “Undoing the Discourse of Fate: The Case of Der fliegende Holländer,” The Opera Quarterly 21/3 (Summer 2005): 430–432. Thomas Grey, “The Return of the Prodigal Son: Wagner and Der fliegende Holländer,” Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer, 6.

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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Ibid. Robert Miles, “Eighteenth-Century Gothic,” The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 10–18. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions—2nd Edition (London: Methuen, 1986). Jerrold E. Hogle, “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture,” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14–15. William Hughes, Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 111. Barry Murnane, “Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic,” Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000, eds. Andrew Cusack and Barry Murnane (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 11–13. J.W. Appell, Die Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauerromantik: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Unterhaltungsliteratur (1859). Cited in Michael Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre: A Search for the German Gothic Novel (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978), 13. Murnane, 13. Hadley earlier noted that the advent of the term Schauerroman only came about after the translation of the major English gothic novels into German. See Hadley, 147. David Hill, ed. Literature of the Sturm und Drang (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003). Murnane, 12–17. James Landes, “The Kantian Analytic of the Sublime in Tieck’s ‘Runenberg,’” Colloquia Germanica 42/1 (2009): 5. Ibid., 8. Jürgen Barkhoff, “‘The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb’: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller’s Der Geisterseher,” Popular Revenants, 44. Murnane, 23. Hughes, 112. Christopher R. Clason contrasts the oft-negative reception of the novel in Hoffmann’s time and well beyond, and the increased appreciation posterity has afforded it in “Narrative ‘Teasing’: Withholding Closure in Hoffmann’s Elixiere des Teufels,” Colloquia Germanica 42/1 (2009): 81–82. Richard Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 17. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 66. Linda Siegel, “Wagner and the Romanticism of E.T.A. Hoffmann,” The Musical Quarterly 51/4 (October 1965): 598. Marc A. Weiner, “Richard Wagner’s Use of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Mines of Falun,’” 19th-Century Music 5/3 (Spring 1982): 201–214. As Holly Watkins

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26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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notes, Dessauer had hoped to sell the scenario to the Paris Opéra (Wagner had sold the scenario for Holländer to the Opéra in 1839, which is what prompted Dessauer’s request). The Opéra rejected the “Falun” project, whereupon Wagner left Paris in April 1842 and returned to Germany. See Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E.T.A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119. Dieter Borchmeyer notes that while the play is of Heine’s invention, he nonetheless may have had in mind Edward Fitzball’s The Flying Dutchman: or, The Phantom Ship which, according to Borchmeyer, Heine could have seen in London in 1827. See Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, trans. Daphne Ellis (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 79. Joachim Köhler, Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 134–139. “Autobiographic Sketch” (1843), Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume I: The Artwork of the Future (1895), 13–14, 17. Köhler further points out (139) that in such subsequent writings as A Communication to My Friends and My Life, Wagner nearly expunges Heine’s influence completely. Two prominent examples: Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 7–9; Grey, Der fliegende Holländer, Appendix A, 166–169. Jörg Kreienbrock, “Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel,” Popular Revenants, 123–143. John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 268. Ibid., 303. Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 76– 115; Michael C. Tusa, “Cosmopolitanism and the National Opera: Weber’s Der Freischütz,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36/3 (Winter, 2006): 483–506. Meyer explores Weber’s use of orchestral textures and harmonic language to set the scene in Carl Maria von Weber, 96–106. Ibid., 118. “Le Freischutz,” (1841), Wagner Writes from Paris: Stories, Essays, and Articles by the Young Composer, trans. and ed. Robert L. Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), 138–155. “Overture to Der fliegende Holländer” (1852), Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer, 192. Goehr, 432. Simon Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8–13. Hughes, Gothic Literature, 127. Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero, 39. Wagner mentions this occurrence in My Life, 73.

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42. Williams, 41. 43. John Deathridge, Wagner—Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 22–23. 44. Ibid., 23–24. 45. Grey, Der fliegende Holländer, 167. 46. Borchmeyer, 87. 47. Ibid., 89–90. 48. Ibid., 127. 49. Stephen McClatchie, “The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, and Wagner’s Anti-Semitism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 81/4 (Fall 2012): 886–888. 50. Deathridge quotes a parody of the ballad that Wagner created (for his own amusement) after drafting his initial French scenario in 1840 (“the poor devil dances well/his pig’s foot doesn’t spoil it/Houih! he dances well”) that draws upon the stereotype of the Jew having a deformed foot and the Grimm fairy tale of a Jew forced to dance to the music of a boy’s violin. See Wagner, 19. 51. Wagner will return to this type of anguished monologue several times: for example, the mortally wounded Tristan longing for Isolde’s return, and the similarly injured Amfortas, in agony over the wound that will not heal, pleading to be allowed to die in Parsifal. Even Hans Sachs’ “Wahn” monologue in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, where he laments the illusion and suffering of the world, is not far removed from the Dutchman’s oration. 52. Grey, “Text, Action, and Music,” Der fliegende Holländer, 43–44. 53. All translations from the libretto are by Gwyn Morris (1960). 54. Grey, “Text, Action, and Music,” 45. 55. Mary A. Cicora, Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner’s Music-Dramas (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), 35. 56. Siegel, 598. 57. Siegel, 598–599; Weiner, 207. 58. Weiner notes that Hoffmann’s “Ulla/Queen” duality serves the same function as the “Elisabeth/Venus” one in Tannhäuser. See Weiner, 207. Watkins similarly maintains that Ulla/Elisabeth represent surface worlds of “socially sanctioned love” contrasted with the “underground realms of temptation” presided over by the Queen and Venus. See Watkins, 119. 59. Katherine R. Syer, Wagner’s Visions: Poetry, Politics, and the Psyche in the Operas Through Die Walküre (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 90. 60. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Alan Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 61. Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge, Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel (1811), cited in Syer, 91.

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62. Sara Luly, “Magnetism and Masculinity in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Magnetiseur,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 88/4 (2013): 418–434. 63. Liane Bryson, “Romantic Science: Hoffmann’s Use of the Natural Sciences in ‘Der goldne Topf,’” Monatschefte 91/2 (Summer, 1999): 241. 64. Syer, 101. 65. Grey, “Text, Action, and Music,” Der fliegende Holländer, 53. 66. Daniel Hall, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 149. 67. Ibid., 149–184. 68. Murnane, 17. 69. Ibid., 18. 70. Syer, 1–9. 71. Prose Works Volume I, 19. 72. Although Borchmeyer does suggest that the Dutchman and his crew’s dispossessed status expresses a longing for a “homeland” that in part speaks to Wagner’s feelings of homelessness during his time in Paris, not “belonging” there, but knowing a return to Germany is not politically ideal. In that sense, the “society” of the Flying Dutchman longs for an idealized German homeland that does not currently exist and may never be found. See Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, 93–96. 73. James Parakilas, “Political Representation and the Chorus in NineteenthCentury Opera,” 19th-Century Music 16/2 (Fall 1992): 181-202; “The Chorus,” The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76–92. 74. Cicora, Modern Myths, 46. 75. Ibid., 47. 76. Grey, “Text, Action, and Music,” 60.

Bibliography Borchmeyer, Dieter. Drama and the World of Richard Wagner. Translated by Daphne Ellis. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bryson, Liane. “Romantic Science: Hoffmann’s Use of the Natural Sciences in ‘Der goldne Topf.’” Monatschefte 91/2 (Summer 1999): 241–255. Charlton, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cicora, Mary A. Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner’s Music-Dramas. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2000. Clason, Christopher R. “Narrative ‘Teasing’: Withholding Closure in Hoffmann’s Elixiere des Teufels.” Colloquia Germanica 42/1 (2009): 81–92. Crabtree, Alan. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Cusack, Andrew and Barry Murnane, eds. Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.

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Dahlhaus, Carl. Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas. Translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Deathridge, John. Wagner—Beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Goehr, Lydia. “Undoing the Discourse of Fate: The Case of Der fliegende Holländer.” The Opera Quarterly 21/3 (Summer 2005): 430–451. Grey, Thomas, ed. Richard Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hadley, Michael. The Undiscovered Genre: A Search for the German Gothic Novel. Berne: Peter Lang, 1978. Hall, Daniel. French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. Hill, David, ed. Literature of the Sturm und Drang. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003. Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hughes, William. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Köhler, Joachim. Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans. Translated by Stewart Spencer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Landes, James. “The Kantian Analytic of the Sublime in Tieck’s ‘Runenberg.’” Colloquia Germanica 42/1 (2009): 5–18. Luly, Sara. “Magnetism and Masculinity in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Magnetiseur.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 88/4 (2013): 418–434. McClatchie, Stephen. “The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, and Wagner’s Anti-Semitism.” University of Toronto Quarterly 81/4 (Fall 2012): 877–892. Meyer, Stephen C. Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Parakilas, James. “Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera.” 19thCentury Music 16/2 (Fall 1992): 181–202. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions—2nd Edition. London: Methuen, 1986. Siegel, Linda. “Wagner and the Romanticism of E.T.A. Hoffmann.” The Musical Quarterly 51/4 (October 1965): 597–613. Spooner, Catherine and Emma McEvoy, eds. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Syer, Katherine R. Wagner’s Visions: Poetry, Politics, and the Psyche in the Operas Through Die Walküre. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014. Tatar, Maria M. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Tusa. Michael C. “Cosmopolitanism and the National Opera: Weber’s Der Freischütz.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36/3 (Winter, 2006): 483–506. Wagner, Richard. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 8 vols. (1892–1899). Translated by William Ashton Ellis. New York: Broude Brothers, 1966. ———. Wagner Writes from Paris: Stories, Essays, and Articles by the Young Composer. Translated and edited by Robert L. Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972. ———. My Life, ed. Mary Whittall. Translated by Andrew Grey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Watkins, Holly. Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E.T.A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Warrack, John. German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Weiner, Marc A. “Richard Wagner’s Use of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Mines of Falun.’” 19th -Century Music 5/3 (Spring 1982): 201–214. Williams, Simon. Wagner and the Romantic Hero. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Decadent Gothic

Aestheticism and Decadence in Britain and France Giles Whiteley

The movement of aestheticism and its doctrine of ‘l’art pour l’art’ has its origins in the tradition of French Romantic Gothic. In his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) took issue with contemporary journalism written in the wake of the July Revolution (1830), and indeed, with the entire history of French literature since the seventeenth century. Emblematised by Molière (JeanBaptiste Poquelin) (1622–1672), such a literary tradition had reduced art to a question of (Christian) morality. For Gautier, ‘the only things that are really beautiful are those which have no use’, for ‘everything that is useful is ugly’.1 The phrasing compares with another famous preface, written in English and dating to the end of the century. Defending his gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) against its critics, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) argued that ‘those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming’, for ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’.2 As perhaps the most famous spokesperson for, and the most visible exponent of, decadence in Britain during the period, Wilde argues that what makes art great is not its subject matter or moral, but style and treatment. Beauty not only could be found in unlikely subjects, but should be. As Wilde’s friend and mentor Walter Pater (1839–1894) put it, any idea ‘which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience […] has no real claim on us’.3 This chapter surveys the ways in which the aestheticism and decadence of the nineteenth century intersects with the Gothic. I focus primarily on literature emerging from Britain and France, and specifically on the Gothic of Charles Baudelaire (1821– 1867), Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), Walter Pater, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) (1856–1935). I also discuss the contributions of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), Oscar Wilde and Arthur Machen (Arthur Llewellyn Jones) (1863–1947), although these key figures of fin de siècle Gothic are given less space on the grounds that other chapters in this volume are devoted solely G. Whiteley (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_41

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to their work. In what follows, aestheticism, understood primarily as a doctrine of art, is read in relation to decadence, a literary movement, but one that is linked to the wider intellectual and historical context of the late nineteenth century. From the French décadence, ‘decadence’ derives etymologically from the Latin de-cad¯ere, a falling away or decaying from a state of prior excellence. It originated in the Middle Ages as a moment of Christian commentary on the supposed moral failings that caused great civilisations to topple. This was a topic that fascinated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, as in Edward Gibbon’s (1737–1794) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), underwritten philosophically by enlightenment theories of history developed by figures such as Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). They offered narratives of progress, reading history teleologically as an irresistible story of the gradual perfecting of humanity. Indeed, the history and origin of gothic literature are intimately bound up with such philosophies of history. The Whig politician Horace Walpole (1717–1794), whose The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first ‘Gothic Story’ (a subtitle added to the second edition of 1765), argued that the British nation had a Gothic, as opposed to classical, heritage. For Whig historians, that which marked Britain’s greatness was its system of parliamentary democracy, which they read as precipitated by the Civil War (1642–1651), and retroactively as a necessary, if belated result of Henry VIII’s 1533 break with Catholicism. Britain cast off the Roman yoke of the Papacy in a moment of resistance, which was creatively contextualised by the Whigs alongside the Visigoths’ Sack of Rome of 410. For this reason, figures such as Walpole championed the Gothic, promoting it over and above the neoclassicism dominant during the middle of the eighteenth century. Of course, as Walpole’s novel shows, this ‘progressive’ reading of gothic history was precarious at best, bypasing those ghostly presences and acts of violence intimately tied to medieval feudal power. But this notwithstanding, Whiggish enlightenment progressivism, which had been shown by the fin de siècle to be both untenable and often unpalatable, was precisely the kind of ideology that decadence reacted against. Gautier’s attack on enlightenment moralising offers an early skirmish in the decadent responses to nineteenth-century historicism. But if his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin is generally credited as being the first open statement of literary aestheticism, he was not alone among the Romantics in his interest either in the autonomy of art or in its intersection with the Gothic. In Britain, John Keats (1795–1821) concluded his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819) with the famous lines, ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”’,4 claiming an identity of the aesthetic and philosophical truth. This kind of privileging of the aesthetic is also witnessed in Keats’ fascination with the Gothic. In ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1819) and ‘Lamia’ (1820), two poems written during the same, extraordinarily productive period of 1819, two femmes fatale, figures of arresting beauty, are simultaneously figured as monsters, succubi or vampires. The poems foreground what Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] (1920), would call ‘thanatos’, the death drive, that mingling of sexual desire and sadistic pleasure that propels the subject towards its dissolution. It is this idea that, in preliminary forms, also underwrote Freud’s essay on ‘Das Unheimliche’ [‘The “Uncanny”’] (1919), his reading

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of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1821) and one of the cornerstones of the psychoanalytic theorisation of the Gothic.5 Here, Freud argues that the uncanny disturbs the reader, registering a return of the repressed, troubling the subject’s sense of identity: Keats’ Belle Dame and lamia are precisely uncanny figures, whose beauty promises death, mobilising long-repressed desires in the (male) subject. Alongside the work of Keats, another significant Romantic precursor of gothic aestheticism is Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), hugely influential on the French tradition. Baudelaire, who first encountered Poe in 1847, prepared four translations of his works published 1856– 1865, while Mallarmé published a translation of ‘The Raven’ (1845), illustrated by Édouard Manet (1832–1883) in 1875. The following year, he published his elegy, ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ [The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe], and translated Poe’s poetry in 1889, dedicating his translation to Baudelaire. Themes of decadence, linked to physical, moral and social degeneration, are ones which Poe foregrounds in his Gothic, perhaps most famously in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). In this story, Roderick Usher is a proto-aesthete, rich and isolating himself from the material realities of modernity in his crumbling mansion. He suffers from ennui, seeking to alleviate it through a life of learned leisure, pursuing music, painting and poetry. The Usher House’s ‘deficiency’,6 its hereditary decline, implied to be a result of incest, is a theme which Huysmans would play upon in discussing the ‘dissolution’ of the House of des Esseintes in his important novel À rebours (1884).7 In works such as ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Poe unmistakably links aestheticism to decadence, and both to the Gothic. The most significant landmark in the new aesthetic literary movement was the publication in 1857 of the radical volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil], a work that saw both Baudelaire and his publisher prosecuted for an offence against public morals. The volume begins with ‘Au lecteur’ [To the Reader], an extraordinary opening gambit, in which Baudelaire addresses his reader directly as his double or ‘twin’, suggesting they are complicit in Les Fleurs du mal and take their place alongside its characters. The ‘evil’ of this volume is at once ancient and modern, the devil pulling the strings, ‘the alchemist / Satan Thrice-Great’. Whether Baudelaire intends us to take Satan literally or allegorically has been the subject of scholarly debate, but regardless, it is under his diabolical influence that the nineteenthcentury subject finds himself stepping ‘each day […] further into Hell’. The vision of French society is of a ‘demon nation’, teeming with death. ‘If slaughter, or arson, poison, rape / Have not yet adorned our fine designs’, it is simply because ‘our spirit lacks the nerve’, Baudelaire’s persona opines, reading the subject as a ‘design’ or a work of art, one who is able to find charm ‘in the most repugnant objects’.8 This kind of crepuscular aestheticism is perhaps most famously emblematised by ‘Une charogne’ [A carcass], in which the speaker recalls the day he and his lover came upon a corpse in the countryside. The ‘superb carcass’ had been rotting in the summer heat, a horrific vision of the degradation of the flesh, but also an erotic one, its legs ‘spread out like a lecherous whore’, opening ‘in slick invitational style / Her stinking and festering womb’.9 The gesture towards necrophilia, a taboo topic which we find a recurrent motif throughout gothic literary history, is also precisely one in which an

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aestheticism, which holds all objects as potential sites of beauty, may also fall into a decadence, the cadaver quite literally in a state of decay. This broadened sense of the beautiful is linked throughout Les Fleurs du mal to modern man’s propensity towards ‘excessive’ experiences of pleasure. In the ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ poems, Baudelaire images the corruption of mid-nineteenthcentury Paris, its pages populated by gamblers, drunkards, drug-addicts and prostitutes. Developing Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) point in Das Passagenwerk [The Arcades Project] (1927–1940), which considers Baudelaire the allegorist of the modern city,10 we might argue that Baudelairean allegory revisions modern Paris as a metropolitan gothic landscape. Thus in ‘Le Cygne’ [The Swan], the ghostly presence of the past, allegorised through the figure of a swan which is also a ‘sign’ (its homophone, ‘le signe’), is seen floating ethereally through the newly renovated streets laid by Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891).11 Likewise, in ‘Danse macabre’, haute couture consumer fetishism is read as complicit with sexual fetishism, evacuating the body of life and mobilising desire in the object, both expressions of the death drive. The interrogative ‘who has not embraced a skeleton?’ by extension makes the modern city a necropolis.12 Indeed, this sense in which contemporary Paris has become a space of transgression in which desires hitherto repressed have their gothic return, is treated in a number of the most infamous poems of Les Fleurs du mal. In ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’, desire infects subjects, corrupting them and possessing their soul, making them living dead. A vampiric woman ‘drain[s] the marrow out of all my bones’, before this encounter is revealed as a dream and the vampire allegorical of capitalism.13 Baudelaire’s vampires also trouble gender, with the attraction of homoerotic desire another leitmotif of his poetry. In ‘Lesbos’, the speaker fantasises about the figure of the lesbian and the ‘wild cascades’ and ‘excesses’ of their sexual transgressions.14 As he puts it in ‘Femmes damnées’ [Condemned Women], such figures are ‘lamentable victims’ running at the ‘limits of desire’, finding their ‘passion’ ‘unsatisfied’ in ‘The harsh sterility of all [their] acts of lust’.15 Sex and death are locked in a chiastic structure, with Paris figured as a hedonistic and nightmarish playground of the flesh. In ‘Spleen (II), Baudelaire characterises the nineteenth-century subject as a modern monster. Their ‘sullen skull’ is haunted, ‘a pyramid, a giant vault / Holding more corpses than a common grave’, ‘a graveyard hated by the moon’.16 In this radical diagnosis of the age, Les Fleurs du mal was hugely influential on the development of aestheticism on both sides of the Channel. In Britain, one of the first to recognise its significance was Algernon Charles Swinburne, also among the first to translate the doctrine of l’art pour l’art into English-language criticism. In William Blake (1868), an essay on the Romantic poet (1857–1827), written around 1865, Swinburne recommends ‘art for art’s sake first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to her’.17 Educated at Oxford, but leaving without a degree, Swinburne identified with the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1860s, friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). He courted controversy, telling extravagant stories of his own decadence. In a diary entry dating to 1883, Edmond de Goncourt

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(1822–1896), brother of Remy (1858–1915), both leading figures of French Naturalism, said that Wilde thought Swinburne embellished his stories: he was ‘a braggart in the matter of vice’, having attempted ‘to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality, without being in the slightest degree a homosexual and a bestializer’.18 While no definitive evidence regarding Swinburne’s homosexuality has survived, what is certain is that he had an addictive personality, suffering from alcoholism, and was a masochist, enjoying flagellation. Through his friendship with Cambridge Apostle and member of parliament Richard Monckton Milnes (1809– 1885), he became introduced to the works of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), in whom Swinburne saw someone unwilling to turn a blind eye to intoxicating pleasures, the ‘sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid relish of suffering felt or inflicted’,19 qualities he also recognised in Baudelaire. In his 1862 review of Les Fleurs du mal, Swinburne lauded its author for choosing ‘to dwell mainly upon sad and strange things – the weariness of pain and the bitterness of pleasure – the perverse happiness and wayward sorrows of exceptional people’.20 Swinburne’s volume of Poems and Ballads (1866) shocked readers and reviewers upon its first publication. The dramatic monologue ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ is spoken from the point of view of a pagan, bemoaning the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of Rome in 379. Anticipating Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Swinburne’s speaker considers Christianity, rather than the pagan’s own faith, the mark of spiritual and cultural ‘decadence’: ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; / We have drunk of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.’21 If ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ scandalised the Victorian religious community, in poems like ‘Hermaphroditus’, Swinburne also challenged conventional Victorian morality, problematising normative images of the gendered body and sexual desire. His hermaphrodite is an erotic and eroticised figure, who is swept up in an ‘amorous air’, refusing to make a reductive choice between their ‘two loves’.22 The subject of Swinburne’s poem was the Borghese Hermaphroditus held in the Louvre, a sculpture which also fascinated both Wilde and Gautier, as when the protagonist of The Picture of Dorian Gray, having recently murdered Basil Hallward, tries to take his mind off the deed by reading Gautier’s poem on the Hermaphroditus, ‘Contralto’, from his 1852 volume Émaux et Camées [Enamels and Cameos].23 Related themes are developed in Swinburne’s poems dealing with lesbianism, ‘Sapphics’ and the monologue ‘Anactoria’, both of which also pick up on themes developed in Les Fleurs du mal. As in Baudelaire’s ‘Lesbos’ and his two poems on the vampire, Swinburne figures lesbian desire as an exotic and intense loss of the self. Written in the imagined voice of the historical figure who was the lover of Sappho, Anactoria’s ‘insatiable’ sexual hunger is a heady mix of sadism and masochism, a desire to possess as well as to punish the other: ‘I feel thy blood against my blood: my pain / Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein’.24 She fantasises of having Sappho slain in an ‘intense device, and superflux of pain’, to ‘vex’ her with ‘amorous agonies’.25 Swinburne’s extraordinary command of metre and rhythm in the poem combines with local effects of alliteration, assonance and sibilance, pulling the reader into the feverish intensity of Anactoria’s dreams. She becomes another vampire figure, ‘feeding’ off Sappho, and fantasises about ‘consuming’ her

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body in a motif of cannibalism which simultaneously expresses her own death drive, so that Sappho might be entombed in her own flesh.26 In October 1868, two years after the publication of Poems and Ballads, an anonymous essay on ‘Poems by William Morris’ appeared in the Westminster Review, the same year that Swinburne published William Blake. The review concluded by advocating an aestheticist philosophy of life of ‘burn[ing] always with [a] hard gem-like flame’, living an ‘intensive’ life.27 The author was the young Oxford don Walter Pater, who would rework these passages into his infamous ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). This work was hugely influential on a whole generation of young aesthetes, including Wilde who would famously reflect on the ‘strange influence’ of the book on his life in De Profundis (1905), written from a prison cell at Reading Gaol after his conviction for homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency’ under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act.28 The review’s final sentences stand with Swinburne’s essay in its succinct summary of the new aesthetic philosophy. For Pater, ‘success in life’ lay in experiences of ‘poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake’, ‘for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’.29 Pater is one of the most important writers of the aesthetic Gothic. His discussion Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) La Gioconda [The Mona Lisa] (c. 1513), first published in 1869 and later included in his Renaissance, is rightly praised for its style, and was influential on disciples such as Wilde.30 This famous encomium to that ‘presence that […] so strangely rose besides the waters’, an image of ‘strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’, reads the painting’s subject as a form of the living dead. In this, Pater’s radical approach to the Renaissance sees in the movement not simply a classical revival, but a gothic one. ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave’, so that ‘Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea’.31 Reading the figure’s ‘strangeness’, a term which is repeated and which was coded during the period, implying homoerotic desire, Pater’s representation of the sexually charged figure of the vampire builds on Swinburne and Baudelaire. Pater was also influenced by the Frenchman: Les Fleurs du mal was published when he was eighteen, its effect on the young Pater given fictional treatment in the historical novel, Gaston de Latour (1888), where the protagonist, himself around the same age, discovers Pierre de Ronsard’s (1524–1585) Odes (1550). For Gaston, this book stands for ‘modernity’ (the title of the chapter), defined as ‘the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent’, in a silent quotation from Baudelaire’s essay ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ [The Painter of Modern Life] (1863).32 In the Odes, Gaston first discovers that beautiful art can sometimes touch on less elevated subjects, that ‘there were “flowers of evil”, among the rest’.33 Indeed, Pater was fascinated with what he calls the quality of the ‘macabre’ that he had discovered in the Romanticism of Gautier and his peers, ‘that species of almost insane pre-occupation with the materialities of our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption’.34

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Gaston de Latour is important for understanding another of the contexts for Pater’s Gothic. Set during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), the novel witnesses Gaston’s appreciation of French gothic architecture, most notably at Notre-Dame de Chartres. It would be this church that Huysmans would write about so remarkably in La cathédrale (1898), part of a tradition of French writing on its medieval heritage that would reach its crowning glory in Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) Le Temps retrouvé [Time Regained] (1927).35 Interest in gothic architecture during the nineteenth century was growing on both sides of the Channel, marked by that quintessential work of French Romantic Gothic, Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) NotreDame de Paris (1831). In the influential work of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), for instance, there was an attempt to reconceptualise the Gothic, moving away from a pure Christological interpretation, considering its buildings as the products of the new cities and indices of medieval French society’s sense of ‘community’. Pater himself certainly knew Viollet-le-Duc’s work,36 which may be read as part of the ideology of historical ‘progression’ that late nineteenth-century decadence reacted against. So too in Britain, where a broadly congruous reconceptualisation of the Gothic was being undertaken by John Ruskin (1819–1900), later translated into French by Proust. Ruskin’s spiritual reading of the Gothic, most famously in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1852), sees its strength lying in its characteristic quality of unfinishedness, attesting to the fact that Christian societies supposedly recognised what classical ones could not, ‘the individual value of every soul’.37 Another teleological reading, Ruskin’s argument was part of that lineage traceable back to Walpole, considering Britain’s strength as lying in its gothic heritage. Ruskin’s influential arguments eventually fed into major shifts in architectural taste in the country, a part of the movement of Gothic Revival that began in the mid-eighteenth century, and gained momentum from the 1820s through the work of Augustus Pugin (1812–1852). For his part, Pater was broadly appreciative of Ruskin, and they were colleagues at Oxford after he returned to take up the position of Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1869. But while influenced by Ruskin, Pater reads the Gothic otherwise, finding a sense of grotesque ‘strangeness’ there, closer to Hugo than either Viollet-le-Duc or Ruskin. In Notre-Dame de Chartres, for instance, ‘the somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished there something strange, or even bizarre’.38 This fascination with the ‘bizarre’, linking the historical Gothic with a gothic sensibility, is an idea developed in two of Pater’s imaginary portraits, ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (1886) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893). Both of these short stories rely upon the ‘gods in exile’ trope of the German Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), in which the ancient gods of the classical world, finding themselves redundant following the victory of Christianity, went into exile into northern Europe, creating unanticipated effects and often precipitating violent scenes. ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ is set in set in thirteenth-century Auxerre, and follows the figure of Denys, a stonemason employed at the construction of Cathédrale Saint-Étienne d’Auxerre, the type of figure who Ruskin idealises. But working on the carvings for the steeple, ‘the soul of Denys darkened’ and his art ‘passed into obscure regions of the satiric, grotesque and coarse’.39 Denys is revealed to be a Dionysian figure, if not exactly the god reborn, then a simulacrum of Dionysus, compelled to play his part in a retelling of

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the ancient myth. Pater’s interest in this god had been developed in his earlier ‘A Study of Dionysus’ (1876), an essay which historicises the Greek myth and considers the complex interplay between the god’s various manifestations. It recalls Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragödie [The Birth of Tragedy] (1872), whose influential approach to the Dionysian as the principle of force, excess and irrationality, contrasts with the Apollonian principle of reason and rationality, what Pater calls elsewhere ‘the Dorian element’ of light.40 In ‘A Study of Dionysus’, Pater is fascinated by ‘a certain darker side of the double god of nature, obscured […] but never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea, […] – the conception of Dionysus Zagreus’.41 Dionysus is not singular but ‘twofold then – a Döppelganger [sic.]’, so that the one god becomes a dark double of the other.42 This motif of the doppelgänger fascinated Freud, of course, where the figure of the double calls into question the singular subject, producing the sense of the uncanny, and was one that Pater would later use to explore Wilde’s character of Dorian Gray.43 In his imaginary portrait, this ‘twofold’ aspect is also seen in Denys, who was ‘was like a double creature, of two natures, difficult or impossible to harmonise’.44 Most significantly, this doubleness is manifested in Dionysus’ sadomasochism, where pain and pleasure are intertwined. In the imaginary portrait, the population of Auxerre find themselves suffering from a form of ‘degeneration’. There are rumours of women drowning new-born babies, and a mother committing suicide ‘in a dark cellar’. Denys himself is accused of committing another murder in a local vineyard, and ‘people turned against their favourite, whose former charms must now be counted only as the fascinations of witchcraft’.45 It dramatises a change in Dionysus’ fortunes, noted in ‘A Study of Dionysus’, ‘the beautiful soft creature become an enemy of human kind’.46 In the imaginary portrait, the Church reacts to this ‘degeneration’ with their own superstitions, exhuming the remains of one of the local patron saints. In this way, Pater juxtaposes pagan myth alongside both the residual ‘mysticisms’ of Christianity and the public credence of witchcraft widespread during the Middle Ages. If the former passes an oblique commentary on Ruskin’s valorisation of the Gothic by highlighting the gothic residuum underwriting medieval faith, the latter, and in particular the ways in which the people, spurred on by their belief in the occult, turned against Denys, recalls another passage from ‘A Study of Dionysus’. After Dionysus goes mad, as Denys does in the imaginary portrait, he is seen ‘haunting, with terrible sounds, the high Thracian farms’, an episode Pater links ‘to one of the gloomiest creations of later romance, the werewolf, the belief in which still lingers in Greece, as in France, where it seems to become incorporate in the darkest of all romantic histories, that of Gilles de Retz’.47 In preparation for writing his essay, Pater had been reading Sabine Baring-Gould’s (1834–1924) The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), which discusses the fifteenth-century paedophile and mass-murder, Gilles de Rais (1405–1440), a vampire figure who drank the blood of his victims and a Satanist who attempted to conjure the devil.48 Historically speaking, Rais is a monster of the gothic period, as well as figure of fascination for gothic literature, and Pater’s discussion of Rais is part of a wider nineteenth-century interest in this particular figure, culminating most notably in Huysmans’ Là-Bas (1891).49 In this novel, Huysmans’ semi-autobiographical protagonist, Durtal, is writing a biography of Rais, describing

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him as a kind of proto-decadent, ‘the most exquisite sadist and the most terrible artist in crime the world has ever known’.50 Rais’ sadism was much discussed: Durtal makes the comparison with Sade, and it was an idea that contemporary sexologists were also developing, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s (1840–1902) Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).51 Moreover, Huysmans suggests the figure of Rais foreshadows the decadence of the fin de siècle. In the novel, Durtal is drawn into the world of contemporary Parisian Satanism through his affair with Madame Chantelouve, culminating in him attending a Black Mass. This Mass is held by Canon Docre, who is called ‘a modern Gilles de Rais’,52 although in practice it is more decadent than supernatural, the excuse for an orgy. The associations Durtal draws between Rais and Sade are not developed by Pater. But both of his ‘gods in exile’ imaginary portraits revolve around sadomasochistic desire, mobilising that quintessential gothic concern, the ‘fascination’ with and eroticisation of danger and the ways in which the death drive expresses a form of pleasure which may ultimately lead to the dissolution of the very subject desiring it. At the close of ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, Denys takes the central part of Dionysus in a mystery play Return from the East, but art soon becomes reality. His lips accidentally scratched, ‘the sight of blood transported the spectators with a kind of mad rage’, and ‘his body, now borne along in front of the crowd, was tossed hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb’.53 There is a deliriousness to the mass violence which Denys seems to some degree complicit in, carried away by the pleasurable spectacle of his own destruction, as though it were a form of displaced wish-fulfilment, even if not one ‘consciously’ desired. Likewise, ‘Apollo in Picardy’ is also fascinated with the pleasures of sadism. In this portrait, Prior Saint-Jean leaves his monastery in medieval France to travel to the countryside of rumoured ‘unnatural magic’.54 He is accompanied by a young monk Hyacinthus, and they meet the god Apollo reborn. Apollyon is a sadist, who ‘wantonly’ and ‘very cruelly’ destroys birds, discovered with ‘broken backs, rent away limbs, pierced […] wings’.55 Meanwhile, the Prior, who has earlier had nightmarish visions of the earth burning, goes insane having finally divined the ‘wicked, unscriptural truth’ of heliocentrism, ungrounding his world.56 Unearthing an old discus, an archeological motif that operates as a common narrative motor in nineteenth-century Gothic, Apollyon and Hyacinthe play, until the god’s final throw ‘sinks edgewise, sawing through the boy’s face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing the tender skull upon the brain’.57 Even the god of light has his dark side. Pater’s imaginary portraits were hugely influential on later fin de siècle gothic writers, most notably Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen, who both offer their own version of the gods in exile motif. Lee had met Pater in 1881 and her early work shows the influence of aestheticism and decadence. She published ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ (1895) in The Yellow Book, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) and named after the yellow paper which covered decadent works in Paris. The story tells of another lamia, half-woman half-snake, who allegorises the patriarchal subjection of women during the Victorian period, so that the story can be read within the context of the ‘New Woman’ movement, which maintained a number of literary links to the decadents. In Hauntings (1890), Lee’s story ‘Dionea’

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develops the Paterean Gothic, but also adds to it a proto-feminist message regarding the objectification of the ideal woman. Making clear its own debt to ‘Heine’s little book’ on the gods in exile,58 its protagonist Dionea is the ancient Greek god reborn. Mother of Aphrodite and, in some mythological traditions, confused with her, Dionea was an earth goddess who was also a goddess of love. The narrative begins with a young girl washed ashore in Italy, raised in a convent. As she grows older, Dionea’s sexuality is unmistakable, ‘an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an odd ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still odder smile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo da Vinci’s women’,59 the latter allusion clearly marking her as a Paterean vampire. She is associated with Satan by the local women, who make ‘horns with their fingers’, and through her ‘strange influence’, ‘unknown things have sprung up into the good Sisters’ hearts’.60 Leaving the convent aged seventeen ‘in her short white skirt and tight white bodice’, men lose their sanity in their lust,61 and she becomes the muse of the artist Waldemer, who captures her beauty in a ‘cursed statue’, which he values beyond her person. He idealizes her, which also means fetishising her, with Dionea’s real person ranking to him as ‘a mere inanimate thing’.62 The story concludes with Waldner taking Dionea to an ‘old desecrated chapel’, ‘once the temple of Venus’,63 placing her on the altar. But his dreams of staging the perfect aesthetic spectacle are interrupted by the arrival of his wife. She is found the next morning, ‘lying across the altar’, seemingly having taken Dionea’s place, a sacrifice to patriarchal desire, her blood ‘trickling among the carved garlands and rams’ heads’. Waldemer has apparently committed suicide, and Dionea is missing, though her ghost is supposedly later seen ‘on stormy nights, wandering among the cliffs’.64 The story shows how society criminalises a young woman for her sexuality, threatening those whose desire she arouses, but also offers a gothic feminist allegory of the potential aestheticist tendency towards fetishising the artefact. ‘Dionea’ is related through the letters of Doctor Alessandro, who purports to be a friend of Heine.65 He alludes to the myth of Pan, ‘for the awfulness of the deep woods, with their unfiltered green light, […] exists, and is Pan’.66 Interest in this god grew across the nineteenth century, spurred by Romanticism, as in Keats’ Endymion (1818). It links to ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, with some myths holding Dionysus Pan’s father. With the legs and horns of a goat, a faun or satyr, Pan is the god of shepherds and lover of nymphs, and fascinated a number of decadent writers, including Remy de Gourmont (1858–1919) and Mallarmé, the leading figure of the Symbolist movement, often identified with decadence. Illustrated by Manet, Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune [A Faun in the Afternoon] (1876), beloved by Huysmans’ des Esseintes,67 tells the story of a faun who wakes from his sleep and narrates his erotic encounter with two nymphs in what appears to be a waking dream. The poem, regarded as one of the most important of the Symbolist tradition, is one in which the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious, reality and dream, are dissolved, the faun questioning the very existence of the nymphs, which may be a projection of his unconscious desire.68 Another Symbolist, Gourmont was a friend of Huysmans, with whom he attended séances, introducing him to Berthe de Courrière (1852–1916), the model for Madame Chantelouve in Là-Bas.69 In his short story ‘Le faune’ (1894), Gourmont tells of a woman’s erotic dreams, where

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she imagines ‘a lavish act of fornication’ with a he-goat, before an ‘incubus’ forms in the reality of the room.70 ‘Frightened, but want[ing] to be more frightened’, she becomes ‘possessed’, ‘prey to the amorous monster’,71 finding his violence ‘not displeasing’, expressing her masochism. In her ‘passion’, she tries to steal a glance at her lover, closing her eyes too late. ‘She had seen the monster face to face’ rather than in ‘complacent mirror’ of her dream, her ‘desire […] disfigured by the most uncompromising realities’.72 The aesthetic ideal here is itself a kind of ‘complacent mirror’, as in the portrait of Wilde’s Dorian,73 with the realities lying behind its shimmering surface horrific visions of excess. Perhaps the most notable entry in this decadent tradition is Arthur Machen’s gothic novella, The Great God Pan (1890), which develops Pater’s version of the gods in exile narrative by situating the continued malign presence of the god Pan within the context of the modern nineteenth-century occult. Published by John Lane (1845–1925), editor and publisher of The Yellow Book, in his Keynotes series for The Bodley Head, Machen’s story was associated with literary decadence. As such, it dates to the time before Machen joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1899, introduced through his friend Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), co-creator of the famous Rider-Waite tarot deck (1910). The Great God Pan follows Mr. Clarke, who is writing ‘Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil’.74 Clarke witnesses an experiment by his friend, Dr. Raymond, brain surgery designed to allow a young woman named Mary to go ‘beyond the veil’, to witness ‘the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes’, to see ‘the god Pan’.75 As he waits, Clarke begins to dream of the ‘odour of the woods, of cool shaded places, deep in the green depths’.76 He discovers himself ‘in the deep folds of dream’, face to face ‘with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form’.77 For her part, Mary is traumatised, reduced to a ‘hopeless idiot’.78 The story continues the case of Helen Vaughan, living in a village on the border of Wales in the early 1880s, and who often goes into the forest where she is seen by a boy ‘playing on the grass with a “strange naked man”’.79 Helen later confides in Rachel M., who accompanies her into the woods, but Rachel’s ‘wild story’ of her experiences ends in aposiopesis (‘She said — —’), marked as not only unreadable but unrelatable, since if true, it would turn reality into ‘nightmare’. 80 Some years later, Helen reappears in London as the wife of Herbert, a friend of another character, Villiers, a man ‘corrupted’ by his wife’s influence.81 Helen is described as ‘at once the most beautiful and the most repulsive’ figure,82 binding the aesthetic and the decadent in her person as an expression of the death drive. Rumours spread of occult practices at their home, witnessed by ‘a gentleman, whose business or pleasure, or both, made him a spectator of the London streets at five o’clock in the morning’,83 his flâneurie and noctambulism marking him as an aesthete, and who is later found dead. So too Herbert, with Helen conveniently disappearing, the apparent suicides ‘dumbfounding’ the police, just as they had been ‘powerless to arrest or explain the sordid murders of Whitechapel’,84 an allusion to the figure of Jack the Ripper, another kind of fin de siècle monster.85 When Helen is eventually tracked down, Villiers and Clarke offer her the choice of hanging or taking her own life, before the doctor who is called to attend to the body witnesses

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it transforms before his eyes. ‘The firm structure of the human body’ begins ‘to melt and dissolve’, the ‘form waver[ing] from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited’.86 The novel ends with a letter from Raymond to Clarke in which Helen is revealed to have been Mary’s child, born nine months after the experiment, impregnated by Pan, her ‘human flesh’ home to ‘a horror one dare not express’.87 In his introduction to The House of Souls (1923), collecting stories published first in the 1890s, Machen recalled that more than one reviewer of The Great God Pan had claimed it ‘a stupid and incompetent rehash of Huysmans’ “Là-Bas” and “A Rebours”. True, like Clarke, Huysmans’ Durtal is fascinated by the existence of the devil, but as Machen continued, he had ‘not read these books so I got them both. Therein, I perceived that my critics had not read them either’.88 But if Machen hadn’t read them, Huysmans’ Gothic was nevertheless hugely influential. À rebours, the socalled ‘breviary’ of decadence,89 relates the life of des Esseintes, rich and living a hermetic life in the Parisian suburbs, conducting a series of aesthetic experiments. The novel also constitutes a landmark of gothic fiction, particularly in the strange, erotic nightmare that des Esseintes has of the Pox, standing for late nineteenthcentury ‘degeneration’. The weird imagery foreshadows Freudian dream theory, with the Pox morphing into a Flower, a hermaphroditic succubus which des Esseintes simultaneously fears and desires, in another thanatic motif linking sex and death.90 Wilde was taken with À rebours, claiming to have based the ‘poisonous’ ‘yellow book’ of his own gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray on it, the colour of the wrapper signifying its decadence.91 The story of a beautiful man who trades places with the image of his portrait, its protagonist Dorian remaining ever-lastingly young, while the picture shows the marks of physical and moral degeneration, Wilde’s novel ranks as one of the most famous works of fin de siècle literature. In its treatment of London, Wilde builds on Baudelaire’s gothic Paris, and compares with the capital in Machen’s The Great God Pan, as well as that drawn in Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850–1894) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) Dracula (1897), among others. Wilde knew Stoker personally, the two having been friendly as young men in Dublin, and there are other points of comparison between their novels. Like Count Dracula, Dorian’s privileged life is sustained by social inequality, feeding parasitically off the lower classes further down the food chain. He is also vampiric insofar as his physical body draws the life out of his portrait. And although Stoker’s novel was published in a very different social context following the Wilde trial of 1895, Dracula seems to have learnt lessons from the tradition of aestheticism and decadence more broadly in the ways in which it mobilises the homoeroticism of the figure of the vampire to create its charged sense of danger. But this having been said, the difference between Wilde’s novel and the fin de siècle Gothic of Stoker and Stevenson should also be noted, for unlike these writers, Wilde also allegorises aestheticism and decadence. At the beginning of the novel, the portrait stands as an image of idealised aesthetic beauty. Dorian himself is an aesthete, living his life as though it were a work of art. But as the novel progresses, the portrait decays, so that The Picture of Dorian Gray represents the culmination of the decadent gothic tradition and its most arresting fable, showing the ways in which aestheticism is always liable to slip into decadence and excess.

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The influence of the aesthetes and decadents on literary modernism is well documented,92 but the interdependence of their respective gothic traditions, beyond the obvious influence of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, is less widely discussed. Nevertheless, it is in the ways in which Machen’s Gothic is born out of a similar context as Pater’s and Lee’s, as much as the way in which Baudelaire’s Gothic replies to Poe, that we can chart a lineage from the aesthetes and decedents towards the Gothic of the twentieth century. In Clarke’s dream in The Great God Pan, a cosmic vision of ‘the darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of the everlasting’,93 the Gothic of decadence unmistakably paves the way for the ‘weird’ pulp fiction of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).94 Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Jacques Robichez (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1979), 57; trans. Helen Constantine (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2005), 23. A note on French sources: I give references to the original first, then to a translation, occasionally silently modified. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 167. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 120. John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, line 49, in The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 289. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols (London, Imago, 1940-52), 12: 229–268; ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London, Vintage, 2001), 17: 219–252. Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986), 140. Poe is championed by des Esseintes, the protagonist of J.-K. Huysmans’ novel, À rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier (Paris, Imprimierie nationale, 1981), 155, 165– 167; Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2003), 180, 190–192. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Au lecteur’, lines 9–10, 13, 14, 22, 25–26, 28. I quote Les fleurs du mal from the bilingual edition, The Flower of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Baudelaire, ‘Une charogne’, lines 13, 5, 7–8. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999). Baudelaire, ‘Le Cygne’, lines 7–8, 29–32. Baudelaire, ‘Danse macabre’, line 41. Baudelaire, ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’, line 17. The point recalls Karl Marx (1818–1883) in Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1990), 342. Baudelaire, ‘Lesbos’, lines 6, 23.

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15. Baudelaire, ‘Femmes damnées’, lines 85, 88, 91, 97. 16. Baudelaire, ‘Spleen (II)’, lines 5, 6–7, 8. 17. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake, in Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004), 375–384, 380. 18. Quoted in Philip Henderson, Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet (London, Macmillan, 1974), 149. Apparently Swinburne himself spread a rumour that he had had sex with, and then eaten, a monkey. 19. Swinburne, ‘Charles Baudelaire’, in Major Poems and Selected Prose, 343–347, 344. 20. Ibid., 343. 21. Swinburne, ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, lines 35–36. I quote Swinburne’s poetry from McGann and Sligh’s Major Poems and Selected Prose. 22. Swinburne, ‘Hermaphroditus’, lines 6, 9. 23. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 305. On Swinburne’s ‘Hermaphroditus’, read within the context of his own supposed homosexuality, see Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 69–71. 24. Swinburne, ‘Anactoria’, lines 11–12. 25. Ibid., lines 28, 29. 26. Ibid., lines 113, 114. The theme of ‘entombment’ is another uncanny one: see Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, 12: 257; 17: 244 27. Pater, Renaissance, 120. 28. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 168. 29. Pater, Renaissance, 121. 30. In ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Gilbert claims to ‘murmur’ Pater’s lines whenever he passes through the Louvre. Oscar Wilde, Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), 156. 31. Pater, Renaissance, 70–71. 32. Walter Pater, Gaston de Latour, ed. Gerald Monsman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019), 65. 33. Ibid., 72. Compare Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris, Gallimard, 1961), 1152–1192, 1163; ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2006), 390–435, 403. The link between Les fleurs du mal and these passages is discussed by Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater’s Art of Autobiography (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980), 137–138. 34. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, 2 vols. (London, Macmillan, 1910), 1: 60. 35. On this French tradition, see Elizabeth Emery, Romanticism the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001).

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36. Pater cites and silently quotes Viollet-le-Duc in his essays on ‘Notre-Dames d’Amiens’ and ‘Vélazay’ (both 1894): see Miscellaneous Studies (London, Macmillan, 1910), 112, 135, 138. 37. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London, George Allen, 1903–1912), 10: 189–190. 38. Pater, Gaston de Latour, 50. For more on Pater’s critique of Ruskin, see my The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 125–137, and on this point in particular, see 129. 39. Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits, ed. Lene Østermark-Johansen (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019), 92. For more on this, see my The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 132. 40. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London, Macmillan, 1910), 36. 41. Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London, Macmillan, 1910), 41–42. 42. Pater, Greek Studies, 44. 43. See Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, 12: 246–247; 17: 234–235. For Pater’s review, see ‘A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde’, in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London, Routledge, 2013), 83–86. 44. Pater, Imaginary Portraits, 90. 45. Ibid., 90. 46. Pater, Greek Studies, 47. 47. Ibid., 47. 48. See Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater and his Reading, 1874–1877 (London, Garland, 1990), 268-69, and compare Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of WereWolves (London, Smith, Elder & Co, 1865), 181–237 on Rais. See also ibid., 114–115, for the cultural links between vampirism and lycanthropy. Huysmans discusses Rais’ vampirism in Là-Bas, ed. Yves Hersant (Paris, Gallimard, 1985), 197–198; The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2001), 144. 49. See Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), 235–239. 50. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 47; The Damned, 19. 51. Ibid., 80; 46, and compare Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia, F.A. Davis, 1921), 55. 52. Huysmans, Là-Bas, 175; The Damned, 125. 53. Pater, Imaginary Portraits, 95. 54. Ibid., 203. 55. Ibid., 207. 56. Ibid., 201, 209. 57. Ibid., 211. 58. Vernon Lee, ‘Dionea’, in Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Ontario, Broadview, 2006), 77–104, 83, 102. 59. Ibid., 84.

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60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Ibid., 85, 86. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 100, 98. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 91. See Huysmans, À rebours, 274–275; Against Nature, 197–198. Stéphane Mallarmé, L’après-midi d’un faune, in the bilingual edition of Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), 38-47. See Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, Clarendon, 1955), 202. Remy de Gourmont, ‘Le faune’, in Histoires magiques et autres récits (Paris, Mercure de France, 1894), 155–159, 157; ‘The Faun’, in French Decadent Tales, trans. Stephen Romer (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), 162–164, 163. Ibid., 158, 163. Ibid., 159, 164. Compare Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 258, 355. Arthur Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, in Decadent and Occult Works, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Cambridge, MHRA, 2018), 43–88, 51. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 48–49. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 59. Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 61. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 73. The context of the Whitechapel murders informs other works of fin de siècle London Gothic, including Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: see Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Ibid., 84. Ibid., 87. Quoted by Dennis Denisoff in his introduction to Machen, Decadent and Occult Works, 1–2. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, Dutton, 1919), 265. Huysmans, À rebours, 169–173; Against Nature, 103–106. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 274, and see his comments in a letter to E.W. Pratt, 15 April 1892, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Mervin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, Fourth Estate, 2000), 524.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

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92. See for instance, Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). 93. Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’, 49. 94. For more on these lineages, see James Machen, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880– 1939 (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Bibliography Baldick, Robert, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, Clarendon, 1955). Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Book of Were-Wolves (London, Smith, Elder & Co, 1865). Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris, Gallimard, 1961). ———. Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2006). ——— The Flower of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Beckson, Karl, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London, Routledge, 2013). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999). Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Dryden, Linda, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Emery, Elizabeth, Romanticism the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001). Freud, Sigmund, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols, (London, Imago, 1940–52), 12: 229–268. ——— ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, Vintage, 2001), 17: 219–252. Gautier, Théophile, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. Jacques Robichez (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1979). ———. Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Helen Constantine (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2005). Gourmont, Remy de, ‘Le faune’, in Histoires magiques et autres récits (Paris, Mercure de France, 1894), 155–159. ———. ‘The Faun’, in French Decadent Tales, trans. Stephen Romer (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), 162–164. Henderson, Philip, Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet (London, Macmillan, 1974). Huysmans, J.-K., À rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier (Paris, Imprimierie nationale, 1981). ———. Là-Bas, ed. Yves Hersant (Paris, Gallimard, 1985). ———. The Damned, trans. Terry Hale (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2001). ———. Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2003). Inman, Billie Andrew, Walter Pater and His Reading, 1874–1877 (London, Garland, 1990). Keats, John, The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001). Lee, Vernon, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Ontario, Broadview, 2006). Machen, Arthur, Decadent and Occult Works, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Cambridge, MHRA, 2018). Machen, James, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006). Marx, Karl, Capital: Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1990).

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Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). Monsman, Gerald, Walter Pater’s Art of Autobiography (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980). Pater, Walter, Greek Studies (London, Macmillan, 1910). ———. Marius the Epicurean, 2 vols. (London, Macmillan, 1910). ———. Miscellaneous Studies (London, Macmillan, 1910). ———. Plato and Platonism (London, Macmillan, 1910). ———. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010). ———. Gaston de Latour, ed. Gerald Monsman (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019). ———. Imaginary Portraits, ed. Lene Østermark-Johansen (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019). Poe, Edgar Allen, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986). Ruskin, John, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London, George Allen, 1903–1912). Sherry, Vincent, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). Swinburne, Algernon Charles, Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004). Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York, Dutton, 1919). von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia, F.A. Davis, 1921). Wilde, Oscar, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Mervin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, Fourth Estate, 2000). ———. De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). ———. The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). ———. Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007). Whiteley, Giles, The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray Giles Whiteley

In a signed review of the book-length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Walter Pater (1839–1894), a leading figure in the British aestheticism movement and one of his mentors, reflected on Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) achievements. The plot of Wilde’s novel concerns the eponymous Dorian Gray, who trades places with the image in his portrait, painted by his friend Basil Hallward; whereas the figure in the image grows old and is marked by the decay and decadence of his age, soul and actions, the man himself is unblemished, remaining a picture of eternally beautiful youth. In his review, Pater notes appreciatively the novel’s gothic elements, those ‘adroitly managed supernatural incidents’ written ‘in more of less conscious imitation’ of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) and French decadent literature. Moreover, Pater notes the strange anachronistic conceit of the plot itself, based on old themes reworked into a modern form: Its interest turns on that very old theme, old because based on some inherent experience or fancy of the human brain, of a double life: of Döppelgänger [sic.] – not of two persons, in this case, but of the man and his portrait; […] – ‘the devil’s bargain’.1

Pater’s allusion to the idea of the doppelgänger as an ‘inherent experience’ of the human mind foreshadows Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who famously discusses this figure his essay on ‘Das Unheimliche’ [The ‘Uncanny’] (1919), one of the most important psychoanalytic contributions towards theorizing gothic literature. Moreover, it is perhaps not unimportant to note that Freud’s analysis was informed by Otto Rank’s (1884–1939) Der Doppelgänger (1914), which itself contains a discussion of Wilde’s novel.2 For Freud, the doppelgänger signifies the presence of the uncanny, that unsettling experience where the unconscious ground of reality is made visible, displacing the subject and its identity. But Wilde’s novel added to the ‘very old’ conceit of the doppelgänger by reworking it into a Faustian framework. G. Whiteley (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_42

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The quotation, with which Pater’s passage finishes, is taken from the novel itself, when Dorian passes a prostitute in London’s East End who comments, ‘“There goes the devil’s bargain!”’.3 Indeed, in a letter to the Daily Chronicle, 30 June 1890, defending the periodical version of his novel, published in Lippincott’s Magazine, from attack on the grounds of its supposed immorality, Wilde commented that he had ‘first conceived’ of the novel as ‘the idea of a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth’, ‘an idea that is old in the history of literature, but to which I have given new form’.4 In this sense, The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read as an allegory of the covenant of modernity itself. The ‘devil’s bargain’ is no longer to be understood literally as one between a man and a demon, but between a man and his conscience: the prize is living a decadent life, with all its attendant pleasures of the flesh. Old ideas drawn from the past and associated with Gothic are thus being explicitly modernized in Wilde’s contribution to the genre. Developing Pater’s point, we may say that Wilde’s Gothic is modern in at least three different ways. Firstly, Wilde’s contributions to the mode are modern in the sense in which he displaces the geographical and temporal settings traditionally associated with gothic fiction, relocating the action out of the typical locales of medieval castles into the heart of the urban metropolis. The effect of this displacement, in common with other late nineteenth-century contributions to the Gothic, is to show the ways in which the force of the unconscious and its desires are not limited to the haunting spaces of the Romantic imaginary, but infect the heart of contemporary cosmopolitan life. Secondly, Wilde’s Gothic is also modern in the sense in which it is humorous rather than simply terrifying. In the case of his short stories, this humour structures his entire narratives, while in the case of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the horror is framed by humorous asides. Wilde’s use of humour makes his gothic modern in the sense that it registers on some level the incongruity between the Gothic and modernity, which has supposedly transcended belief in magic and superstition. But at the same time, the nineteenth century also witnessed a renaissance in interest in seemingly outmoded beliefs, with Wilde’s work registering contemporary fads for chiromancy, mediumship, mesmerism and spiritualism. Such a recurrent interest in a world beyond suggests that, like the idea of the doppelgänger, these kinds of ideas are never fully transcended. On the one hand, Wilde’s use of humour risks destabilizing the fear that the Gothic produces, but on the other hand, it also registers that essential sense of irony which is so significant to the development of the genre during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distance which divides the modern subject from those fears which return as its repressed. Thirdly, Wilde’s Gothic is also modern in the sense in which it is intensely aware of its temporality, in another related manifestation of its sense of irony. As a writer associated with the movements of aestheticism and decadence, Wilde’s writing registers the sense in which modernity itself is decadent, and produces a Gothic that on some level allegorizes life during the fin de siècle. Indeed, after his very public fall from grace following his conviction and imprisonment for ‘gross indecency’, Wilde even went so far as to conceive of himself as a kind of gothic figure.

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My argument regarding the ‘modernity’ of Wilde’s contributions to the Gothic develops the historicist reading of the Victorian Gothic undertaken by Robert Mighall.5 The main body of this chapter focuses on Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is read as an example of the ‘modernity’ of his Gothic. Before addressing this novel, however, I begin by discussing some of his earlier experiments with the Gothic in his short stories. In the concluding section of the chapter, I look at some of Wilde’s later Gothic, both predating and postdating his imprisonment, briefly discussing both some of his poetry and his biblical drama, Salomé. That Wilde should have been interested in the Gothic is hardly surprising. He was born in Dublin to Sir William Wilde (1815–1876), the Irish surgeon, and Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde (1821–1896), both prominent intellectual figures in Dublin society. His mother, writing under the pen-name Speranza, was an active presence in the burgeoning movement of Irish nationalism, and both she and her husband were keenly interested in local folktales and mythology. Speranza herself came from gothic stock: she was the niece of Charles Maturin (1782–1824), author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), another Faustian tale of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil for 150 years of life, and which offers one of the inspirations for Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Their house also became a space where Irish literary figures congregated, the salons at Merrion Square hosting figures such as Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), perhaps the leading exponent of the ghost story during the nineteenth century. Wilde was educated first at Trinity Dublin, 1871–1874, where he would meet another young man who would go on to gothic fame, Bram Stoker (1847–1912), later author of Dracula (1897). The two were friendly, with Stoker proposing Wilde for membership in the university’s Philosophical Society, before Wilde left for Magdalen College, Oxford. Returning in 1878, he discovered that his childhood sweetheart, Florence Balcombe (1858–1937), was engaged to Stoker. Disappointed, Wilde took up residence in London, determined to make his name as a writer and aesthete. After trying his hand at poetry and somewhat unsuccessfully as a playwright, financial constraints led him to pursue a career as a journalist, 1886–1889. From this period date Wilde’s two most significant gothic short stories, ‘The Canterville Ghost’ and ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ (1887). Outgrowths of his journalism, these two stories took aim at the topical fads for the occult, revolving around plots where modern life is placed into relation with a spiritual world that it had supposedly transcended. ‘The Canterville Ghost’ was first published in The Court and Society Review, serialized in two parts in February and March 1887. The plot revolves around Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, buying the hereditary estate of Lord Canterville. He warns Otis from the outset that this estate is haunted by the ghost of Sir Simon, a relative who had murdered his wife three hundred years beforehand. Undeterred, Otis determines to ‘take the furniture and the ghost at a valuation’.6 The plot is driven by culture clash, where the modern American newcomers find themselves nonplussed by the gothic spectre from the past, here also standing in for an older, aristocratic society. Canterville Chase may well be a haunted house, with ‘a curious stillness seem[ing] to hold the atmosphere’ around it,7 but neither it nor its ghostly inhabitant affects the Americans. When ‘a terrible flash of lightening lit up the sombre room’,

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Otis remarks that the ‘monstrous weather’ implies that ‘the old-country is so overpopulated that they have not enough decent weather for everybody’.8 As he puts it earlier, ‘I come from a modern country’: ‘There is no such thing […] as a ghost, and I guess the laws of Nature are not going to be suspended for the British Aristocracy’.9 When they arrive to discover red marks on the floors, Mrs. Lucretia Otis remarks that ‘I don’t care at all for blood-stains in a sitting room’, as though it was an aesthetic inconvenience which might be more acceptable in another room. Upon being informed that ‘the blood-stain has been much admired by tourists’, and that it cannot be removed, Washington, Otis’ son, exclaims that ‘Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time’.10 The Americans put their faith in commodity culture that makes possible modern standards of living. Likewise, when Otis is disturbed by the Ghost’s rattling chains and comes face to face with him at night, he insists that he use ‘Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator’ to oil them.11 These commodities have varied effects, at least as far as the Americans are concerned: the Lubricator is successful, the Detergent less so, for the blood-stain returns daily, despite regular treatment (although, as we later learn, this is down to the Ghost borrowing their daughter Virginia’s paints and applying a fresh coat nightly).12 Still, the presence of the recurrent stain is only a matter of ‘interest’ for the Americans, not one of concern: ‘Mr. Otis began to suspect that he had been too dogmatic in his denial of the existence of ghosts, Mrs. Otis expressed her intention of joining the Psychical Society, and Washington prepared a long letter to Messrs. Myers and Podmore on the subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous Stains when connected with Crime’.13 The references situate Wilde’s text clearly in the context of the 1880s and its fashion for the occult. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by the poet Frederic William Henry Myers (1843–1901), an outgrowth of the Spiritualists association, with the philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) its first president and early members including William James (1842–1910). The year before Wilde’s story was serialized, Myers had collaborated with Frank Podmore (1856– 1910) and Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) on Phantasms of the Living (1886). The ‘interest’ of Mrs. Otis and her son in the movement however is clearly one that is detached and ironic: the Society is as much a ‘curiosity’ as the Ghost. A similar topicality is implied by the subtitle, ‘A Hylo-Idealistic Romance’, that Wilde added when the story was collected in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891), a reference to a materialist philosophy propounded by the poet Constance Naden (1858–1889), who had recently died when Wilde revised the piece. Such contemporaneous references are another way in which Wilde’s Gothic engages with the conditions of modern life, alluding to these fashions while simultaneously poking fun at them. For Freud, this ironic tone constitutes the story’s weakness, and he argues that ‘even a “real” ghost, as in Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about it’.14 Indeed, the story uses gothic tropes to comment ironically on both the modernity that the Americans represent and the older traditional culture of England. While it contains some effective straight use of the Gothic, in particular revolving around the Ghost’s interactions

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with Virginia and his vision of the Garden of Death,15 by this point it becomes difficult to demarcate clearly the difference between the straight and ironic. For instance, when the Ghost sits by the window ‘watching the ruined gold of the yellowing trees fly through the air, and the red leaves dancing madly down the long avenue’, in a passage which alludes to both the Gothic of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) Maud (1855) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) Christabel (1816), it is unclear whether Wilde intends the passage to be literary parody or tribute.16 A similar uncertainty as to how seriously we should take Wilde’s use of the Gothic is common to ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, first published in The Court and Society Review, May 1887. The plot is driven by chiromancy, with the eponymous Lord Arthur having his hands read by Septimus Podgers at a society party, and discovering he is fated to commit a murder. Before he can marry Sybil, his fiancée, his ‘strong sense of duty’ leads him to determine to commit the crime,17 but he finds it easier said than done. He fails to murder his elderly aunt Lady Clementina, who falls to natural causes before Lord Arthur can manage to poison her, and fails to kill his uncle, the Dean of Chichester, when an explosive device he had planted does not go off. For all his methodical preparations, it is a chance meeting with Podgers on the Embankment that leads him to murder the very person who had first predicted the crime. The story marks an intense interest in chiromancy during the 1880s, in which Wilde himself partook. He was friends with Edward Heron-Allen (1861– 1941), author of Cheiromancy (1883), asking him to read his son Cyril’s hands in June 1885, and in December of the same year witnessing him reading the hands of a number of fashionable women at the house of Lady Wilde.18 In this sense, Wilde was invested in that which he satirizes in the story. Podgers’ presence at the party marks Lady Windermere’s interest in fashion, with the chiromantist referred to as her ‘pet’,19 but it is a fad which passes, for after Lord Arthur has committed his murder, Lady Windermere remarks that he had been ‘a dreadful imposter’, and that she had moved on ‘to telepathy now’.20 Wilde’s early experiments in gothic fiction fed into his crowning achievement, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In this novel, the irony and humour differ from that deployed in his earlier short stories: rather than operating as a plot point, the humour is moved to the margins of the narrative in chapters where figures such as Lord Henry and his fellow members of high-society spar in witty conversation. The gothic horror elements of the plot, by contrast, now feature in their own chapters, broadly separated from these humorous interludes. Moreover, in this novel, the irony is archer and less tongue-in-cheek. It reflects the sense in which The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read as an allegory of the kind of millenarianism that was experienced as a product of the ‘modernity’ of life at the turn of the twentieth century. In this novel, the fin de siècle also registers an imminent sense of fin du globe.21 The novel focuses on ‘a young man of extraordinary beauty’,22 and his portrait, painted by Basil. Dorian’s portrait ‘fascinates’ their mutual friend,23 the dandy Lord Henry Wooton, not least of all erotically, and a certain homoeroticism is also implied in Basil’s affection for his subject, whose personal charms threaten to ‘absorb [his] whole nature’.24 As a homosexual, writing after the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which outlawed acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men, a law under which

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he would be later tried and imprisoned, Wilde’s emphasis on male love in the novel was risky, and some of his more openly homoerotic statements were edited out of the manuscript by his editor, J. M. Stoddard (1845–1921). Nevertheless, not only Dorian’s Christian name, but his whole person, suggests ‘the spirit of the Greek’, an idea which, as Linda Dowling has argued, was coded during the period, implying homoerotic attachment. Basil, for his part, fears ‘the personality of Dorian Gray will dominate me’, suggesting that such homoerotic desire is a kind of spiritual perversion that threatens the stability of the ‘civilized’ stable subject of the Enlightenment tradition, and which associates the aesthetic ‘gaze’ with mesmerism.25 Upon seeing the portrait for the first time, Dorian is overcome with emotion, and makes the ‘devil’s bargain’ that Pater refers to in his review, giving his ‘soul’ to exchange places with the image.26 From this point onwards, Dorian lives an ‘aesthetic’ life, giving ‘form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream’, and which causes him to ‘vibrat[e] and throb […] to curious pulses’.27 He receives a ‘poisonous’ ‘yellow book’ from Lord Henry, modelled on Joris-Karl Huysmans’ (1848–1907) À rebours [Against Nature] (1884), another work of the modern Gothic, in which ‘a certain young Parisian […] spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own’.28 Under its influence, Dorian’s life becomes a work of art, a living embodiment of the aesthetic and decadent doctrine of l’art pour l’art. After the initial scene setting, the plot turns on Dorian’s infatuation for a lowerclass actress called Sybil Vane. She performs at a theatre in Holborn in central London, rather than in the more fashionable West End. Dorian had first come across Sybil having set out for an adventure through London, in a journey that treats the modern city as a gothic landscape: As I lounged in the park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at every one who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations. […] I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things. The mere danger gave me a sense of delight. […] I don’t know what I expected, but I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares. About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. A hideous Jew […] was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. […] He was such a monster.29

In this passage, ‘fascination’, etymologically a bewitching (Latin: fascinatus), is linked both to the experience of the pleasure of flâneurie, the subject voyeuristically engaging with the modern city as they walk the crowd, but also and at the same time, to ‘terror’. It means that aesthetic fascination, the quality that marks both Dorian’s personal beauty and the power of his portrait, becomes linked to what Freud calls the death-drive. Driven by such a compulsion, Dorian finds himself walking east from Piccadilly, with the allusion to a labyrinth suggesting a journey through the rookeries of St. Giles, a notorious slum district.30 Arriving in Holborn, Wilde figures the Jewish manager, who is later implied to pimp out his actresses,31 as a kind of

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gothic ‘monster’ that might be encountered in the darker thoroughfares of fin de siècle London. It is an incident where Wilde’s antisemitism belies the more idealistic rhetoric of his professed ‘cosmopolitanism’.32 Dorian’s desire for Sybil is predicated on her ability as an actress to lose her personality in the characters she plays, as well as on an implied homoeroticism in her performance of various cross-dressing Shakespearean figures. Entranced, Dorian proposes marriage to her, but after a disastrous performance as Juliet, they fight backstage and Dorian calls off the engagement. Leaving the theatre alone, Dorian again walks London in another passage where the modern metropolis becomes a gothic space: Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through dimly lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon door-steps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.33

He arrives eventually in Covent Garden, and the passage recalls a similar one in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ where Lord Arthur, distraught by the news delivered by Podgers, gets ‘lost’ walking London.34 The darkness of the streets and the prosopopoeia of the archways and houses combine to give the space of London the imminent sense of danger, populated by prostitutes and drunkards. Likened to ‘monstrous apes’, such images show the lower class subjects of the fin de siècle city devolving in a kind of reversed-Darwinism. It is indicative of what H. G. Well’s (1866–1946) calls a ‘zoological retrogression’ in an article published in 1891, the year after The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a theme which Wells would memorably develop in his own gothic novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).35 In Wilde’s hands, however, the ‘monstrosity’ of these ‘apes’ also marks an implicit point of comparison between the lower classes and the upper classes who exploited their poverty, the society which produced them—Dorian is also monstrous. Through passages such as these, Wilde suggests that life in the modern city of London has become a gothic nightmare. The troping of the movement east is significant, even if this action, located in St. Giles, has not yet seen Dorian arrive in London’s East End. As critics such as Linda Dryden have argued, Wilde wrote his novel in the context of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders of 1888.36 Violent crime was common in the East End, with the poor congregating in slums around the London docklands. We are told that Lord Henry’s aunt, Lady Agatha, engages in improving missions to Whitechapel, and when Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical Member of Parliament, sagely remarks that ‘the East End is a very important problem’, Lord Henry quips: ‘It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves’. 37 More broadly, in dividing the city along a West–East axis, Wilde seems to map London psychologically: the West End is figured as a ‘civilized’ space, ordered and rational, whereas the ‘labyrinthine’ East End is a space of unconscious pleasure and thanatic desire. The East End becomes an uncanny remainder, a perverse double of the West End. The East End constitutes the return of the West End’s repressed.

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These kinds of associations are made explicit later in the novel when Dorian travels to an opium den in Bluegate Fields. This journey has been foreshadowed earlier in the novel, when we are told of Dorian’s rumoured propensity to visit ‘dreadful places’ in the area, alongside reports of his having been seen ‘brawling with foreign sailors […] in the distant parts of Whitechapel’.38 Travelling east, the space of London is once again nightmarish: A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist. The public-houses were just closing, and dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. In others, drunkards brawled and screamed.

From the remove of his cab, ‘Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city’, hoping that through opium that he could ‘buy oblivion’ in one of those ‘dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new’.39 As he travels, he sees the moon hanging ‘low in the sky like a yellow skull’, a portentous image of death. Later, he ‘passed by lonely brickfields’, where the ubiquitous ‘fog was lighter’, and where ‘he could see the strange bottle-shaped kilns with their orange fan-like tongues of fire’.40 The phrasing and location suggest Brick Lane in Whitechapel; it was there that the prostitute Emma Elizabeth Smith was attacked on 3 April 1888, later causing her death, in an murder which is often considered the first victim of the Ripper. As the hansom proceeds, it passes houses with ‘fantastic shadows […] silhouetted against some lamp-lit blind[s]. He watched them curiously. They moved like monstrous marionettes, and made gestures like live things’. The phrasing recalls Wilde’s poem, ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1885), describing London’s prostitutes as ‘strange mechanical grotesques’ who made ‘fantastic arabesques’ with ‘shadows rac[ing] across the blind’, and their customer as a ‘horrible marionette’ who moves ‘like a live thing’.41 These images linking the danse macabre to the corruption of the modern city implies a series of intertextual echoes, most notably to the ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ of Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–1867) Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] (1857), as well as recalling Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the modernity of Wilde’s gothic imagery revolves around a double sense of unheimlichkeit, with the living dead associated not only with puppetry but also with the mechanical. When he eventually arrives at his destination, the opium den presents itself as a microcosm of the British Empire, as befitting such a location in the docklands of London’s East End: Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove playing with bone counters, and showing their white teeth as they chattered. In one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the tawdrily-painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two haggard women mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust. ‘He thinks he’s got red ants on him’, laughed one of them, as Dorian passed by. The man looked at her in terror and began to whimper.42

These dens are populated by imperial subjects harking from Asian territories, lower class figures such as Sybil’s brother, the sailor James Vane, and noblemen, such as Dorian and Adrian Singleton: the entire ‘cosmopolitan’ world of London is brought

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together under one roof, joined by the decadent pleasure of opium. Surveying the scene, Dorian sees ‘grotesque things that lay in […] fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes’ that ‘fascinated him’.43 Again, the personal corruption of Dorian seems to be reflected in the gothic spaces in which he finds himself, and this Gothic in turn seems to reflect the wider decadence of fin de siècle London, here standing as both an image of British dominion overseas and its cruel inequalities at home. And once again, the image of the Ripper, that ultimate gothic nightmare of late nineteenth-century London, is never far from the reader’s mind, as when James accosts and nearly murders Dorian outside the den, in one of those dark archways in which the serial killer’s victims would be discovered.44 As an allegory for the decadence of modernity, the central motif of Wilde’s gothic horror revolves around the portrait. As Mighall argues, The Picture of Dorian Gray situates itself within a wider gothic tradition of stories dealing with ancestral portraits. Mighall links this nineteenth-century literary tradition to the contemporary science of figures such as Joseph Fergusen Nisbet (1851–1899) and Henry Maudsley (1835– 1919) on hereditary illnesses, noting the moment when Dorian ‘recognizes’ himself in the face of the portrait of one of his own ancestors, Philip Herbert.45 More broadly, Wilde’s narrative ‘operates within a framework of expectations about the visibility of vice’.46 This was an idea that criminologists had been developing across the nineteenth century, linked to contemporary pseudo-scientific ideas of phrenology, emblematized by the work of figures such as Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and Max Nordau (1849–1923). As Basil puts it, ‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things’.47 Many Victorian readers would likely have concurred with the painter in these sentiments. Playing upon the widespread currency of such assumptions, Wilde would later go so far as to claim his own ‘crimes’ to be a form of ‘sexual madness’ in a letter written from Reading Gaol in which he refers by name to both Lombroso and Nordau. There Wilde noted the fact that Nordau had ‘devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example’ of the connection between the aesthetic temperament and mental infirmity, a reference to Nordau’s theory of the ‘degeneration’ of civilized values at the fin de siècle which he developed in Entartung (1892).48 In Dorian’s case, the ‘sin’ of his ‘sexual madness’ is not simply homoerotic but also narcissistic, with the oblique suggestion that Dorian masturbates over his own portrait noted by Mighall, and linked to the Victorian stigma surrounding auto-eroticism.49 The horror of the portrait comes to a head in chapters twelve and thirteen, when Dorian meets Basil by chance in Mayfair. With the artist noting the rumours of Dorian’s ‘friendship’ being ‘so fatal to young men’,50 he invites him back to his house to view the portrait: ‘You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall see it face to face’.51 Dorian’s house, located somewhere on Grosvenor Square, becomes a gothic ruin, a haunted house in the heart of the modern city. As they walk up the stairs, ‘the lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A rising wind made some of the windows rattle’.52 The lexical echoes foreshadow those ‘fantastic shadows’ he sees on his journey towards Bluegate Fields.53 Revealing his portrait,

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‘an exclamation of horror broke from the painter’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing’.54 Recognizing it as his own work, Basil inspects it more closely: The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.55

Suddenly, Dorian is possessed by ‘mad passions’ and murders Basil, digging a ‘knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table, and stabbing again and again’.56 After the deed, Dorian is dispassionate, treating Basil’s dead body as simply a ‘thing’ and likening it to ‘a dreadful wax image’, another image of the uncanny.57 When contextualized as a product of the fin de siècle, what becomes clear is that horror of The Picture of Dorian Gray lies in the ways in which it not only investigates some of the ethical issues surrounding the doctrines of aestheticism and decadence—the moral price to paid for living life in the spirit of art, but also reveals a hypocrisy underwriting the wider spectacle of modern life. Wilde shows that the so-called ‘civilized’ values of modernity are founded upon a history of violence, and the repression of the forces of the unconscious. Dorian’s desires for that which the nineteenth century’s ‘monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful’58 are expressed simultaneously in his decadent life and in the portrait, an uncanny mimesis of the soul of its subject, manifesting physically this repressed history and history of repression. While Wilde’s most influential contribution to the genre’s history in the nineteenth century, The Picture of Dorian Gray was not his final significant work of Gothic. As an unsigned reviewer wrote in The Times, 23 February 1893, Wilde’s biblical drama Salomé, written around 1891, the same year that the book length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared, was ‘an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive’.59 Wilde’s play sees the young Salomé request the head of John the Baptist in recompense for dancing the dance of the seven veils for the tetrarch Herod, married to her mother. The drama was written originally in French in a poetic style influenced by Symbolism, and the topic of the femme fatale and the figure of Salomé was one common to a number of other decadent writers working out of France during the fin de siècle. In Huysmans’ À Rebours, the protagonist des Esseintes is inspired by the Symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), ‘L’Apparition’ (1876) and ‘Salomé dansant devant Hérode’ (1876), with Salomé figured as a ‘monstrous Beast’, a ‘symbolic incarnation of undying Lust’ and ‘Goddess of immortal Hysteria’.60 It was a passage that Wilde recalled in the 1890 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray,61 and he would send a copy of the first edition of Salomé to the painter. The English edition, published the year after in 1894 and translated by Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), was accompanied by illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) which accentuated the gothic themes, drawn in the distinctive visual style that he would also develop the year afterwards in his illustrations for an

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edition of the tales of Poe. The eroticism of the figures of Salomé and Herodias is accentuated, the hermaphroditism of some of the male characters is implied, and indeed of Wilde himself, whose face is imaged in the moon, which is throughout the play associated with women, chastity, Salomé and feminine sexuality. At the same time, Beardsley’s images find new characters appearing, including a perverted dwarf figure, and their borders are intricately drawn in his distinctive style influenced by Japanese woodcuts, here populated with phallic flowers of evil and bloody ejaculates. Beardsley’s images haunt the reader as much as Wilde’s play, particularly where they divert from his source material, but Salomé itself also diverts from its source in the Biblical narrative, most notably in the final scenes. Having danced for Herod’s desire, Salomé gets her prise, holding the decapitated head of the prophet in front of her face, eroticizing it and kissing his lips in a necrophilic moment, causing Herod to turn from the object of his desire and order her murder.62 Sex and death are placed into uncomfortable conjunction in the play, challenging the viewer who, seeing the drama from a position of relative detachment, nevertheless may on some level come to feel as though they have been made uncomfortably complicit in Herod’s misogynistic objectifying gaze. Salomé is a gothic monster of the fin de siècle, and in this compares with the monster of Wilde’s poem, ‘The Sphinx’ (1894). Written in something of an imitation of Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (1845), the poem sees a silent Sphinx enter into the rooms of a young undergraduate, turning the male subject into the passive object of a monstrous feminine gaze. As the writer of an unsigned review published in the Pall Mall Budget, 21 June 1894, commented, ‘the monsters of the Egyptian room at the British Museum, half-human, half-animal, and wholly infernal’, were brought to life in Wilde’s ‘weird, sometimes repulsive’ poem.63 The notoriety of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and its implied subtext of homoerotic desire, would later be used as evidence by the prosecution during Wilde’s 1895 trial.64 But his writing during and following his imprisonment also engages with the Gothic. In De Profundis (1905), an 1897 letter he wrote to Douglas, he compared himself and his crimes hyperbolically to the gothic figures of Gilles de Rais (1405– 1440) and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814).65 Such a reference picks up on the burgeoning discipline of late nineteenth-century sexology which sought to give an aetiology of ‘perverted’ desire and better understand its ‘evils’, as in Richard KraftEbing’s (1840–1902) Psychopthia Sexualis (1886), and later, in Henry Havelock Eliss’ (1859–1939) Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1910). Certainly, Wilde seems on some level to have considered himself a gothic figure after his time in prison. After his release, he would ‘adopt the name of […] his great uncle’s solitary wanderer’ Melmoth as his own, travelling under the pseudonym to France.66 ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1897), Wilde’s major poem reflecting upon his time in prison, also engages with the Gothic, both in its own allusions to the Baudelairean trope of the grotesque danse macabre,67 and in the ways in which its subject, those prisoners who had been condemned to death, become ghostly figures. This later use of the trope, seemingly also semi-autobiographical in its commentary on his own perceived fall from grace, highlights that which is common to all of Wilde’s various uses of the Gothic, from his humorous short stories, through The Picture of Dorian Gray, into the work postdating his trial. Throughout, Wilde deploys the

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Gothic in order to critique, more or less ironically, the foundations of ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ life in the late nineteenth century. In this sense, while Wilde’s fin de siècle Gothic, particularly in the metropolitan horrors of the London of The Picture of Dorian Gray, bears comparison with that of contemporaries such Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stoker in Dracula or Richard Marsh (1857–1915) in The Beetle (1897), it also differs from these works, precisely in the current of its irony, which always underwrites his work. Read historically, Wilde’s significant role in the development of the Gothic as a major form of modern artistic expression, and one that serves to offer a critical commentary on modernity itself, cannot be underestimated. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Walter Pater, ‘A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde’, in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London, Routledge, 2013), 83–86, 85–86. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols (London, Imago, 1940–1952), 12: 246–247; ‘The “Uncanny”’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, Vintage, 2001), 17: 234–235. For Rank’s analysis in the work on which Freud builds, see Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 71–77. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 329. I quote from the 1891 version unless otherwise indicated. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Mervin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (London, Fourth Estate, 2000), 435. See Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). Oscar Wilde, The Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018), 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 84. Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, Gesammelte Werke, 12: 267-68; ‘The “Uncanny”’, Standard Edition, 17: 252. Wilde, The Short Fiction, 97. Ibid., 95. Compare the ‘ruined gold’ of Tennyson’s Maud, line 12, and ‘red leaves’ of Coleridge’s Christabel, lines 47–50. See John Sloan’s notes in his edition for The Complete Short Stories (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 238.

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17. Wilde, The Short Fiction, 53. 18. Wilde, Complete Letters, 177. On Wilde and Heron-Allen, see Joan Navarre, ‘Oscar Wilde, Edward Heron-Allen, and the Palmistry Craze of the 1880s’, English Literature in Transition, 54: 2 (2011), 174–184. 19. Wilde, The Short Fiction, 52. 20. Ibid., 77. 21. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 318. 22. Ibid., 169. 23. Ibid., 170. 24. Ibid., 173. 25. Ibid., 177, 179. On the ways in which Greek culture was deployed discursively as a cypher for homoerotic passion in the nineteenth century, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994). On Wilde’s novel and mesmerism, see Kerry Powell, ‘The Mesmerizing of Dorian Gray’, Victorian Newsletter, 65 (1984), 10–15. 26. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 191. 27. Ibid., 184. 28. Ibid., 274. 29. Ibid., 211. 30. In this and the following three paragraphs, I draw on my discussion of these and other passages where Wilde’s characters navigate the ‘labyrinthine’ spaces of London, discussed in more detail in my The Aesthetics of Space in NineteenthCentury British Literature, 1843–1907 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 174–184, 192–198. I differ here in the emphasis I place on the Gothic. 31. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 215, 216–217. 32. On Wilde anti-Semitism in this passage, see Christopher S. Nassaar, ‘The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, The Wildean, 22 (2003), 29–36. 33. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 244. 34. Compare Wilde, The Short Fiction, 60-61. 35. See H.G. Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 271 (1891), 246–253. 36. See Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). I discuss the point in my The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 24–25. 37. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 18, 41. 38. Ibid., 135, 136. 39. Ibid., 176. 40. Ibid., 177. 41. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Harlot’s House’, lines 18, 7, 8, 9, 21–24, in Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), 161. 42. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 326–327. 43. Ibid., 327. 44. Ibid., 330.

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45. 46. 47. 48.

Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 158–159. Ibid., 195. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 293. Wilde, Complete Letters, 565. For his critique of Wilde, see Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 317–322. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 197. As Basil puts it irritably, ‘as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home. Then you can do what you like with yourself’ (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 191). Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 293. Ibid., 295. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 301. Freud discusses the uncanniness of the waxwork in ‘Das Unheimliche’, 226; ‘The “Uncanny”’, 236. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 183. Unsigned notice, ‘Books of the Week’, The Critical Heritage, ed. Beckson, 133. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 124. Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier (Paris, Imprimierie nationale, 1981), 126; Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2003), 64. Oscar Wilde, Salomé, lines 976–1034, in Plays I: The Duchess of Padua, Salomé: Drame en un Acte, Salome: Tragedy in One Act, ed. Joseph Donohue (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), 559–563. Unsigned notice, ‘The City of Books’, The Critical Heritage, ed. Beckson, 165. On the Wilde trial, see in particular Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997). Oscar Wilde, De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 80. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988), 491. Wilde’s temperament following his release has been the subject of some important recent revisionist biography in Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2017). Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, lines 283–306, Poems, 204.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

Bibliography Beckson, Karl, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage (London, Routledge, 2013).

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994). Dryden, Linda, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1988). Foldy, Michael S., The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997). Frankel, Nicholas, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2017). Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud, 18 vols. (London, Imago, 1940–1952). ———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, Vintage, 2001). Huysmans, Joris-Karl, À Rebours, ed. Rose Fortassier (Paris, Imprimierie nationale, 1981). ———. Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 2003). Mighall, Robert, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). Nassaar, Christopher S., ‘The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, The Wildean, 22 (2003), 29–36. Navarre, Joan, ‘Oscar Wilde, Edward Heron-Allen, and the Palmistry Craze of the 1880s’, English Literature in Transition, 54:2 (2011), 174–184. Nordau, Max, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Powell, Kerry, ‘The Mesmerizing of Dorian Gray’, Victorian Newsletter, 65 (1984), 10–15. Rank, Otto, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). Tennyson, Alfred, The Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009). Wells, H.G., ‘Zoological Retrogression’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 271 (1891), 246–253. Wilde, Oscar. Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000). ———. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Mervin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London, Fourth Estate, 2000). ———. De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, ed. Ian Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). ———. The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). ———. The Complete Short Stories, ed. John Sloan (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010). ———. Plays I: The Duchess of Padua, Salomé: Drame en un Acte, Salome: Tragedy in One Act, ed. Joseph Donohue (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). ———. The Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018). Whiteley, Giles, The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Edwardian Thrills

Golf and Masculinity in M. R. James David A. Ibitson

In M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), Professor Parkins is harassed by a spirit after venturing out of the safety of his professional confines, with some ill-judged archaeology at the site of a Templars’ preceptor at the East Anglian seaside. Yet, this is not the reason he is there. He explains to colleagues at the fictional St James’s College, Cambridge, that ‘my friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East coast […] for a week or ten days, to improve my game’.1 It is the playing of sport which takes Parkins out of the safety of the university, and makes him vulnerable to gothic encroachments. Similarly, in ‘The Mezzotint’ (again, in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary), the university museum curator Williams, in between bouts of gazing at the unfolding horrors of a haunted mezzotint, is involved in games of, and conversations about, golf with his colleagues. These ostensibly trivial mentions of golf signal how James’s gothic narratives entertain and interrogate fin de siècle discourses of masculinity in sophisticated, yet anxious, ways. James’s spectres perform what Rosemary Jackson sees as the function of the ghost story, to ‘make visible that which is culturally invisible’, exposing the rules and expectations that govern and constrain what it means to be a man.2 The Gothic’s established tropes of pursuit and constraint are played out again in various negotiations of masculinity rendered horrific to James’s protagonists. If James’s ghosts are yet another iteration of the Gothic’s return of the repressed, then it is lost, elusive or worrying forms of masculinity that are at stake here. James’s ghosts are manly metaphors; his oblivious academics are not only haunted by spectres, revenants and demons, but by the negotiation of traumatising masculine ideals. It is Parkins’s initial introduction that indicates one target of the text. His admission of his newly acquired sporting pastime is conspicuously phrased as one imposed upon him: his friends ‘have been making’ him take up golf. It is this enforcement D. A. Ibitson (B) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_43

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of sport by popular public opinion that gestures to where some of the gothic gaze of the story lies: the role of sport in childhood masculine development. By the end of the nineteenth century, the institutional role of sport in public schools was firmly established, wedded to ideas of health, morality and manliness, as well as modelling the leadership and behaviour required for British national and international security and success.3 This is, of course, exemplified by Henry Newbolt’s poem ‘Vitai Lampada’, in which a schoolboy’s heroism on the cricket pitch is mapped onto his later heroism on the desert battleground, spurred on by his Captain’s cry of ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’.4 Mike Huggins notes how, by the 1880s, school advertisements boasted about their sporting strengths ahead of their academic ones.5 For J. A. Mangan, this sporting system was tantamount to a ‘conveyor-belt’, manufacturing bodies and minds for a particular ideal of manhood.6 Alongside these privileged schools worked an increasing number of social organisations, such as the Boys’ Brigade, and, later, the Scout Movement. Of course, the militaristic stylings of these organisations signalled their supposed long-term imperial utility.7 In the Boys’ Brigade, with its seaside excursions, this was to be supplemented with physical exertion and sport; the Brigade was, according to John Springhall, one of the first organisations to introduce a public school sporting ethos to working-class boys.8 Of course, playing sport is exactly what Parkins has been pressured into doing. These concerns are evoked, not just by Parkins’s journey to the seaside, but also by his notable youth. Parkins, the narrator is careful to inform us, is ‘young, neat, and precise in speech’ (75). Of course, that is not to say that Parkins is a boy; but such an emphasis on a youth exceptional enough to warrant specific mention allows the target of contemporary youth organisations to fall within the reach of the story. We are also told that one of Parkins’s ‘principle characteristics was pluck’ (78), evoking the required ‘pluck’ associated with the heroism of the boy-heroes of G. A. Henty’s adventure novels (such as By Sheer Pluck [1884]), or boys journals such as Boys of England and the Boys Own Paper, whose youthful protagonists have ‘pluck’ in abundance. Parkins undergoes a subtle but significant infantilisation. There is something here of A. C. Benson’s judging of James to be developmentally stunted, ‘a kind of child’.9 Indeed, with Parkins’s admission that his excursion is to ‘improve’ his game, the issue of his own improvement obliquely acknowledges contemporary ideas of the sporting moulding of the nation’s youth. As we know from ‘Lost Hearts’ (1904), where Mr Abney drinks the ashes of burnt hearts cut out of children to eliminate ‘the prospect of death itself’ (28), and the sinister and necromantic child Saul in ‘The Residence at Whitminster’ (1919), children in James’s ghost stories are a source of potentially deadly power. James’s childhood and professional life was spent in the masculine establishments of Eton and Cambridge: both exemplars of the institutionalised endorsement of ideals of sporting manliness and national fitness. It is perhaps not surprising that we see this imposed on to his protagonists. It is interesting to note that in Jonathan Miller’s 1968 adaptation of ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, when Parkins (played by Michael Hordern) is terrorised by the ghost at the climax of the tale he sucks his thumb. Interestingly, this

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Freudian regression plucks out one of the covert preoccupations of the original tale, displaying something of the infantilisation of the protagonists that is to be found in James’s stories. As ever, it is hard to keep Freud out of the Gothic. So, Parkins is driven to the seaside by popular opinion, the sporting improvement he seeks mirroring the moral and physical improvement that public school and youth programme games were to instil in their members. The Boy’s Own Paper even featured a three part guide to golf in 1884, such was sport’s potential importance in attaining a suitable masculinity.10 Indeed, even the increasing imperial function of sport is present at Parkins’s destination: the name of the ‘Globe Inn’ acting as a comic reduction of the global concerns inherent in codified childhood sport. This is exacerbated when the narrator informs us of the rest of the ‘population’ of the inn (a golfing one, ‘of course’) (78). The swastikas which adorn the whistle that Parkins finds in the preceptor also gestures towards the Imperial context in which the Brigade saw itself functioning, with the symbol’s origins in India and use in Saxon ritual; this story of rural England is subtly set in a global context. That ‘the great game’, a colloquial term for golf, would also become a euphemism for spying, and the Imperial competition between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, indicates the idealistic proximity of the implications of sporting activity to national strength. The context of manly militarism is cemented with Parkins’s only companion at the Globe: Colonel Wilson, ‘an ancien militaire, secretary of a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible strength, and views of a pronouncedly Protestant type’ (78). In many respects, the Colonel is an imposing and comically idealised figure, with his powerful voice, clubbable London reputation and a patriotism reflected in his Protestant zeal, with which he antagonises the Vicar, who has ‘inclinations towards a picturesque ritual’ (78). The Colonel acts as an ostensible symbol of the manliness that Parkins has set out to find, and the narrative itself calls him ‘the most conspicuous figure’ in the Globe (78). However, this model of military manliness is former military, old, retired. The ideal is nowhere to be found, and this lack is compounded by their playing of golf. The importance of golf in this story is suggested by the title of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. Taken as it is from a Robert Burns poem, it gestures towards golf’s supposed Scottish origins. Sportswriter and editor Alfred E. T. Watson, in his preface to The Poetry of Sport (1896), notes that golf has ‘become the rage in every quarter of the country […] there were districts of England where a person’s moral character was considered of less importance than the ease and precision of his swing’.11 We can presume that the ease and precision of Parkins’s swing is somewhat lacking; it does, after all, need improving. The first mention of Parkins’s game appears soon after his arrival at the Globe, as he Spent the greater part of the day […] in what he had called improving his game, […] and during the afternoon – whether the process of improvement were to blame or not, I am not sure – the Colonel’s demeanor assumed a colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking home with him from the links. (78)

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The narrator’s tone is ironic, and it seems that precious little ‘improvement’ is being made to Parkins’s sporting prowess. Indeed, at one point we are informed that the Colonel ‘had been rather repining at the prospect of a second day’s play in his company’ (84). The caustic comments are relentless: when the Colonel tells Parkins that it is his ‘drive’, the narrator, unable to stay silent, interrupts with another sarcastic aside to the reader, saying ‘or whatever it might have been: the golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper intervals’ (85). The narrator is anxious to stress how unimpressive a sportsman Parkins is. We are given some sparing accounts of Parkins’s play after this, but the quality of his golf is discretely, or rather pointedly, skirted round. We are informed, in a mockheroic tone, that the ‘dauntless’ (77) Parkins ‘set forth, with a stern determination to improve his game’, compounded by the revelation that ‘he succeeded in this enterprise so far that the Colonel […] became quite chatty’ (84). After this, when Parkins authoritatively commands his ‘boy’ to hand him his cleek, all the detail we are given about his shot is that there was, bathetically, ‘a short interval’ (85). Finally, we are informed that ‘both continued to play well’, praise somewhat lessened by the addition ‘or, at least, well enough to make them forget everything else until the light began to fail them’ (86). Golf, while acknowledged, is conspicuously edited out of these scenes, and subjected to a knowing reduction. Also notable is the literal peripheral presence of sporting boyhood in the form of Parkins’s caddy (the aforementioned boy). When they return to the inn ‘the Colonel was almost knocked down by a boy who rushed into him at the very top of his speed’ (86). This dangerous boyhood vigour upsetting the equilibrium of golfing manhood further signals the questionable place of their adult masculinity in comparison with the ideal athletic youth. This is compounded by the exaggerated cockney accent of the lad, who has, we assume, seen a ghost in Parkins’s room: ‘I seen it wive at me out of the winder […] the front winder it was, at the ‘otel’ (86). This may be class snobbishness for comic effect, but it also grants a presence in the text to the sort of energetic urban East End youth that some youth programmes, such as the Fresh Air fund, were set up to serve. The fact that the Colonel’s advice to the boy is ‘another time, like a brave English boy, you just throw a stone’ explicitly evokes the fetishizing of English boyish pluck by the Boys of England and the Boys Own Paper, as well as its violent national utility (87). Importantly, this is a mere pretence of golf, a shadowy approximation rather than an actual game. Indeed, we get as much detail of Parkins ‘putting the finishing touches to his golfing costume’ (84) as we do to his game. We are left with mere surface-level sporting masculinity, trappings newly adopted, and an affectation of a certain kind of manliness. Here, the tale is engaging with ideas of Butlerian gender performance, which work to place James in a gothic lineage dating back to The Castle of Otranto (1765), which Kathy Justice Gentile sees, with its own anxious gender performances, as ‘the granddaddy of Gothic Drag’.12 There is always a narrative gap where the golf should be; it is implied, found in the same place in which Scott Brewster notes James’s ghosts lurking: ‘from the edge of the frame’ and ‘in the margins’.13 The conspicuous eliding of the play encapsulates Parkins’s predicament: it is as if the text knows the sort of outdoors sporting

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masculinity in which Parkins, as a man, should be participating, but cannot actually show him competing on such a playing field. There is a potential reason for this sporting self-consciousness: golf’s narrative ambiguity here mimics its ambiguous status in real life. Just as the ghost, when it appears, is always far away, and ‘the distance between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen’, so to does the narrative place Parkins’s play at arm’s length (80). As a result, Parkins and the ghost are curiously aligned, and Parkins’s own marginal or spectral status comments on his halfway manliness. It is manliness he chases, but never catches up with. Importantly, the manliness of golf was similarly insecure. Maurice Craig (later Virginia Woolf’s psychiatrist), in Psychological Medicine (1905), cites golf as a useful treatment for hysteria, a malady with conspicuously feminine implications.14 Women had access to golf that they did not have with other sports. A cursory glance at Hearth and Home on 13th February 1896 shows how popular the sport was with women, with articles such as ‘Scratch Lady Players’, ‘Ladies at Golf’, Health Aspect of Golf for Women’, and ‘Ladies Golf Clubs’, as well as an instalment of regular feature ‘The World of Sportswomen’, which consistently featured golfers.15 C. Hutchison argues that the idea of women ‘as useless for purposes of masculine golf’ is redundant, while P. Murray Braidwood identifies golf as a sport in which, while ‘the young and strong can expend their energy’, it is ‘moderate’ enough for women and ‘the stiffening joints and muscles of those getting old’.16 It seems that golf, at least occasionally, was seen as sport for the feminine, and the frail. Golf, then, could be shorthand for a masculinity that was not up to scratch. Blackwood’s Magazine detailed additional reasons to be suspicious of golf in an 1895 article called ‘Should Golf be encouraged at Public Schools?’. In it, the author’s objection centres on the solitary and unmanly nature of the game. Nicholas Freeman notes that the article establishes a masculine ideal defined by team sports, with cricket as the moral exemplar.17 Blackwood’s objection to golf is that it is ‘more or less egotistical’, and its view that cricket, as an alternative, is ‘an attractive and manly’ game, has clear implications for exactly how manly golf is.18 ‘Except in rare cases’, the article advises, we should instinctively condemn the boy who devoted his play-time to a more or less solitary and selfish game – a game where bad temper towards adversaries, and mutual recrimination between partners, are common if not inseparable accidents, taking the place of the esprit de corps existing among the members of a cricket XI […]19

Rather than improving the manliness of boys, golf, it seems, offers nothing more than the opportunity for loafers to find ‘legitimised excuses’ to avoid more ‘active’, ‘exciting’ and ‘dangerous’ games like cricket and football (probably rugby football), suitable only for the ‘bona fide invalid’, ‘the child of seven’ or ‘the old grey beard’ with ‘one foot in the gave’ and ‘the other firmly on the putting green’.20 With the masculinity of the nation’s boys apparently at stake, Blackwood’s goes on to stress that: most certainly we do not want to swell the numbers of the malingerers or boyhypochondriacs. Modern humanitarianism claims too many of these victims already - these hothouse plants whom an east wind is supposed to cut and a cold in the head drives straight

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to the welcome shelter of the sanatorium; reputedly brittle ornaments whom a cricket –ball might shiver or a charge at football pulverise; precious darlings over whose destiny are watching those absent mysterious powers, the family doctor and the nurse, who, so mamma says, “know the constitutions of all my children.” 21

This hypothetical mother, we are soon informed, is of course ‘a deadly putter on the ladies’ links’.22 In a later article which attempts to demystify and explain ‘the witchery of golf’ (a rather gothic phrase), in 1898, Blackwood’s likens the position of golf among games as ‘almost exactly that as the novelist’s young lady, who, while possessing no regular or recognised traits of beauty, yet exercises an undoubted attraction upon those who come within her influence’.23 Apparently, ‘no woman, in a novel or out of it, has had to undergo so much contempt, ridicule, contumely, and disparagement as has been directed at golf’, cementing a portrayal of golf that is simultaneously enervating, infantilising and feminising.24 The solicitor, cricketer and cricket writer Frederick Gale, in his book on Modern English Sports (and ‘their use and abuse’), leaves lawn tennis and golf for the last chapter, explaining that ‘the last toast at public dinners is generally “The Ladies”’.25 Fittingly, for all we are told about Parkins’s apparent ‘pluck’, he is, rather conflictingly, also described by the narrator as ‘something of an old woman – rather henlike perhaps’. Additionally, and significantly considering Blackwood’s concern about apparent ranks of ‘boy-hypochondriacs’, after first blowing the haunted whistle he finds himself lying awake at night, fancying that ‘he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that it was going to stop work at any moment, and would entertain grave suspicions of his lungs, brain, liver etc.’. Brewster sees James’s domestic settings as ‘parodies of “original” Gothic architecture […] that physically embody morbid symptoms’.26 Here, the morbid symptoms of the gothic resurface internalised in Parkins himself, and serve as allusions to a more widespread cultural malady. Irrespective of any supernatural reasons, this comic hypochondria, has clear detrimental implications for his fitness, and a condition that was still a topic of medical discourse, in such texts as Craig’s (although Craig recommends rest, not exercise). For Blackwood’s, sport is about making ‘better men’ and ‘correcting deficiency’ in the character of boys. After all, as Blackwood’s argues, ‘we do not send our boys to Eton or Harrow’ merely to ‘read the classics’.27 Parkins, it seems, represents a compromised masculinity reminiscent of those bemoaned by Blackwood’s. Golf is at best a sport of questionable manliness, and Parkins is damned by his own sporting endeavours. These sporting instabilities need to be situated alongside pre-existing suspicions of a lack of masculine performance. Patrick J. Murphy notes how the figure of the Oxbridge scholar was often cast as a type of weakened manhood, and his companion figure the amateurish antiquary as unfocused, unsystematic, feminised, unmanly, or even sexually underdeveloped.28 What is more, the language of sport and the idea of antiquarianism are both implicated in the reason for Parkins being haunted: his digging up of the whistle on the Templar site. Before he leaves, he asked by a colleague to look at the site, to let him know whether ‘it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer’ (75). After his first day of golf with the Colonel, he makes his way back to the inn via the site, in order to take a look at the ruins.

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His exploration results in him digging up the whistle, and his decision to do so is explained by the narrator: ‘few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously’ (78–9). In Parkins’s assumption of amateur status, the text gestures to Victorian concerns about the statuses of professional and amateur sportsmen, with the gentleman amateur regarded as more respectable than the lower-status professional. Huggins sees these debates as revolving around middle-class desires to contain and control working-class encroachments into sport, as well as the ideal of amateurism being untainted by an unhealthy competitiveness and desire for money.29 With golf, the relationship between professional and amateur was, for Vamplew, ‘one of master and servant’.30 The key contemporary literary comparison here is E. W. Hornung’s gentleman burglar A. J. Raffles, whose status as ‘The Amateur Cracksman’, with his social alibi as a successful amateur cricketer, raises him above both common thieves and suspicion; at least for a while. What is curious here then is that Parkins is moving from vulgar professionalism to gentlemanly amateurism and is punished for it; the ideal of sporting masculinity, it seems, is not for the likes of him. Murphy sheds light on this problem, by placing it in the context of shifting ideas of academia at the turn of the century from unfocused antiquarianism to academic professionalism and specialisation, with suggestions of low commerciality.31 Nevertheless, the idea of professionalism as ‘potentially degrading’ may have been hard to kill, while anxieties about commercialisation surface in James’s tales, as they do in the world of sport.32 The amateurism of Parkins marks him out as antiquated, rather than the modern new professional, punished for crossing those boundaries.33 It seems unlikely that James himself was specifically concerned about these same issues in sport, but what this does show is the prevalence of similar ideas in society, the multivalent expression of perhaps more fundamental concerns about new shifts in professionalism and status. This continues in ‘The Mezzotint’, which also utilises the sporting pretentions of its academics for comic currency. In this instance, the regulation scholar is Williams who acquires the mezzotint in question in his role as a curator of an art museum at Oxford. The mezzotint is a ‘not specially exciting’ picture of a manor house (p. 31). Golf is mentioned three times. When he first views the picture we are told that Williams made the tea, and supplied the friend with whom he had been playing golf (for I believe the authorities of the University I write of indulge in that pursuit by way of relaxation); and tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing person. The conclusion arrived at was that certain strokes might have been better, and that in certain emergencies neither player had experienced that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect. (32)

The golf-talk continues at dinner, the details of which, we are told, ‘need not be dwelt upon; the less so as he met there colleagues who had been playing golf during the afternoon, and words with which we have no concern were freely bandied across the table – merely golfing words, I would hasten to explain’ (33). Thirdly, the morning

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after he first notices grotesque changes occurring in the mezzotint, we see Williams at breakfast with his neighbour Nisbet: those who are familiar with the University life can picture for themselves the wide and delightful range of subjects over which the conversation of two Fellows of Canterbury College is likely to extend during a Sunday morning breakfast. Hardly a topic was left unchallenged, from golf to lawn tennis. (34)

Again, the narrator has no love for golf, and it is notable that tennis was also a sport played by women, and so potentially feminising.34 Frederick Gale, after all, bundled golf and lawn tennis together at the end of his book. Considering the horrific subject matter of the tale, as the mezzotint changes in instalments to show the image of a monstrous figure abducting a child from an isolated house, these are incongruously comic interludes; the dismissive humour targets both golf, and the enthusiasm of the men for it. Indeed, the game itself is once again conspicuously absent from the tale, and all we are left are fragile professions of sporting masculinity within a gothic narrative that holds this small all-male community up to ridicule. This is signalled by a scene in which the full gruesomeness of the story within a story that is contained within the mezzotint becomes apparent. After noticing the series of changes within the picture, Williams, Nisbet and another friend named Garwood, leave it for a few hours, and return to check its progress, only to find Williams’s ‘skip’ (a college servant), Mr Filcher, staring in horror at the picture which now features a skeletal figure running from the house with a child in its arms. Filcher’s judgement of the picture is that ‘it ain’t the pictur I should ’ang where my little girl could see it, sir […] if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know ’ow it is with children; ’ow nervish they git with a little thing and all’ (37). First of all we may note that Filcher’s shock and objection with the picture being on display in Williams’s room is bound up with it being unsuitable for viewing by children, despite the fact that this is not the sort of place where a child is likely to see it. Secondly, at several points we do actually see Williams getting ‘nervish’, presumably like a child, at the sight of the mezzotint: once when he notices the first change in the image we are told that ‘he declares now that if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit’ (33), and again where ‘with very considerable – almost tremulous – excitement’ he hands the picture to Nisbet (34). There is something here of the hypochondriacal ‘brittle ornaments’ of the Blackwood’s article. In any case, the effect is one of Williams’s rhetorical enervation and infantilisation. For Andrew Smith, the implication of the tale is that Williams and his colleagues ‘represent an indifferent world […] one which is amoral and associated with triviality. In essence they are lifeless figures who are forced, if only temporarily, out of their complacency’.35 In this reading, golf is ‘a marker not of leisure but of moral vacuity’.36 There is something in this, but, rather than forcing them out of their complacency, the moving pictures of the mezzotint actually highlight how inactive these men are.

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The significance of this is revealed by the Boys’ Brigade’s distinction between a healthy participation in sport and dangerous devotion to merely being a spectator; the former being decidedly manlier than the latter.37 In 1904 the liberal sociologist L. T. Hobhouse, critical as he was of Imperial rhetoric, would complain that ‘no social revolution will come from a people so absorbed in cricket and football’, focusing on spectators, rather than players.38 Liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman demonstrates the persistence of this concern, citing a key fault with the suburban man as his ‘childish absorption in vicarious sport and trivial amusements’.39 The ability to ‘play up and play the game’, rather than to sit down and watch it, is what is desired of true men of England; but the shock of the gothic renders Williams and his friends powerless. The passivity of the academics is conspicuous. Rather than crime-solving men of action, they are reduced to the role of spectators, which diminishes their masculinity. Nisbet suggests to Williams that ‘it looks very much as if we were assisting at the working out of a tragedy somewhere’, but they are instead entirely passive consumers of the action they observe (35). Nisbet asks Williams ‘are you going to sit and watch it all day’; ‘Well, no, I think not’, replies Williams, ‘I rather imagine we’re meant to see the whole thing’ (36). And they do, despite Williams’s half-hearted refusal to sit and watch it all day, we are soon informed that ‘from five to seven the three companions sat and watched the picture by turns. But […] it never changed’ (37), that they ‘assembled again, at the earliest possible moment’ (37), and that later it is again ‘carefully watched’ at the ‘Ashleian Museum’ (39). For Shane McCorristine, these are ‘playful amateurs in the ghost-hunting field’, shoring up their social group.40 But the point here is that they do not play, and the effect of the ghost is to reveal the extent of their lack of vitality. Williams is, as Murphy calls him, a ‘sterile bystander’.41 This must all be viewed in the light of the horrific narrative that Williams sees play out in the mezzotint: the disappearance in infancy of the last surviving heir of Anningly hall in 1802, taken, we are led to believe, by the corpse or spirit of a hanged poacher named Gawdy. Here we have a tale about the literal death of masculine youth, what is described by another character as ‘spes ultima gentis’. This is a multivalent phrase, likely to mean the last hope of bloodline, tribe, clan or family (which has obvious applicability to the story), but also potentially translating as the last hope of the people, race or nation. It is this malleability of meaning, alongside the enervated masculinity of the academics, that again alludes to the work of organised sports in developing juvenile masculinity for the good of Britain. Gawdy too is the last of his family line, compounding the sense of doomed patrilineal inheritance. Indeed, James’s protagonists are, in general, a remarkably infertile lot; bachelors, and rarely fathers. They are, in more ways than one, a dead end for masculinity. As Smith highlights, in the refusal of the mezzotint to change again at the close of the tale, no matter how carefully they watch it, ‘the drama of the mezzotint informs them about their own sense of sterility’.42 The sterility that Murphy notes is given a second significance here, but it is a sterility that has wide-reaching analogical importance: this is about culturally ingrained ideas of masculinity and heroism. This is a world in which the risk of the gothic death of masculinity is bound up with the survival of the

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nation, or race; Nisbet’s identification of the house in the mezzotint as conspicuously English guarantees that the story engages in these national concerns. A key comparison text here is Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899), a notable literary celebration of what Joseph Bristow calls the ‘assertive individualism’ of the pluck British boy. In this episodic set of boarding school misadventures of three lads, golf and national pride again become intertwined. The chapter ‘The Flag of their Country’ sees an MP come to give a speech to the school, which the boys judge to be vulgarly and patronisingly jingoistic. He attempts to dramatically end his misjudged speech by unfurling a large ‘Union Jack’.43 The response of the youthful audience is underwhelming: They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before – down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton Sands; above the roof of the Golf-club […] But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eyes?44

Here this vulgar and manipulative utilisation of a civilian’s idea of imperial patriotism is met with scorn, and associated with the compromised sporting endeavours of the golf club. The relationship of Stalky and Co with imperial manliness is a complex one, they are all from military families, and Stalky does, in fact, go on to have exploits in the army in (presumably) Afghanistan. However, their suspicion of this golf club patriotism does indicate how we can read the game in James’s stories as similarly pushing back against certain conceptions of heroic manliness. Indeed, the acknowledgement of James’s stories that masculinity is a shifting condition, rather than a monolithic type, with the men moving between various performances, fits Kelly Hurley’s identification in turn-of-the-century British gothic fiction of confounding and liminal bodies and identities, resulting in a threat to identity or nation.45 For James’s Gothic, even British manliness is insecure, let alone the country that depends on it. However, whether this unstable masculinity is something to fear, or a challenge to social ideals, is question that needs addressing. It is worth considering that the comic attacks on golf in these tales simply reveal a golf-sceptical stance like that of Blackwood’s; one critical of golf in a way that testifies to the importance of sports perceived as more manly. Perhaps they are asserting ideas and standards of sporting masculinity rather than critiquing them. However, the absence of any other more ideal sport, or a paradigm of functioning masculinity prevents this easy conclusion. The closest we get to such a figure is Colonel Wilson, who does, after all, seemingly rescue Parkins from the ghost. At the end of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, the ghost summoned by the blowing of the whistle penetrates Parkins’s room and clothes itself in, or inhabits, the spare bedding. The Colonel becomes such a stereotypical heroic figure that his entrance at the climactic moment is prefaced by the weary-sounding narrator saying ‘at this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the colonel burst the door open’ (90). Later it is his ‘very brawny arm’ that casts the haunted whistle into the sea (90). Perhaps the Colonel is our masculine paragon after all, one that all James’s antiquarians are failing to emulate.

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However, even the Colonel is not immune from the narrator’s comic barbs, as when he is ‘almost knocked down’ by the panicked cockney-accented boy he is promptly described as ‘the warrior’, an ironically dramatic description which undermines any heroism that the narrative may otherwise bestow on him. So, this rather lessened military figure must rescue Parkins; but it is what he is rescued from that is more important. When the story’s phantom finally manifests itself it is as ‘a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen’ (90). The story so far has frequently indulged in irony, and so the italicisation of the last three words could well be seen as hinting at a moment of bathetic revelation: crumpled linen is not exactly the most terrifying thing, and we are presented with a ghost literally dresses up as a ghost in a bedsheet. It does not take an interpretative stretch to see the potential comedy in this climactic reveal. But one needs to consider in what instance crumpled linen represents something to be frightened of. Lucy Armitt has looked at the story as representing an illicit homosexual encounter, which has clear implications for its depiction of non-normative masculinity.46 Mike Pincombe has judged it to be an example of ‘homosexual panic’,47 while Darry Jones notes James’s association of sex and ‘bodily corruption’, and identifies numerous tales in which sexual anxiety pools around their protagonists.48 Here, Oscar Wilde also inhabits the tale, as his trial for gross indecency saw a maid named Jane Cotter called to testify about the state of his bedsheets.49 If Wilde could be pursued by genuinely harmful bedsheets, why not Parkins? Murphy too, sees plenty of ‘erotic thrill’ in James’s stories.50 Then there is Parkins’s reaction, before he leaves Oxford, to his colleague Rogers’s offer of sharing his room: ‘the Professor quivered, but managed to laugh’ (76). This quivering response, and the indescribable, maddening ghost that later emerges from the coveted bed, has more than a suggestion of the sublime castration that Gentile sees as a consequence of the Eighteenth-Century rise of the Gothic.51 In this case, it is not castration per se that is implied, but how any homosexual eroticism may mean Parkins falls short of an exclusive Victorian manliness. The Gothic, again, works to cast doubt over ‘manliness’ as a stable status, and the sedentary text-filled lives of James’s antiquaries implicates them as having a below-par masculinity. In ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book’, also in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), Denistoun (another overly curious academic asking for a haunting) is unable to distinguish between the fear of a verger afraid of a demon hiding in the rafters of his Church, and the possibility that he might just be ‘an unbearably henpecked husband’ (11). James’s men are in such a state of gender confusion that demons and wives are indistinguishable. This is a variation on the ‘monstrous-feminine’ that Jones records as populating James’s Gothic.52 In ‘The Rose Garden’, in More Ghost Stories (1911), we see Mrs Anstruther, having just purchased Westfield Hall, planning a new rose garden. Asking her husband to run an errand for her, he responds with ‘Oh, well, of you wish it, Mary, of course I can do that, but I had half arranged to play a round of golf with Geoffrey Williamson this morning’ (114). He nevertheless loses his resolve under pressure from his wife, and acquiesces. For Terry W. Thompson, golf here is a way of avoiding work.53 But it is not to avoid labour that he wants to play golf, it to avoid being sent to find

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‘knitted things’ for his wife’s stall at a bazaar (114). We have here yet another allusion to an emasculating domesticity, and a clichéd comic henpecked husband figure. ‘After luncheon’, Mrs Anstruther says, ‘you can go over to the links, or -’ (115). Mr Anstruther’s immediate response of ‘I should be glad of a round’, is quashed by his wife saying ‘I was going to say, you might call on the bishop; but I suppose it is no use my making any suggestion’ (115). By four o’clock, Mrs Anstruther had ‘dismissed her husband to his golf’ (116). Mr Anstruther has no masculine autonomy. The rose garden, should there be any uncertainty, turns out to be haunted. Also in More Ghost Stories, ‘Mr Humphrey’s Inheritance’ is the fourth of James’s stories to feature golf. In it the ‘rather tall and reasonably good-looking young man’ Humphreys inherits a previously unseen country house, from a previously unseen uncle (184). His suitability for this position is placed in doubt by the narrator, who is of the view that his Employment in a Government office for the last four or five years had not gone far to fit him for the life of a country gentleman. He was studious and rather diffident, and had few out of door pursuits except golf and gardening (185).

One gets the impression that golf alone does not amount to much, if one is to be a country gentleman. Murphy notes how Humphreys is more concerned with the sedentary work of cataloguing the library, rather than the estate work befitting a more patriarchal ideal.54 In the end, Humphreys is attacked by the spirit of his cremated great grandfather, and once again a precarious male lineage is subjected to gothic violence. Of course, this may simply be attacking those unable to live up to standards of sporting masculinity, rather than the ideals of the standards themselves. Golf has, of course, an uncertain cultural position. For Country Life Illustrated, timid horse riders, ‘afraid to take the slightest risk’, can cause other riders to ‘lose their dash’ and ‘may even take to golf’.55 However, with the conspicuous absence of any examples of a manly ideal, one suspects it is the manliness peddled organised boyhood sports, and the boys-own adventure narratives which encourage heroic pluck, that are disrupted by James’s ghosts. So, in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, after lengthy fretting about the state of his room and the bed-making standards of the maids, Parkins is literally attacked by domesticity itself in the form of his own messy linen, a comic Gothicisation of domestic drudgery (as noted by Jones), the antithesis to heroic outdoors masculinity.56 This deadly domesticity is, indeed, a feature of James’s ghost stories, with Jones also noting such anxieties in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, ‘The Haunted Doll’s House’ and ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’, while James’s unsafe beds are also noted by Julia Briggs.57 However, the colonel is of the opinion that ‘if Parkins had closed with [the linen phantom] it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening’ (90–1). The military man himself suggests that fears of domestic or unadventurous masculinity are ridiculous. It is a comically undermined threat, blown out of all proportion. The Colonel even tells us that he ‘remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India’ (90); no amount of imperial travel will make one immune to such masculine inadequacies.

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Yet, for all the efforts of his friends making him take up the sport, Parkins is still left the victim of a smothering domesticity, so fragile is this empty pretence of masculinity. Notably, Rogers, the colleague who joins him at the end of the story, does not play golf and, since he does not evidence the desire to aspire to a masculinising process, is not subject to wrestling with, or being haunted by, gothic and spectral domesticity. It is the constraints of masculine ideology that haunt James’s victims, no matter how harmless the ghosts themselves are. It is worth noting that, as Murphy highlights, with Rogers’s arrival, Parkins is now part of a social group, part of a team, rather than a golfing individual.58 The story links golf (itself an institution of manly segregation) and antiquarianism by their ‘homosocial utility’.59 It is the strengthening of maleness that is at stake here; one borne out by golf clubs as serving the interests of a segregated male society, despite female participation.60 A more positive homosociality, it seems, is still within Parkins’s reach. By the time of ‘A Warning to the Curious’ in the collection of the same name (1925), golf is resurrected in a tale which is essentially a re-writing of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad’. This time it is a ‘rabbity anaemic’ young man (315), whose digging up of the last of the three lost crowns of the kingdom of East Anglia, which are said to protect the country from invasion causes him to be haunted and hunted by its guardian spirit. Again, national security is at stake, and Murphy has established how the tale is concerned with the First World War. Hounded by the spirit, the young man is comforted and aided in the crown’s return by two men on a golfing holiday. Does the young man himself play golf? ‘Yes, he did, but he didn’t think he should care about that tomorrow’ (324). Instead, he is met only with a grizzly end on the shingle of the beach: ‘his mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits’ (327). If looked at slightly askance it might be a horrific gothicisation of a golfer stranded in a sandy bunker. Perhaps if he was less rabbit, and more sportsman, he would have stood more of a chance. We might read golf in James’s stories as pushing back against certain conceptions of heroic manliness. I do not want to suggest that golf was completely taboo; of course men played golf and it would obviously prove increasingly popular. As Vamplew notes, despite not being a sport of ‘courage and overt masculinity’ it is still framed as a male-dominant activity, extending ‘the cult of manly athleticism’ beyond youth.61 In 1913, golfers could still muster up this manliness, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s apocalyptic The Poison Belt, where players continue their game as the world ends, and we are told that: ‘it would take the crack of doom to stop a true golfer’.62 Yet, it is clear that golf was subject to particular sleights in a way that team-based field sports were not. It was cricket, not golf, which had the ‘manly tussle’ to inculcate the ‘persevering pluck / That saved the day at Waterloo’.63 One cannot ignore the sporting scepticism of M. R. James’s ghost stories; but one cannot ignore their wry comedy either. With their ambivalences and ambiguities, they are best seen as playfully discursive, rather than stridently ideological; the texts function as sites that gothically animate and bring to the fore anxieties about the construction, and viability, of masculinity. And yet, with the ironic treatment of enforced masculine standards, and the ineffectual sporting half measures used as comic currency by the narrator, these texts go a fair way to disfigure or

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decentre ideologies of masculine development. James’s ghostly bogeymen put pressure on masculinity, revealing it to be not firm and objective, but spectral, shifting and unstable as the spirits themselves. Notes 1.

M. R. James, The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London, Penguin, 1987), 75. All references to James’s tales are from this edition. 2. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Abingdon, Routledge, 2013), 69. 3. See Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2004); Rob Light, ‘A “Strange…Absurd…and Somewhat Injurious Influence”? Cricket, Professional Coaching in the Public Schools and the “Gentleman Amateur” Ethos’, Sport in History, 30.1 (2010), 8–31; Hamad S. Ndee, ‘Public Schools in Britain in the Nineteenth Century: The Emergence of Team Games and the Development of the Educational Ideology of Athleticism’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 27.5 (2010), 845–871; J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008); Mangan, ‘Manufactured’ Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism (Abingdon, Routledge, 2012). 4. A similar message is implied by the ‘Football Song’ in R. St John Anslie’s Sedbergh School Songs, which claims that ‘In the future afar there are goals for your still, / There are fields for the men who can fight’. R. St John Ainslie, ‘Football Song’, Sedbergh School Songs (Leeds, Richard Jackson, 1896), 24–28 (27). 5. Huggins, Victorians and Sport, 32. 6. Magan, Preface: ‘Swansong’, in ‘Manufactured’ Masculinity, 9. 7. See David A. Ibitson, ‘Jerome K. Jerome, Masculinity and the Parody of Urban Escape: ‘Sunday-School Slops’, English Literature in Transition, 61.1 (2018), 98–117. 8. John Springhall, ‘Building Character in the British Boy: The Attempt to Extend Christian Manliness to Working-Class Adolescents, 1880–1914’, in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 52–74 (56–7). 9. Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983), 125. Cited by Patrick J. Murphy, Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 134. 10. ‘Golf’, Boy’s Own Paper (26 January 1884), 271; (2 February 1884), 286; (9 February 1884), 302. 11. Alfred E. T. Watson, ‘The Badminton Library’, in Poetry of Sport, ed. Hedley Peek (London, Longman’s Green and Co., 1896), ix–xxviii (xii).

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12. Kathy Justice Gentile, ‘Sublime Drag: Supernatural Masculinity in Gothic Fiction’, Gothic Studies, 11.1 (2009), 16-31 (18). 13. Scott Brewster, ‘Casting an Eye: M. R. James at the Edge of the Frame’, Gothic Studies, 14.2 (2012), 40–54 (40). 14. Maurice Craig, Psychological Medicine (London, J. and A. Churchill, 1905), 272. 15. I. P., ‘Scratch Lady Players’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 410; Horace C. Hutchinson, ‘Ladies at Golf’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 512; P. Murray Braidwood, M.D., ‘Health Aspect of Golf for Women’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 514; Anonymous, ‘Ladies Golf Clubs’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 515. 16. Hutchinson, ‘Ladies at Golf’, 512; Braidwood, ‘Health Aspects’, 515. 17. Nicholas Freeman, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 76. 18. ‘Should Golf Be Encouraged at Public Schools?’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1895), 417–423 (417). 19. Ibid., 419. 20. Ibid., 419; 419; 419; 419; 419; 418; 418. 21. Ibid., 419–420. 22. Ibid., 420. 23. ‘The Special Attraction of Golf’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1898), 52–57 (54; 52). 24. Ibid., 52. 25. Frederick Gale, Modern English Sports: Their Use and Abuse (London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885), 174. 26. Brewster, ‘Casting an Eye’, 41. 27. ‘Should Golf be Encouraged at Public Schools?’, 422. 28. Murphy, Medieval Studies, 12; 16; 16. 29. Huggins, Victorians and Sport, 52–57. 30. Wray Vamplew, ‘Successful Workers or Exploited Labour? Golf Professionals and Professional Golfers in Britain, 1888–1914’, Economic History Review, 61.1 (2008), 54–79 (68). 31. Murphy, Medieval Studies, 54; 65. 32. Ibid., 54. 33. Ibid., 17. 34. See Huggins, Victorians and Sport, 8; 74; 82. 35. Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010), 177. 36. Ibid. 37. Springhall, ‘Building Character in the British Boy’, 56–57. 38. L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1904), 76. 39. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, Methuen, 1910), 91.

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40. Shane McCorristine, ‘Academia, Avocation and Ludicity in the Supernatural Fiction of M. R. James’, Limina: A Journal of Cultural and Historical Studies, 13 (2007), 54–65 (62). 41. Murphy, Medieval Studies, 17. 42. Smith, The Ghost Story, 177. 43. Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co (London, Macmillan and Co, 1899), 213. 44. Ibid. 45. Kelly Hurley, ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189–207 (190; 199). 46. Lucie Armitt, ‘Ghost-Al Erosion: Beaches and the Supernatural in Two Stories by M. R. James’, in Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, ed. Lisa Fletchter (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95–108 (101). 47. Mike Pincombe, ‘Homosexual Panic and the English Ghost Story: M. R. James and Others’, in Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, ed. S. T. Joshi and R. Pardoe (New York, Hippocampus Press, 2007), 184–196. 48. Darryl Jones, ‘M. R. James’, in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, ed. Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (Abingdon, Routledge, 2017), 160–168 (164). 49. I am grateful to Dr Scott Brewster for bringing this to my attention. See also H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, Dover Publications, 1973). 50. Murphy, Medieval Studies, 14. 51. Gentile, ‘Sublime Drag’, 19. 52. Jones, ‘M. R. James’, 164. 53. Terry W. Thompson, ‘“I Shall Most Likely Be Out on the Links”: Golf as Metaphor in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’, Papers on Language and Literature, 40.4 (2004), 339–352 (349). 54. Murphy, Medieval Studies, 141. 55. Country Life Illustrated (1897), cited in Pamela Horn, Pleasures and Pastimes in Victorian Britain (Stroud, Amberley Publishing, 2011), 131. 56. Jones, ‘M. R. James’, 165. 57. Ibid.; Julia Briggs, Night Visitors, The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, Faber, 1977), 127–128. 58. Murphy, Medieval Studies, 50. 59. Ibid., 40. 60. Jane George, ‘“Ladies First”?: Establishing a Place for Women Golfers in British Golf Clubs, 1867–1914’, Sport in History, 30.2 (2010), 288–308 (294; 295). 61. Wray Vamplew, ‘Concepts of Capital: An Approach Shot to the History of the British Golf Club Before 1914’, Journal of Sports History, 39.2 (2012), 299–331 (314; 318). 62. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt (London, Hodder and Stroughton, 1913), 82. 63. R. St John Ainslie, ‘Cricket Song’, Sedbergh School Songs (Leeds, Richard Jackson, 1896), 57–61 (57; 59).

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Bibliography Ainslie, R. St John, Sedbergh School Songs (Leeds, Richard Jackson, 1896). Anon., ‘Golf’, Boy’s Own Paper (26 January 1884), 271. Anon., ‘Golf’, Boys Own Paper (2 February 1884), 286. Anon., ‘Golf’, Boys Own Paper (9 February 1884), 302. Anon., ‘Ladies Golf Clubs’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 515. Anon., ‘Should Golf Be Encouraged at Public Schools?’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1895), 417–423. Anon., ‘The Special Attraction of Golf’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1898), 52–57. Armitt, Lucie, ‘Ghost-Al Erosion: Beaches and the Supernatural in Two Stories by M. R. James’. In Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings, ed. Lisa Fletchter (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 95–108. Braidwood, P. Murray, ‘Health Aspect of Golf for Women’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 514. Brewster, Scott, ‘Casting and Eye: M. R. James at the Edge of the Frame’, Gothic Studies, 14.2 (2012), 40–54. Briggs, Julia, Night Visitors, The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London, Faber, 1977). Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Poison Belt (London, Hodder and Stroughton, 1913). Craig, Maurice, Psychological Medicine (London, J. and A. Churchill, 1905). Freeman, Nicholas, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 76. Gale, Frederick, Modern English Sports: Their Use and Abuse (London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885), 174. Gentile, Kathy Justice, ‘Sublime Drag: Supernatural Masculinity in Gothic Fiction’, Gothic Studies, 11. 1 (2009), 16–31. George, Jane, ‘“Ladies First”?: Establishing a Place for Women Golfers in British Golf Clubs, 1867–1914’, Sport in History, 30.2 (2010), 288–308. Hobhouse, L. T., Democracy and Reaction (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1904). Horn, Pamela, Pleasures and Pastimes in Victorian Britain (Stroud, Amberley Publishing, 2011). Huggins, Mike, The Victorians and Sport (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2004). Hurley, Kelly, ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189–207. Hutchinson, Horace C., ‘Ladies at Golf’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 512. Hyde, H. Montgomery, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, Dover Publications, 1973). Ibitson, David A., ‘Jerome K. Jerome, Masculinity and the Parody of Urban Escape: ‘Sunday-School Slops’, English Literature in Transition, 61.1 (2018), 98–117. I. P., ‘Scratch Lady Players’, Hearth and Home (13 February 1896), 410. Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Abingdon, Routledge, 2013). James, M. R., The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James (London, Penguin, 1987). Jones, Darryl, ‘M. R. James’. In The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, ed. Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (Abingdon, Routledge, 2017), 160–168. Kipling, Rudyard, Stalky & Co (London, Macmillan and Co, 1899). Light, Rob, ‘A “Strange…Absurd…and Somewhat Injurious Influence”? Cricket, Professional Coaching in the Public Schools and the “Gentleman Amateur” Ethos’, Sport in History, 30.1 (2010), 8–31. Mangan, J. A., Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008). ———, ‘Manufactured’ Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism (Abingdon, Routledge, 2012). Masterman, C. F. G., The Condition of England (London, Methuen, 1910). McCorristine, Shane, ‘Academia, Avocation and Ludicity in the Supernatural Fiction of M. R. James’, Limina: A Journal of Cultural and Historical Studies, 13 (2007), 54–65.

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Murphy, Patrick J., Medieval Studies and the Ghost Stories of M. R. James (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). Ndee, Hamad S., ‘Public Schools in Britain in the Nineteenth Century: The Emergence of Team Games and the Development of the Educational Ideology of Athleticism’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 27.5 (2010), 845–871. Pincombe, Mike, ‘Homosexual Panic and the English Ghost Story: M. R. James and Others’. In Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, ed. S. T. Joshi and R. Pardoe (New York, Hippocampus Press, 2007), 184–196. Smith, Andrew, The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010). Springhall, John, ‘Building Character in the British Boy: The Attempt to Extend Christian Manliness to Working-Class Adolescents, 1880–1914’. In Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 52–74 (56–7). Thompson, Terry W., ‘“I Shall Most Likely Be Out on the Links”: Golf as Metaphor in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James’, Papers on Language and Literature, 40.4 (2004), 339–352. Vamplew, Wray, ‘Successful Workers or Exploited Labour? Golf Professionals and Professional Golfers in Britain, 1888–1914’, Economic History Review, 61.1 (2008), 54–79. ———, ‘Concepts of Capital: An Approach Shot to the History of the British Golf Club Before 1914’, Journal of Sports History, 39.2 (2012), 299–331. Watson, Alfred E. T., ‘The Badminton Library’. In Poetry of Sport, ed. Hedley Peek (London, Longman’s Green and Co., 1896), ix–xxviii.

Algernon Blackwood and the Classic Weird Tale Antonio Alcalá González

Algernon Blackwood lived the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He started publishing his fiction in his thirties as a way to share the reflections about Nature and the human existence that his life experience had led to. At 70, he wrote: “My real interest here [in writing supernatural fiction], however, lay always and still lies in the question of a possible extension of human faculty [emphasis in italics and capitals in the original], and the suggestion that the Man on the Street possesses strange powers which never manifest normally” (quoted in Felix, viii). He led a varied range of occupations during his experience in Canada and later in New York among which E. F. Bleiler lists journalism, milk farming and bartender (v). Such multiplicity allowed him to look at civilization from various perspectives he contrasted with his life inspiration, Nature: By far the strongest influence in my life, however, was Nature; it betrayed itself early, growing in intensity with every year. Bringing comfort, companion- ship, inspiration, joy, the spell of Nature has remained dominant, a truly magical spell. Always immense and potent, the years have strengthened it. The early feeling that everything was alive, a dim sense that some kind of consciousness struggled through every form, even that a sort of inarticulate communication with this “other life” was possible, could I but discover the way—these moods coloured its opening wonder. (Blackwood, Episodes Before Thirty, 32–33)

For him, Nature was that other environment where experience could extend beyond the limits imposed by the symbolic order that frames civilization imposing restrictions through the use of language (Lacan, 61, 65). He considered the traditional, civilized view of success reflected in economic terms as absolutely irrelevant: “Any lawful method of extending the field of consciousness, of increasing its scope, of developing latent faculties, with its corollary of greater knowledge and greater powers, excited and interested me more than the immediate prospect of making a million….” (Episodes Before Thirty, 52). His life in the culprit of civilization at the A. A. González (B) Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_44

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beginning of the twentieth century, New York, convinced him that if he was to find pleasure in life it was going to be in the exploration of the connections in between Nature and himself: New York, I felt, was not to be trifled with; the human element was strenuously keen; no loafing or dreaming here; work to the last ounce, or the city would make cat’s meat of one! Whereupon, by contrast, stole back again the deep enchantment of the silent woods, and the longing for the great, still places rose; I saw our little island floating beneath glittering stars; a loon was laughing farther out; the Northern Lights went flashing to mid-heaven; there was a sound of wind among the pines. The huge structure that reared above me seemed unreal; the river of men and women slipped past like silent shadows; the trains and boats became remote and hushed; and the ugly outer world about me merged in the substance of a dream and was forgotten… (81–82)

These lines make it clear that for him the artificial edifications made by humanity to dominate its environment were but an imposition to distance the human experience from Nature in which, as his fiction suggests, our roots and proper place are to be found. As a result, the purpose of the following pages is to explore such view of humanity in three of Blackwood’s stories. Using Timothy Morton’s proposal on the limits imposed by the civilized on natural objects as a main reference, this chapter studies the use of Blackwood of what Joshi proposes to call the Weird Tale (a concept he molded after Lovecraft’s own proposal of the term) in order to express an alternative interaction for humans and Nature in the stories: “The Old Man of Visions” (1907), “The Touch of Pan” (1917) and “The Valley of the Beasts” (1921). To begin with, under the phrase “ecological awareness,” Morton presents an approach that would allow coexistence between humans and what, through means of separation, we have transformed into “the ghostly host of nonhumans” (Dark Ecology, 63). He defines it as “becoming accustomed to strangeness” (5) in the sense that the other does not become more familiar, but its existence is accepted the way it is, without demanding any transformation on its part. The result produces a loop inside which the observer also lets himself to be known. This creates what he labels as “weird knowing” since for him, the term “weird” refers to “a turn or twist or loop, a turn of events” (5). Throughout the ages, Western culture has suppressed this approach; however, things in Nature are loops; that is to say, constant cycles of renewal which are opposed to the lineal view of development that the human eye imposes on objects around it in an insistence to demand alignment to a civilized unstoppable advance. As a result, the “politics of coexistence” we follow to interact with Nature “are always contingent, brittle, and flawed, so that in the thinking of interdependence at least one being must be missing” (6). And that missing perspective is but the one on the side of Nature which is ignored. Nevertheless, if we side stepped into the loop and took such neglected perspective, we could find ourselves as “the perpetrators, discoverers and accusers of ecological damage at the same time” (8–9). Actually, Morton’s proposal is inspired on Derrida’s ideas on the denial of humanity to recognize ourselves as animals. Based on a perspective of otherness1 from which the observed needs to be attributed those characteristics I want to deny in myself, human eyes insist on tagging animals as different and therefore inferior:

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As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze, called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. (381)

The mere use of human language to assign the term “animal” to a multitude of creatures different among themselves marks the arbitrary perspective imposed on them since we have given ourselves “the right and the authority to give to another living creature” any name we want (392). Derrida proposes to consider them simply as “nonhumans” and emphasizes the abuse perpetrated by the mere act of imposing a name on them: The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime. Not a crime against animality precisely, but a crime of the first order against the animals the confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime. Not a crime against animality precisely, but a crime of the first order against the animals, against the animals. (416)

Inside this context of imposition, the animal is what we want it to be, and any excuse to abuse it for whatever purpose is validated by means of arguments articulated through the use of our language. Actually, Morton names our times as “Homogenocene” which in his words is the age in which “humans have stamped their impression on things they consider as ductile as wax, even if those things cry” (Dark Ecology, 23). The word “consider” is the cornerstone of all the practice and argumentation behind it. We insist our perspective is the only one valid and, from the moment sedentarism and “agrologistics” started shaping our civilization, we spawned “the concept of Nature definitely outside the human” (56) and created our artificial world as separate and different from it. The resulting situation on Earth is a “Spectral Plain” (Morton, Humankind, 137) in which the lack of an equalitarian coexistence of humans with all other things belonging to the nonhuman sphere provokes that they are mere spectres “ambiguous entities, in a thick, fuzzy middle region excluded from traditional Western logic” (55). In the end, and as our perspective is everywhere surrounded by this “distorted halo” of “flickering ghosts,” we end up discovering that we inhabit an area of spectrality (42). This isolation and the distortion it creates exist because we have thrown all other nonhuman things into what Morton calls the “Uncanny Valley”2 where everything considered separate from us and therefore worth of being exterminated has been expelled (134–135). Our civilization has failed to recognize that existence occurs in a context of mutual symbiosis where human and nonhumans need each other (61, 70). It is precisely this view beyond the limits of the civilized and into the vastness of Nature what Blackwood renders in the experience of the three protagonists in the stories selected for this study. They perceive Nature in a similar way as what Morton proposes for a successfully inclusive coexistence from our side: “An environment is not a neutral, empty box, but an ocean filled with currents and surges. It’s not just that you can have solidarity with nonhumans. It’s that solidarity implies nonhumans. Solidarity requires [emphasis in the original] nonhumans. Solidarity just is solidarity

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with nonhumans” (189). Blackwood was aware of this need for solidarity with Nature. It is by means of his gothic fiction and the emphasis on the irruption of supernatural elements in it that he reminds us that we are undeniably part of Nature because, as proposed by Punter, “the so-called ‘borderline’, or boundary, between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ is inherently unstable. We are all humans; we are all animals” (Gothic Condition, 143). In Blackwood’s fiction humanity is led to reflect that, when not perceived from the anthropocentric view, humans are just one type of the many creatures on Earth. As a result, his stories break the boundaries between Morton’s “Plain of Spectrality” and “Uncanny Valley.” The fiction of Blackwood is a branch of the Gothic in which, as just mentioned above, the supernatural plays a preponderant role. Nevertheless, in the end his characters discover that what under human terms is called supernatural, is but an expansion of Nature once the civilized limits of perspective have been removed. Traditionally, his stories have been grouped and analyzed under the category known as Weird Tale which Lovecraft defined as presenting A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (Supernatural Horror, 22–23)

It is a type of Gothic in which the reader is brought into the horror experience “of contact with unknown spheres and powers” (23) that make the reader wonder what lies beyond the comfortable sphere framed by the human order; Lovecraft identifies the name of Blackwood among those few creators from his time “who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prisonhouse of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which… things like deep woods… momentarily suggest” (Lord of a Visible World, 113–114). Those creative minds respond with their “aesthetic outlet” to the “the lure of the unknown abyss” in societies “where this urge cannot be gratified by actual research in pure science, or by the actual physical exploration of unknown parts of the earth” (115–116). More recently, in the 90s, and echoing the sensibility alluded by Lovecraft in the creators of Weird Tales, S. T. Joshi defined the term as a “consequence of a world view [originally in italics]” rather than a genre, at least in the case of its precursors during the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth.3 (1) In my view, the two cases mentioned, those of Lovecraft and Blackwood, make such affirmation valid since both of them used their fiction to express their own visions of the world. Nevertheless, the similarity ends there, for while the former relied on his stories to portray his view on the infimal role of man on the unfathomable eons on Earth and the cosmic vastness of the universe, the latter imprints in his fiction his proposal of Nature as something much vaster than what we have been conditioned to appreciate by means of social restraints, and which, if willing to do so, could evaporate our supremacy on the planet: “In Blackwood, the realm of the supernatural is accepted as existent, his stories are full of ‘explanations’… The supernatural forces which he posits ae fundamentally

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indifferent to man… but if disturbed, for one reason or another, they are able to act in powerful and terrifying ways” (Punter, Algernon Blackwood, 80). Joshi himself named Blackwood’s fiction as “Supernatural [emphasis in the original] horror” (7). And about the talent of Blackwood in exploring the supernatural, Lovecraft acknowledged his “skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision” (Supernatural Horror, 66). What Lovecraft recognized has later been emphasized by others. Felix Morrow described Blackwood’s tales as “unique because they are impregnated with a profound belief in the supernatural while other writers in this genre are skeptics, disbelievers or half believers and half-skeptics” (v). Such claims align with the role of supernatural fiction as indicated by Cavaliero. He points out that the supernatural shatters our commonplace with the purpose of accommodating “our perception of the world to the ways and conditions under which we actually perceive it, and thus make it possible to feel at home there” (243). That is, it expands the limits of what we call natural and therefore accepted as part of our surrounding context. In the end, it forces us to accept that the world is more than what lies inside the rational frames imposed by civilization since “it asserts, and at its finest it demonstrates, and enlargement of possibilities, opening up epistemological and imaginative horizons, extending the measurements perceptible to narrowly rationalistic philosophy” (238). In the end, writers of supernatural fiction aim at suggesting the world is more than what we have been made to take for granted by revealing its long-forgotten secrets. Their fiction: may emphasize the unfamiliar and the uncanny, the finest of them do so in order to heighten and enrich their readers’ responses to the familiar and the seen. They enhance those readers’ susceptibilities to the endless diversity of life in space and time: by venturing into the realm of the invisible, they renew appreciation of the significance of the life of the five senses. (242)

The following pages explore the connection between three of Blackwood’s stories and his knowledge of Nature as something vaster than the limited concept maintained by an industrialized society which was not merely empirical, but the result of the accumulated experience from his contact with the wild in Canada during his twenties and his later membership in The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn.4 About his encounter with The Golden Dawn, Blackwood stated that “My breathless dog, Imagination [emphasis with capital in the original], broke the leash and dashed off full of speed into the unknown” (quoted in Ashley, 110). He joined the order in 1900, and according to his biographer, Mike Ashley, his most active time in the order was between 1901 and 1902.5 The author found in the order a “club where he was able to meet like-minded individuals and discuss esoteric subjects” (119). This means his experience in the group provided him with a thoughtful understanding and an argumentative back up for the awe-inspiring impression of Nature he had brought from the earlier North American episode in his life. Thus, it is no coincidence then that his literary production started around that time with the publication of The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906).

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Not only in the three stories analyzed in this text, but in all his fiction in general, Nature is a living force where “the consciousness of the trees and the animals is not inferior to that of a man. It is different and the difference is often in favor of nature. Wild nature is not separated from the supernatural; it is shot through with the supernatural” (Morrow, viii). It is not that Nature is hostile, but “The supernatural forces which he posits are fundamentally indifferent to man… but if disturbed, for one reason or another, they are able to act in powerful and terrifying ways” (Punter, Literature of Terror, 80). The Nature in his fiction is not against humanity, but if humans are not tuned with it, they experience it as something dangerous in the sense that they feel threatened and out of place in it; on the contrary, those who realize that its limits are the mere result of an arbitrary imposition effected by civilization, undergo an awe-inspiring expansion of its borders. They cross such limits and can then look back on the limited view of it we have from our civilized perspective and contrast it with the wider one they have acquired as a result of their experience. The three protagonists of the stories selected for this study are connected to experiences beyond the borders imposed on Nature from the human perspective. However, their involvement in the trespassing process implied occurs at different levels. While the protagonist in “The Old Man of Visions” witnesses this process in another character, his counterpart in “The Touch of Pan” lives it in the first person and comes back to the civilized deeming it an artificial, masked way of life. As a final case, the main character in “The Valley of the Beast” returns from his trespassing adventure a changed individual, but with a balanced proposal of existence in equilibrium between Nature and such human artificial constructions. The fact that “The Old Man of Visions” is the only of the three instances where the protagonist is not the transgressor is connected with the fact that the latter has passed tremendously beyond the limits of the civilized. He is a being for whom “Life somehow seemed to pass below him” (77).6 This is the result from the deep knowledge he has acquired through his detailed and elevated contemplation of the world: “I have peered too profoundly into life and beyond it” (78). He is so removed from the limited human perspective, that he does not need to go under a name other than the one given to the story because that is what he is for the narrator: a man whose deep sight into the secrets of the universe brings what for others are mere visions. The “Invisibles” whom he has found and commune with stand for a representation of something beyond the human understanding; that is why he emphasizes that, in order to find them, “you must first be able to lose yourself” (79). I propose that what Blackwood is suggesting here is that only by detaching from the limited view of our surroundings, we can start grasping a deeper knowledge. Being responsible for securing the borders around us, the human language is not ready for such wider comprehension. In fact, the Man “could satisfy, but not in mere language” because “visions need no words” (76). What he is able to see through his so-called visions go “beyond the scope of ordinary limited language” (76). These visions do not need human language because they imply a deep contemplation of Nature: At his word, houses melted away, and the green waves of all the seas flowed into the places; forests waved themselves into the coastline of dull streets; and the power of the old earth,

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with all her smells and flowers and wild life, thrilled down among the dead roofs and caught me away into freedom among the sunshine of meadows and the music of pipings.7 (80)

The narrator notices the fact that the Man is losing his corporeality when he “could see the pattern of the wall and shape of the furniture through his body, as though he had grown semi-transparent” (82). This reinforces his detachment from the human restrictions. His body has reached a state that challenges the materiality and the limited perspective of five senses upon which we base our interpretation and restrictions of our environment. Like Nature and in a condition above the human one, “he dwelt beyond time and space” (83). Though literally the narrator is claiming by such words that the Old Man of Visions has always existed, I also propose that those lines emphasize his having achieved a perspective of Nature much wider than the one we have. He keeps some basic contact with humanity; however, he indicates he has an “outer shell” which “lies within impenetrable solitude, for only so can my inner life move freely along the paths and terraces that are thronged with the beings to whom I belong” (77). This is precisely the answer that can be found in Blackwood’s fiction towards Morton’s proposal regarding solidarity with Nature: if humans are to reach such state of mutual understanding, it has to be through an individual experience. This is stressed by the fact that the narrator loses contact with the Old Man after having tried to share his knowledge on the existence of the latter with someone else. Before this episode, the Man had already warned him: “no true dream can ever be shared, and should you seek to explain me to another, you must lose me beyond recall” (83). My proposal is that these words are intended to go beyond the understanding of the narrator, but to come right to the reader through the filter of the former’s experience. They find an echo in what is lived by the protagonists of the other two stories. The case of Herbert in “The Touch of Pan” has only one similarity to that of the narrator in “The Old Man of Visions”; like his counterpart, Herbert also has an interest in Nature; however, he is closer to the solidarity achieved by the Old Man. Like that character, he keeps in touch with humanity for the basic things he needs from it, but also knows he feels better in the company of Nature which “meant much to him. He would rather see a woodland misty with bluebells than all the chateaux in the Loire; the thought of a mountain valley in the dawn made his feet lonely in the grandest houses” (89). In short, “He felt uncomfortable and out of place” in social meetings (91). In addition, he is inherently attracted to Nature since the girl that brings him into a wider comprehension of Nature, Elspeth, only starts what he had already prepared to happen; she “had torn up the anchor. Only the anchor had previously been loosened a little, perhaps, by his own unconscious and restless efforts” (95). Another difference is that this character, who works for Herbert as the threshold between the civilized and Nature, is connected to him by a strong attraction. She is considered as a “lunatic… someone whose reason had gone awry” (89) also referred to as “idiot” and “backward” just because the human perspective cannot understand her lack of interest in her parents’ “having collected much metal and achieved position” (90). Though for them this makes her a retarded, from the view she shares with Herbert, society is to be despised because in it “There was no sun and wind, no flowers – there was depravity only, lust instead of laughter, excitement instead of happiness.

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It was calculated, not spontaneous” (97). Contrary to this artificiality he recognizes in civilized humanity, the girl “made the natural clean and pure” (93). Like the Old Man, she looks older than the average for a human, just like Nature does. Before their trip into the wild that will reveal to him a view of Nature separated from the one imposed by humans, Herbert meets Elspeth leaning against a satyr’s statue. Although the presence of this object alludes to her connection with Nature,8 he deems it as “vulgar”; this opinion reflects that, for him, the human perspective of Nature is incomplete and superfluous. At her side, the restraints of reason are weakened and “The primitive thing broke loose in him” (93). And when they start their wild run into the wild, he realizes he is acting “on instinct” (99). The world he enters is described as of “magical enchantment… In black and white the garden lay, brimmed full with beauty, shot by the ancient silver of the moon, spangled with the stars’ old gold” (99–100). The transition he is being guided to is not only manifested in his view of things, but also physically in the presence of “two small horns that hid in the thick curly hair behind, and just above, the ears” (101) which she pulls and tweaks. These little protuberances mark his departure from civilization into Nature. They are marks of the wild he has allowed to be loosened in him since they are a feature he shares with the god Pan.9 The gathering of beings they join which would be “strange as well as riotous” from a human perspective, is full of “innocence and purity” (104) when observed from inside. The experience that gives the title to the story, namely to be touched by Pan, is a moment of “sweetness, peace, loveliness; but above all, there was – life” (105). All those present in the wild meeting see him in a different form. This is why Herbert sees the civilized imposition of static figures on the forces of Nature like the one present in the satyr statue as unsophisticated. Since Herbert and the girl have not reached the level of solidarity with the wild of the Old Man of Visions, they must come back to the human world where they belong despite their gained knowledge. However, they recognize it as an artificial construction of labels and restrictions imposed by language while the “elemental blood” they let loose in the wild is “not translatable” (108). The world they return to is filled with civilized humans who have turned their backs to Nature; as a result, “They feel guilty and Ashamed. There is no innocence!… Vice masqueraded in the ugly shape of pleasure; beauty was degraded into calculated tricks. They were not natural. They knew not joy” (106–107). The fact that “The Touch of Pan” was published ten years after “The Old Man of Visions” helps understand that there is an adjustment in Blackwood’s view of the solidarity that can be established with nature. While the Old Man is extremely far, in both perspective and body, from the human sphere, Herbert and Elspeth are able to “outwardly” (106) remain part of civilization by seeing beyond the veils and prohibitions that blind others around them to reach solidarity with the Nature around and inside themselves. The involvement with Nature experienced by Grimwood, a hunter and protagonist in “The Valley of the Beasts,” leads him to reach a position between the wild and the civilized similar to that of Herbert. Nevertheless, the path he follows is distanced from that of his counterpart; Grimwood is a hunter whose “blood was of the fiery, not to say ferocious, quality. It almost seemed he liked hunting for its own sake” (115). He considers nonhuman beings as lower than man; for him, their heads can be placed

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as trophies on the wall. In addition, from his view, other human races can be treated as inferior because that is what they are. It is precisely such greed for exhibiting the moose head that would break all records what makes him enter the valley where his understanding of Nature changes forever. Like Herbert, he has an inner impulse towards the wild, but, as opposed to the attraction towards a vaster comprehension triggered by Elspeth, the hunter’s connection with the wild arises from “The brutality of his nature” (123). When mad, his inner beast is easily released: “The touch of odd nervousness that made his anger grow betrayed itself in his language” (117). He struggles to control his temper and adjust it to the behavioural restrictions dictated by the civilized and effected through its use of language. The moose has a similar role to that of Elspeth in Herbert’s story; for it is not only the creature that drags Grimwood into the valley, but it is also the “inexplicable alteration in of the animal’s behavior that makes him recognize, at last, the alteration in his own” (125). Unexpectedly, the animal becomes careless of the hunter that barely missed it before entering the valley. It is as if such missing had been an antecedent of what was going to happen later on, inside the valley. There Grimwood witnesses how “the desire to kill had apparently left him” (126). His transformation takes him to a state in which he becomes one of those animals protected inside the valley who had never been hunted. His turn of perspective makes him feel “happy, peaceful, unafraid” (127) as he detaches himself from the civilized perspective expressed through human language which he has forgotten: “His name had disappeared” (127). The transformation advances and later, “No thoughts came into him, but feeling rose in a tide of wonder and acceptance. He was in his rightful place. His nature had come home” (131). The rational process manifested in language gives place to a return into the origin of the human being; that is, another animal in the context of Nature: “he had returned at last where he belonged” (131). As words and reason start abandoning him, those manufactured objects he had brought with him produce “a sensation of almost horror” (128) by merely picking them. As Morton proposes in his view about solidarity with Nature, humans need not become animals again, but just give those nonhuman entities surrounding them their rightful position. Similar, through the supernatural events around Grimwood’s experience in the valley, Blackwood proposes that humans can understand Nature without needing to become back to it. The transition of Grimwood has been so drastic that when Language, comes back in the shape of his name, he experiences “The horror of his position petrified him” (134). From the regained civilized perspective, he considers the creatures that surround him as wild animals. When he asks for help from the spirit of the valley, this one attacks him in the shape of a bear10 for he is considered a threat to the valley. The position of humans can no longer be inside Nature after centuries of having followed separate paths. Nevertheless, Blackwood suggests that solidarity can arise on humans and even the most obsessive hunter can turn to Nature with a different eye of comprehension instead of exploitation. Grimwood’s adventure in the valley leads him to quit hunting and turn into a “quiet, easy-tempered, almost gentle sort of fellow” (137) who does not even despise other humans anymore. His new comprehension of the nature inside him makes him unable to explain in detail with words, the code that frames civilization, why he claims the

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totem stick he used to call for help in the valley “saved his soul” (137). Blackwood’s choice of the word “soul” instead of simply “life” emphasizes his protagonist came out from the valley not only alive but also with a new view on the human existence and its connection with Nature. The fact that Herbert’s and Grimwood’s stories are narrated in a third-person voice obeys to the fact that their experiences are initial journeys into the secrets of Nature, while the Old Man has long possessed those. Humanity deems the incomprehensible riddles of Nature that these characters understand as supernatural because they lie beyond the borders we do not allow ourselves to cross since they challenge the frames of civilization and the language that molded it. Blackwood’s characters come back from Nature changed, able to coexist with it beyond the restrictions others still impose. Their adventures are individual and experienced under different terms. This, I propose to read as a message from the writer regarding the fact that to find Nature’s place in our existence (the understanding needed to reach the solidarity proposed by Morton) is to be lived individually like the case of the Old Man of Visions also shows. Like him, the other two, Herbert and Grimwood, are not to show the way for others to follow. Each human has to find individually the way to dialogue with an uncanny memory from our animal past: that we are as nonhuman as the creatures we have labelled as such in a vain attempt to claim superiority over them. Notes 1.

2.

To understand the concept of otherness, it is important to remember that the human being has always been more than one from the mirror stage. This is the process proposed by Lacan through which the baby passes from a fragmented image of his own body to a unified one that corresponds, not to his body seen from the perspective of his own eyes, but to the one he finds inside of the mirror (Écrits, 1–4). In this way, although the mirror allows the child to take the first step towards the understanding of his personality as something unified, this occurs through the observation of a stranger in the mirror. The mirror stage is the first event that shows us that, inevitably, we depend on another to define ourselves in relation to it; according to Lacan, it is through the exchange of looks that, immediately after the mirror stage, the being reaffirms his body as the repository of the self in relation to the other (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 169–170). The self does not exist without reference to you (166). Moreover, without a signifier, I lack meaning, and it is precisely within the code of the other that the signifier which gives me my own meaning is found (The Four Fundamental Concepts, 205). The result of the above is a series of reciprocal relationships in which I depend on the other and the other depends on me to exist, and being I the one who gives meaning to the other, I can turn it into the repository of everything that I do not want to recognize within my own being for fear that it contradicts the truths on which I base my identity. Morton bases the term “Uncanny Valley” on Freud’s proposal of the “uncanny” as that which was familiar but went through a process of repression, threatening the being with the consequences of its return. According to Morton, if allowed

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to return from the valley, everything we have thrown into it will remind us that we are part of the world we have arbitrarily labelled as nonhuman (see Morton, 2017, 135). 3. In a further text, The Modern Weird Tale (2001), Joshi identifies the solidification of the Weird as a genre from the 1970s (after it stopped being an object of underground publication far from the academic eye) and into the twenty-first century. Additionally, China Miéville in his essay “Long Live the New Weird” acknowledges the continuity of the Weird after the influence left by its classic representatives (2003). 4. As sciences advanced throughout the nineteenth century, the occult became attractive because it provided some relief for the anxiety about the possibility that the soul did not survive after death among other concerns brought up by an industrial society of proofs and evidences in front of which the religious faith seemed something outdated. About this, Jarlath Killeen stated:The occult was attractive because it accepted the paradigm shift to naturalism, yet it maintained that a spiritual aspect (reconfigured as a special articulation of the natural rather than a supernatural) was central to both the universe and the human personality. In doing this it either provided comfort to those who felt that their faith was undermined —since it tended to agree that the survival after death was possible— or addressed the basic human investment in the spiritual” (127–128). 5. The sexual scandals around Theo Horos and his wife, Madame Horos, both of whom were brought into The Golden Down by one of the three founders and an important leader of the order, Samuel Mathers, affected the order so much that it almost disappeared. After having to change its name and finally splitting into two, what was left of the order survived. Though Blackwood remained in the order after this turmoil, he lost interest in it (Ashley, 117–118). 6. Unless otherwise indicated, all following quotations correspond to the anthology of Blackwood’s tales: The Dance of Death and Other Stories published by House of Stratus in 2002 as a new edition of the 1st one from 1927. 7. The same piping sounds are heard in “The Touch of Pan” where they work as signals that Pan is coming closer. Being a god of the wild as well as shepherds, like them, he would entertain himself with music which he played “on the reed-pipe that is named after him” (Hard, 214). 8. In Greek mythology, Satyrs were portrayed as spirits of wild life; particularly of its unrestrained and unguided fertility (Hard, 212). 9. Pan was usually pictured as half animal, half human, with horns, ears and legs of a goat, but human torso. He was lustful and sportive, a vigorous and fertile spirit of nature (Hard, 214). 10. From Grimwood’s view, what appears in front of him after asking Ishtot, the guardian of the Valley of the Beasts, for help is “A gigantic Red Indian” whose presence “included the actual valley itself and all its trees” (135). Nevertheless, from the viewpoints of his friend, Iredale, and his servant, Tooshalli, they found him being embraced by a giant bear from which a shot by the latter one barely saved him. I suggest this difference between perspectives is caused by Grimwood’s raising awareness of Nature. On one hand, he has experienced the

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supernatural powers contained in the valley which allows him to recognize the guardian when he appears in front of him although his returning rationality makes him see its presence as a native American. On the other hand, his human companions enter the place without having stopped being part of the civilized. Their rational perspective forces them to see an animal, a nonhuman entity we have tagged as “bear.”

Bibliography Ashley, Mike. Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001). Blackwood, Algernon. Episodes Before Thirty (London: Cassell and Company, 1923). ———. The Dance of Death and Other Stories (New York: House of Stratus, [1927] 2002). Bleiler, E. F. “Introduction”. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. (New York: Dover Publications, INC, 1973), i–x. Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am”. Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter 2002 (University of Chicago Press), 369–418. Hard, Robin. The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (New York: Routledge, 2004). Joshi, S. T. The Weird Tale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Kileen, Jarlath. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardif: University of Wales Press, 2010). Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. (London: Tavistock Publications, 1966). ———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and Trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977). ———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Vol. I. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Trans. and notes, John Forrester (Cambridge: CUP, 1988). Lovecraft, H. P. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Ed. S.T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press [1927] 2000). ———. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Ed. S.T. Joshi y David E. Schultz (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). Miéville, China. “Long Live the New Weird.” The Third Alternative # 35. Ed. Andy Cox (TTA Press, 2013). Morrow, Felix. “Introduction to the Causeway Edition”. The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood (New York: Causeway Books, 1973), v–x. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ———. Humankind (New York: Verso, 2017). Punter, David. “Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit”. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Huges. Ecogothic (Manchester: MUP, 2013), 44–57. ———. The Literature of Terror, the Modern Gothic, Vol. 2 (Essex: Pearson Education, 1999). ———. The Gothic Condition: Terror, History and the Psyche (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016). Punter, David, and Byron, Glennis. “Algernon Blackwood”. The Gothic (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2009), 90–91.

Shades of Sail: Edwardian Nautical Hauntings Emily Alder

Not wind, but steam; d’you hear? Steam, steam. Steam, in eight Yarrow water-tube boilers. S-t-e-a-m, steam. Got it? Oliver Onions, ‘Phantas’ (1911)

Describing the second half of the long nineteenth century as a ‘Steam Age’ signals the dominance over this period of history of a certain kind of propulsive power. The term’s significance for the subject of this chapter—nautical gothic fiction—is the way it obscures the final decades of the Age of Sail and of the wind-driven ships that nonetheless continued in use until the break of the twentieth century. Iron-hulled and steam-powered ships came into their own over the course of the nineteenth century, revolutionising sea travel and warfare and ultimately ending the Age of Sail, but new models of sailing ship were still being designed and built as late as the 1890s, and many Victorian steamships were sail-assisted. Nevertheless, Sail was on the ebb, already spectral before it was truly dead, Steam’s shadowy companion, almost invisible amid the march of technological progress that characterises one perspective on the fin-de-siècle decades. Advances in marine science and technology further transformed seafaring in the twentieth century, and with it cultural constructions of the sea and the kinds of gothic and horror stories set there.1 This chapter is about fictional ghost ships in the period immediately before that happened—the 1900s, a time of transition in which spectres of a romanticised maritime past return to haunt anxieties about the present and the future, including the impending Great War. I have examined gothic ghost ships before, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and in William Hope Hodgson’s sea fiction.2 Yet theirs were not isolated cases: the ghost ship is a prevalent, flexible, and diverse gothic literary trope whose uses range from the psychological to the ecological, the comic to the economic, the horrifying to the reassuring. Here, I explore three ghost ship stories from the Gothic’s ‘Steam Age’: Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates (1909), Oliver Onions’s E. Alder (B) Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_45

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‘Phantas’ (1910), and Richard Middleton’s ‘The Ghost-Ship’ (1912). Each different in tone, these fin-de-siècle tales all concern an encounter with the past, using the figure of the ghost ship to negotiate contemporary concerns. Their treatments of the ghost ship are not simply translations of landbound spectres such as human phantoms or haunted houses into the maritime realm. These stories depend for their success as gothic tales on the oceanic qualities that intensify their atmosphere and affect, and on the nature and history of sailing and sailing ships. Shades of sail are discovered to have been lingering alongside us all along, concealed in the liminal zone of the sea only to reappear at moments of personal and cultural stress and crisis. Sailing, at least as the dominant mode of commercial and military seafaring, was in decline in the nineteenth century long before these stories were written. Even its latest developments were rapidly overtaken by the developments of steam-based transport. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant that clippers like the famous Cutty Sark, inauspiciously launched the same year, lost their advantages except over the longest voyages.3 The modern windjammers—large, tall, fast, steel-hulled merchant sailing vessels from the 1890s and early twentieth century—were haunted by the wane of their own genre, by a slow death that had begun a century before. Sailor and historian Franco Giorgetti attributes the windjammers’ name to their ‘ability and willingness to seek out every last breath of wind in an era in which the ominous smoke from the funnels of steam ships was already in sight well over the horizon’, and notes that they were built by shipowners who still held to the ‘supremacy of sail’.4 Nineteenthcentury sailing ships acquire melancholic, nostalgic qualities; even when new they were relics of a lost seafaring past, of outdated technologies and industries, and of a British empire no longer unrivalled. Fin-de-siècle ghost ship stories are distinct from those of the mid-Victorian period or the eighteenth century, and in them the line between fictional ships (ghostly or otherwise) and their real-world counterparts is often blurred. The meanings of the ghost ship trope are dynamic, even while ghost ships themselves are often static entities doomed to replay a moment of the past.5 Ghost ships occupy a pre-existing imaginative framework of the sea as a liminal space. Eighteenth-century deep-sea vessels, historian Marcus Rediker summarises, were ‘so far-flung about the oceans of the globe as to be isolated from any landed society and its dominant patterns of social life’.6 To be voyaging was to exist in a floating self-contained world, somewhere on the edges of culture or nation.7 Alone and isolated on dangerous seas, ships embarked on voyages along the margins of life and death. Ghost ships symbolise, and embody, the liminal qualities of the ocean and of seafaring: they are characterised by their ephemeral appearance and disappearance, and by their physical emergence from a realm beneath the waves. Consequently, the term ‘ghost ship’ is a flexible one, much like ‘ghost story’, which is often applied to a range of weird or horror tales which don’t always feature conventional phantoms, or phantoms at all.8 A ‘ghost ship’ might be an immaterial spectre (whether ‘real’ or hallucination, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ [1833]), or a material vessel that is haunted or seemingly haunted (such as W. Russell Clark’s ‘The Bewitched Ship’ [1884]), crewed by the dead (as in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ [1798]), or derelict (that is, a once-viable ship that has ‘died’, like the famous Mary Celeste discovered drifting and deserted in 1872). If these ghost

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ship variants have anything in common, it is their ambiguous hovering on boundaries of some kind: real and unreal, dead and alive, material and immaterial. Despite my attention to long nineteenth-century fiction here, none of these conceptions of ghost ships are inventions of literature: they run across maritime legend, documented history, and creative art and stories, and are continually reworked.9 The Flying Dutchman is the most obvious example. A legend captured in poetry, prose, opera, artwork, and film, the Dutchman is doomed to sail the seas around the Cape of Good Hope eternally. It is sometimes glimpsed as a distant spectre, sometimes physically interacted with; it is still captained and crewed by men from a past time, and is able to traverse the depth and surface of the sea as well as the borderline of life and death. In Frederick Marryat’s novelisation The Phantom Ship (1839), the cursed captain Vanderdecken returns to his wife cold and dripping. ‘“I am not dead”’, Vanderdecken tells her, ‘“nor yet am I alive. I hover between this world and the world of spirits”’.10 The Dutchman, like its captain, also spans two worlds, and at the novel’s end is observed materialising out of the water: they beheld slowly rising out of the water the tapering masthead and spars of another vessel. She rose, and rose, gradually; her topmasts and topsail yards, with the sails set, next made their appearance; higher and higher she rose up from the element. Her lower masts and rigging, and, lastly, her hull, showed themselves above the surface.11

The Dutchman, here, crosses from the unreal sea realm into the physical world, and Vanderdecken and his son finally make contact. The capacity of the ghost ship to occupy an indeterminate position is typical; Poe’s ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ is another example. The found text recounts the experience of a survivor of a hurricane-damaged ship, flung onto a giant vessel that runs down his own during a storm. The decrepit, ancient crew ‘glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries’ and cannot see him; the architecture and materials of the ship, though ‘strange’, are also ‘familiar’ and trigger ‘indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago’.12 It is left unclear if the narrator really is on a supernatural ship, is hallucinating, or has entered the past somehow. Onions’s ‘Phantas’ reworks aspects of Poe’s story, including the antique age of the ship and the doubt over what is witnessed, exploiting the liminality of seafaring. Ocean depth, too, generates fears. Life inheres on the surface: depth, for sailing ships, is unvisitable, except in death. The other world Vanderdecken mentions is not just the world of spirits, it is also the world beneath the waves. The deep sea is a world of death, claiming life, yielding spirits; it is a burial site, a murder site, a repository of secrets and history, implicated in the return of the dead, who are sometimes exchanged for the living. In their essay on oceanic studies and the Gothic, Jimmy Packham and David Punter perceive a lack of critical attention to depth as a theoretical concept, which ‘makes the deep even deeper, as it slides from that which we can’t represent to that which we can’t even think about’.13 The ghost ship, traversing water and air, confronts depth, bringing what is lost or buried to the surface. As they observe, ‘if the depths are dangerous, the lack of a clear distinction between surface and depth makes the surface dangerous too’.14 To be trapped on the surface in an injured ship is

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also to be trapped in time, as many characters in ghost ship stories experience; with movement restricted or dictated by the sea, it is a condition not quite of life, but not yet of death. Julia Mix Barrington has noted that ghost ships are often wander in space but are trapped in time, undergoing perpetual moments of repetition, and also are characterised by a compulsion to communicate with the rest of the world about a past or present hidden truth (her examples include an 1821 tale of the Flying Dutchman legend). She sees ghost ships as ‘travelling moments of gothic rupture’, doubles of the viable ships that connected the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.15 For Mix Barrington, the ghost ship functions as a Bakhtinian chronotope that ‘makes visible some of the unspeakable or uncomfortable aspects of Atlantic networks as well as moments of dislocation within the chronological flow of the Atlantic world’, such as the realities of the slave trade.16 And, while never static or set in a single form, the chronotope persists through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, put to different uses in the contexts of different age. In my three tales, I examine how the texts’ liminal, temporal, and oceanic qualities create gothic affects of suspense and horror, as well as how they are used to expose and resolve concerns of the time. The ghost ship, irrupting from another time or dimension, encodes culturally contingent meanings, legible when viewed through historical lenses specific to the turn of the century. I read Hodgson’s, Onions’s and Middleton’s texts as shaped by the moment at which the end of the Age of Sail coincided with the end of the Victorian period, yielding ghost stories that navigate hopes and anxieties about a changing modern world and anticipate the coming war of 1914. William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was a British writer of weird gothic and horror stories in the 1900s and 1910s, following an earlier career as a sailor in the Merchant Marine. He is noted for his sea fiction, especially two much-anthologised short stories, ‘The Voice in the Night’ (1907) and ‘The Derelict’ (1912). It is with The Ghost Pirates that I concern myself here. This short novel is the story of the Mortzestus, a ship sailing between San Francisco and Europe, which is attacked by shadowy figures coming apparently from a ghostly underwater ship. The ghost pirates pick off the crew one by one until finally overrunning the ship and dragging it down into the sea. The story is narrated by the sole surviving sailor, Jessop, rescued by another vessel, the Sangier. I have, previously, explored how Hodgson’s novel reworks traditional maritime legends and superstitions about ship spirits, omens, and the sea as other world, recast through the scientised discourses of fin-de-siècle spiritualism and occultism.17 Here, I read the novel alongside Onions’s and Middleton’s stories to examine how the ghost ship trope works through concerns about the fin de siècle as a time of technological transition. The end of sail coincided with the development of new steam-powered vessels, including destroyers and submarines— innovations driven in part by rising political tensions in the lead-up to the First World War. Hodgson’s sailing career with the Merchant Marine ran between 1891 and 1898. He voyaged to Dunedin, New Zealand, on the Euterpe in 1898, and when it was sold

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there he joined the Canterbury.18 Both, like his fictional Mortzestus, were windjammers, the last generation of great sailing ships. The Canterbury survived until it was scrapped in 1927, but biographer Jane Frank remarks that ‘by 1898 the Euterpe was already the “old Euterpe” to Hodgson, perhaps because so many ships were turning to steam’.19 In this sense, The Ghost Pirates enacts the death of sail through the claiming of the windjammer by a spectral fleet from the world beneath the waves. Yet the Ghost Pirates are more than spectres. This underwater crew takes physical form once above the surface, and the novel invites another reading, too, this time in context of the development of submarines in the 1900s. Design and construction of submersibles had been going on since the sixteenth century, long before submarines became practical either for warfare or exploration. The idea of a vessel able to travel underwater has obvious imaginative appeal, but the reality demands a conceptual shift. In Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1870) the Nautilus’s early appearances cause international consternation; no-one can interpret it, and it is assumed to be some kind of sea monster. The crucial moment of clarification is when Ned observes that the ‘giant narwhal’ on which the castaways cling is made ‘of steel plate!’. These words ‘produced a sea-change in my mind’, Arronax recalls.20 His mental shift is significant. The submarine’s capacity to traverse the boundary of the surface of the sea in a way that an animal can but an ordinary ship cannot makes it transgressive. The traditional world beneath the waves, the deep sea that was burial ground, repository of the past, and home to mysterious denizens, monstrous or spectral, is opened up to intrusion, exploration, and warfare. Submarines epitomise the new epoch of maritime warfare that the First World War would initiate. What was fantastical technology when Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1872) was becoming reality by the 1900s, threatening new kinds of destructive power even at its early stages. An engraving representing an unbuilt 1861 design by pioneer submarine engineer Wilhelm Bauer shows the Brûleur de Côtes submersed, attacking a sail-assisted steamer, while beside it a tall sailing ship heels slightly. Two more are pictured in the background.21 While the attack is on a warship, the prominence of sailing vessels in the same illustration draws attention to their vulnerability in the face of this projected new kind of technologised warfare. The submarine’s ‘coming of age as a true weapon of war’ took place during the American Civil War, when a Confederate submersible damaged the sail-assisted USS New Ironsides in 1863.22 Torpedoes, upon which a submarine’s weaponisation depended, were developed by Robert Whitehead in the 1860s and quickly found a place in warship architecture.23 By the 1900s, Russian, British, French, German, and other European navies were pursuing submarine development, though many early examples sank or foundered. The first modern submarine was arguably the US Navy’s Holland IV, bought in 190024 ; the first German U-boat was built in 1906, triggering a series of progressing models in the years following.25 Hodgson, who conscientiously joined the army in his mid-thirties, served in the First World War until he was killed in April 1918. Living in France until the outbreak of war, he would plausibly have attended to the tensions between Britain and Germany and the naval arms race that took place through submarines as well as ships. Antony

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Preston notes that in the 1900s, ‘navies had little or no idea how to use [submarines]’, especially not against commercial shipping, but that changed after the outbreak of war when the British merchant steamship Glitra was sunk by U17 in October 1914.26 According to Giorgetti, many windjammers were destroyed in the First World War by German submarines.27 Until then, submarine threat was more potential than it was real, but lurked in the literary imagination nonetheless. Submarine anxiety in The Ghost Pirates consists in a number of features associated with the idea of submersible ships. Firstly, the concept of a submarine requires an altered understanding of the medium of the sea. As Packham and Punter propose, ‘the sea is a space of unease not simply because its own fluid multidimensionality is itself unstable and unfixed, thereby rendering one’s own physical position precarious, but because the ocean prompts modes of thought that are also unstable and unfixed, rendering one’s mental processes precarious too’.28 In the novel, Jessop’s grasp of what the rise of ghost ship and pirates from the deep means is indeed precarious; there are numerous moments at which he is paralysed with disbelief, doubt, or uncertainty over what his senses have witnessed and what those observations mean (including glimpsing figures on the deck, sails coming loose when they shouldn’t, and other real-world ships that come and go from view). Later, attempting to put it all together, he struggles with a ‘blind circle’ of ideas concerning ‘this shadow-vessel thing ghost-ship I called it’ and the man-shaped figures that ‘had come out of the sea’, but eventually concludes ‘Were they the crew?’29 Either way, Jessop has to come to terms with a radically different way of being, where relations between surface and depth are not what they were. Secondly, there is anxiety over the invisible stealth of submarines. Eberhard Rössler notes the ‘veil of secrecy’ that ‘has always surrounded submarine development’, and it makes sense that this secrecy, as well as the stealth of submarines themselves, should lend itself to the kinds of feelings of unease a ghost ship is suited to express.30 Drifting into a liminal dimension, the Mortzestus’s crew’s main problems are with what they cannot see. Other ships appear and disappear from the horizon until eventually, Jessop says, they are ‘doing a sort of eternal blind man’s hop’ and ‘couldn’t put into port, even if [the captain] wanted to. He’d run us bang on shore, without our ever seeing it’.31 The ghost pirates’ first assaults happen invisibly, or else they are glimpsed only as blurs or shadows. Pirates and ships are only clearly visible when above the surface, signalling, thirdly, the capacity of submarines and their crews to transgress the boundary of surface and depth. One evening, Jessop observes a shadow-like ship taking form out of a ‘mistiness’ that ‘collected and shaped and rose into three towers’. Taking on ‘the shape of a great ship’, it turns in their direction before ‘sinking back into the ocean’.32 Like early submarines, which travelled mainly at the surface and dived to make an escape or an attack, the ghost ship appears here to be preparing for another assault on the Mortzestus. Accordingly, later, while gazing into the water, Jessop and Tammy see ‘something big and shadowy, that appear to be growing clearer. […] The thing seemed to be rising out of the depths’.33 The ‘thing’ is a sailing ship in appearance (Jessop can see masts, decks, and set sails under the surface), but it also behaves like a submarine; Jessop

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notes the ‘stirring of the water above the submerged truck’, displaced as the vessel rises (the ‘truck’ is the cap on the top of the mast).34 There are other associations, too, of the ghost ship with a technological modernity. After his rescue, the Sangier’s officers validate Jessop’s story with nods of ‘silent assent’. The third mate documents it with ‘a short note of what we saw from our side’, but its language is telling: we began to hear sounds from her; very queer at first, and rather like a phonograph makes when it’s getting up speed. Then the sounds came properly from her, and we heard them shouting and yelling.35

A relatively new communication technology, the phonograph, is used to describe the transmission of noise from the stricken ship. The allusion invites us to interpret the ‘queer sounds’ as technological or mechanical, not natural or supernatural, and from an unfamiliar technology, too. The ship founders as though it has been torpedoed underwater, sinking bow-first as the ruptured hull fills with water. The novel’s climax, then, dissolves the separation characterising more traditional encounters with ghost ships, when the spectre is glimpsed at a distance and binaries of materiality and immateriality, self and other, are maintained. The Mortzestus joins an underwater fleet, the spectral remains of a lost age that lingers symbolically (through romanticised nostalgia for the Age of Sail), and materially (as scrap, floating hulks, or wrecks enduring on the sea bed). In this way, the novel looks to the past, but it also faces the future; or, perhaps, it demonstrates the collapse of the future into the present: technological maritime modernity as represented by the wartime submarine is happening now, not later. A similar collapse, for different reasons, also occurs in my next story, Oliver Onions’s ‘Phantas’. Edwardian ghost story author Oliver Onions is best known for ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, a ‘story more famous than its author’ and published in his collection Widdershins (1911) alongside ‘Phantas’.36 ‘Phantas’ dwells on the final moments of a dying sailor eking out his life on a damaged, ancient sailing ship drifting in a remote strait off the coast of Africa. Suffering the effects of isolation, sun, hunger, and thirst, Abel Keeling encounters a modern destroyer and talks with its captain and crew shortly before the rotting hull of his own vessel gives way and he is plunged to his death. Like The Ghost Pirates, ‘Phantas’ responds to nautical gothic traditions, invoking superstitions and echoing earlier fiction, while negotiating present concerns about personal and cultural continuity and progress in the early twentieth century, a time of transition to a new technological modernity in seafaring and warfare. Keeling’s ship, an old galleon, the Mary of the Tower, is an already-dead vessel: ‘here she was of a white that glistened like salt-granules, there of a grey chalkish white […] but everywhere it was the mild, disquieting whiteness of materials out of which the life had departed’.37 The intense effects of salt, water, and heat on a derelict wreck render the ship ghostly even its materiality. Its spectrality is enhanced by the morning weather: ‘The sun was yet so pale a buckler of silver through the still white mists that not a cord or a timber cast a shadow; and only Abel Keeling’s face and hands were black, carked and cinder-black from exposure to his pitiless rays’.38 The mist—a regular accompaniment of ghost ships both fictional and folkloric— adds to the vessel’s unrealness by eliminating the shadows that would add depth and

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perspective. Keeling, burnt black by the sun and agonisingly thirsty, is evidently not far from death himself; these conditions cause visions, including vivid memories of his home and the glorious display of the Mary on first leaving port. In another typical nautical gothic reversal of land-based values, the calm of the ‘glassy’ water is not a benefit but a threat. The galleon glides sideways toward a cliff: ‘The motion was due - must be due - to the absolute deadness of the calm in that silent, sinister three-miles-broad waterway’.39 With the ship essentially a floating wreck with stumps of its masts, dragging its sail and leaving ‘a broad tarnish on the silver sea’, nothing can be done to prevent it striking the cliff.40 Helplessness over this difficulty leads Keeling to muse on the limits of sail as a means of propulsion: Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would devise a craft, not oar-driven (because oars could not penetrate into the remote seas of the world), not sail-driven (because men who trusted to sails found themselves in an airless, three-mile strait, suspended motionless between clouds and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock).41

He imagines a ship that can store energy, that can ‘conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning the forces both of calm and storm against themselves’.42 What Keeling imagines is a fantasy of total technological mastery over nature, and the conditions of water and air around him prove conducive for materialising phantoms: The buckler of the sun was of a more ardent silver; the sea below it was lost in brilliant evaporation; and between them, suspended in the haze, no more substantial than the vague darknesses that float before dazzled eyes, a pyramidal phantom-shape hung. Abel Keeling passed his hand over his eyes, but when he removed it the shape was still there, gliding slowly towards the Mary’s quarter.43

Like Marryat’s Flying Dutchman and Hodgson’s ghost ship, the new ship (the innocently named Seapink) emerges from an elemental space in which boundaries between sea, surface, and air are erased. As sea and air become indistinguishable, time and space collapse too. Since the Mary of the Tower is at least as mysterious to the Seapink as the Seapink is to Keeling, both vessels figure as ghost ships, really or symbolically both dead and alive, physical and phantom, hallucination and apparition. While it would be tempting to dismiss the Seapink as Keeling’s imagination, the text resists this explanation, raising the possibility to shed doubt upon it. By doing so, ‘Phantas’ invokes elements of the same psychological debate Oliver Tearle detects in ‘The Beckoning Fair One’.44 Tearle argues that Onions sought new kinds of ghosts in his fiction, generating them out of the psychology of hallucination rather than the traditions of apparitions. Tearle’s reasoning draws on Edmund Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living (1886), in which Gurney distinguishes ‘the self-evoked waking-vision’ from an ordinary hallucination because in the former we are not fooled; we are aware of what it is, and the mind has some agency over it.45 Gurney’s reasoning demonstrably applies to ‘Phantas’ too; Keeling’s self-awareness of his own mental state suggests that the ‘ship-shaped thing of spirit-grey’ is explicable as a ‘waking-vision’.46 Keeling understands the newcomer as his projection. He consciously connects it to his recent musings on such a vessel, and moreover, ‘he,

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Abel Keeling, was the master of it. His own brooding brain had contrived her, and she was launched on the illimitable ocean of his own mind’.47 Yet the narrative undermines Keeling’s conclusions by showing that he is not ‘master’ of a waking vision. The Seapink and its crew have too much of their own agency, as their discussion of their doubts about the Mary’s mysterious appearance show. They joke about the Flying Dutchman legend (which, from the seventeenth century, post-dates Keeling’s original historical moment, of which more later): ‘Don’t tell me it’s that damned Dutchman - don’t pitch me that old Vanderdecken tale - give me an easy one first, something about a sea-serpent … You did hear that bell, didn’t you?’48 They puzzle not over ‘who’ Keeling and his ship are—but ‘what’ he is; they call him ‘your phantomhood’ and ‘poor spook’, while their discussion over whether to ‘lower a boat and pull out to it - into it - over it - through it -’ indicates the insubstantiality to them of a vessel that is highly material to Keeling.49 The Mary of the Tower, ancient and pale with ‘the whiteness of extreme eld’, clearly belongs to the past, while the Seapink is a modern warship: a destroyer. The captain describes their ‘Yarrow water-tube boilers’ and their armaments: we’ve twin-screw triple expansion engines, indicated horse-power four thousand, and we can do 430 revolutions per minute. […] we’ve two revolving Whitehead torpedo-tubes, three sixpounders on the upper deck, and that’s a twelve-pounder forward there by the conning tower. I forgot to mention that we’re nickel steel, with a coal capacity of sixty tons in most damnably placed bunkers, and that thirty and a quarter knots is about our top.50

This information closely identifies the Seapink with HMS Havock, ‘the world’s first true destroyer’, launched in 1893 and not scrapped until 1912.51 Havock could carry 57 tons of coal, had twin-screw triple expansion engines, and bore three six-pounder guns and a twelve-pounder forward. Other destroyers had similar specifications; the Bullfinch, for example, was launched in 1898 and could do 30 knots, but it had five six-pounders, and Thornybank boilers. HMS Havock’s top speed was 26.78 knots and it was built with three torpedo tubes, but one was removed later and its Yarrow boilers, too, were retrofitted, in 1900.52 These alterations may have increased its speed; while a number of ‘30-knotter’ destroyers were commissioned in 1896, none of them were built by Yarrow.53 Havock had only three funnels, but it is possible that the fourth seen by Keeling in the Seapink’s phantom outline is the gun tower.54 The Seapink, therefore, presents as a veteran early generation destroyer, built in the 1890s but, since it is ‘His Majesty’s Ship’, operating in the 1900s.55 Thus the story invites us to doubt the hallucination or waking vision explanation. The Seapink’s technical specifications could not have arisen from Keeling’s unconscious; he could not possess the knowledge required to imagine such a level of detail. This is further demonstrated by the archaic floundering of the manner in which Keeling asks for information about the destroyer’s ‘wind-chamber […] that driveth the vessel - perchance ’tis not wind - a steel bow that is bent also conserveth force’. The captain endeavours to explain the power of ‘[s]team, in eight Yarrow water-tube boilers’, leaving Keeling ‘annoyed […] that words in his own vision should have no meaning for him. How did words come to him in a dream that he had no knowledge of when wide awake?’56 The Seapink, all this implies, is ‘real’ on some level, making

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‘Phantas’ a story of what Rachel Jackson calls ‘collisions in time’, characteristic of many of the stories in Widdershins where ‘the insidious workings of narrative can be detected tampering with the fingers of the clock’.57 The tampering with time in ‘Phantas’ is particularly visible through a number of nautical markers embedded in the text, including the armaments description quoted above. The signal that stands out most, perhaps, is the shocked reaction of the Seapink to Keeling’s announcement that his ship is ‘The Mary of the Tower, out of the Port of Rye on the day of Saint Anne’: ‘Out of where?’ gasps the new captain.58 The significance of the Port of Rye is that by 1911, there is no Port of Rye. Once a medieval port on the East Sussex coast and on a rock surrounded by water, today the village of Rye is three kilometres from the sea, due to shifts of the coastline around the thirteenth century. In its day, however, Rye was one of the Cinque Ports, specially chartered by English kings: ‘these Ports were the first parents of our navy’, recorded Victorian historian William Holloway; ‘from these all our earliest monarchs, down to the accession of the Tudors, drew the whole of their naval force’.59 Rye, then, is significant because of its association with Britain’s early naval supremacy, and because it dates Keeling and his ship to, at latest, Tudor England. The name of the ship and the reference to the day of Saint Anne (26 July) further mark Keeling’s culture as Catholic and pre-Reformation, while the Mary of the Tower itself is identified as a galleon, a large wooden sailing ship developed in the early sixteenth century.60 Holloway’s rationale for writing Rye’s history is that, since then, ‘the ancient constitution of the Cinque Ports has been completely changed; their privileges have become, in a great measure, a dead letter, and thus, in another generation or two, the memory of them would be clean gone forever, were not some record made of them ere it be too late’.61 The ancient Rye is a kind of ghost town, a ‘dead’ port represented by the lifeless Mary and the transformation of its Tudor splendour into the ‘whiteness of extreme eld’.62 ‘Phantas’, in that sense, is a fictionalised history; the ghost ship trope becomes a record of the memory of a long-gone time of naval and national glory. The Mary is profoundly dislocated in time: a galleon from a pre-Reformation medieval port, encountering an early twentieth-century warship. Dislocation is compounded by physical confinement to the three-mile strait, which traps it in space as well as time. Dragging its sail, the ship drifts eternally to the cliff while for Keeling, time stops. The ships’ encounter occurs in a single suspended point of time at his dying moment. The outcome is not the doomed repetition of the Flying Dutchman, but a resolution: Keeling discovers, at the story’s end, that the Seapink’s captain is also called Abel Keeling. The two captains evidently recognise each other; the Mary’s Keeling feels ‘a sudden tremor’ on hearing the other’s voice, while the Seapink’s Keeling speaks ‘rapidly and feverishly […] straining forward anxiously over the rail’.63 The relationship between the pair—whether as ancestor and descendent, gothic doubles, or one and the same—heals the rupture created by the impossible collision in time. What was dislocation becomes continuity, and Keeling’s final drowning moment is marked by a ‘huzza’ of triumph.

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A reading of ‘Phantas’ as a story of the consolation of continuity is supported by the story’s opening epigraph, the final three lines from a ballad called ‘The Chapter of Admirals’. These read: For, barring all pother, With this, or the other, Still Britons are Lords of the Main.64 ‘The Chapter of Admirals’ dates to around 1800 and is part of a popular tradition of naval balladry.65 It describes a number of British naval victories from the Elizabethan period onwards, including the notable victories of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) also commemorated in Francis Hayman’s contemporaneous painting ‘The Triumph of Britannia’ (1762).66 ‘The Chapter of Admirals’ and ‘The Triumph of Britannia’ are celebrations and consolidations of Britain’s superiority at sea, and they complete a chronological chain linking Tudor Rye to the twentieth century, thus restoring a continuous line of progress that had been disrupted by the dislocated ghost ship chronotope. The ballad’s final lines suggest that superiority has always been and always will be, encouraging a reading of ‘Phantas’ in light of that confidence. Keeling, though despairing the failure of his broken ship, discovers that Britons ‘still’ rule the seas, while the Seapink, as the captain’s boasting about their Yarrow boilers and armaments indicates, demonstrates further advances in technological mastery and shows the continuity of British naval supremacy. By playing with time in this way, Onions’s story is able to resolve anxieties over death, the future, continuity, and progress that are centred on the spaces and forms of the two ships, the old, melancholy galleon, and the new, optimistic destroyer. The story can be read as a resolution to the melancholy of the end of the romanticised Age of Sail, where end and loss are replaced by continuity and progress. Continuity is assured personally, as Abel sees or imagines a future self, technologically, as steamships figure as a development rather than a replacement of sail, and socially. The Seapink’s crew display plenty of satisfaction with themselves and their vessel, hinting at a sense of confidence in Britain’s continued naval prowess, without much anticipation of the shocks that the realities of the First World War would administer to the national consciousness. Richard Middleton’s ‘The Ghost-Ship’, discussed next, however, is far more ambivalent. ‘The Ghost-Ship’ is the title story of a posthumous collection published in 1912, though the story itself is set in 1897—the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Middleton (1882–1911) was an English writer who lived later in Brussels; he committed suicide at the age of twenty-nine.67 ‘The Ghost-Ship’ is his most noted story, but nevertheless has attracted almost no critical attention. It is a playful tale of a phantom ship and its captain, blown inland to the village of Fairfield during a storm, where it anchors in a turnip field for the summer before departing with a number of new recruits from among the local ghosts. The story, like the others I have discussed, draws on familiar legends and traditions about ghost ships and the sea. Not only is the ship, like Marryat’s, Poe’s, and Onions’s, old, but the captain’s stated wish for recruits resembles a legend whereby ghost sailors on a phantom ship lure living

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young men aboard to augment their numbers before plunging with them into the sea. Anchored to the pub landlord’s turnip field, the tale recalls another traditional story about a ship in the clouds seen anchored to the land, recorded by Victorian folklorist William Jones. Jones cites a thirteenth-century account of ‘“the existence of a sea above this earth of ours, situated in the air, or over it”’.68 At the end of Middleton’s story, the villagers see the ship, ‘over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars’.69 These traditional features of ghost ship tales are reworked by Middleton. ‘The Ghost-Ship’ invokes the past to explore worries about the future and the inevitable change that early twentieth-century modernity was bringing to traditional English life, imperial confidence, and national identity. Captain Bartholomew Roberts has a ‘gentleman’s voice’ but an old-fashioned piratical look—he wears ‘a black uniform set out with rusty gold lace and he had a great cutlass by his side in a brass sheath’.70 His vessel, like the Mary of the Tower, is ‘such a ship as no man had seen on the water for three hundred years. It was all painted black and covered with carvings, and there was a great bay window in the stern’.71 Hidden under the story’s charming comic tone is an example of Mix Barrington’s ‘travelling moments of gothic rupture’. The ghost ship, a disruptive visitor from the past, threatens the stasis of Fairfield’s contented village life, making visible contemporary concerns about the future war looming around the corner. Fairfield is presented as a romanticised idyll, a crystallised ideal of a traditional English rural past. It is ‘a pretty, old-fashioned place’, organised around its inn, church, and village green, a microcosm of Englishness and closely identified with its contented, peaceful inhabitants.72 ‘Our minds have taken the shape of the inn and the church and the green, I suppose,’ reflects the narrator; ‘At all events we never feel comfortable out of Fairfield’.73 As a result, he explains, Fairfield is the ‘ghostiest place in England’ because nobody wants to leave.74 The local ghosts are simply accepted as members of the community, a naturalised part of normal life, and the villagers are genuinely distressed by the captain’s corruption of the young men ghosts though rum and revelry. Many are cherished family members and ancestors, such as great-aunt Martha who lives in the landlord’s loft and Joshua, the ‘quiet lad’ who is also the shoemaker’s great-uncle.75 Fairfield’s popularity with ghosts marks it as a village that values the past, but is also stuck in it. It belongs to a static moment of days of yore, rather than to the modernity of the surrounding fin-de-siècle world, which is signalled by the invocation of the Diamond Jubilee. The captain duly takes part in the anniversary celebration, but is at first oblivious: ‘On Jubilee Day, however, someone told Captain Roberts why the church bells were ringing, and he hoisted a flag and fired off his guns like a loyal Englishman’.76 The simile here compounds the earlier hints, through his costume and desire for recruits, that the captain may be more pirate or privateer than honest sailor, ‘loyal’, or indeed ‘English’. His ignorance of the Jubilee can be further explained by his dislocation in time. Historian Walter Arnstein points out that Victoria’s fiftieth and sixtieth celebrations were innovations that consolidated the association of a ‘jubilee’ with monarchal anniversaries; it was more of a ‘novel phenomenon’ than an ‘ancient tradition’.77 The captain’s obliviousness thus underscores the continual historical

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change that does affect Fairfield even though the village considers itself settled and traditional. The Jubilee can be seen as a reinforcement of British national identity, but the ghost ship’s meaningless performance of participation in the celebration also exposes its hollowness and fragility: the guns Captain Roberts fires turn out to be loaded, knocking a hole in the farmer’s barn. Arnstein notes the ironies of the ‘accidental manner in which the Diamond Jubilee became a celebration of empire’ and of the mismatch between later popular perceptions of the Victorian period as one of ‘peace, stability, and complacency’ and contemporaries’ understandings of it as a ‘dramatically eventful epoch of change’.78 After Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1877, the idea of the role of the monarch as representing a unified, expanded British empire took hold, but by the fin de siècle the security of that empire was also coming under threat. As Patrick Brantlinger summarises, ‘[t]he confident era of free trade doctrine gave way only gradually to the defensiveness, self-doubts, and worries about “fitness”, “national efficiency”, and racial and cultural decadence which characterize the end of the century’.79 The implications of the scramble for Africa and the successes of rival imperial powers, the struggle of the Boer war (1899–1902), and the poor condition of recruits drawn from working-class urban centres, the naval arms race between Britain and Germany—all belonged at least in part to the path that led to the First World War.80 The use of a ghost ship specifically to negotiate all this is significant. As a ghost, it is able to transgress boundaries normally unassailable (past and present, life and death), while as a ghost ship it links those crossings to naval history, British national identity, and concerns over foreign invasion, transgressing the boundaries of sea, land, and air. There is no reason to think that Fairfield was ever coastal like Rye, but the fact that the ghost ship has been blown inland unsettles faith in the coast as protective barrier for an island nation. Not least because of the potential for the kinds of changes that affected Rye, the south England seashore was often conceived as ‘a bastion under siege’.81 Erosion and flooding themselves often figured morally, James Winter describes, as ‘an erosion in the political and moral fabric of the nation’, and linked in the early twentieth-century imagination to concerns about German invasion.82 Middleton’s ghost ship not only reaches as far inland as Fairfield but brings a spectral nautical world with it. While drinking rum with the captain and looking out of the cabin window, the narrator observes ‘the fishes swimming to and fro over the landlord’s turnips’ and ‘a drowned sailor float by in the thin air with his hair and beard all full of bubbles’.83 From one perspective, Fairfield has been flooded, invaded not just by the ship but by a ghostly sea. The guns fired by the captain on Jubilee day, sufficiently real to cause material damage to Fairfield buildings, further highlight contemporary fears of invasion and conflict being brought to Britain’s shores. In context of all this, the theft of the young men—many of whom are ghosts of those who died in previous wars, we are told—anticipates the onset of the Great War, the inroads it would make into a generation of young men, and the disruption it would cause to British national identities, confidence, and security. The ghost ship enacts and then reverses the trajectory of the kind of invasion fiction inaugurated by G. K. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), by removing young men rather than bringing them, as the war would shortly do. The theft of the ghost recruits erases one

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source of memory of the past, suggesting concerns about the irrevocable impacts of the massive cultural and political changes of the early twentieth century. The sense of loss associated with the end of the Age of Sail is a feature of all three stories, leading them to offer new models of ghost ship tropes intersecting with modern cultural concerns, which inevitably brings all three into dialogue with the cultural context of the years before the outbreak of war. Both the Great War and the transition to steam implicate, to an extent, the passing not only of earlier technologies, but of ways of life, of being and knowing. To sail the ocean rather than steam through it is to interact differently with your vessel and with the elements, to live according to a different set of values, as it was to live before or after 1914. The rescued Jessop describes the sort of bland entry he expects the Sangier’s captain to record in the log-book and is sceptical about their story being believed: ‘Noone except ourselves will ever know how it happened - really. The shellbacks don’t count’, he comments cynically. ‘No one would think of taking anything they said, as any more than a damned cuffer’.84 What ‘shellbacks’—that is, veteran sailors—know will be disregarded; Jessop’s history, the ship’s history, the history of sail, will be lost, effaced by a modernity that relies on the certainty of secular scientific knowledge and dismisses the traditional knowledge shared between sailors over centuries of maritime culture. The ghost ships in these three tales serve multiple functions: they hark back to the lost heyday of sail, they encode history and bring it into the present, while the unrealness or liminality of both ships and textual construction suggest a fading or uncertainty about the knowledge they record. The unique dislocated temporal and spatial existence of these shades of sail invites glances to the future, too, whether those glimpses yield the promise of a better world or hint of nightmares to come. Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

I have elaborated elsewhere on these points. Emily Alder, ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic,’ Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017). Emily Alder, ‘Dracula’s Gothic Ship,’ Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (2016); Emily Alder, ‘The Dark Mythos of the Sea: William Hope Hodgson’s Transformation of Maritime Legends,’ in William Hope Hodgson: Voices From the Borderland, ed. Massimo Barruti, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014). Franco Giorgetti, The Great Sailing Ships: The History of Sail From Its Origins to the Present (Vercelli: White Star Publishers, 2011), 115. Giorgetti, Great Sailing Ships, 120, 121. Julia Mix Barrington, ‘Phantom Bark: The Chronotope of the Ghost Ship in the Atlantic World,’ Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017). Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 158. See Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

853

Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977). See, for example, Margaret Baker, Folklore of the Sea (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979). Frederick Marryat, The Phantom Ship. 1839 (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896), 11. Marryat, The Phantom Ship, 380. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle,’ in Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 108, 106. Jimmy Packham and David Punter, ‘Oceanic Studies and the Gothic Deep,’ Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017), 17. Packham and Punter, ‘Oceanic Studies,’ 19. Mix Barrington, ‘Phantom Bark,’ 68–69. Ibid., 59. Alder, ‘Dark Mythos’. Jane Frank, The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Life: A Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works (Hornsea; Leyburn: PS; Tartarus, 2005). Frank, Wandering Soul, 23. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. Mendor T. Brunetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 41. Robert F. Burgess, Ships Beneath the Sea: A History of Submarines and Submersibles (London: Robert Hale, 1976), ‘Wilhelm Bauer’s “Brûleur de Côtes”’, plate, between pages 112–112. Robert Hutchison, Submarines: War Beneath the Waves From 1776 to the Present Day (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 11. Antony Preston, Destroyers (London: Hamlyn, 1977), 6. Hutchison, Submarines, 23. Eberhard Rössler, The U-Boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines (London: Cassell & Co., 2001), 21. Antony Preston, The World’s Great Submarines (Blitz: Leicester, 1998), 21; Hutchison, Submarines, 68. Giorgetti, Great Sailing Ship, 121. Packham, and Punter, ‘Oceanic Studies,’ 19. William Hope Hodgson, ‘The Ghost Pirates,’ in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 201–305 (285). Rössler, U-Boat, 8. Hodgson, ‘Ghost Pirates,’ 278. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 283 Ibid., 299. Ibid., 304. Zoe Brennan, ‘“Let the Miserable Wrestle with His Own Shadows”: The Beleaguered Edwardian Male Author in Oliver Onions’ ‘The Beckoning Fair One’,’ Literature & History 26, no. 2 (2017), 178. Oliver Onions, ‘Phantas,’ in Widdershins (London: Martin Secker, 1911), 107.

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Ibid., 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 118. Oliver Tearle, Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880– 1914 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013). Edmund Gurney, quoted in Tearle, Bewilderments of Vision, 12. Onions, ‘Phantas,’ 122. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 125–26. Robert Jackson, Destroyers, Frigates and Corvettes (Hoo: Grange Books, 2000), 223. Captain T. D. Manning, The British Destroyer. 1961 (London: Godfrey Cave Associates, 1979). Preston, Destroyers, 11. Manning, British Destroyer. 1961, 34–35. Onions, ‘Phantas,’ 124. My italics. Ibid., 125. Rachel Jackson, ‘The Ghostly Femme Fatale: Meta-Textuality, Desire, and Homo-Eroticism in the English Ghost Story (1890–1925),’ diss., University of the West of England, 2008), 123. Onions, ‘Phantas,’ 124. William Holloway, The Histories and Antiquities of the Ancient Town and Port of Rye, in the County of Sussex (London: John Russell Smith, 1847), v. Giorgetti, Great Sailing Ships, 54. Holloway, Histories and Antiquities, v. Onions, ‘Phantas,’ 107. Ibid., 124, 126. The ballad’s date of creation is uncertain, but it refers to British navy officers known for exploits up to the 1790s. The copy I consulted is included in a collection of ballads from 1750 to 1812. ‘The Chapter of Admirals,’ in Ballads, Vol. 3, 1750–1812 (Glasgow: Fuimus, Motherwell Collections). Roly Brown, ‘Glimpses into the 19th Century Broadside Ballad Trade: No. 23: “Duncan, Jarvis and Lord Howe …”.’ Musical Traditions Internet Magazine (28 October 2006): Accessed 27 October 2019. https://www.mustrad.org.uk/art icles/bbals_23.htm. Katherine Gazzard, ‘The Triumph of Britannia: Naval Victory and Urban Entertainment in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London.’ Royal Museums Greenwich (2019). Accessed 27 October 2019. https://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/blog/ triumph-of-britannia.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

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67. For full biographical information, see Henry Savage, Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work (London: Cecil Palmer, 1922). 68. William Jones, Credulities Past and Present: Including the Sea and Seamen, Miners, Amulets and Talismans, Rings, Word and Letter Divination, Numbers, Trials, Exorcising and Blessing of Animals, Birds, Eggs, and Luck (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 4. 69. Richard Middleton, ‘The Ghost Ship,’ in The Ghost Ship and Other Stories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 19. 70. Middleton, ‘The Ghost Ship,’ 6. 71. Ibid. 5. 72. Ibid., 2. 73. Ibid., 2. 74. Ibid., 3. 75. Ibid., 9. 76. Ibid., 8. 77. Walter Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee,’ The American Scholar 66, no. 4 (1997), 592. 78. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee,’ 591. 79. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 33. 80. Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2002), 60–61. 81. James Winter, Secure From Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 234. 82. Winter, Secure From Rash Assault, 234. 83. Middleton, ‘The Ghost Ship,’ 13. 84. Hodgson, ‘Ghost Pirates,’ 303.

Bibliography Alder, Emily, ‘The Dark Mythos of the Sea: William Hope Hodgson’s Transformation of Maritime Legends’. In William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland. Edited by Massimo Barruti, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014), 56–72. ———, ‘Dracula’s Gothic Ship’, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (2016): 4–19. ———, ‘Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic’, Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017): 1–5. Arnstein, Walter, ‘Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee’, The American Scholar 66, no. 4 (1997): 591–97. Ballads, Vol. 3, 1750–1812 (Glasgow: Fuimus, Motherwell Collections). Baker, Margaret, Folklore of the Sea (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1979). Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Brennan, Zoe, ‘“Let the Miserable Wrestle with His Own Shadows”: The Beleaguered Edwardian Male Author in Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One”’, Literature & History 26, no. 2 (2017): 177–94.

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Briggs, Julia, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977). Brown, Roly, ‘Glimpses into the 19th Century Broadside Ballad Trade: No. 23: “Duncan, Jarvis and Lord Howe …”’, Musical Traditions Internet Magazine (28 October 2006): Accessed 27 October 2019. https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/bbals_23.htm. Burgess, Robert F., Ships Beneath the Sea: A History of Submarines and Submersibles (London: Robert Hale, 1976). Frank, Jane, The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Life: A Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works (Hornsea; Leyburn: PS; Tartarus, 2005). Gazzard, Katherine, ‘The Triumph of Britannia: Naval Victory and Urban Entertainment in MidEighteenth-Century London’, Royal Museums Greenwich (2019). Accessed 27 October 2019. https://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/blog/triumph-of-britannia. Gilroy, Paul, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Giorgetti, Franco, The Great Sailing Ships: The History of Sail From Its Origins to the Present (Vercelli: White Star Publishers, 2011). Hodgson, William Hope, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002). Holloway, William, The Histories and Antiquities of the Ancient Town and Port of Rye, in the County of Sussex (London: John Russell Smith, 1847). Hutchison, Robert, Submarines: War Beneath the Waves From 1776 to the Present Day (London: HarperCollins, 2001). Jackson, Rachel, ‘The Ghostly Femme Fatale: Meta-Textuality, Desire, and Homo-Eroticism in the English Ghost Story (1890–1925)’, diss., University of the West of England, 2008. Jackson, Robert, Destroyers, Frigates and Corvettes (Hoo: Grange Books, 2000). Jones, William, Credulities Past and Present: Including the Sea and Seamen, Miners, Amulets and Talismans, Rings, Word and Letter Divination, Numbers, Trials, Exorcising and Blessing of Animals, Birds, Eggs, and Luck (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880). Judd, Denis, and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2002). Manning, Captain T. D. The British Destroyer (London: Godfrey Cave Associates, 1979). Marryat, Frederick, The Phantom Ship (1839) (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896). Middleton, Richard, ‘The Ghost Ship’. In The Ghost Ship and Other Stories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 1–21. Mix Barrington, Julia, ‘Phantom Bark: The Chronotope of the Ghost Ship in the Atlantic World’, Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017): 58–70. Onions, Oliver, ‘Phantas’. In Widdershins (London: Martin Secker, 1911), 107–29. Packham, Jimmy, and David Punter, ‘Oceanic Studies and the Gothic Deep’, Gothic Studies 19, no. 2 (2017): 16–29. Poe, Edgar Allan, Selected Writings. Edited by David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Preston, Antony, Destroyers (London: Hamlyn, 1977). ———, The World’s Great Submarines (Blitz: Leicester, 1998). Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Rössler, Eberhard, The U-Boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines (London: Cassell & Co., 2001). Savage, Henry, Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work (London: Cecil Palmer, 1922). Tearle, Oliver, Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013). Verne, Jules, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated by Mendor T. Brunetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Winter, James, Secure From Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

List of Contributors

Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University, UK David Annwn Jones, Assistant Lecturer, The Open University Simon Bacon, Independent Researcher, UK Dr Jen Baker, Visiting Fellow at University of Warwick, UK Claire Bazin, Independent Researcher, Paris, France Clive Bloom, Emeritus Professor Middlesex University, UK; Research Fellow New York University, London Dr Naomi Simone Borwein, the Western University, Canada Nicola Bowring at Nottingham Trent University, UK Dr Carmel Cedro, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand Miranda Corcoran, University College Cork, Ireland Dr Marius-Mircea Crisan, West University of Timis, oara, Romania Dr Alicia Edwards-Boon, Independent Researcher, UK Professor Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling, UK Maria Giakaniki, Independent scholar, Greece Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, the University of Southern Queensland, Australia Dr Antonio Alcalá González, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City Dr Jonathan Greenaway, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Dr David A. lbitson, the University of Leeds, UK Erin Janosik, independent researcher from New York City, United States Dr Brian Jarvis, Loughborough, UK Jarlath Killeen, School of English, trinity College Dublin Dr Emma Liggins, Manchester Metropolitan, Manchester, UK Dr J. S. Mackley, the University of Northampton, UK Kirstin A. Mills, Macquarie University, Australia Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Joan Passey, University of Bristol Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell, the University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand Dr Franz Potter, National University, Dan Diego, United States © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4

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List of Contributors

Sophie Raine, Independent Researcher, UK Dr Joana Rita Ramalho, University College London, UK Angela Elisa Schoch/Davidson, Independent Researcher, United States Professor Carol Senf, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA Dr Robert Shepherd, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Daniel Sheridan, Independent scholar, Canada Dr Katy Soar, Winchester University, UK Stephen Sowerby Independent Researcher, London Dr Aspasia Stephanou, Independent Researcher, editor and publisher, Cyprus Professor Giles Whiteley, Stockholm University Dr John Woolf, Hult Business School, UK Dr Catherine Wynne, Hull University, UK

Index

A Abney Park, 481, 491, 492, 494, 495 Abney Park Cemetery, 481, 489, 491 Abridgements, 29, 30 Adaptations, 29–31, 34–36 Aestheticism, 773–776, 781, 784, 791, 792, 800 Age of Sail, 839, 842, 845, 849, 852 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 11, 12 Albumen, 414, 416, 421–425, 427, 428 Alter ego, 39, 41, 46, 47, 51, 53 Ambivalence, 581 American Short Story, 221, 222 Anglican/Anglicanism, 473–475, 481–483, 487, 488, 492–494, 496, 497, 499, 500 Animal magnetism, 761 Appetite, 319–323, 325–329 Arcadia, 478, 480, 574, 575 Arcadian, 468, 469, 478–480, 482, 484, 488, 501 Architecture, 779 Armadale (1864-6), 673 Arsenic, 102–104 Art, 179, 182, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192, 193 Arthur Conan Doyle, 703 A Strange Story, 98–101 The Atlantic Monthly, 222, 230, 726, 727 Australia, 203–212 Authorship, 384 Autopsy, 103, 106

B Baartman, Sara, 676, 677 AKA The Hottentot Venus, 676 Bailey, John, 29

Ballet, 731–734, 742 Barrett, Charlotte Frances, 28 Barrie, J.M., 20 Bataille, Georges, 603 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 22, 798 Bavaria, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188, 190– 192 Beardsley, Aubrey, 800 Beckford, William, 476, 486, 503 Benson, E.F., 573, 574, 583, 586, 590, 591 Besant, Annie, 100, 548, 555 Bierce, Ambrose, 335–351 Black Magic Story, 249, 551, 554, 555 Blackwood, 161–164, 166–169, 171–174 Blackwood, Algernon, 827 Blair, Robert, 476 Blavatsky, H.P., 15–17, 99, 237, 238, 241, 242, 254, 542, 543, 547–551, 554, 555, 620, 702, 708 “A Bewitched Life”, 549 “The Cave of Echoes”, 548 From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, 548 “From the Polar Lands”, 548, 549 Isis Unveiled, 542 Nightmare Tales, 543, 548, 555 The Secret Doctrine, 542 Theosophical Glossary, 554 Blood, 395–397, 400–405, 633–637, 639– 644 Bogdan, Robert, 672, 684 Bohemian, 221, 222, 229 Bolton, George Buckley, 675 Booksellers, 27–29, 33, 37 Borgia, Lucretia, 103, 104 Bowen, John, 674, 685, 686 Braddon, 145–150, 152–157

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Bloom (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4

859

860 Brantlinger, Patrick, 544, 553 British empire, 840, 851 Britten, Emma Hardinge, 541 Brompton Cemetery, 492, 493 Brooklyn, 217, 219, 220, 228 Browning, Robert, 3, 5–7, 9 Bryne, Charles the Irish Giant, 675 Buckland, Francis, 679–681, 687 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 97, 109 Bulwer Lytton, Rosina, 110 Bunker, Chang and Eng, The Siamese Twins, 675 Bureaucracy, 378, 387 Bürger, August, 4, 5 Burial (premature/live), 62, 63, 65, 69–72 Burial sites, 64, 65, 68, 69 Burke, Edmund, 2 Burton, Tim, 5 Byron, Glennis, 544, 552, 553

C Calotype, 414, 416, 417, 419, 420, 424, 425, 427 Calvinism, 266, 276 Campbell, Bruce F., 553 Cannibal, 223, 224, 227 Cannibalism, 322, 324, 325 Capitalism, 63, 69, 70 exploitative labour, 62 hidden labour, 68 mode of production, 68 Carden, George Frederick, 475, 476, 480, 482, 483 Carmilla, 637, 638, 640, 641 The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), 35, 163, 692 Catholicism, 596–599, 601, 603 Cemetery, 217, 218, 221 Chadwick, Edwin, 471–473, 475, 497–499 Chajes, Julie, 553 Chapbooks, 27–35, 37 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 18, 554 Chatterjee, Mohini Mohandas, 543, 546 Chiromancy, 792, 795 Christianity, 2 Circulating library, 28, 29, 32, 33, 37 The city, 797 City life, 62, 65, 66 ‘Civilising mission’, 692 Civil War, 218 Class divide, 62

Index Classical music, 731–740, 742–746 Clerk, 377–389, 392 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2–5, 7 Collections, 27, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37 Collins, Mabel, 542, 546 Collins, Wilkie, 17, 100–102, 108, 110, 148, 444, 446, 447, 673, 738 Collodion, 414, 416, 418, 422, 423, 425, 426 Colonel Stodare, 695 Colonial, 203–207, 209–213 Colonization, 217 Comedy, 79–81, 84, 92 The Coming Race, 98, 99, 109 Common graves, 473, 481, 493, 494 Composers, 731–746, 748 Conjoined twins, 673, 676 Conrad, Joseph, 691, 699, 705, 708 Consumption, 320, 322, 323, 325, 327, 329, 331 Contemporary magazines, 12 Cooper, L. Andrew, 673, 684 Cornwall, 561–563 Cosmic Terror, 355, 357, 366 Count Dracula, 633, 637, 638 Cox, Jessica, 553 Crace, John, 100 Cranston, Sylvia, 548, 554 Creativity, 185, 187, 195 Creature, 223, 224, 228 Cromwell, 225 Crowley, Aleister, 17, 20, 179, 238, 551, 555 Cullen, Stephen, 30 Cult fiction, 236, 238, 240, 242, 243, 248, 249, 253, 254 Cultic, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242, 250 Culture, 283, 294 Curties, T.J., 35 Cuvier, Georges, 676

D Dacre, Charlotte, 546 Zofloya; or, the Moor, 546 Daguerreotype, 414, 416, 419, 420, 431 Darwin, Charles, 642, 643, 678–680, 686 Davidson, Carol Margaret, 37 Dead-child spirit, 712, 725 Dean & Munday, 29 Death, 77–79, 82–85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 179– 181, 184, 186–193, 217–221, 224, 228, 616–618, 621–624, 626 Death of Halpin Frayser, 335–338, 340, 341, 344–351

Index Decadence, 576, 596–600, 602, 604, 607– 609, 773–777, 779, 781–785, 791, 792, 799, 800 Decapitation, 696, 698, 700 de Gourmont, Remy, 603, 782 de Man, Paul, 395, 398, 399, 401, 404, 407 De Quincy, Thomas, 3, 15 Der fliegende Holländer, 753, 756, 757, 765, 767–769 Derrida, J., 828, 829 Detective, 80–83, 87, 89, 91, 221, 225, 228 de Vere, Charles, 693, 694 The devil, 40, 44 Devils, 441, 445–447, 449 Devon, 251 Dickens, Charles, 9–11, 27, 31, 37 Dining, 319–323, 326 Disguise, 39–41, 43, 49, 53 Dixon, Joy, 553 Domesticity, 157 Domestic space, 127, 130 Doppelganger, 378, 385, 386, 388 Double, 79, 86, 89, 90, 381–385, 388 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 14, 17, 20, 21, 80, 238, 239, 248, 252, 380, 384, 390, 552, 560, 569, 703, 708, 821, 824 The Land of Mist, 552 The Parasite, 552 Dracula, 647, 649, 650, 652–655, 657–664 Dracula (1897), 321–323, 329, 395–398, 400–408, 677, 679, 683 Dracula adaptations, 659, 660 Dracula criticism, 661 Dramas, 28, 31, 33–35 Dream(s), 82, 84–86, 89, 596, 598, 600, 604–606, 608, 610 Dugpa (Theosophical Concept), 545, 554 Du Maurier, George, 546 Trilby, 546 Durbach, Nadja, 682, 684, 687 Dutch, 222, 227 Dwarfs, 673, 674, 683

E Eating, 319–329 Ecocritical theory, 343 Ecocriticism, 339, 340, 349, 350 Ecofeminism, 343 Ecogothic, 335, 336, 340–344, 348–350 Edwardian, 355–358, 366, 369 Eerie, 19 Egyptian Hall, 695, 704

861 Egyptianising, 486, 489, 491 Egyptian Revival, 243, 482, 504 Egyptomania, 235–239, 241, 243–248, 250, 252, 253 Egyptophilia, 235, 237–240, 248–250 Egyptophilic vogues, 236, 243, 247, 248 Elysian, 468, 475, 479, 480 Elysium, 478, 479 Empire, 691–696, 699, 703, 705 Eroticism, 236, 239, 241, 245 Essex Poison Club, 104 Evolution, 577, 581, 585, 633, 637, 642–644 The evolution of the vampire, 456 F Failure, 180, 187, 192, 193 Fairy tales, 281–292 Famine, 220–224, 228, 230 Faust, 98 Feature, 441, 443, 445, 446, 448, 449 Female Gothic, 543, 551, 553, 615, 621, 624, 627, 628 Female vampires, 634, 638–640 Ferguson, Christine, 541, 552 Film, 441–446 Fin de siècle, 595–597, 600–603, 605, 613, 627, 684, 773, 774, 781, 783, 784, 788 First World War, 448, 450, 842–844, 849, 851 Fisher, Simon, 28, 29 Folklore, 559–561, 563, 569, 711, 714–717, 723, 724 Food, 319–330 Forgery, 106 Forster, E.M., 573, 574, 581–583, 585, 589, 590 Fourth dimension, 614–622, 624–627 Freak, 672–675, 683 Freakery, 672–675, 677, 681–683, 685 Freak show, 672–675, 678, 679, 682, 683 French Revolution, 2–4, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 791, 802 The fringe, 235, 241, 247 Funeral, 217, 218, 228 G Geary, Stephen, 488, 489, 492, 504 Gender, 207, 812, 819 Gender anxiety, 348 General Cemetery Company, 481, 497 General Tom Thumb

862 AKA Charles Stratton Halberstam, Judith, 673 Genre, 79, 81, 83 German, 98, 754–758, 761, 763, 765, 766 Ghost, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131–137, 145– 158, 378, 382, 384, 385, 387, 391, 441, 442, 448, 562, 567–569, 613, 614, 618, 619, 622, 625, 809, 810, 812, 813, 817–821 Ghost-child, 714, 717, 725 Ghost Club, 17 Ghost ship, 839–842, 844–846, 848–852 Ghost stories and collections, 12, 13, 15 Ghost story, 126, 128–132, 134, 136, 139, 299, 300, 302, 305, 308, 310, 312, 313, 528, 529, 531, 532, 535–537, 740, 744 Ghoul, 223–225, 227, 228 Gilles de Rais, 801 Global Pre-Raphaelitism, 413 Goblin Market (1862), 674 Gods in exile, 779, 781–783 Godwin, Joscelyn, 552 Godwin, William, 32 Golf, 809, 811–816, 818–822 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, 552 Gothic, 467, 468, 472, 476, 477, 479, 482, 484, 486–488, 491, 493, 495, 496, 503 Gothic architecture, 3 Gothic cult, 235, 236, 239, 253 Gothic drama, 453–460, 462 Gothic film, 671 Gothic hero, 758, 759 Gothicism, 477 Gothic literature, 537, 744 Gothic photography, 415, 417, 418, 427, 428, 433 Gothic Revival, 100, 237, 484, 731, 740, 744, 779 Gothic space, 127, 131, 133 Grahame, Kenneth, 575, 576, 580, 587, 589 Grave, 217–221, 223, 228, 229 Graveyard poets, 474, 476–478, 499 Gray, Thomas, 472, 476, 477 Great Expectations, 321, 324, 326, 329, 331, 332 The Great Famine, 220 Greek Revival, 482, 493 Green-Wood Cemetery, 217, 218, 221, 228 Grimes, Hilary, 552 Grimm, 281–294

Index H Haggard, H. Rider, 544, 545, 693, 695, 700, 701, 704, 705, 707 She, 550 Hahn, Helena Von, 548, 554 Harper’s magazine, 219 ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, 98, 100 Haunted house, 125–128, 132–135, 137, 139, 223 Haunted stage, 461 Haunting, 99, 145, 147, 148, 153–157, 162– 165, 167–169, 171, 174 Haut-Koenigsbourg, 22 Hazlitt, William, 30 Head, Dominic, 553 Heart of Darkness, 691–694, 703–705, 708 Heine, Heinrich, 754, 756 Heremon, 224 Hero-villain, 180, 185, 187, 193, 194, 196, 198 Highgate, 483, 487–489, 491–496, 505, 506 Highgate Cemetery, 469, 471, 488, 492, 495, 496, 499, 504, 505 Hill, Strawberry, 482, 486, 488, 503 History, 89, 90, 294 Hodgson, William Hope, 19, 20 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 553 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 36, 549, 754, 756, 760– 762, 765, 766, 768 “The Cremona Violin”, 549 Homogenocene, 829 Homosexuality, 580, 581, 583, 585, 777, 786 Horror theatre, 453, 458, 459, 461 Humour, 792, 795 Hunter, John, 675 Hurst, Thomas, 29 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 796 Hypnotism, 445, 448

I Imagination, 1–3, 7, 15, 19, 22 Immigrant, 223, 225 Imperial gothic, 544, 546, 547, 550 Incest, 86, 87, 90 ‘Indian Basket Trick’, 698 Insanity, 187–189, 193, 195 Invasion, 162–166 Ireland, 33, 148, 219, 220, 222–225, 230, 263, 264, 274–276, 662 Irish, 220–224 Irish Famine, 273, 275 Irony, 792, 795, 802

Index “I sat down near him, but told him I could not eat”, 327 Isis, 236–238, 240, 244, 249

J Jack the Ripper, 10, 13, 17, 18, 21, 358, 360 James, M.R., 12, 14, 19 Jane Eyre, 321, 326–332 Jones, Tim, 551, 555 Jung, Karl, 2

K Keats, John, 243, 573, 574, 649, 735, 742, 774, 775, 782 Kensal Green, 481–487, 491, 494–496, 502 Killeen, Jarlath, 671, 684, 685, 687 Kingsford, Anna, 541 King Solomon’s Mines, 693, 695, 699–701, 703, 705, 707 Kipling, Rudyard, 541, 549, 552 Life’s Handicap, 552 Kittler, Friedrich, 395, 397–401, 406, 407 Knebworth House, 100, 101 Kumara Sambhaba/Kum¯arasambhava, 546, 554

L Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), 673 Landscape, 203–205, 208, 209, 212 Landscape garden, 468, 476, 478–480, 487, 488, 501 Leadbeater, Charles, 555 Lee, Vernon, 13, 300, 552, 773, 781, 787 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 263–271, 273– 277, 634, 637, 639, 641 Legends, 561–563, 567, 569 Lemoine, Ann, 27–29, 31, 32 Lent, Theodore, 678 Leviticus, 545 Lewis, Matthew, 27, 29, 31, 34 Liminal space, 625 Lisbon earthquake, 273, 274 Literature, 515, 516, 518 Lloyd, Edmund, 11 Lodge/lodging, 355, 365, 368 London, 62–69, 72, 73 London Cemetery Company, 488, 492–494, 502, 504, 505 London slums, 65 London Spiritualist Alliance, 17 Lord Byron, 35

863 Loudon, J.C., 481, 483, 492, 493, 495, 501, 502, 505 Lucifer, 548, 554 Luckhurst, Roger, 542, 552, 553 Lucretia, or, The Children of Night, 98 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 1, 15, 97, 109, 129, 132, 133, 139, 549 Zanoni, 549

M Machen, Arthur, 541, 542, 552, 553, 573, 574, 576–580, 588, 589 The Great God Pan, 256, 542, 552, 553, 576, 578–580, 588, 589, 783, 784, 788, 789 Madame Tussauds, 9, 10 Madness, 77, 79, 86, 91, 93, 101, 108, 448, 449, 451 Magic lantern, 427, 428, 431 Magic tricks, 693, 699, 701 Magnificent Seven, 468, 473, 481, 493–497, 503 Male gothic, 615, 617, 620, 624 Malet, Lucas, 613–623, 626–628 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 584, 596, 773 Manhattan, 217, 222, 225–227 Marquis de Sade, 801 Marquis of Waterford, 41, 44–46 Marryat, Florence, 542 Marsh, Richard, 14, 18, 19, 21, 541, 545, 552 The Beetle, 552 Marx, Karl, 13 Masculinity, 809, 811–813, 815–822 Mask, 39, 40, 44, 49, 52 Maskelyne, John Nevil, 695, 698, 702 Materiality, 395, 396, 398, 399, 401, 402, 404, 405 Mathers, Samuel Lidell MacGregor, 254, 541, 837 Maturin, Charles, 33, 36 Maximo and Bartola, The Aztecs, 674 McCann, Andrew, 542, 545, 553, 554 McEvoy, Emma, 552 Meinhold, Wilhelm, 11, 17 Melancholy, 467, 472, 477, 478, 486, 494, 496 Menstrual blood, 347, 348 Merrick, Joseph AKA The Elephant Man, 682 Mesmerism, 761, 762, 792, 796, 803 Methodism, 475 The Middle Ages, 601, 606, 774, 780

864 Mighall, Robert, 793, 802 The mind, 626, 627 Miscegenation, 544, 635, 641 Mitford, Bertram, 546 The Weird of Deadly Hollow, 546 Mock heroism, 184 Modernity, 604, 607, 775, 778, 792–795, 798–800, 802 Modernity vs. past, 153 Moers, Ellen, 543, 553 The Monk (1796), 677 Monsters, 671, 672, 674, 675, 677, 680, 683 Monstrous feminine, 340, 346, 347 Moore, Frank Frankfort, 236, 245, 255 Moral insanity, 5, 6 Morris, William, 8, 11, 13 Morton, Timothy, 828 Mourning, 467, 468, 472, 473, 489, 493, 496, 498–500 Mulvery-Roberts, Marie, 672 Mummies, 249 Munby, Arthur, 678–682, 687 Murder, 102–105, 107 Mut, 236, 238, 240, 244, 245 Mutilated bodies, 691 The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), 677

N National identity, 205–207 Naturalism, 596, 597, 601, 602 Nature, 827–837 Nautical gothic, 839, 845, 846 Navy, 848, 854 The negative, 418–421, 423, 424, 431, 433 Nesbit, E., 552 Neuschwanstein, 22 Newgate novel, 98, 99, 103 New Gothic, 114, 121 New York, 218, 219, 221–223, 225, 226 New York City, 221 The New York Times, 217, 218, 229, 231, 705, 708 Night Thoughts, 477, 478, 480 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 584 Non-conformist, 475, 481, 483, 487, 488, 491–493, 497, 500, 503 Nonhumans, 828, 829, 834, 836–838 Novels, 27–36 Nunhead, 492–495 Nunhead Cemetery, 495

Index O Occult, 235–238, 240–242, 244, 245, 248– 250, 253, 495, 505, 603, 604, 606, 620, 626, 780 Occultism, 542, 543 Occult revival, 541, 551 Office, 377–382, 384–389 Office Gothic, 378, 381, 385, 387–389 “The Old Man of Visions”, 828, 832–834, 836 Oliphant, Margaret, 552 On the Origin of Species (1859), 679 Opera, 731–734, 736–746, 753, 754, 756– 762, 765 Orchestral, 736, 739, 743–745 Otherness, 320, 321, 324–326, 329 Otto, Hermann Waldemar AKA Signor Saltarino, 681 Owen, Alex, 552, 553

P Paganism, 575, 576, 583 Paley, William, 680 Palmer, William, 103, 104, 108 Pamphlets, 27, 29–37 Pan, 573–591 Pasi, Marco, 542, 553 Pastrana, Julia, AKA The Baboon Lady or Embalmed Nondescript, 677, 678 Pater, Walter, 791 Peake, Richard Brinsley, 34, 35 Peeke, Margaret B., 542 Penny bloods, 61 Penny dreadful, 39, 43, 54, 61–63, 65, 68, 72 Pere-Lachaise, 475, 476, 480, 481, 488 Performance, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152 Periodicals, 236, 238, 241 Piano, 309, 736, 738, 740, 741, 743–746 Piccadilly, 695 Pickersgill, Joshua, 34, 35 Picturesque, 467, 468, 472, 476, 478–480, 483, 484, 486–489, 491–493, 500 Planché, James, 34 Plant horror, 351 Poe, Edgar Allan, 3, 7, 12, 21, 22, 77, 93– 95, 98, 193, 230, 285, 369, 408, 446, 515, 523, 598, 713, 722, 775, 785, 791, 840, 853 Poison, 101–108, 110 Poisoners, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105 Polidori, John, 633–638, 641 Popular, 282–285, 288, 292

Index Popular fiction, 245 Postcolonialism, 263, 264, 275 Poverty, 63, 65–67, 69, 70, 72 Praed, Rosa Caroline Affinities: A Romance of To-Day, 553 As a Watch in the Night, 553 The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of To-Day, 543, 554 The Insane Root: A Romance of a Strange Country, 553 Soul of Nyria: The Memory of a Past Life in Ancient Rome, 553 Pre-Raphaelite photography, 414–416, 418, 419, 424, 429, 431, 432 Primitive, 574, 582, 584, 585 The Princess and the Goblin (1870-1), 674 Printers, 28, 29, 33, 37 Providentialism, 273, 274 Psychoanalysis, 86, 93 Psychology, 614 Publishers, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34 Pugin, Augustus, 482, 484, 492 Punter, David, 552, 672, 684

Q Queen Elizabeth I, 222 Queen Victoria, 672, 675 Queerness, 193 Queer Theory, 152

R Race, 207, 212 Radcliffe, Ann, 4, 9, 11, 27, 30, 32, 674, 677 Realism, 366 Regional, 561, 562, 564 Reincarnation, 82, 86, 108, 238, 242, 246, 249, 304, 517, 543 Revenants, 713 Reyes, Xavier Aldana, 552 Reynolds, George W.M., 10, 11 The Mysteries of London, 61, 62 Richet, Charles, 554 “Rita” [pseud. Eliza Humphreys], 542 Ritual, 236, 238–247, 249, 250 Robert-Houdin, Jean, 693, 696 Romance, 627 Romantic, 573, 575, 576, 581, 582 Romantic gothic, 180, 191–193 Romanticism, 179, 184, 302, 306, 307, 732, 734–736, 744, 745, 755, 778, 782 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 480, 501

865 Ruskin, John, 416, 417, 419, 420, 429, 434, 438, 779, 780, 787 Rymer, James Malcom, 10 S Saki, 573, 574, 582–585 Salted paper, 421, 423 Sandeman, Mina, 542 Satanism, 597, 601–604, 606 Schauerroman, 754–758, 763, 766 Science, 510–519, 521–523 Science fiction, 82, 83, 222 Scin-Lecca, 545, 547 Scott, Walter, 5, 11, 33 Sea, 839–846, 848, 849, 851 Séance, 237, 238, 248, 250 Secret society, 763, 765 Sentimental/sentimentalism, 472–474, 477, 478, 489, 493, 496, 499 Sewer systems, 68 Sexology, 602, 801 Shamrock, 220, 221, 229, 230 Shelley, Mary, 34, 35, 549 Frankenstein, 549 Shelley, Percy, 27 Shepard, Leslie, 30 Shipwrecks, 562–564 Short story(ies), 161, 168, 530–533, 713 Silent, 441, 451 Smith, Andrew, 543, 553 Smith, Madeleine, 103 Society for Psychical Research, 17, 18 Solidarity with nature, 830, 833, 835 Solitude, 181, 184, 185, 189, 192 South Metropolitan Cemetery, 484 Space, 145, 146, 148–157, 159, 161–168, 171–173, 614–619, 621–627 Spatial imaginary, 128 Spectrality, 128, 414, 417, 428, 617, 624, 739, 829, 845 (the) Spectral plain, 829 Spirit photography, 510, 514, 519–521, 524 Spiritualism, 100, 509, 510, 512–514, 518– 524, 626, 792 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 547, 554 Spooner, Catherine, 552 Sport, 809–811, 813–818, 820, 821 Spring-heeled Jack, 39–42, 44–48, 50–54 Stead, W.T., 541 Stenbock, Stanislaus Eric, 20 Stevenson, R.L., 541, 544 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 544

866 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 21, 693, 701, 703, 705, 707 Stoker, Bram, 5, 16–21, 395–398, 400, 401, 403, 405–408, 633, 634, 637, 638, 640–644, 647, 651, 656, 661–664 Dracula, 541, 544–546, 550, 552 Sublime, 477, 479, 483, 486, 488, 491, 505 Subterranean, 61–65, 69, 72 Succubi, 245, 249 Supernatural, 100, 101, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228, 299–302, 306, 308, 309, 312, 313, 613–615, 617, 618, 620–627, 731–741, 830–832, 835, 838 Swedenborgism, 269 Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 9, 54, 430, 578, 773 (the) Symbolic order, 827 T Taylor, Jenny Bourne, 553 Technology, 510–513, 515, 519, 520, 522 Tegg, Thomas, 29, 31 Tenement, 225, 226, 231 Tennyson, Alfred, 7, 12 Terror, 281–288, 290–292 Thackeray, William, 9, 12 Theodicy, 272, 274, 278 Theology, 528, 529, 532, 534, 535, 537 Theosophical society, 542, 551 The Theosophist, 548, 554 Theosophy, 237, 238, 241, 248, 542, 547, 548, 620, 626 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 677, 685 Tiffin, Chris, 553 Tomb, 217, 218 Tombstone, 217–219, 221, 228, 229 Toothache, 182–184 “The Touch of Pan”, 828, 832–834, 837 Tourism, 125, 126, 131, 135 Tower Hamlets, 494, 495 Tower Hamlets Cemetery, 493 Toxicology, 102 Trance, 614, 616, 619, 622, 627 Transylvania, 649, 650, 652, 654, 655, 659, 664 Treves, Frederick, 682 Trial, 102, 103, 106, 108 U Uncanny, 14, 16, 19, 203–207, 209, 211– 213, 300, 301, 305, 311, 731–734, 741, 744–746

Index Uncanny and the theatre, 453, 462 (the) Uncanny valley, 829, 830, 836 Undead, 633, 634, 636–640, 642, 644 United States of America, 225 Urban, 162–164, 169 Urban ghost, 134 Urban legend, 40 V “The Valley of the Beasts”, 828, 832, 834, 837 Vampire, 378–382, 397, 400–406, 448, 449, 451, 559, 564, 565, 633–644, 647– 650, 652–655, 657–664, 774, 776– 778, 780, 782, 784, 785 Vampyre, 633–636 Vernon Lee, 13, 300, 773, 781 Victorian, 378, 379, 815, 819 Victorian Horror, 355–357, 366 Victorian literature, 241 Victorian writing, 528 Violence, 77, 83, 89, 92 Visual arts, 510, 518, 521 Voivode Dracula, 650, 652 von Holst, Theodore, 98 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 801 W Wagner, Richard, 753–766, 768, 769 Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths, 106 Wallace, Alfred, 678 Wallace, Diana, 543, 553 Walpole, Horace, 35, 476, 479, 482, 486, 488, 496, 503, 692 Warwick, Alexandra, 552, 553 Washington Irving, 222 Weimar, 451 Weird, 19, 20 Weird tale, 828, 830 Wells, H.G., 544, 643–645 The Island of Dr Moreau, 544 Westminster Cemetery Company, 108, 134, 135, 492, 698 West Norwood Cemetery, 483, 484, 487, 488, 491, 492, 495–497, 503, 504 Westwood, Sarah, 104 Wheatley, Dennis, 551 The Devil Rides Out, 551 Wheeler, Anna, 105, 106 Whitman, Walt, 221 Wilde, Oscar, 541, 552, 791, 794, 802–804 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 552

Index Wilkinson, Sarah, 28, 31–33, 36 Winter, William, 217, 218 Witches, 11, 12 Wolle, Francis, 218, 220, 222 Wordsworth, William, 4 Work, 377–381, 383–390 Working-class, 61–63, 67, 68, 70

867 Y Young, Edward, 476, 477

Z Zanoni, 98, 99, 101 Zhelihovsky, Vera Petrovna de, 548, 554 Zola, Émile, 596