GOTHIC FICTION

Introduction

By Peter Otto

1 The Sadleir-Black Collection

It was not long before the lust for Gothic Romance took complete possession of me. Some instinct – for which I can only be thankful – told me not to stray into 'Sensibility', 'Pastoral', or 'Epistolary' novels of the period 1770-1820, but to stick to Gothic Novels and Tales of Terror.
Michael Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction

It seems appropriate that the Sadleir-Black collection of Gothic fictions, a genre peppered with illicit passions, should be described by its progenitor as the fruit of lust. Michael Sadleir (1888-1957), the person who cultivated this passion, was a noted bibliographer, book collector, publisher and creative writer. Educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, Sadleir joined the office of the publishers Constable and Company in 1912, becoming Director in 1920. He published seven reasonably successful novels; important biographical studies of Trollope, Edward and Rosina Bulwer, and Lady Blessington; and a number of ground-breaking bibliographical works, most significantly Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (1922) and XIX Century Fiction (1951).

According to Sadleir, the roots of his "mania" for Gothic Romance lay in his "youthful enthusiasm" for Baudelaire and Mallarmé. These writers were "profound admirers of Edgar Allan Poe". Following in their footsteps, Sadleir read Poe's gothic stories and so was led to "the work of Charles Brockden Brown; and from Brown to the English, German and French romances of the 'Terror' school".

As Gothic novels commonly testify, passions, even those with such a plausible pedigree, never operate in isolation. The attempt to possess a desired object is inevitably shaped and constrained by chance, means and predisposition. Sadleir, for example, was "more interested in hunting 'difficult' and unusual books than in the acquisition of famous and therefore expensive ones". "This ingrained characteristic of [his] collecting mania” was, he admits, "virtually forced on me ... by limitations of finance". At the same time, "intensive collection of any author or movement" was for Sadleir always carried out with "the intention of ultimately writing the material collected into biography, bibliography or fiction". Nevertheless, it was a remarkable stroke of luck that enabled Sadleir's Gothic collection to become a reality, while also helping to determine the form it would ultimately take.

“In the autumn of 1922", while "poking about on the uppermost floor" of Bumpus' bookshop in London, Sadleir "came across a little run of books", five titles in all, that included a first edition of Regina Maria Roche's The Children of the Abbey (London: Minerva, 1796) and Horrid Mysteries. A Story, translated from the German of the Marquis of Grosse by Peter Will (London: Minerva, 1796). The former was one of the most successful of the books published by William Lane's notorious Minerva Press, appearing in at least ten editions before 1825. The latter is the last of the seven "horrid novels" recommended to Catherine Moreland by her friend Isabella Thorpe in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (London: John Murray, 1818). Its discovery was remarkable because only ten years earlier it was commonly assumed that Isabella's list contained names only of fictitious novels. In 1922, although now recognised as the titles of real works, it seemed unlikely that all seven Northanger novels were extant. The attempt to obtain a complete collection of "horrid novels" became the chief support and object of Sadleir's biblio-mania.

The next Northanger novel to fall into Sadleir's hands was Roche's Clermont. A Tale (London: Minerva, 1798), and then Eliza Parsons' The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (London: Minerva, 1796). Using words that evoke the aura of a religious quest, Sadleir writes that his acquisition of the fourth was a "miracle" that occurred "one blessed morning" when a "sudden impulse" took him into the shop of "perhaps the least likely bookseller in London to have such obscure trifles as Gothic Romances". Guided by his "good angel" he found, "straight opposite the door in a shelf under the broad central table", a copy of The Midnight Bell, a German story, founded on incidents in real life by Francis Lathom (London: H.D. Symonds, 1798). The remaining Northanger novels, however, were obtained in the first instance by Arthur Hutchinson, who must be counted as second only to Sadleir as architect of the Sadleir-Black collection of Gothic Fiction.

Hutchinson was editor of Windsor Magazine, a member of the Omar Khayyam Club, and a "bibliomaniac". Sadleir described him as "a bald, large-faced, solid-built but terrifically energetic and always bustling man, with a more tireless capacity for talk than anyone I ever met". The friendship between Sadleir and Hutchinson was, evidently, based on their shared penchant for collecting books; but beyond this broad similarity, one is struck by their differences: both collected books of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, but whereas Sadleir had a sharp focus (Gothic fictions), an aim (the production of "biography, bibliography or fiction"), and standards (first editions, in good quality), Hutchinson was, in Sadleir's words, "the kind of collector conventionally called 'omnivorous', his lust for fiction being uncontrolled ... by selective design". Hutchinson's "devouring hobby" was, simply, the collection of fiction, "not necessarily fiction in first edition or fiction in original state, but just fiction".

Hutchinson's passion for collecting was unconstrained even by space. In the bedroom in which he lived, "in a hotel off the Strand", he kept two large packing cases which he filled with his purchases, often not stopping even to unwrap them. Once the cases were full, they were replaced with fresh ones. The old cases were transported to a warehouse where they awaited Hutchinson's retirement, a period in which he would have the leisure at last to sort and arrange his books. Even this remarkably unconstrained passion, however, did have a degree of focus. As Sadleir notes, with more than a hint of incomprehension, Hutchinson had "a very strange but quite definite predilection for fiction by women authors".

When Hutchinson died, sadly before his retirement, Sadleir discovered that he had been made executor of Hutchinson's immense, unsorted, heterogeneous library. Sadleir describes his first attempt to survey this collection as the entry into a gothic labyrinth:

“I shall never forget the first sight of that astonishing collection ... Having arrived at the huge building, we were conducted to a sort of mezzanine floor -- low-ceilinged and in complete darkness. There were, we were told, one hundred and forty packing cases of books, of which a random dozen or fifteen had been unpacked. We were given torches and left to investigate.
The rays of light flickered across the vast floor on which - spines upward - were ranged row after row of books. It looked as though an over-floor of books had been laid down, with the narrowest passages here and there through which we crept, flashing the torches on to title after title, and feeling every moment more appalled at the prospect of having to sort these thousands of volumes and prepare them for sale. For they were completely unclassified and desperately miscellaneous ... Out in the daylight my colleague and I stared at one another in despair. What in the world were we to do?”

Of course, the obstacles that impeded Sadleir's first attempt to survey Hutchinson's library were also an index of its strengths. A less "omnivorous" collector, or even a collector more constrained by space, might have rejected or overlooked some of the priceless items assembled by Hutchinson. For example, Sadleir found a copy of The poems of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (London: J. Smith, 1816) "sandwiched between two fiction-cheaps for bookstall sale, the three items wrapped in newspaper and tied with a string". A large number of Gothic chapbooks, in many cases still today the only extant copies, were "discovered in bundles of paper-covered oddments -- modern novels, local guides, time-tables and odd numbers of magazines". The remarkable array of Gothic chapbooks contained in the Sadleir-Black collection is today one of its major strengths.

Entombed in Hutchinson's packing cases, Sadleir also found many of the novels by women and by minor Gothic writers that are now counted as major strengths of the collection. There were novels by Charlotte Dacre, Mary Charlton, Elizabeth Helme, Francis Lathom, Lady Morgan (Sidney Owenson), Harriet and Sophia Lee, Eliza Parsons, Regina Maria Roche, Charlotte Smith, and a host of other writers less well known to all but the readers of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century circulating libraries. As Sadleir remarked, "from no other single source were so many new titles obtained".

In 1926, when Sadleir was preparing a paper on the Northanger Novels, Hutchinson provided him with two more of the novels on Isabella's list: Eliza Parson's Castle of Wolfenbach (London: Minerva, 1793) and The Necromancer; or, The tale of the Black Forest. Founded on facts, translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg (a pseudonym of Karl Friedrich Kahlert) by Peter Teuthold (London: Minerva, 1794). Although Hutchinson was unaware of the fact, his collection also contained the seventh and last "horrid novel", The Orphan of the Rhine. A Romance by Eleanor Sleath (London: Minerva, 1798), for Sadleir the most valuable of the gems he was to uncover.

Sadleir continued to add to his collection until 1935. By that date, he seems to have lost interest, perhaps because his set of Northanger novels was now complete; the biographical work on the Gothic, after Sadleir's pioneering efforts, was now being done by others; and/or his interests had turned elsewhere, to his work on Trollope and Victorian fiction. Whatever the reason, Sadleir's collection was now for sale.
Robert Kerr Black (born in 1907 at Montclair, New Jersey; died in 1975), a bibliophile and antiquarian bookseller, purchased the collection in 1937. During the next five years, he added approximately 100 items. Sadleir and Henderson had established the collection; Black attempted to fill the gaps they had left. His contributions included Beckford's An Arabian tale, from an unpublished manuscript; with notes critical and explanatory (London: J. Johnson, 1786; the first edition of Vathek); a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The modern Prometheus (London: Lackington, et al, 1818); Percy Shelley's St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: a Romance (London: J. Stockdale,1811) and Zastrozzi; a Romance (London: G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, 1810); along with all six of Charles Robert Maturin's novels (often cited as "the greatest as well as the last of the Goths"), including a first edition of Melmoth the Wanderer: a Tale (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820). Black also added the publisher's contract for Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794).

Black studied first at Princeton and then, as a graduate student, at the University of Virginia. While at the latter, he was introduced to the Gothic, and his own particular interest in parodies and burlesques of the Gothic was roused, by Professor Archibald Shepperson, author of The Novel in Motley: A History of the Burlesque Novel in English (1936), which contained a chapter on "Gothic Nonsense". In 1942, therefore, when the need to preserve the collection became pressing, and in order to establish a public, scholarly resource, Black gave the collection to the University of Virginia, where it is now housed in the Special Collections Department of the Alderman Library. In addition to maintaining the collection, in the years since then the Special Collections Department has, "through purchase and gift", made significant additions.

2 - The Microfilm Collection

3 - Gothic Origins

4 - Gothic Revolutions

5 - The Northanger Novels

6 - Radcliffe and her Imitators

7 - Lewis and her Followers

8 - Terror and Horror Gothic

9 - Gothic Echoes / Gothic Labyrinths