GOTHIC FICTION

GOTHIC SATIRES, HISTORIES AND CHAP-BOOKS

By Alison Milbank

1- Satires

The burlesquing of its own procedures is a tendency implicit in the conventional Gothic novel, which risks laughter as well as horror by the excessive nature of its imaginative effects. Most notably Matthew Lewis’s The Monk oscillates between comic irony and full seriousness in a manner influenced by the German Schauerromantik extravaganza of horrors. Much earlier in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) Tobias Smollett included a highly Gothic graveyard scene in which the amorous phantom’s all too substantial physicality was revealed to grotesquely comic effect. Satire is therefore an early element in the Gothic fashion of the eighteenth century, although it was a late one in this collection, being an especial interest of Robert Kerr Black, who studied burlesque fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Virginia.

The earliest two satirical items in this collection, Powis Castle: or, Anecdotes of an Antient Family (1788) and Earl Strongbow: or, the History of Richard de Clare and the Beautiful Geralda (1789) share this admixture of the comic and the serious. After a Shandyesque opening in which Sir Walter’s attempts to render his already decrepit mansion even more ruinously Gothic are lampooned, the tone of Powis Castlei deepens with the entry of the fascinating yet designing Count Parmeni, who keeps Voltairean deism a secret and is compared by the narrator to Milton’s Satan with no irony whatsoever. Transmuting swiftly into a full Gothic villain Parmeni fails in his adulterous machinations and disappears in a great storm to plunge to a watery death on Holyhead beach. Just as the Gothic novel tends towards parody, so many a satire is itself subsumed by the energies of the Gothic narrative.

Earl Strongbow works rather differently, in that its hold on satirical intention is never lost and it offers an effective parody of the anachronistic nature of much Gothic historical fiction, and a sprightly ghost who narrates his history with a certain wit. We learn that ghosts are ignorant of all that happens after their demise, so that apparitions in churchyards are emissaries from the deep sent to gather intelligence. Ghostly groans, Strongbow claims, are ‘mere affectation’ by their producers. Despite the heavy ironies of the narration, the novel offers also all the hallmarks of the conventional historico-gothic romance, and follows the actual career of Strongbow quite closely in Ireland and elsewhere, as well as offering a parallel to the career of Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, the subject of the earliest Gothicised historical tale also in this collection. The careful historicism of Stothard’s frontispiece engraving of a knight offering a buckler to his lady under a window of the decorated period is fully serious, in keeping with a work in which the reader is offered at once a parody and an actual Gothic tale - since the irony does not infect the story itself.

Some Gothic parodies are by writers of conventional Gothic fiction, as, for example, Eliza Parsons, author of the satirical Anecdotes of Two Well-Known Families as well as a number of novels for the Minerva Press. She begins by delineating the comic adventures of a girl who seeks to create an imaginary Gothic life-history for herself but then performs an abrupt volte face in the third volume, in which the heroine’s persecutory fantasies are proved to have foundation, and she is rescued from her murderous pseudo-parents and revealed as the true heir in Radcliffean style. It is interesting to compare Parsons’ novel with Jane Austen’s celebrated Northanger Abbey, which was written (though not published) at about the same time. Austen includes two works by Parsons in Isabella Thorpe’s Gothic reading list. Like Parson’s Elinor, Austen’s Catherine Morland begins by constructing a ludicrous Gothic fantasy of a murderous plot, and the scene in which she opens the black cabinet only to discover a washing bill has a parallel in the finding of a miniature in the bathroom cabinet among the indigestion medicines in Anecdotes. And Northanger Abbey goes on to validate Catherine’s Gothic suspicions when General Tilney is indeed revealed as a tyrant, and has her forcibly ejected from the house. That this represents a Gothic rather than a realist trope is made clear by the disbelief of Maria Edgeworth and the reviewer of the British Critic, who severally doubted the credibility of such behaviour by an English gentleman.

Parsons and Austen focus their satire upon the female reader following a venerable tradition begun by moralists and writers such as Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote of 1752, in which Arabella, cut off from society in a remote castle, takes the world of her mother’s French romances for reality, and attempts to force that reality on those around her. Lennox’s novel forms a model for a large class of Gothic satire which also includes Mary Charlton’s Rosella and Eaton Barrett’s The Heroine, or; Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader. In Charlton’s novel, it is the heroine’s mother who after near madness and death must be brought to see the errors of treating her daughter as a Gothic heroine but in Barrett’s wonderful satire it is the heroine herself, one Cherry Wilkins - “Cherry? Better be called Pine-apple at once. There is a green and yellow melancholy in Pine-apple that is infinitely preferable” - whose attempts to read the world as a Gothic novel have wildly catastrophic effects. Her adventures include laying a trail of gunpowder and blowing up a house, taking a partnership with a prostitute, getting accidentally shut in a chest with a man, and escaping his embraces by feigning mania, accidentally unwrapping at a ball and defending a castle under siege. Despite emerging victorious from her battle, she surrenders to avoid immodesty by sleeping in a room full of men. Unlike Lennox’s Arabella, who harms no one but herself, Cherubina’s exploits lead to the incarceration of her father in a lunatic asylum and others desperate unhappiness. There are also real Gothic traps, such as the libertine mansion in which she escapes only by means of a revolving door in the fireplace as the ‘ghost’ exits.

Barrett, a skilful satirist and poet, had the compliment of an imitation of The Heroine in Belin de La Liborlière’s The Hero, which was translated into English by Matthew Lewis’s sister, Sophia Shedden, in 1817. Mr Dob, like Cherry Wilkins, is imposed upon by masqueraders, and in his case, he is presented with enactments of scenes from the most celebrated Gothic novels. It is noticeable that the protagonist of this and other critiques of the romance reader is of the mercantile or lower classes. There is even a comic tale, Mary, Or the Fragment, appended to several Gothic chap-books, in which the hero whose ghostly fantasies are interrupted is a domestic servant. In Love and Horror by Ircastrensis Thomas Bailey is the son of a butcher, and his inamorata the daughter of a greengrocer. This mundane genealogy, however, does not protect them from abduction by mysterious Armenians with secret entrances to St Paul’s, secret tribunals, subterranean adventures and escape disguised as a dog, with a climax at the Inquisition. Thus the novel may be read both as satire but also imitation of a Vathek type marvellous romance.

The employment of lower-class protagonists reflects the class bias of the writers of many of these satiric works. Masculine writers abound, and occasionally append ‘Esq.’ After their initials, to emphasise their gentlemanly status, or give their name and university degree. Certain items have dedications to royalty or to politicians such as George Canning. Most of the titles of this class of work in the Sadleir-Black collection are bound in calf and have armorial bookplates inside, showing that they were part of a gentleman’s collection and not merely volumes borrowed from the circulating libraries. Combining parody and close imitation these novels could afford the sophisticated reader both the comic delights of irony and also the more vulgar pleasure of excessive Gothic narrative.
Hardenbrass and Haverill, or; the Secret of the Castle, by R.S.Esq. is an example of this upper-class production and has a bookplate of the Carew family. Again a masculine taste is evidenced since this enormous rambling production is full of characters that could have come from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with names like the Reverend Obadiah Tilt, who seduces the wealthy Monominia, who is herself named after Smollett’s heroine in Count Fathom. The novel lurches between eighteenth-century comedy and full Gothic seriousness, advertising by its subtitle, ‘A Madman and No Madman - Who walks - Deeds of Darkness etc’ and then claiming in the Preface that it is written for those who prefer “what is natural to what is absurd and monstrous.” The plot’s climax, however, is thoroughly Gothic in tone as well as structure. The heroine, Anarella, is lured to the evil Marquis’s apartments under the impression that her servant has been taken ill, locked in and attacked. She is rescued only by the entry of the (open) secret of the castle, the immured and supposedly insane father of the Marquis, the Duke of Trimingham. Moreover, one of the most sane and realistically presented characters proves to have a thoroughly Gothic secret past involving an Italian nun, a Scottish monk, and a German dungeon holding a prince’s mother who is supposedly dead.

Two of the most serious satires of the collection parody individual Gothic novels. Charles Lucas makes a thoroughgoing attack on William Godwin’s advanced political and social philosophy as well as his novel Caleb Williams in The Infernal Quixote of 1801. Following Godwin’s defence of what he believed to be the legitimate grievances of Milton’s Satan in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Lucas prefaces the novel with a scene from Pandaemonium. Satan announces that the reign of the Anti-Christ has begun (presumably with the French Revolution) but is as yet unsuccessful in Great Britain, to which he turns his diabolic attention. The main narrative then charts the contrasting lives of Lord James Marauder and the poor but virtuous Wilson Wilson in eighteenth-century England. Lord James, under the tutelage of Imphell and Subtile embarks on a career of dissipation, seduction and finally treachery as he joins the Irish uprising of 1798, having created an alter ego as an alibi. Unmasked by Wilson, he leaps into the abyss in the manner of Byron’s doomed heroes and the protagonist of Maturin’s later Melmoth the Wanderer. In a work that casts Sir James as a satanic agent, Lucas imitates the seeming omniscience of Falkland in Caleb Williams, while his Wilson is a figure reminiscent of Williams himself, and is similarly persecuted for his knowledge of the villain’s secret. So Lucas, an accomplished satirist in both prose and verse, validates the Gothic narrative of Godwin’s novel but in order to employ it against the writer’s own politics.

‘R.S.’ in The New Monk attacks Lewis’s novel The Monk on moral grounds as tending to “inoculate the heart for the admission of every vice.” The author proceeds to offer a close parody of the plot in a contemporary British setting and with a Methodist hero, the Reverend Joshua Pentateuch, much addicted to the pleasures of the table and hypocrisy. It is sometimes difficult to establish whether the primary target of the satire is Lewis or Methodism, especially in the scenes that unmask ‘Peter’ as a female in imitation of Ambrosio’s faithful novice, the seductive Matilda. A series of references ostensibly about roast pork could easily be attributed to ‘Peter’s’ ample charms. Later, the purse of the sleeping Ann Maria Augusta which Pentateuch is about to steal, seems to stand metonymically for the girl’s body: “the motion of the bolster discovered part of their swelling forms. Thus glutted the hypocrite his eyes and ‘coveted other woman’s goods.’”

Arguably the only work in this section that truly avoids Gothic contamination is Thomas Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, perhaps because it satirises a whole range of cultural fashions as well as the Gothic. They young scion of the house, Scythrop Glowry, is based on Peacock’s friend, the poet Shelley, who began by writing two Gothic romances, also in this collection, as is his mother’s own copy of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. A parody of the credulous romance reader, Scythrop sleeps with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow in a ruinous tower, “dreaming of venerable eleutherachs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves.” Although a Gothic plot develops with the arrival of the beauteous Stella seeking escape from persecution, whom Scythrop hides in a secret cabinet, it is quickly dissipated when it is discovered that the fate she escapes is actually marriage to Scythrop himself. Despite the appearance of a suitably noisy apparition, the Gothic is never allowed to spread narrative wings or to exert any atmospheric pressure, so that ironic distance is always maintained. That this is rare in Gothic satire only points up the power of the original Gothic genre, which, as one can see from the broad chronological range of the satirical material here included, was an enduring one.

2 - Histories

3 - Chap-books

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