GOTHIC FICTION

Gothic Satires, Histories and Chap-books

by Alison Milbank

2 - Histories

Taking Longsword Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance, usually attributed to the antiquarian Thomas Leland, as its starting point, the Gothic novel in England can claim the historical novel as its earliest generic form, since its publication predates The Castle of Otranto by at least two years. Based on an actual historical figure, an illegitimate son of Henry II and (possibly) that chap-book heroine Fair Rosamund, the novel charts his return in the guise of a pilgrim from the wars in Gascony, and his attempts to foil the machinations of the usurper Raymond. This last now possesses Longsword’s land and is just about to marry his wife in a manner reminiscent of the Odyssey but also the chap-book romances. What renders this version Gothic is the strong emphasis on tropes of imprisonment, usurpation and forced unions within specifically Gothic sites of monastery, castle and dungeon, in a plot that involves fear, pain and other strong emotions. The novel has a fine frontispiece, designed by Samuel Wale, Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, which makes a strong attempt at historically correct delineation of a medieval abbey, and a monk offering aid to a wounded knight. It offers a surprisingly positive picture of the catholic past for the time, although the novel also includes an exemplar of the Machiavellian monastic schemer in the poisoner, Father Reginald. Longsword, however, is unlike later Gothic histories, in which the feudal past is evoked only to be rejected by characters who anachronistically, hold good protestant values and escape the castle for the freedom of post-Enlightenment rationality. In contrast, it depicts the Middle Ages as distant and heroic. As Clara Reeve wrote about Leland in her Spirit of Romance, he offers a depiction of feudal values ‘composed of Chivalry, Love and Religion.’ Leland was himself an antiquarian, author of a history of Ireland and was no doubt cognizant of Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, which were published in the same year as Longsword. Despite later controversial exchanges between the two scholars, Leland seems to have shared Hurd’s attitude to the medieval period.

In the Gothicised history tale a specifically British setting dominates, in complete contrast to the exotic Italian and continental locales of Walpole, Lewis and much of Radcliffe. Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story, published in 1777 and retitled The Old English Baron in later editions is carefully set in the picturesque Thames valley at Minster Lovel. In her Preface, Reeve sets out her project as one that will unite the heroic nature of historical romance with a more factual attention to the minutiae of medieval life. Gothic in her title refers primarily to the period, which is that of the minority of Henry VI, when Humphrey Duke of Somerset was Protector of England. Characters engage in such mundane activities as eating bacon for breakfast, lighting fires and packing up their clothes. The structural similarities with Longsword and Otranto are close, involving a usurpation plot, but unlike Longsword, Reeve introduces a ghost, who leads a trail to the bones of the murdered Lord Lovel. As in the parodic Strongbow, the ghost becomes a figure of historical mediation. Indeed, the popularity of ghosts in the historical Gothic tale is perhaps due to their standing for the process of historical investigation itself by which the dead are, as it were, restored to life. These spectres appear, furthermore, in an historical setting and in periods when belief in ghosts was common, and thus, as Samuel Johnson argued in relation to apparitions in Shakespeare’s plays, they are admissible as historical curiosities.

Ann Radcliffe opened her career with a story with a British setting but began a new trend by choosing an east coast Scottish situation for her Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne of 1789. This was favoured poetic territory thanks to Ossian and James Beattie’s The Minstrel but Radcliffe was the first to colonise it for the novel. Her last, posthumously published novel, Gaston de Blondeville, written around 1802, was inspired by a building, Kenilworth Castle, later to influence Sir Walter Scott, although his novel of that name is set in a later period. Radcliffe chooses the time in Henry III’s reign that immediately precedes his wars with the barons over executive and legal prerogatives. This is also the reign in which Longsword is set and shows an interest by Gothic writers in periods of contestation, in which the modern constitution was beginning to take shape. Gaston de Blondeville also contains a ghost who warns the king of Blondeville’s crimes, and thus becomes an agent of change because he enables the release of Woodreeve, a lower-class man who has been wronged by an aristocrat. This novel is self-consciously historicist in its frame story, which involves two nineteenth-century travellers meditating on historical distance as they discuss the various uses to which Kenilworth has been put over the centuries. Archaeological endeavour produces the manuscript that forms the body of the novel, and its title page is ‘reproduced’ in authentically Gothic script. Radcliffe makes one of her typical double gestures here, looking backwards with her manuscript to the forgeries of Ossian, and forwards to the self-consciousness of the modern historical novelist, since she ends with a list of the sources she consulted.

Another favoured period of British history for Gothic treatment was that of the Tudors, forming as it did the end of the medieval and Catholic world, and the birth of the modern centralised state. Henry VIII, moreover, was an historical Bluebeard in his marital relations. The most influential Gothic history novel however, was set later, in the reign of Elizabeth I. Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783-5) tells the story of two legitimate daughters of Mary Queen of Scots who are brought up in complete secrecy in the subterranean ruins of a former abbey. This picturesque home becomes less of a haven and more a nightmare labyrinth as the girls are caught up in the intrigues of Elizabeth, Leicester and Essex. Longsword had a conventional dungeon, The Old English Baron a haunted chamber, but The Recess is one huge and all-embracing Gothic universe, from which one sister escapes only to madness and death, and the other to safe seclusion only through a pretended death and funeral. All encounters with the outside world and actual historical figures are catastrophic for Mary’s daughters, so that history itself subsumes the role of Gothic tyrant, a trope that Lee may owe to her French sources, such as Prévost’s Histoire de Cleveland and the romances of Madame de Scudéry. Her own influence was immense, and in this collection Martha Harley’s The Priory of St Bernard owes much to Lee, as do Francis Lathom’s The Mysterious Freebooter and especially Mystic Events, which yokes a Reeve-type plot involving Anne Boleyn to Schauerromantik horrors. The best of the Tudor novels are Lee, which closely follows her female narrative style is the anonymous Lady Jane Grey, which was published by Minerva Press in 1791. It is much more accurate in its use of Lady Jane’s extant letters and other sources than most Gothic histories, and it employs the epistolary mode effectively to show characters trying and failing to assert autonomy against political and family pressures.

Sophia Lee and Ann Radcliffe’s emphasis on architecture as the structuring trope for an historical romance unites a number of the disparate items in this collection in which the ostensible historical setting provides no more than a credible backcloth for a classic Gothic plot of incarceration, murder and usurpation. A typical example is T.J. Curties’s The Watch-Tower, which has a Scottish setting amid the wars of Robert the Bruce but uses this political chaos to allow every sort of barbarous tyranny imaginable in which historical characters play no part but the stupendous castles and crags of Ulthona provide a magnificent setting.

More historically engaged is a writer like Jane Porter, who describes actual events including the Battle of Bannockburn in The Scottish Chiefs, all from the perspective of the Scottish side. William Wallace provides her individual focus, and her nationalist sympathies are also evident in her treatment of the young Polish hero in Thaddeus of Warsaw. Her sister, Anna Maria Porter, also wrote historico-gothic tales, and our specimen, The Fast of St Magdalen, is set like so many Gothic novels, in sixteenth-century Italy. Unlike so many others, however, Porter gives graphic details of battle scenes, and makes historical events responsible for her heroine’s release.

Since nearly all Gothic novels in this period involve a setting in the past, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the historical from the conventional Gothic romance. Most of the titles in this section either involve actual historical figures, as in I. Stanhope’s The Siege of Kenilworth, or make the historical setting intrinsic to the narrative, as in Charles Maturin’s The Albigenses, although the Cathars of this last seem more like eighteenth-century Deistic protestants than medieval heretics. In complete opposition to the historical record the Albigensians here defend themselves successfully but in so doing they reveal the whig tendency in much gothicised historical fiction. Even the seemingly conservative Clara Reeve wrote specifically in relation to history, “My father was an old whig: from him I learned all that I know.” For despite the glamour and chivalry of the Gothic past, the sensitive and rational protagonists of these stories move out of the castle and forward into the future, outfacing the fictional tyrants and overbearing monarchs of the past. In this evocation of a lost world in order to move beyond it, these proto-historical writers prepare the way for Walter Scott’s Waverley of 1814 in which the hero’s romantic
involvement in the Jacobite cause must give way to an accommodation with the Hanoverian future.

Scott is represented in this collection by his completion and editing of Joseph Strutt’s Queenhoo-Hall in 1812. Strutt, an engraver and antiquarian, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of folk customs, which is illustrated in this work by a series of tableaux of May-games, a visit to a local weird-woman, morris dancing and other revels intended by the author to provide background to Shakespeare’s plays. The owners of Queenhoo Hall form the audience for these set-pieces, while also being entertained by the Gothic travails of their persecuted friend Emma, and the mysterious arrivals of the self-styled ‘Knight of the Bleeding Heart.’ Both the Gothic, traditional past and the supernatural and excessive Gothic novel are safely enclosed by the frame of the great house and its detached audience, who stand in for and represent the modern reader. Scott ends the novel with a bawdy comic account of a rural wedding and an ending forced by the mutilated state of the manuscript source.

It might seem that the vast range of Scott’s influence and his greater understanding of the processes of historical change might be the end of the Gothic history tale but two major writers are represented here by productions that still hark back to the Gothic mechanics of the earlier form. Mary Shelley in Valperga, her next novel after Frankenstein takes an historical figure from fourteenth-century Italy and renders him as a doomed Gothic hero in the manner of Lewis, although she does employ her two female protagonists as embodiments of alternative political visions in a manner akin to Scott’s use of Rose Bradwardine and the Jacobite Flora in Waverley. In Klosterheim, published as late as 1832, Thomas De Quincey is more interested in spreading an atmosphere of mystery and terror about the identity of the Red Mask than in giving a realist treatment of politics in the German city states. And in the novels of Bulwer-Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth, a historico-Gothic tradition survived well into the Victorian period.

3 - Chap-books

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