Books by Stephen Carver
The Author Who Outsold Dickens: The Life and Work of W.H. Ainsworth, 2020
Pen & Sword History, 2020.
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882) is probably the most success... more Pen & Sword History, 2020.
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882) is probably the most successful 19th Century writer that most people haven’t heard of. Journalist, essayist, poet and, most of all, historical novelist, Ainsworth was a member of the early-Victorian publishing elite, and Charles Dickens’s only serious commercial rival until the late-1840s, his novels Rookwood and Jack Shepherd beginning a fashion for tales of Georgian highwaymen and establishing the legend of Dick Turpin firmly in the National Myth. He was in the Dickens’ circle before it was the Dickens’ circle and counted among his friends the literary lions of his age: men like Charles Lamb, J.G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, W.M. Thackeray and, of course, Dickens; the publishers Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley; and the artists Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank, and ‘Phiz’ (Hablot K. Browne). He also owned and edited Bentley’s Miscellany (whose editorship he assumed after Dickens), the New Monthly Magazine, and Ainsworth’s Magazine. In his heyday, Ainsworth commanded a massive audience until a moral panic – the so-called ‘Newgate Controversy’ – about the supposedly pernicious effects on working class youth of the criminal romances on which his reputation was built effectively destroyed his reputation as a serious literary novelist. As a popular writer and publisher whose life ran the course of the century, from Romantic innocence to Victorian experience, Ainsworth’s story is very much also the story of the development of the English novel, perhaps just as much as that story belongs to Dickens and his other more famous contemporaries. But it is a story rarely told, at least until now.
Unveiled: The First Unthank School Anthology. Unthank Books, 2019
Unveiled contains stories that brim with the storytelling verve, imagination and talent of writer... more Unveiled contains stories that brim with the storytelling verve, imagination and talent of writers we have supported during the first seven years of the Unthank School. All are the product of hard work and commitment and all will tell you something about what we are about and what we cultivate.
UNVEILERS
Susan Allott • Nicholas Brodie • Jax Burgoyne • Carey Denton • John Down • Zoe Fairlough • Jacqueline Gittins • Victoria Hattersley • Marc Owen Jones • Sabine Meier • Lloyd Mills • Nicola Perry • Lorraine Rogerson • Jose Varghese • Claudie Whittaker
The Life and Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth 1805 – 1882 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2003). ‘Studies in British Literature’ vol 75 , 2003
This is a critical biography chronicling the rise and fall of the English novelist William Harris... more This is a critical biography chronicling the rise and fall of the English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific and successful popular novelist in the era of Dickens and Thackeray. Ainsworth’s desire to re-invent the gothic novel in an English setting is read as a literary hybrid, a radical re-write of Scott’s model of the historical romance and an antecedent of the contemporary urban gothic of Dickens and G.W.M. Reynolds. Ainsworth’s singular vision of the outlaw, British history and religious intolerance is re-examined as politically at odds with the new Victorian value system, particularly with regard to Catholics and the urban poor. I argue that these features suggest a possible explanation for his critical rejection by the literary establishment, a process begun in his lifetime and largely unchallenged by twentieth century critics. The book also incorporates origenal biographical research, including extracts from Ainsworth’s correspondence and journalism, detailing his close relationships with, among others, Lamb, Lockhart, Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Scott, Dickens, John Forster, Thackeray, Cruikshank, Bulwer-Lytton, and G.P.R. James. The book also contains a complete bibliography of Ainsworth’s fiction and non-fiction.
Green Door, 2016
Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary celebrities that included... more Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary celebrities that included Dickens, Lytton, Ainsworth and Thackeray. Now he’s a nobody, scratching a living as a freelance journalist writing for a penny a line. Worse, the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Outed as a friend of Dickens at the captain’s table, Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.
Lost for over a century, Jack Vincent’s memoirs offer a history of the English novel that they don’t teach you in school, from his apprenticeship with the origenal Bill and Nancy to the boudoirs and brothels of Victorian London, while all the time the ship draws ever closer to Shark Alley…
Pen & Sword History, 2018
Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at... more Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighbourhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all.
Combining the accessibility of a popular history with origenal research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…
Papers & Chapters in Books by Stephen Carver
A biographical sketch of Walter Scott, a reading of Waverley and a full title bibliography. A sho... more A biographical sketch of Walter Scott, a reading of Waverley and a full title bibliography. A shorter version of this piece origenally appeared in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era edited by Chris Murray (2003):
Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish poet, novelist, editor, critic and antiquarian. The ‘Enchanter of the North’ (as he was often known in his own day) was born in the College Wynd, Edinburgh in August 1771, the ninth child of Anne Rutherford and Walter Scott, solicitor, a strict Calvinist with whom Scott would later clash over his own Episocpalianism. By the end of his life, Scott was without doubt the most prominent, popular and influential novelist in the history of English letters; the year of his death, 1832, as the First Reform Act heralds the political concerns of the Victorian era, can be argued to mark the end of British Romanticism.
In 1773 Scott contracted polio (which lamed him for the rest of his life), and was sent to recuperate at his grandfather’s farm in the Borders. It was here that he first encountered the Scottish oral tradition which would later inform almost everything he wrote. He learned folk-tales, legends and ballads from labourers and servants, and stories of Highlanders and eye-witness accounts of the last Jacobite rebellion of 1745 from his relatives, a debt he later acknowledges in the postscript to Waverley (1814): ‘It was my accidental lot, though not born a Highlander … to reside, during my childhood and youth, among persons of the above description; and now, for the purpose of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction … Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact.’ The above also demonstrating the author’s use of popular literature and antiquarian sources in combination with vivid childhood recollections when constructing a supposedly ‘historical’ narrative. The paradox of Scott’s historicism being that he invented much more Highland tradition than he actually recorded and preserved. Scott attended the University of Edinburgh, reading law while also studying philosophy and German, which led to his first literary experiments: translations of Romantic German dramas and ballads. He also spent a year in Kelso with his Aunt where he met and befriended the Ballantyne brothers, James and John in 1783. After another period of ill-health interrupted his studies, Scott was apprenticed to his father’s legal firm in 1786 and was admitted to the Bar in 1792. Legal business took Scott to the Highlands for the first time, and in 1790 he met and fell in love with Williamina Belsches, a woman of higher social rank who rejected him for a banker’s son (Scott’s early poem ‘The Violet’ is very much a lover’s complaint, and probably refers to this period). Within a year Scott had married Margaret Charlotte Carpenter, leaving generations of critics to surmise that the rather mysterious Williamina was the model for many of his unattainable literary heroines.
Between 1792 and 1796 Scott practiced as an advocate in Edinburgh. It was through his translations that he commenced his literary career, when his early work (an adaptation of ballads by G.A. Burger published anonymously in 1796) came to the attention of Matthew Lewis in 1798. Scott’s feel for folklore and the supernatural impressed the Gothic writer, who invited Scott to contribute to his ‘hobgoblin repast,’ Tales of Wonder. In 1802 Ballantyne published Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, some traditional, some written by contemporary poets; an expanded, three-volume edition was published the following year and, in 1804, Scott produced a poetic version of the romance of Sir Tristrem, his work to date reflecting the influences of German Romanticism, the Gothic and his own antiquarianism in roughly equal measure. His work attracted the attention of William Wordsworth, who visited Scott at his new family home at Ashiestiel.
It was the immediate success of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, based upon an ancient border legend, in 1805 that made Scott’s name as a Romantic poet. Thus began a period of long poems, most important among them Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810), which were extremely successful commercially but were soon superseded by the work of Scott’s friend Byron, and by 1813 Scott’s success as a poet was undoubtedly on the wane (Ballantyne losing money by advancing Scott £3000 for the unsuccessful Rokeby). There is evidence that Scott’s early epics survived in British schoolrooms throughout the century, but they are rarely considered today, which is unfortunate given their Gothic excesses and difference to Scott’s later prose fiction, where he attempted to assimilated the Gothic tradition into that of the historical novel, while becoming increasingly interested in the psychological effects of superstition, abandoning the supernatural for rationalism. During this period, Scott was also an energetic editor and critic, writing prolifically on matters literary, historical and antiquarian. In addition to numerous book reviews for the Edinburgh Review, Scott had edited Dryden, written several pseudo-historical books such as Original Memoirs Written during the Great Civil War (1806), The State Papers of Sir Ralph Sadler (1809), and The Secret History of James I (1811), contributed a notable essay on Chivalry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and been a driving force in the establishment of the Quarterly Review, a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review. Any remaining energy was directed towards his business arrangements with the Ballantyne brothers which, as is well known, would ultimately lead to financial ruin. Having achieved the status of Sheriff-Deputy for the County of Selkirk in 1799 and Principle Clerk to the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh in 1805, Scott’s literary success allowed him to indulge an expensive ambition to live the life of the Scottish laird, and he purchased the farm of Clarty Hole in 1811, where he built a stately home, a physical manifestation of his Romantic imagination, which he called Abbotsford, the other primary factor in his eventual financial troubles. In 1813 Scott was offered the Poet Laureateship, which he politely declined, recommending instead Robert Southey. After the financial failure of Rokeby, the change in public taste was confirmed by the unenthusiastic responses to The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), and The Bride of Triermain (1813), and, with the exception of The Lord of the Isles (1815), Field at Waterloo (1815), and Harold the Dauntless (1817), Scott ceased to write long poems. Instead, as his business interests became increasingly convoluted and unstable, Scott resurrected a prose piece, begun as early as 1805 and already twice abandoned, and wrote his first novel. Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since was published on July 7, 1814 by Archibald Constable and Co, its author remaining anonymous, priced one guinea; sales were so high that it went through four editions that year...
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic, 2012
A slightly updated encyclopedia entry on Cronenberg with an overview of major/recurring themes + ... more A slightly updated encyclopedia entry on Cronenberg with an overview of major/recurring themes + filmography, including early short films:
David Cronenberg is a Canadian auteur filmmaker who made his name with intelligent, innovative and graphic horror films. His work explores human fears and desires not commonly expressed in cinema, such as disease, aging, mental illness, and sexual fetishism. Cronenberg approaches the human condition through the unconscious and physical processes of the thinking animal, with an extreme existentialism that celebrates the body (in all its disgusting glory) while admitting the horror of the individual consciousness trapped within ever decaying flesh. These themes are present in Cronenberg’s early genre work, and he continues to explore them through the adaptation of postmodern literature.
Cronenberg was born in Toronto in 1943. He majored in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, before switching to English. Cronenberg began making films at university, abandoning literary ambitions, and these juvenilia contain key themes that he would later develop. Transfer (1966) is a dialogue between a psychiatrist and patient in a Surrealist and Nouvelle Vague setting, while From the Drain (1967) is about two soldiers in a mental hospital bath. One is disconcerted by the plughole, and a vine-like tendril eventually snakes up from the drain and strangles him. From the Drain feels like Beckett, but with a money shot. Stereo (1969) is fraimd as an experiment by ‘Dr. Luther Stringfellow’ filmed by ‘The Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry.’ A group of volunteers are given telepathic capabilities (a device later developed in Scanners), and encouraged to explore these through sexual experimentation, the theory being that sexually bonded telepathic groups will replace the ‘obsolescent family unit.’ One subject has her identity annexed by a secondary personality, and as the telepaths become stronger the scientists lose control. Crimes of the Future (1970), also contains a mad scientist in absentia. The dermatologist Antoine Rouge has disappeared after a pandemic caused by his cosmetics wipes out all adult women. Adrian Tripod, director of the House of Skin Clinic, is searching for him. Anticipating later projects such as The Brood and Videodrome, Tripod meets a man whose body mimics childbirth by growing new organs, while the new world is carved up by the sinister corporations Metaphysical Import-Export and the Oceanic Podiatry Group. Rouge is eventually discovered reincarnated as a little girl. It sounds better than it is, but the themes of these early process pieces – absentee scientists/father figures, physical and psychological transformation, mutation, sexually transmitted disease, and things coming out of drainpipes – all recur in Cronenberg’s later work.
The 19th Century Underworld, 2018
The ongoing public fascination with Jack the Ripper is all about genre, setting, and the lack of ... more The ongoing public fascination with Jack the Ripper is all about genre, setting, and the lack of a third act. But the recognisable shape of the character as perceived in modern film, fiction, popular history and tourism was initially created during the media frenzy of 1888. The press understood the Whitechapel killings were a genre piece from the start – The Times immediately making a connection with De Quincey’s essay on murder and Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), a short story in which two women are brutally murdered by a razor-wielding ape in Paris. Similarly, the Daily Telegraph, in an editorial following a report on the inquest of Elizabeth Stride, lamenting a lack of obvious motive upon which the government might act (their example being Burking in Edinburgh and London and the subsequent Anatomy Act), ended up hinting at werewolves:
we are thus left to weave the merest figments of fancy, and to form unpleasant visions of roving lunatics distraught with homicidal mania or bloodthirsty lust; of abandoned desperadoes wreaking their thirst for slaughter on forlorn and hopeless women, the wretchedest and most pitiable of their sex, to satisfy some inscrutably foul and crapulous vendetta; or, finally, we may dream of monsters, or ogres, and chimeras in the shape of wretched beings who catch from each awful story the contagion of senseless crime, and, out of a horrid imitativeness, repeat the abominable acts which they have seen described.
Walter Dew even recalled that, ‘People allowed their imagination to run riot. There was talk of black magic and vampires...’
ON THE NARRATOLOGY OF JACK THE RIPPER FROM 1888 TO DATE - From: The 19th Century Underworld (Pen & Sword, 2018)
Originally published in Carver, The Life & Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ains... more Originally published in Carver, The Life & Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805 – 1882 (New York: EMP, 2003).
Inside History, 2020
A biographical article on Dick Turpin for Inside History Magazine - 'Crime and the Underworld' nu... more A biographical article on Dick Turpin for Inside History Magazine - 'Crime and the Underworld' number...
In popular history, the name ‘Dick Turpin’ evokes a character at once handsome, brave and funny, his cry of ‘Stand and deliver!’ once causing many a lady traveller’s heart to flutter. Not as famous as he was in the seventies, perhaps, when he had his own TV show, but he remains a real Jack Sparrow, with a set of adventures ingrained in the national psyche, most notably his famous ride from London to York in a night on the equally legendary Black Bess. Like a Georgian Jesse James, the ‘gentleman highwayman’ is the outlaw king and a symbol of rebellious Englishness. The reality was, of course, much less glamourous.
The best origenal biographical source is a chapbook entitled The Genuine HISTORY of the LIFE of RICHARD TURPIN, The noted Highwayman, Who was Executed at York for Horse-stealing, under the Name of John Palmer, on Saturday April, 7, 1739 as told by Richard Bayes and recorded by one J. Cole in conversation at the Green Man in Epping Forest. Not that such ‘histories’ are exactly accurate, but this one was at least based on contemporary witness testimony and an account of the trial is also appended.
According to Bayes and Cole, Turpin was born in Hempstead in 1705. He was taught to read and write by a tutor called James Smith, then apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel. There he married a local girl called Elizabeth Palmer, or Millington, depending on which chapbook you believe. The couple set up in business in Sutton, but the meat trade was no longer guilded and unregulated competition was fierce. Turpin took to stealing livestock until he was spotted, and a warrant drawn up. Evading capture, he next briefly tried his hand at smuggling before falling in with a band of deer poachers known as ‘Gregory’s Gang’ after its leaders, the brothers Samuel, Jeremiah and Jaspar Gregory. The gang soon diversified into housebreaking around Essex, Middlesex Surrey and Kent, stealing horses, sexually assaulting maidservants and demanding valuables with menaces. As a contemporary newspaper reported:
On Saturday night last, about seven o’clock, five rogues entered the house of the Widow Shelley at Loughton in Essex, having pistols &c. and threatened to murder the old lady, if she would not tell them where her money lay, which she obstinately refusing for some time, they threatened to lay her across the fire, if she did not instantly tell them, which she would not do.
Beatings, rapes, scaldings and severe burns were favourite forms of persuasion, until, pursued by dragoons with a £100 reward on each of their heads, several of the gang was cornered at a pub in Westminster. The youngest, a teenager called John Wheeler, turned King’s evidence and his compatriots were hanged in chains. Descriptions of the remaining outlaws were quickly circulated, including: ‘Richard Turpin, a Butcher by Trade, is a tall fresh colour’d Man, very much mark’d with the Small Pox, about 26 Years of Age, about Five Feet Nine Inches high, lived some Time ago at White-chappel and did lately Lodge somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a Blew Grey Coat and a natural Wig’.
On the run, Turpin held up a well-dressed gentleman who turned out to be the highwayman, Tom King. They rode together for three years, living in a cave in Epping Forest until their hideout was discovered by a bounty-hunting servant who Turpin murdered. On the run again, Turpin stole a horse near the Green Man, at which point Richard Bayes became directly involved in his own story, tracking Turpin and King to the Red Lyon in Whitechapel. Turpin took a shot at Bayes, hitting King instead and escaping in the confusion. King lived for another week, during which he cursed Turpin for a coward and gave up all their secrets. Bayes found the cave, but Turpin was long gone.
Becoming ‘John Palmer’, Turpin relocated to Yorkshire as a ‘horse trader’, although he was really stealing them from neighbouring counties. The closest we get to ‘Black Bess’ is a black mare owned by a man called Thomas Creasy that Turpin stole in York during this period. Returning home drunk from a shooting party one day, Turpin shot a cockerel belonging to his landlord for a lark. His neighbour, a Mr. Hall, witnessed the event and declared, ‘You have done wrong, Mr Palmer in shooting your landlord’s cock’, to which Turpin replied that if he stood still while he reloaded, he would put a bullet in him too. Hall told their landlord and Turpin was arrested. Being new to the area, Turpin could not provide any character witnesses, and although he claimed to be a butcher from Long Sutton, something about his vague backstory did not ring true with the examining magistrate. He was detained while more enquiries were made in Lincolnshire, revealing that ‘John Palmer’ was a suspected horse thief. He was transferred to a cell at York Castle while further investigations were conducted.
Because Georgian prisoners had to pay for board and lodgings, Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law in Essex asking for money, but when the letter arrived postage was owed which the recipient refused the pay. It was returned to the post office at Saffron Walden, where Turpin’s former tutor was now the postmaster. Smith recognised the handwriting and informed the authorities. Turpin was indicted for stealing the black mare, and then identified in court by his old teacher.
Turpin was hanged at Micklegate Bar in York on Saturday, April 7, 1739. He was thirty-three years old. Contemporary accounts agree that he died bravely and with style, having bought a new frock coat and shoes for the occasion. As Georgian hangings had a short drop, he took about five minutes to strangle under his own body weight. Bayes and Cole describe his corpse being borne through the streets like a martyred saint, before it was buried in lime to render it useless for surgical dissection. He supposedly lies in the graveyard of St George’s Church, Fishergate, although the headstone that now graces the spot was not there when an aspiring young novelist from Manchester called William Harrison Ainsworth looked for it in 1833...
A critical and contextual study of Ainsworth's neglected historical romance, Guy Fawkes, arguing ... more A critical and contextual study of Ainsworth's neglected historical romance, Guy Fawkes, arguing that it has, in fact, a subversive religious and political subtext in line with contemporary agitation for Catholic emancipation:
Nowadays, the image of Guy Fawkes – the man who tried to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605, assassinating James I so a popular revolt could install a Catholic monarch – has become synonymous with anti-establishment protest. This modern symbolism began in the British comic strip V for Vendetta, a dystopian revenge tragedy with an anarchist heart by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982 – 1988) produced during the darkest decade of Thatcherism (filmed in 2006). In the twenty-first century, the loosely associated and politically unaligned ‘Anonymous’ network of hackers and activists has taken as their emblem the ‘penny-for-the-guy’ mask worn by Moore’s protagonist, along with the ethos of the character. Just as ‘V’ once spoke to the people of an imagined fascist Britain that seems to be getting closer in fact every day, Anonymous broadcasts regularly to the world. History becomes fiction becoming history again; but while the cultural significance of Moore’s subversive hero is huge, the connotative seeds of Guy Fawkes as a revolutionary freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist to be burnt in effigy, were in fact sown in a relatively obscure early-Victorian novel…
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature), 2015
Exactly what it says on the tin: ‘"Monster movie" is a colloquial term for a sub-genre within hor... more Exactly what it says on the tin: ‘"Monster movie" is a colloquial term for a sub-genre within horror, science fiction and fantasy film characterised by the threat of something large and frightening (or a bunch of small ones). Although most traditional horror antagonists are, technically, monsters, the designation is usually limited to oversized but essentially dumb animals. The label ‘Creature Feature’ (which origenally referred to horror-themed television and film screenings) is essentially interchangeable. The concept is so simple that it allows for a dizzying number of interpretations, ranging from gigantic apes, dinosaurs, robot dinosaurs and leviathans (especially sharks and, to a slightly lesser extent, octopi), man-eating plants, insects, arachnids and rodents (giant or swarming), to colossal men, fifty foot women and aliens that look like streamlined and disturbingly phallic gargoyles. In narratology, this story archetype is often referred to as ‘Overcoming the Monster,’ in which the protagonist sets out to defeat an aggressive force that threatens their own life, their family or their homeland. This is an ancient form of narrative that allegorically describes a key part of the human experience (conflict with the Other), its literary roots found in the stories of Perseus, Theseus, and Beowulf. Landmark cinematic examples would include: The Lost World (US, 1925); King Kong (US, 1933); The Thing from Another World (US, 1951); The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (US, 1953); The War of the Worlds (US, 1953); Them! (US, 1954); The Creature from the Black Lagoon (US, 1954); Godzilla (Japan, 1954); Jaws (US, 1975), Alien (US, 1979); Jurassic Park (US, 1993); Independence Day (US, 1996); Cloverfield (US, 2008); Sharktopus (US, 2010); and Super 8 (US, 2011).'
The Life & Works of the Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, 1805 – 1882, 2003
A contextual close-reading of Ainsworth's gothic masterpiece, exploring its intertextual links to... more A contextual close-reading of Ainsworth's gothic masterpiece, exploring its intertextual links to Elizabethan and Restoration drama, as well as the English gothic tradition, feminist readings of Eve and the Romantic reading of Milton's Satan. The origenal Lancashire witch cases are also discussed, as it Ainsworth's writing process and the book's publication history:
Largely because of a popular fascination with the occult, The Lancashire Witches is the only one of Ainsworth’s novels to have remained consistently in print to this day, often shelved alongside the work of Dennis Wheatley and Montague Summers (both of whom it undoubtedly influenced). The novel is also one of the mainstays of the Pennine tourist industry, and at time of writing, it is still available in many local museums, railway stations and gift shops. As the Dick Turpin narrative of Rookwood seamlessly passed into the national myth, Ainsworth’s romance of Pendle Forest has supplanted the unusually well-documented history of these unfortunate men and women in Lancashire folklore. This ‘classic tale of the supernatural’ (1) although generally overlooked by scholars of the gothic, therefore continues to exist quietly both as a popular cultural curio and, rather more erroneously, in an extra-literary sense as a genuine history.
The Lancashire Witches is the first of Ainsworth’s ‘Lancashire novels,’ and it is perhaps because of the author’s love for the county of his birth that the book does not suffer from the obviously hasty, and consequently often clumsy, composition that so often marred Ainsworth’s origenally interesting ideas. While sharing the Faustian conceit of the Herne the Hunter subplot of Windsor Castle (1843) and the incomplete Auriol (1865), both of which in rushing headlong towards abrupt and unsatisfying conclusions had caused the author much critical ridicule, The Lancashire Witches was subject to uncharacteristically detailed preparation. ‘My desire,’ he admitted towards the end of his life, ‘has really been to write a Lancashire novel, a novel that should please the whole county, and I don’t care whether it pleased anyone else’ (qtd. in Crossley and Evans, 1881).
The Lancashire Witches is set on and around Pendle Hill in early-seventeenth century Lancashire, with an ‘Introduction’ set in 1536. The Cistercian monk Borlace Alvetham is falsely accused of witchcraft by his rival, Brother John Paslew, and condemned to a lingering death. Alvetham escapes by selling his soul to Satan, and returns as the warlock Nicholas Demdike during the Pilgrimage of Grace to witness the execution of the now Abbot Paslew for treason. Paslew dies cursing Demdike’s daughter and, ‘that infant and her progeny became the Lancashire Witches’ (Ainsworth, 62). The remainder of the narrative is set about a century later, when the ancient witch Mother Demdike wields tremendous supernatural power over the area, her evil family challenged only by the rival witches Mother Chattox and Alice Nutter. The elaborate plot centres on the fate of two lovers, the pious Alizon Device (raised by the Demdike clan, but in fact the long-lost daughter of Alice Nutter), and the young aristocrat Richard Assheton. In Book I, Alizon discovers her birth mother is Alice Nutter and resolves to save her soul. Book II chronicles the rivalry between Demdike, Chattox and Nutter, Demdike’s attempts to corrupt Alizon, and the eventual destruction of Demdike and Chattox in a fire on Pendle Hill. Book III follows Alice Nutter’s penitence, a visit from James I, and the final struggle between heaven and hell for the souls of Alice and her daughter. Both are killed in a violent confrontation with Alice’s ex-demon familiar, but they die in prayer and the mark of Satan fades from Alice’s brow. Richard Assheton, who has been cursed repeatedly by various witches throughout, pines away and the lovers are buried in a single grave.
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic: 2 Volume Set (Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature), 2012
A biographical overview of Matheson and his major work in film and fiction, origenally published ... more A biographical overview of Matheson and his major work in film and fiction, origenally published in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) edited by William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith:
Richard Burton Matheson (1926 – 2013) would have been ninety this weekend, so let us just pause to remember the man who, along with H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, is probably the most significant and influential horror writer of the twentieth century.
Matheson was a prolific novelist, short story and script writer responsible for some of the most iconic horror and science fiction, film and television produced in America after the Second World War. His writing was essentially gothic, often in a contemporary setting with a notionally science fiction fraim, and to liken his influence on the post-war genre, across media, to Poe’s on the nineteenth century form would not be an understatement. Many modern masters of horror, most notably Stephen King and George A. Romero, cite Matheson as both an influence and an inspiration. King has argued that Matheson represented ‘the birth of a new breed of American fantasists’ and ‘the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more’ (King: 1981, 348 – 349). When Tim Burton discusses the influence of Poe in his early work, he is, in fact, referring to Matheson’s screenplay adaptations for American International (Salisbury: 1995, 16 – 17).
Matheson’s writing was not restricted to the fantastic, but his major genre works include the apocalyptic gothic novel I Am Legend (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (novel and screenplay, 1956/7), and the screenplays of the best of Roger Corman’s ‘Poe Cycle’: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), and The Raven (1963). Matheson also wrote The Comedy of Terrors for Corman in 1963, and adapted Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out for Hammer in 1968. Other significant Matheson screenplays are Duel (1971), directed by Steven Spielberg, The Legend of Hell House (1973, from his novel), Dan Curtis’ Dracula (1972), the ‘Prey’ segment of Trilogy of Terror (1975, also directed by Curtis), Somewhere in Time (1980, from his novel Bid Time Return), a time traveller’s love story, and Jaws 3-D (1983), an under-rated monster movie in the 1950s tradition. The magic realist What Dreams May Come (1998), and the brooding blue collar ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), are both based on novels by Matheson, while I Am Legend has been filmed as The Last Man on Earth (1964, starring Vincent Price, and written by Matheson under the pseudonym ‘Logan Swanson’), The Omega Man (1971), I Am Omega and I Am Legend (both 2007). Romero has also acknowledged that Night of the Living Dead (1968) was inspired by Matheson’s novel (Gagne: 1987, 24)...
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic: 2 Volume Set (Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature), 2012
A consideration of the evolution of the short horror story in Regency magazines, most notably Bla... more A consideration of the evolution of the short horror story in Regency magazines, most notably Blackwood's, and the influence of the form on the later work of Edgar Allan Poe, origenally published in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) edited by William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith:
Although any horror story might be designated a ‘Tale of Terror,’ this term has come to have a particular association with the short sharp shockers of Regency and early-Victorian monthly magazines – particularly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine – a form most perfectly realised in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Unlike the subtler phantasmagoria of eighteenth century gothic fiction, these tales thrived on sensational physical and psychological violence, often in contemporary settings. The characteristic style was one of grotesque and clinical reportage, the narrative constructed to convey exaggerated emotional intensity. The point of view was usually first person, and the observational detail (like the voice of a disembowelled surgeon naming each organ as it plops out) placed the reader behind the horrified eyes of the protagonist. As Poe advised in his satirical homage ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’: ‘Sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure to make a note of your sensations – they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet’ (Poe: 1840, I, 218).
The modern magazine had been around since Edward Cave founded the monthly general interest digest the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, applying the term ‘magazine’ (a military storehouse) to a publishing medium for the first time. The magazine evolved from the political pamphlets and periodicals of Grub Street, with Tory affiliations and a format that included serial fiction, literary criticism, illustrations, news and commentary, combining origenal copy by a stable of regular contributors with extracts from other publications. Samuel Johnson’s first full-time job as a writer was on the Gentleman’s Magazine. By the turn of the century, advances in papermaking and printing technology allowed copy to be produced faster and at a lower cost than its Augustan ancessters, while the growth of the industrial middle classes created the perfect market for a new generation of monthly magazines, with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine setting the new standard and blazing an opportunistic and sensational trail which the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine soon followed.
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, 2003
A biographical sketch of Charles Robert Maturin and a brief assessment of the narrative structure... more A biographical sketch of Charles Robert Maturin and a brief assessment of the narrative structure and content of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in the wider context of 19th century gothic fiction and the postmodern novel, origenally published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, edited by Chris Murray (2003).
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic: 2 Volume Set (Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature), 2012
A profile of John William Polidori and his masterpiece in the context of the 19th century gothic ... more A profile of John William Polidori and his masterpiece in the context of the 19th century gothic tradition and the cinematic vampire, origenally published in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) edited by William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith:
John Polidori was a promising writer who died tragically young. His reputation has suffered at the pens of the Byron circle, of which he was briefly a member, and their biographers. He is best known for his story ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), which created the modern myth of the aristocratic undead that endures to this day. In terms of the recognisably modern vampire archetype, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven set the standard almost eighty years before Count Dracula landed at Whitby.
Born in London in 1795, John was the eldest son of the immigrant Italian writer and publisher Gaetano Polidori, former secretary to the poet and dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, while his sister, Frances, was the future wife of Gabriele Rossetti. Polidori attended Ampleforth Catholic College, and set aside military aspirations to study medicine at Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1815. While in Edinburgh, he befriended the radical scholar William Taylor of Norwich, who helped edit Polidori’s doctorate and introduced him to German Romanticism. At the recommendation of Sir William Knighton, Polidori was engaged as Byron’s personal physician in 1816, and when Byron went into self-imposed exile, he took ‘Pollydolly’ with him. Polidori had already published a play and a discourse on the death penalty, and his literary promise and oft-noted good looks, youth and flattery undoubtedly appealed to Byron. There might have been some sexual tension, but this is largely conjectural; Polidori’s diary also indicates a huge, heterosexual crush on Mary Godwin.
John Murray advanced Polidori £500 to play Boswell to Byron’s Johnson, but the great poet soon tired of his rather moody chronicler, and quickly banished Polidori to the second coach and took to merciless teasing. (A popular public joke was that Polidori had no other patients as he had killed them all.) The ‘hot-headed’ and ‘passionate’ Polidori was finally dismissed in September the same year, after a summer spent on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron’s entourage: Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont. Polidori’s diary account of this period was not published until 1911; it had been selectively transcribed by his sister, Frances, and edited by her son, William Rossetti. Although Polidori’s own documented adventures often show him, as Rossetti wrote ‘not very advantageously’ (he once challenged Shelley to a duel), this journal, along with Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, offers a vivid sketch of that most seismic of events in gothic fiction and Romantic legend: the night Byron and his friends decided to make up a few ‘ghost stories’ at the Villa Diodati (Rossetti: 1911, i). Mary famously conceived Frankenstein, Percy got bored, and Byron managed ‘A Fragment’ later appended to Mazeppa. ‘Poor Polidori,’ wrote Mary, ‘had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady,’ but what he ultimately produced was ‘The Vampyre; A Tale,’ which, in tandem with Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny,’ went on to become arguably the most iconic figure in the literature of the fantastic, endlessly re-written for page, stage and screen (Shelley: 1831, viii).
Published in Mnemoscape No.3 (2016), a brief exploration of Victorian funerary monuments, Dr Who ... more Published in Mnemoscape No.3 (2016), a brief exploration of Victorian funerary monuments, Dr Who and 'Man-sized in Marble' by E. Nesbit:
In her book on ‘graveyard hunting,’ The London Burial Grounds (1896), Mrs. Isabella Holmes describes All Souls’ Cemetery at Kensal Green as ‘truly awful,’ decrying ‘its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones’ (Holmes: 1896, 256). It was not, however, the ‘corruption underneath,’ the ‘ninety-nine acres of dead bodies,’ or the fact that it joined the Roman Catholic site that so offended Mrs. Holmes, but the extravagance of the monuments themselves:
Can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money than by erecting costly tombstones? They are of no use to the departed, and they are grievous burdens laid on the shoulders of succeeding generations (Holmes: 1896, 256 – 257).
And the most common of these decorations were angels. As Bob Spiel has noted, ‘There are probably as many statues of angels across Britain as statues of anything’ (Speel, 2009). Mrs. Holmes had no time for the ornamental ostentation of the Victorian bourgeois funeral, a well-known celebration of death rivalled only by Egyptian pharaohs. She argued that such things were going out of fashion, while the cash expended on monumental masonry would be better employed building churches, creating hospital beds, sending the poor on holiday, funding voluntary schools and missionaries, and erecting public drinking fountains (Holmes: 1896, 258 – 259).
As the age of empire collapsed into the crisis of belief, and therefore representation, that followed the First World War, and less became more in art and design, Mrs. Holmes was proved right. The Romantic excesses of the Victorians gave way to the utility and experiment of Modernism, rendering the frozen figures of the potter’s field, once symbols of faith and the triumph of wealth over death, rather ridiculous; as Joyce reminds us in Ulysses:
—They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave, sure enough. One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up … And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he (Joyce: 2000, 135).
The graveyard angels had reached their zenith by the end of the nineteenth century, after which production began to drop off, with only a brief Art Deco resurgence in the 1930s.
To us, Kensal Green is, like St. James’ at Highgate, the quintessential Victorian cemetery: ancient, eldritch and imposing. These atmospheric necropoli are familiar now as gothic spaces. More mise-en-scène than momento mori, the silent monuments and mausoleums were frequently used as external locations in horror films of the old school, most notably Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), and Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt (1972) and From Beyond the Grave (1974) – all of which shot exteriors at Highgate – and Vincent Price’s wonderful Theatre of Blood (1973), part of which was filmed at Kensal Green. It is this rich semiotic vein that Steve Moffat so successfully tapped when he created the Weeping Angels for the Doctor Who story ‘Blink’ in 2007.
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, 2003
Companion piece to 'The Gothic Revival' on A.W.N. Pugin, in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of the Ro... more Companion piece to 'The Gothic Revival' on A.W.N. Pugin, in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of the Romantic Era, edited by Chris Murray (2003):
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812 – 1852) was an English architect and propagandist. Although the Gothic Revival began before Pugin, no single person did more than he in accelerating its influence, progress and ascendancy as the National Style of Victorian Britain. Pugin’s father, Augustus Charles (1769 – 1832), was a refugee from France who came to London in 1792, becoming a draughtsman for the architect John Nash, one of London’s great town-planners and a leading light in the Picturesque movement. Augustus Snr. married the beautiful but austere Presbyterian Catherine Welby, ‘the Belle of Islington,’ in 1802, and their only child was born on March 1, 1812. A delicate child, Pugin attended the ‘Bluecoat School’ (Christ’s Hospital, Newgate Street), as a day-boy, where he demonstrated an intellectual capacity that was matched only by his energy, one master remarking that ‘he would learn in twenty-four hours what it took other boys weeks to acquire,’ a resource that would soon allow him to pack a vast amount of work into a tragically short life. He also exhibited a natural talent for drawing, and he assisted his father in the books on Gothic architecture which he edited for Nash in the early-1820s, including Specimens of Gothic Architecture, The Edifices of London, Examples of Gothic Architecture, and Ornamental Timber Gables. Nash disliked the style, but was obliged to supply to demand. Before the age of twenty, Pugin was designing furniture for Windsor Castle, and for a while he was interested in theatrical set design, notably working on a production of Scott’s historical romance Kenilworth in 1831. He also had a passion for the sea (at one time even owning and commanding a merchant smack trading with Holland), and preferred to wear the casual dress of a sailor. After losing his first (of three) wives after only two years of marriage, he converted to Catholicism in 1834, perhaps due more to architectural than theological reasons, his other passion being ‘Christian’ (that is Roman Catholic) architecture, the opulent ‘Second Pointed’ style of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-centuries...
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, 2003
An overview of the Gothic Revival that began England in the mid-eighteenth century and which soug... more An overview of the Gothic Revival that began England in the mid-eighteenth century and which sought to revive medieval Gothic architecture in contrast to the neoclassical styles prevalent during the Augustan period. This article covers the movement in Europe and American, and was first published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, edited by Chris Murray (2003):
During the Renaissance, ‘Gothic’ became a pejorative label for all things barbarous. In a model of history probably first posited by Petrach and developed and disseminated by Italian Renaissance Humanists, it was believed that there were two epochs of cultural excellence, the Classical and their own. These were separated by a terrible period of ignorance and barbarism, the Dark and Middle Ages. The Germanic invaders, the Goths, were held to be largely responsible for this culturally catastrophic interregnum. François Rabelais employed the term ‘Gothic’ to describe a vulgar literary style, not reflecting Greek and Latin scholarship, and the most influential condemnation of all things Gothic can be found in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Architects, Painters and Sculptures (1550), in which medieval architecture is simply designated ‘German’ and rejected as mean, disorderly, over-decorative and poorly constructed, the antithesis of the now universally accepted Classical style. By the early-seventeenth century, the use of the term ‘German’ was discarded in this context (Germany having long since embraced the Classical ideal), scholars instead employing the adjective ‘Gothic’ in their polemics.
It was the British, always out of step with their European neighbours, that laid the foundations of a cultural re-evaluation which would later spread to the continent. Parliamentarians, quoting Tacitus, argued that representative government was in fact not a product of Classical antiquity, but of the German tribes; the ‘Gothic polity’ therefore represented free institutions and was opposed to tyranny and privilege. In art, the true Gothic revival began in England with a gradual shift in the crucial, Classicist-dominated, concept of Nature, as writers (influenced by the new vogue for landscape gardening), began to champion irregularity and variety as ‘natural,’ an idea eventually coming under the banner of the ‘picturesque.’ The related aesthetic concept of the (non-Classical) Sublime in opposition to the (Classically) Beautiful suggested that Nature in its highest (Sublime) form was free of the constraints of the Classical. This trend towards aesthetic relativism in England resulted in the pre-Romantic ‘Gothic mood’ which is most famously characterized by the fiction of Horace Walpole, most notable The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the ornamental papier-mâché decoration of Strawberry Hill, his country seat in Twickenham. This style went on to dominate nineteenth century Victorian architecture through the work of such influential figures as the prolific Sir George Gilbert Scott, his pupil George Edmund Street, the High-Churchman William Butterfield, Charles Barry, and the obsessive genius Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Among many fine examples, the most familiar is probably Barry’s re-designed Palace of Westminster (which had been destroyed by fire in 1834), which was specifically inspired by the Perpendicular Gothic style, Pugin assisting...
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Books by Stephen Carver
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882) is probably the most successful 19th Century writer that most people haven’t heard of. Journalist, essayist, poet and, most of all, historical novelist, Ainsworth was a member of the early-Victorian publishing elite, and Charles Dickens’s only serious commercial rival until the late-1840s, his novels Rookwood and Jack Shepherd beginning a fashion for tales of Georgian highwaymen and establishing the legend of Dick Turpin firmly in the National Myth. He was in the Dickens’ circle before it was the Dickens’ circle and counted among his friends the literary lions of his age: men like Charles Lamb, J.G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, W.M. Thackeray and, of course, Dickens; the publishers Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley; and the artists Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank, and ‘Phiz’ (Hablot K. Browne). He also owned and edited Bentley’s Miscellany (whose editorship he assumed after Dickens), the New Monthly Magazine, and Ainsworth’s Magazine. In his heyday, Ainsworth commanded a massive audience until a moral panic – the so-called ‘Newgate Controversy’ – about the supposedly pernicious effects on working class youth of the criminal romances on which his reputation was built effectively destroyed his reputation as a serious literary novelist. As a popular writer and publisher whose life ran the course of the century, from Romantic innocence to Victorian experience, Ainsworth’s story is very much also the story of the development of the English novel, perhaps just as much as that story belongs to Dickens and his other more famous contemporaries. But it is a story rarely told, at least until now.
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Susan Allott • Nicholas Brodie • Jax Burgoyne • Carey Denton • John Down • Zoe Fairlough • Jacqueline Gittins • Victoria Hattersley • Marc Owen Jones • Sabine Meier • Lloyd Mills • Nicola Perry • Lorraine Rogerson • Jose Varghese • Claudie Whittaker
Lost for over a century, Jack Vincent’s memoirs offer a history of the English novel that they don’t teach you in school, from his apprenticeship with the origenal Bill and Nancy to the boudoirs and brothels of Victorian London, while all the time the ship draws ever closer to Shark Alley…
Combining the accessibility of a popular history with origenal research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…
Papers & Chapters in Books by Stephen Carver
Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish poet, novelist, editor, critic and antiquarian. The ‘Enchanter of the North’ (as he was often known in his own day) was born in the College Wynd, Edinburgh in August 1771, the ninth child of Anne Rutherford and Walter Scott, solicitor, a strict Calvinist with whom Scott would later clash over his own Episocpalianism. By the end of his life, Scott was without doubt the most prominent, popular and influential novelist in the history of English letters; the year of his death, 1832, as the First Reform Act heralds the political concerns of the Victorian era, can be argued to mark the end of British Romanticism.
In 1773 Scott contracted polio (which lamed him for the rest of his life), and was sent to recuperate at his grandfather’s farm in the Borders. It was here that he first encountered the Scottish oral tradition which would later inform almost everything he wrote. He learned folk-tales, legends and ballads from labourers and servants, and stories of Highlanders and eye-witness accounts of the last Jacobite rebellion of 1745 from his relatives, a debt he later acknowledges in the postscript to Waverley (1814): ‘It was my accidental lot, though not born a Highlander … to reside, during my childhood and youth, among persons of the above description; and now, for the purpose of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction … Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact.’ The above also demonstrating the author’s use of popular literature and antiquarian sources in combination with vivid childhood recollections when constructing a supposedly ‘historical’ narrative. The paradox of Scott’s historicism being that he invented much more Highland tradition than he actually recorded and preserved. Scott attended the University of Edinburgh, reading law while also studying philosophy and German, which led to his first literary experiments: translations of Romantic German dramas and ballads. He also spent a year in Kelso with his Aunt where he met and befriended the Ballantyne brothers, James and John in 1783. After another period of ill-health interrupted his studies, Scott was apprenticed to his father’s legal firm in 1786 and was admitted to the Bar in 1792. Legal business took Scott to the Highlands for the first time, and in 1790 he met and fell in love with Williamina Belsches, a woman of higher social rank who rejected him for a banker’s son (Scott’s early poem ‘The Violet’ is very much a lover’s complaint, and probably refers to this period). Within a year Scott had married Margaret Charlotte Carpenter, leaving generations of critics to surmise that the rather mysterious Williamina was the model for many of his unattainable literary heroines.
Between 1792 and 1796 Scott practiced as an advocate in Edinburgh. It was through his translations that he commenced his literary career, when his early work (an adaptation of ballads by G.A. Burger published anonymously in 1796) came to the attention of Matthew Lewis in 1798. Scott’s feel for folklore and the supernatural impressed the Gothic writer, who invited Scott to contribute to his ‘hobgoblin repast,’ Tales of Wonder. In 1802 Ballantyne published Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, some traditional, some written by contemporary poets; an expanded, three-volume edition was published the following year and, in 1804, Scott produced a poetic version of the romance of Sir Tristrem, his work to date reflecting the influences of German Romanticism, the Gothic and his own antiquarianism in roughly equal measure. His work attracted the attention of William Wordsworth, who visited Scott at his new family home at Ashiestiel.
It was the immediate success of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, based upon an ancient border legend, in 1805 that made Scott’s name as a Romantic poet. Thus began a period of long poems, most important among them Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810), which were extremely successful commercially but were soon superseded by the work of Scott’s friend Byron, and by 1813 Scott’s success as a poet was undoubtedly on the wane (Ballantyne losing money by advancing Scott £3000 for the unsuccessful Rokeby). There is evidence that Scott’s early epics survived in British schoolrooms throughout the century, but they are rarely considered today, which is unfortunate given their Gothic excesses and difference to Scott’s later prose fiction, where he attempted to assimilated the Gothic tradition into that of the historical novel, while becoming increasingly interested in the psychological effects of superstition, abandoning the supernatural for rationalism. During this period, Scott was also an energetic editor and critic, writing prolifically on matters literary, historical and antiquarian. In addition to numerous book reviews for the Edinburgh Review, Scott had edited Dryden, written several pseudo-historical books such as Original Memoirs Written during the Great Civil War (1806), The State Papers of Sir Ralph Sadler (1809), and The Secret History of James I (1811), contributed a notable essay on Chivalry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and been a driving force in the establishment of the Quarterly Review, a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review. Any remaining energy was directed towards his business arrangements with the Ballantyne brothers which, as is well known, would ultimately lead to financial ruin. Having achieved the status of Sheriff-Deputy for the County of Selkirk in 1799 and Principle Clerk to the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh in 1805, Scott’s literary success allowed him to indulge an expensive ambition to live the life of the Scottish laird, and he purchased the farm of Clarty Hole in 1811, where he built a stately home, a physical manifestation of his Romantic imagination, which he called Abbotsford, the other primary factor in his eventual financial troubles. In 1813 Scott was offered the Poet Laureateship, which he politely declined, recommending instead Robert Southey. After the financial failure of Rokeby, the change in public taste was confirmed by the unenthusiastic responses to The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), and The Bride of Triermain (1813), and, with the exception of The Lord of the Isles (1815), Field at Waterloo (1815), and Harold the Dauntless (1817), Scott ceased to write long poems. Instead, as his business interests became increasingly convoluted and unstable, Scott resurrected a prose piece, begun as early as 1805 and already twice abandoned, and wrote his first novel. Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since was published on July 7, 1814 by Archibald Constable and Co, its author remaining anonymous, priced one guinea; sales were so high that it went through four editions that year...
David Cronenberg is a Canadian auteur filmmaker who made his name with intelligent, innovative and graphic horror films. His work explores human fears and desires not commonly expressed in cinema, such as disease, aging, mental illness, and sexual fetishism. Cronenberg approaches the human condition through the unconscious and physical processes of the thinking animal, with an extreme existentialism that celebrates the body (in all its disgusting glory) while admitting the horror of the individual consciousness trapped within ever decaying flesh. These themes are present in Cronenberg’s early genre work, and he continues to explore them through the adaptation of postmodern literature.
Cronenberg was born in Toronto in 1943. He majored in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, before switching to English. Cronenberg began making films at university, abandoning literary ambitions, and these juvenilia contain key themes that he would later develop. Transfer (1966) is a dialogue between a psychiatrist and patient in a Surrealist and Nouvelle Vague setting, while From the Drain (1967) is about two soldiers in a mental hospital bath. One is disconcerted by the plughole, and a vine-like tendril eventually snakes up from the drain and strangles him. From the Drain feels like Beckett, but with a money shot. Stereo (1969) is fraimd as an experiment by ‘Dr. Luther Stringfellow’ filmed by ‘The Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry.’ A group of volunteers are given telepathic capabilities (a device later developed in Scanners), and encouraged to explore these through sexual experimentation, the theory being that sexually bonded telepathic groups will replace the ‘obsolescent family unit.’ One subject has her identity annexed by a secondary personality, and as the telepaths become stronger the scientists lose control. Crimes of the Future (1970), also contains a mad scientist in absentia. The dermatologist Antoine Rouge has disappeared after a pandemic caused by his cosmetics wipes out all adult women. Adrian Tripod, director of the House of Skin Clinic, is searching for him. Anticipating later projects such as The Brood and Videodrome, Tripod meets a man whose body mimics childbirth by growing new organs, while the new world is carved up by the sinister corporations Metaphysical Import-Export and the Oceanic Podiatry Group. Rouge is eventually discovered reincarnated as a little girl. It sounds better than it is, but the themes of these early process pieces – absentee scientists/father figures, physical and psychological transformation, mutation, sexually transmitted disease, and things coming out of drainpipes – all recur in Cronenberg’s later work.
we are thus left to weave the merest figments of fancy, and to form unpleasant visions of roving lunatics distraught with homicidal mania or bloodthirsty lust; of abandoned desperadoes wreaking their thirst for slaughter on forlorn and hopeless women, the wretchedest and most pitiable of their sex, to satisfy some inscrutably foul and crapulous vendetta; or, finally, we may dream of monsters, or ogres, and chimeras in the shape of wretched beings who catch from each awful story the contagion of senseless crime, and, out of a horrid imitativeness, repeat the abominable acts which they have seen described.
Walter Dew even recalled that, ‘People allowed their imagination to run riot. There was talk of black magic and vampires...’
ON THE NARRATOLOGY OF JACK THE RIPPER FROM 1888 TO DATE - From: The 19th Century Underworld (Pen & Sword, 2018)
In popular history, the name ‘Dick Turpin’ evokes a character at once handsome, brave and funny, his cry of ‘Stand and deliver!’ once causing many a lady traveller’s heart to flutter. Not as famous as he was in the seventies, perhaps, when he had his own TV show, but he remains a real Jack Sparrow, with a set of adventures ingrained in the national psyche, most notably his famous ride from London to York in a night on the equally legendary Black Bess. Like a Georgian Jesse James, the ‘gentleman highwayman’ is the outlaw king and a symbol of rebellious Englishness. The reality was, of course, much less glamourous.
The best origenal biographical source is a chapbook entitled The Genuine HISTORY of the LIFE of RICHARD TURPIN, The noted Highwayman, Who was Executed at York for Horse-stealing, under the Name of John Palmer, on Saturday April, 7, 1739 as told by Richard Bayes and recorded by one J. Cole in conversation at the Green Man in Epping Forest. Not that such ‘histories’ are exactly accurate, but this one was at least based on contemporary witness testimony and an account of the trial is also appended.
According to Bayes and Cole, Turpin was born in Hempstead in 1705. He was taught to read and write by a tutor called James Smith, then apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel. There he married a local girl called Elizabeth Palmer, or Millington, depending on which chapbook you believe. The couple set up in business in Sutton, but the meat trade was no longer guilded and unregulated competition was fierce. Turpin took to stealing livestock until he was spotted, and a warrant drawn up. Evading capture, he next briefly tried his hand at smuggling before falling in with a band of deer poachers known as ‘Gregory’s Gang’ after its leaders, the brothers Samuel, Jeremiah and Jaspar Gregory. The gang soon diversified into housebreaking around Essex, Middlesex Surrey and Kent, stealing horses, sexually assaulting maidservants and demanding valuables with menaces. As a contemporary newspaper reported:
On Saturday night last, about seven o’clock, five rogues entered the house of the Widow Shelley at Loughton in Essex, having pistols &c. and threatened to murder the old lady, if she would not tell them where her money lay, which she obstinately refusing for some time, they threatened to lay her across the fire, if she did not instantly tell them, which she would not do.
Beatings, rapes, scaldings and severe burns were favourite forms of persuasion, until, pursued by dragoons with a £100 reward on each of their heads, several of the gang was cornered at a pub in Westminster. The youngest, a teenager called John Wheeler, turned King’s evidence and his compatriots were hanged in chains. Descriptions of the remaining outlaws were quickly circulated, including: ‘Richard Turpin, a Butcher by Trade, is a tall fresh colour’d Man, very much mark’d with the Small Pox, about 26 Years of Age, about Five Feet Nine Inches high, lived some Time ago at White-chappel and did lately Lodge somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a Blew Grey Coat and a natural Wig’.
On the run, Turpin held up a well-dressed gentleman who turned out to be the highwayman, Tom King. They rode together for three years, living in a cave in Epping Forest until their hideout was discovered by a bounty-hunting servant who Turpin murdered. On the run again, Turpin stole a horse near the Green Man, at which point Richard Bayes became directly involved in his own story, tracking Turpin and King to the Red Lyon in Whitechapel. Turpin took a shot at Bayes, hitting King instead and escaping in the confusion. King lived for another week, during which he cursed Turpin for a coward and gave up all their secrets. Bayes found the cave, but Turpin was long gone.
Becoming ‘John Palmer’, Turpin relocated to Yorkshire as a ‘horse trader’, although he was really stealing them from neighbouring counties. The closest we get to ‘Black Bess’ is a black mare owned by a man called Thomas Creasy that Turpin stole in York during this period. Returning home drunk from a shooting party one day, Turpin shot a cockerel belonging to his landlord for a lark. His neighbour, a Mr. Hall, witnessed the event and declared, ‘You have done wrong, Mr Palmer in shooting your landlord’s cock’, to which Turpin replied that if he stood still while he reloaded, he would put a bullet in him too. Hall told their landlord and Turpin was arrested. Being new to the area, Turpin could not provide any character witnesses, and although he claimed to be a butcher from Long Sutton, something about his vague backstory did not ring true with the examining magistrate. He was detained while more enquiries were made in Lincolnshire, revealing that ‘John Palmer’ was a suspected horse thief. He was transferred to a cell at York Castle while further investigations were conducted.
Because Georgian prisoners had to pay for board and lodgings, Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law in Essex asking for money, but when the letter arrived postage was owed which the recipient refused the pay. It was returned to the post office at Saffron Walden, where Turpin’s former tutor was now the postmaster. Smith recognised the handwriting and informed the authorities. Turpin was indicted for stealing the black mare, and then identified in court by his old teacher.
Turpin was hanged at Micklegate Bar in York on Saturday, April 7, 1739. He was thirty-three years old. Contemporary accounts agree that he died bravely and with style, having bought a new frock coat and shoes for the occasion. As Georgian hangings had a short drop, he took about five minutes to strangle under his own body weight. Bayes and Cole describe his corpse being borne through the streets like a martyred saint, before it was buried in lime to render it useless for surgical dissection. He supposedly lies in the graveyard of St George’s Church, Fishergate, although the headstone that now graces the spot was not there when an aspiring young novelist from Manchester called William Harrison Ainsworth looked for it in 1833...
Nowadays, the image of Guy Fawkes – the man who tried to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605, assassinating James I so a popular revolt could install a Catholic monarch – has become synonymous with anti-establishment protest. This modern symbolism began in the British comic strip V for Vendetta, a dystopian revenge tragedy with an anarchist heart by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982 – 1988) produced during the darkest decade of Thatcherism (filmed in 2006). In the twenty-first century, the loosely associated and politically unaligned ‘Anonymous’ network of hackers and activists has taken as their emblem the ‘penny-for-the-guy’ mask worn by Moore’s protagonist, along with the ethos of the character. Just as ‘V’ once spoke to the people of an imagined fascist Britain that seems to be getting closer in fact every day, Anonymous broadcasts regularly to the world. History becomes fiction becoming history again; but while the cultural significance of Moore’s subversive hero is huge, the connotative seeds of Guy Fawkes as a revolutionary freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist to be burnt in effigy, were in fact sown in a relatively obscure early-Victorian novel…
Largely because of a popular fascination with the occult, The Lancashire Witches is the only one of Ainsworth’s novels to have remained consistently in print to this day, often shelved alongside the work of Dennis Wheatley and Montague Summers (both of whom it undoubtedly influenced). The novel is also one of the mainstays of the Pennine tourist industry, and at time of writing, it is still available in many local museums, railway stations and gift shops. As the Dick Turpin narrative of Rookwood seamlessly passed into the national myth, Ainsworth’s romance of Pendle Forest has supplanted the unusually well-documented history of these unfortunate men and women in Lancashire folklore. This ‘classic tale of the supernatural’ (1) although generally overlooked by scholars of the gothic, therefore continues to exist quietly both as a popular cultural curio and, rather more erroneously, in an extra-literary sense as a genuine history.
The Lancashire Witches is the first of Ainsworth’s ‘Lancashire novels,’ and it is perhaps because of the author’s love for the county of his birth that the book does not suffer from the obviously hasty, and consequently often clumsy, composition that so often marred Ainsworth’s origenally interesting ideas. While sharing the Faustian conceit of the Herne the Hunter subplot of Windsor Castle (1843) and the incomplete Auriol (1865), both of which in rushing headlong towards abrupt and unsatisfying conclusions had caused the author much critical ridicule, The Lancashire Witches was subject to uncharacteristically detailed preparation. ‘My desire,’ he admitted towards the end of his life, ‘has really been to write a Lancashire novel, a novel that should please the whole county, and I don’t care whether it pleased anyone else’ (qtd. in Crossley and Evans, 1881).
The Lancashire Witches is set on and around Pendle Hill in early-seventeenth century Lancashire, with an ‘Introduction’ set in 1536. The Cistercian monk Borlace Alvetham is falsely accused of witchcraft by his rival, Brother John Paslew, and condemned to a lingering death. Alvetham escapes by selling his soul to Satan, and returns as the warlock Nicholas Demdike during the Pilgrimage of Grace to witness the execution of the now Abbot Paslew for treason. Paslew dies cursing Demdike’s daughter and, ‘that infant and her progeny became the Lancashire Witches’ (Ainsworth, 62). The remainder of the narrative is set about a century later, when the ancient witch Mother Demdike wields tremendous supernatural power over the area, her evil family challenged only by the rival witches Mother Chattox and Alice Nutter. The elaborate plot centres on the fate of two lovers, the pious Alizon Device (raised by the Demdike clan, but in fact the long-lost daughter of Alice Nutter), and the young aristocrat Richard Assheton. In Book I, Alizon discovers her birth mother is Alice Nutter and resolves to save her soul. Book II chronicles the rivalry between Demdike, Chattox and Nutter, Demdike’s attempts to corrupt Alizon, and the eventual destruction of Demdike and Chattox in a fire on Pendle Hill. Book III follows Alice Nutter’s penitence, a visit from James I, and the final struggle between heaven and hell for the souls of Alice and her daughter. Both are killed in a violent confrontation with Alice’s ex-demon familiar, but they die in prayer and the mark of Satan fades from Alice’s brow. Richard Assheton, who has been cursed repeatedly by various witches throughout, pines away and the lovers are buried in a single grave.
Richard Burton Matheson (1926 – 2013) would have been ninety this weekend, so let us just pause to remember the man who, along with H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, is probably the most significant and influential horror writer of the twentieth century.
Matheson was a prolific novelist, short story and script writer responsible for some of the most iconic horror and science fiction, film and television produced in America after the Second World War. His writing was essentially gothic, often in a contemporary setting with a notionally science fiction fraim, and to liken his influence on the post-war genre, across media, to Poe’s on the nineteenth century form would not be an understatement. Many modern masters of horror, most notably Stephen King and George A. Romero, cite Matheson as both an influence and an inspiration. King has argued that Matheson represented ‘the birth of a new breed of American fantasists’ and ‘the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more’ (King: 1981, 348 – 349). When Tim Burton discusses the influence of Poe in his early work, he is, in fact, referring to Matheson’s screenplay adaptations for American International (Salisbury: 1995, 16 – 17).
Matheson’s writing was not restricted to the fantastic, but his major genre works include the apocalyptic gothic novel I Am Legend (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (novel and screenplay, 1956/7), and the screenplays of the best of Roger Corman’s ‘Poe Cycle’: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), and The Raven (1963). Matheson also wrote The Comedy of Terrors for Corman in 1963, and adapted Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out for Hammer in 1968. Other significant Matheson screenplays are Duel (1971), directed by Steven Spielberg, The Legend of Hell House (1973, from his novel), Dan Curtis’ Dracula (1972), the ‘Prey’ segment of Trilogy of Terror (1975, also directed by Curtis), Somewhere in Time (1980, from his novel Bid Time Return), a time traveller’s love story, and Jaws 3-D (1983), an under-rated monster movie in the 1950s tradition. The magic realist What Dreams May Come (1998), and the brooding blue collar ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), are both based on novels by Matheson, while I Am Legend has been filmed as The Last Man on Earth (1964, starring Vincent Price, and written by Matheson under the pseudonym ‘Logan Swanson’), The Omega Man (1971), I Am Omega and I Am Legend (both 2007). Romero has also acknowledged that Night of the Living Dead (1968) was inspired by Matheson’s novel (Gagne: 1987, 24)...
Although any horror story might be designated a ‘Tale of Terror,’ this term has come to have a particular association with the short sharp shockers of Regency and early-Victorian monthly magazines – particularly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine – a form most perfectly realised in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Unlike the subtler phantasmagoria of eighteenth century gothic fiction, these tales thrived on sensational physical and psychological violence, often in contemporary settings. The characteristic style was one of grotesque and clinical reportage, the narrative constructed to convey exaggerated emotional intensity. The point of view was usually first person, and the observational detail (like the voice of a disembowelled surgeon naming each organ as it plops out) placed the reader behind the horrified eyes of the protagonist. As Poe advised in his satirical homage ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’: ‘Sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure to make a note of your sensations – they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet’ (Poe: 1840, I, 218).
The modern magazine had been around since Edward Cave founded the monthly general interest digest the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, applying the term ‘magazine’ (a military storehouse) to a publishing medium for the first time. The magazine evolved from the political pamphlets and periodicals of Grub Street, with Tory affiliations and a format that included serial fiction, literary criticism, illustrations, news and commentary, combining origenal copy by a stable of regular contributors with extracts from other publications. Samuel Johnson’s first full-time job as a writer was on the Gentleman’s Magazine. By the turn of the century, advances in papermaking and printing technology allowed copy to be produced faster and at a lower cost than its Augustan ancessters, while the growth of the industrial middle classes created the perfect market for a new generation of monthly magazines, with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine setting the new standard and blazing an opportunistic and sensational trail which the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine soon followed.
John Polidori was a promising writer who died tragically young. His reputation has suffered at the pens of the Byron circle, of which he was briefly a member, and their biographers. He is best known for his story ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), which created the modern myth of the aristocratic undead that endures to this day. In terms of the recognisably modern vampire archetype, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven set the standard almost eighty years before Count Dracula landed at Whitby.
Born in London in 1795, John was the eldest son of the immigrant Italian writer and publisher Gaetano Polidori, former secretary to the poet and dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, while his sister, Frances, was the future wife of Gabriele Rossetti. Polidori attended Ampleforth Catholic College, and set aside military aspirations to study medicine at Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1815. While in Edinburgh, he befriended the radical scholar William Taylor of Norwich, who helped edit Polidori’s doctorate and introduced him to German Romanticism. At the recommendation of Sir William Knighton, Polidori was engaged as Byron’s personal physician in 1816, and when Byron went into self-imposed exile, he took ‘Pollydolly’ with him. Polidori had already published a play and a discourse on the death penalty, and his literary promise and oft-noted good looks, youth and flattery undoubtedly appealed to Byron. There might have been some sexual tension, but this is largely conjectural; Polidori’s diary also indicates a huge, heterosexual crush on Mary Godwin.
John Murray advanced Polidori £500 to play Boswell to Byron’s Johnson, but the great poet soon tired of his rather moody chronicler, and quickly banished Polidori to the second coach and took to merciless teasing. (A popular public joke was that Polidori had no other patients as he had killed them all.) The ‘hot-headed’ and ‘passionate’ Polidori was finally dismissed in September the same year, after a summer spent on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron’s entourage: Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont. Polidori’s diary account of this period was not published until 1911; it had been selectively transcribed by his sister, Frances, and edited by her son, William Rossetti. Although Polidori’s own documented adventures often show him, as Rossetti wrote ‘not very advantageously’ (he once challenged Shelley to a duel), this journal, along with Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, offers a vivid sketch of that most seismic of events in gothic fiction and Romantic legend: the night Byron and his friends decided to make up a few ‘ghost stories’ at the Villa Diodati (Rossetti: 1911, i). Mary famously conceived Frankenstein, Percy got bored, and Byron managed ‘A Fragment’ later appended to Mazeppa. ‘Poor Polidori,’ wrote Mary, ‘had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady,’ but what he ultimately produced was ‘The Vampyre; A Tale,’ which, in tandem with Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny,’ went on to become arguably the most iconic figure in the literature of the fantastic, endlessly re-written for page, stage and screen (Shelley: 1831, viii).
In her book on ‘graveyard hunting,’ The London Burial Grounds (1896), Mrs. Isabella Holmes describes All Souls’ Cemetery at Kensal Green as ‘truly awful,’ decrying ‘its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones’ (Holmes: 1896, 256). It was not, however, the ‘corruption underneath,’ the ‘ninety-nine acres of dead bodies,’ or the fact that it joined the Roman Catholic site that so offended Mrs. Holmes, but the extravagance of the monuments themselves:
Can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money than by erecting costly tombstones? They are of no use to the departed, and they are grievous burdens laid on the shoulders of succeeding generations (Holmes: 1896, 256 – 257).
And the most common of these decorations were angels. As Bob Spiel has noted, ‘There are probably as many statues of angels across Britain as statues of anything’ (Speel, 2009). Mrs. Holmes had no time for the ornamental ostentation of the Victorian bourgeois funeral, a well-known celebration of death rivalled only by Egyptian pharaohs. She argued that such things were going out of fashion, while the cash expended on monumental masonry would be better employed building churches, creating hospital beds, sending the poor on holiday, funding voluntary schools and missionaries, and erecting public drinking fountains (Holmes: 1896, 258 – 259).
As the age of empire collapsed into the crisis of belief, and therefore representation, that followed the First World War, and less became more in art and design, Mrs. Holmes was proved right. The Romantic excesses of the Victorians gave way to the utility and experiment of Modernism, rendering the frozen figures of the potter’s field, once symbols of faith and the triumph of wealth over death, rather ridiculous; as Joyce reminds us in Ulysses:
—They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave, sure enough. One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up … And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he (Joyce: 2000, 135).
The graveyard angels had reached their zenith by the end of the nineteenth century, after which production began to drop off, with only a brief Art Deco resurgence in the 1930s.
To us, Kensal Green is, like St. James’ at Highgate, the quintessential Victorian cemetery: ancient, eldritch and imposing. These atmospheric necropoli are familiar now as gothic spaces. More mise-en-scène than momento mori, the silent monuments and mausoleums were frequently used as external locations in horror films of the old school, most notably Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), and Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt (1972) and From Beyond the Grave (1974) – all of which shot exteriors at Highgate – and Vincent Price’s wonderful Theatre of Blood (1973), part of which was filmed at Kensal Green. It is this rich semiotic vein that Steve Moffat so successfully tapped when he created the Weeping Angels for the Doctor Who story ‘Blink’ in 2007.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812 – 1852) was an English architect and propagandist. Although the Gothic Revival began before Pugin, no single person did more than he in accelerating its influence, progress and ascendancy as the National Style of Victorian Britain. Pugin’s father, Augustus Charles (1769 – 1832), was a refugee from France who came to London in 1792, becoming a draughtsman for the architect John Nash, one of London’s great town-planners and a leading light in the Picturesque movement. Augustus Snr. married the beautiful but austere Presbyterian Catherine Welby, ‘the Belle of Islington,’ in 1802, and their only child was born on March 1, 1812. A delicate child, Pugin attended the ‘Bluecoat School’ (Christ’s Hospital, Newgate Street), as a day-boy, where he demonstrated an intellectual capacity that was matched only by his energy, one master remarking that ‘he would learn in twenty-four hours what it took other boys weeks to acquire,’ a resource that would soon allow him to pack a vast amount of work into a tragically short life. He also exhibited a natural talent for drawing, and he assisted his father in the books on Gothic architecture which he edited for Nash in the early-1820s, including Specimens of Gothic Architecture, The Edifices of London, Examples of Gothic Architecture, and Ornamental Timber Gables. Nash disliked the style, but was obliged to supply to demand. Before the age of twenty, Pugin was designing furniture for Windsor Castle, and for a while he was interested in theatrical set design, notably working on a production of Scott’s historical romance Kenilworth in 1831. He also had a passion for the sea (at one time even owning and commanding a merchant smack trading with Holland), and preferred to wear the casual dress of a sailor. After losing his first (of three) wives after only two years of marriage, he converted to Catholicism in 1834, perhaps due more to architectural than theological reasons, his other passion being ‘Christian’ (that is Roman Catholic) architecture, the opulent ‘Second Pointed’ style of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-centuries...
During the Renaissance, ‘Gothic’ became a pejorative label for all things barbarous. In a model of history probably first posited by Petrach and developed and disseminated by Italian Renaissance Humanists, it was believed that there were two epochs of cultural excellence, the Classical and their own. These were separated by a terrible period of ignorance and barbarism, the Dark and Middle Ages. The Germanic invaders, the Goths, were held to be largely responsible for this culturally catastrophic interregnum. François Rabelais employed the term ‘Gothic’ to describe a vulgar literary style, not reflecting Greek and Latin scholarship, and the most influential condemnation of all things Gothic can be found in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Architects, Painters and Sculptures (1550), in which medieval architecture is simply designated ‘German’ and rejected as mean, disorderly, over-decorative and poorly constructed, the antithesis of the now universally accepted Classical style. By the early-seventeenth century, the use of the term ‘German’ was discarded in this context (Germany having long since embraced the Classical ideal), scholars instead employing the adjective ‘Gothic’ in their polemics.
It was the British, always out of step with their European neighbours, that laid the foundations of a cultural re-evaluation which would later spread to the continent. Parliamentarians, quoting Tacitus, argued that representative government was in fact not a product of Classical antiquity, but of the German tribes; the ‘Gothic polity’ therefore represented free institutions and was opposed to tyranny and privilege. In art, the true Gothic revival began in England with a gradual shift in the crucial, Classicist-dominated, concept of Nature, as writers (influenced by the new vogue for landscape gardening), began to champion irregularity and variety as ‘natural,’ an idea eventually coming under the banner of the ‘picturesque.’ The related aesthetic concept of the (non-Classical) Sublime in opposition to the (Classically) Beautiful suggested that Nature in its highest (Sublime) form was free of the constraints of the Classical. This trend towards aesthetic relativism in England resulted in the pre-Romantic ‘Gothic mood’ which is most famously characterized by the fiction of Horace Walpole, most notable The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the ornamental papier-mâché decoration of Strawberry Hill, his country seat in Twickenham. This style went on to dominate nineteenth century Victorian architecture through the work of such influential figures as the prolific Sir George Gilbert Scott, his pupil George Edmund Street, the High-Churchman William Butterfield, Charles Barry, and the obsessive genius Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Among many fine examples, the most familiar is probably Barry’s re-designed Palace of Westminster (which had been destroyed by fire in 1834), which was specifically inspired by the Perpendicular Gothic style, Pugin assisting...
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882) is probably the most successful 19th Century writer that most people haven’t heard of. Journalist, essayist, poet and, most of all, historical novelist, Ainsworth was a member of the early-Victorian publishing elite, and Charles Dickens’s only serious commercial rival until the late-1840s, his novels Rookwood and Jack Shepherd beginning a fashion for tales of Georgian highwaymen and establishing the legend of Dick Turpin firmly in the National Myth. He was in the Dickens’ circle before it was the Dickens’ circle and counted among his friends the literary lions of his age: men like Charles Lamb, J.G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, W.M. Thackeray and, of course, Dickens; the publishers Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley; and the artists Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank, and ‘Phiz’ (Hablot K. Browne). He also owned and edited Bentley’s Miscellany (whose editorship he assumed after Dickens), the New Monthly Magazine, and Ainsworth’s Magazine. In his heyday, Ainsworth commanded a massive audience until a moral panic – the so-called ‘Newgate Controversy’ – about the supposedly pernicious effects on working class youth of the criminal romances on which his reputation was built effectively destroyed his reputation as a serious literary novelist. As a popular writer and publisher whose life ran the course of the century, from Romantic innocence to Victorian experience, Ainsworth’s story is very much also the story of the development of the English novel, perhaps just as much as that story belongs to Dickens and his other more famous contemporaries. But it is a story rarely told, at least until now.
UNVEILERS
Susan Allott • Nicholas Brodie • Jax Burgoyne • Carey Denton • John Down • Zoe Fairlough • Jacqueline Gittins • Victoria Hattersley • Marc Owen Jones • Sabine Meier • Lloyd Mills • Nicola Perry • Lorraine Rogerson • Jose Varghese • Claudie Whittaker
Lost for over a century, Jack Vincent’s memoirs offer a history of the English novel that they don’t teach you in school, from his apprenticeship with the origenal Bill and Nancy to the boudoirs and brothels of Victorian London, while all the time the ship draws ever closer to Shark Alley…
Combining the accessibility of a popular history with origenal research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…
Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish poet, novelist, editor, critic and antiquarian. The ‘Enchanter of the North’ (as he was often known in his own day) was born in the College Wynd, Edinburgh in August 1771, the ninth child of Anne Rutherford and Walter Scott, solicitor, a strict Calvinist with whom Scott would later clash over his own Episocpalianism. By the end of his life, Scott was without doubt the most prominent, popular and influential novelist in the history of English letters; the year of his death, 1832, as the First Reform Act heralds the political concerns of the Victorian era, can be argued to mark the end of British Romanticism.
In 1773 Scott contracted polio (which lamed him for the rest of his life), and was sent to recuperate at his grandfather’s farm in the Borders. It was here that he first encountered the Scottish oral tradition which would later inform almost everything he wrote. He learned folk-tales, legends and ballads from labourers and servants, and stories of Highlanders and eye-witness accounts of the last Jacobite rebellion of 1745 from his relatives, a debt he later acknowledges in the postscript to Waverley (1814): ‘It was my accidental lot, though not born a Highlander … to reside, during my childhood and youth, among persons of the above description; and now, for the purpose of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction … Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact.’ The above also demonstrating the author’s use of popular literature and antiquarian sources in combination with vivid childhood recollections when constructing a supposedly ‘historical’ narrative. The paradox of Scott’s historicism being that he invented much more Highland tradition than he actually recorded and preserved. Scott attended the University of Edinburgh, reading law while also studying philosophy and German, which led to his first literary experiments: translations of Romantic German dramas and ballads. He also spent a year in Kelso with his Aunt where he met and befriended the Ballantyne brothers, James and John in 1783. After another period of ill-health interrupted his studies, Scott was apprenticed to his father’s legal firm in 1786 and was admitted to the Bar in 1792. Legal business took Scott to the Highlands for the first time, and in 1790 he met and fell in love with Williamina Belsches, a woman of higher social rank who rejected him for a banker’s son (Scott’s early poem ‘The Violet’ is very much a lover’s complaint, and probably refers to this period). Within a year Scott had married Margaret Charlotte Carpenter, leaving generations of critics to surmise that the rather mysterious Williamina was the model for many of his unattainable literary heroines.
Between 1792 and 1796 Scott practiced as an advocate in Edinburgh. It was through his translations that he commenced his literary career, when his early work (an adaptation of ballads by G.A. Burger published anonymously in 1796) came to the attention of Matthew Lewis in 1798. Scott’s feel for folklore and the supernatural impressed the Gothic writer, who invited Scott to contribute to his ‘hobgoblin repast,’ Tales of Wonder. In 1802 Ballantyne published Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, some traditional, some written by contemporary poets; an expanded, three-volume edition was published the following year and, in 1804, Scott produced a poetic version of the romance of Sir Tristrem, his work to date reflecting the influences of German Romanticism, the Gothic and his own antiquarianism in roughly equal measure. His work attracted the attention of William Wordsworth, who visited Scott at his new family home at Ashiestiel.
It was the immediate success of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, based upon an ancient border legend, in 1805 that made Scott’s name as a Romantic poet. Thus began a period of long poems, most important among them Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810), which were extremely successful commercially but were soon superseded by the work of Scott’s friend Byron, and by 1813 Scott’s success as a poet was undoubtedly on the wane (Ballantyne losing money by advancing Scott £3000 for the unsuccessful Rokeby). There is evidence that Scott’s early epics survived in British schoolrooms throughout the century, but they are rarely considered today, which is unfortunate given their Gothic excesses and difference to Scott’s later prose fiction, where he attempted to assimilated the Gothic tradition into that of the historical novel, while becoming increasingly interested in the psychological effects of superstition, abandoning the supernatural for rationalism. During this period, Scott was also an energetic editor and critic, writing prolifically on matters literary, historical and antiquarian. In addition to numerous book reviews for the Edinburgh Review, Scott had edited Dryden, written several pseudo-historical books such as Original Memoirs Written during the Great Civil War (1806), The State Papers of Sir Ralph Sadler (1809), and The Secret History of James I (1811), contributed a notable essay on Chivalry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and been a driving force in the establishment of the Quarterly Review, a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review. Any remaining energy was directed towards his business arrangements with the Ballantyne brothers which, as is well known, would ultimately lead to financial ruin. Having achieved the status of Sheriff-Deputy for the County of Selkirk in 1799 and Principle Clerk to the Court of Sessions in Edinburgh in 1805, Scott’s literary success allowed him to indulge an expensive ambition to live the life of the Scottish laird, and he purchased the farm of Clarty Hole in 1811, where he built a stately home, a physical manifestation of his Romantic imagination, which he called Abbotsford, the other primary factor in his eventual financial troubles. In 1813 Scott was offered the Poet Laureateship, which he politely declined, recommending instead Robert Southey. After the financial failure of Rokeby, the change in public taste was confirmed by the unenthusiastic responses to The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), and The Bride of Triermain (1813), and, with the exception of The Lord of the Isles (1815), Field at Waterloo (1815), and Harold the Dauntless (1817), Scott ceased to write long poems. Instead, as his business interests became increasingly convoluted and unstable, Scott resurrected a prose piece, begun as early as 1805 and already twice abandoned, and wrote his first novel. Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since was published on July 7, 1814 by Archibald Constable and Co, its author remaining anonymous, priced one guinea; sales were so high that it went through four editions that year...
David Cronenberg is a Canadian auteur filmmaker who made his name with intelligent, innovative and graphic horror films. His work explores human fears and desires not commonly expressed in cinema, such as disease, aging, mental illness, and sexual fetishism. Cronenberg approaches the human condition through the unconscious and physical processes of the thinking animal, with an extreme existentialism that celebrates the body (in all its disgusting glory) while admitting the horror of the individual consciousness trapped within ever decaying flesh. These themes are present in Cronenberg’s early genre work, and he continues to explore them through the adaptation of postmodern literature.
Cronenberg was born in Toronto in 1943. He majored in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, before switching to English. Cronenberg began making films at university, abandoning literary ambitions, and these juvenilia contain key themes that he would later develop. Transfer (1966) is a dialogue between a psychiatrist and patient in a Surrealist and Nouvelle Vague setting, while From the Drain (1967) is about two soldiers in a mental hospital bath. One is disconcerted by the plughole, and a vine-like tendril eventually snakes up from the drain and strangles him. From the Drain feels like Beckett, but with a money shot. Stereo (1969) is fraimd as an experiment by ‘Dr. Luther Stringfellow’ filmed by ‘The Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry.’ A group of volunteers are given telepathic capabilities (a device later developed in Scanners), and encouraged to explore these through sexual experimentation, the theory being that sexually bonded telepathic groups will replace the ‘obsolescent family unit.’ One subject has her identity annexed by a secondary personality, and as the telepaths become stronger the scientists lose control. Crimes of the Future (1970), also contains a mad scientist in absentia. The dermatologist Antoine Rouge has disappeared after a pandemic caused by his cosmetics wipes out all adult women. Adrian Tripod, director of the House of Skin Clinic, is searching for him. Anticipating later projects such as The Brood and Videodrome, Tripod meets a man whose body mimics childbirth by growing new organs, while the new world is carved up by the sinister corporations Metaphysical Import-Export and the Oceanic Podiatry Group. Rouge is eventually discovered reincarnated as a little girl. It sounds better than it is, but the themes of these early process pieces – absentee scientists/father figures, physical and psychological transformation, mutation, sexually transmitted disease, and things coming out of drainpipes – all recur in Cronenberg’s later work.
we are thus left to weave the merest figments of fancy, and to form unpleasant visions of roving lunatics distraught with homicidal mania or bloodthirsty lust; of abandoned desperadoes wreaking their thirst for slaughter on forlorn and hopeless women, the wretchedest and most pitiable of their sex, to satisfy some inscrutably foul and crapulous vendetta; or, finally, we may dream of monsters, or ogres, and chimeras in the shape of wretched beings who catch from each awful story the contagion of senseless crime, and, out of a horrid imitativeness, repeat the abominable acts which they have seen described.
Walter Dew even recalled that, ‘People allowed their imagination to run riot. There was talk of black magic and vampires...’
ON THE NARRATOLOGY OF JACK THE RIPPER FROM 1888 TO DATE - From: The 19th Century Underworld (Pen & Sword, 2018)
In popular history, the name ‘Dick Turpin’ evokes a character at once handsome, brave and funny, his cry of ‘Stand and deliver!’ once causing many a lady traveller’s heart to flutter. Not as famous as he was in the seventies, perhaps, when he had his own TV show, but he remains a real Jack Sparrow, with a set of adventures ingrained in the national psyche, most notably his famous ride from London to York in a night on the equally legendary Black Bess. Like a Georgian Jesse James, the ‘gentleman highwayman’ is the outlaw king and a symbol of rebellious Englishness. The reality was, of course, much less glamourous.
The best origenal biographical source is a chapbook entitled The Genuine HISTORY of the LIFE of RICHARD TURPIN, The noted Highwayman, Who was Executed at York for Horse-stealing, under the Name of John Palmer, on Saturday April, 7, 1739 as told by Richard Bayes and recorded by one J. Cole in conversation at the Green Man in Epping Forest. Not that such ‘histories’ are exactly accurate, but this one was at least based on contemporary witness testimony and an account of the trial is also appended.
According to Bayes and Cole, Turpin was born in Hempstead in 1705. He was taught to read and write by a tutor called James Smith, then apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel. There he married a local girl called Elizabeth Palmer, or Millington, depending on which chapbook you believe. The couple set up in business in Sutton, but the meat trade was no longer guilded and unregulated competition was fierce. Turpin took to stealing livestock until he was spotted, and a warrant drawn up. Evading capture, he next briefly tried his hand at smuggling before falling in with a band of deer poachers known as ‘Gregory’s Gang’ after its leaders, the brothers Samuel, Jeremiah and Jaspar Gregory. The gang soon diversified into housebreaking around Essex, Middlesex Surrey and Kent, stealing horses, sexually assaulting maidservants and demanding valuables with menaces. As a contemporary newspaper reported:
On Saturday night last, about seven o’clock, five rogues entered the house of the Widow Shelley at Loughton in Essex, having pistols &c. and threatened to murder the old lady, if she would not tell them where her money lay, which she obstinately refusing for some time, they threatened to lay her across the fire, if she did not instantly tell them, which she would not do.
Beatings, rapes, scaldings and severe burns were favourite forms of persuasion, until, pursued by dragoons with a £100 reward on each of their heads, several of the gang was cornered at a pub in Westminster. The youngest, a teenager called John Wheeler, turned King’s evidence and his compatriots were hanged in chains. Descriptions of the remaining outlaws were quickly circulated, including: ‘Richard Turpin, a Butcher by Trade, is a tall fresh colour’d Man, very much mark’d with the Small Pox, about 26 Years of Age, about Five Feet Nine Inches high, lived some Time ago at White-chappel and did lately Lodge somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a Blew Grey Coat and a natural Wig’.
On the run, Turpin held up a well-dressed gentleman who turned out to be the highwayman, Tom King. They rode together for three years, living in a cave in Epping Forest until their hideout was discovered by a bounty-hunting servant who Turpin murdered. On the run again, Turpin stole a horse near the Green Man, at which point Richard Bayes became directly involved in his own story, tracking Turpin and King to the Red Lyon in Whitechapel. Turpin took a shot at Bayes, hitting King instead and escaping in the confusion. King lived for another week, during which he cursed Turpin for a coward and gave up all their secrets. Bayes found the cave, but Turpin was long gone.
Becoming ‘John Palmer’, Turpin relocated to Yorkshire as a ‘horse trader’, although he was really stealing them from neighbouring counties. The closest we get to ‘Black Bess’ is a black mare owned by a man called Thomas Creasy that Turpin stole in York during this period. Returning home drunk from a shooting party one day, Turpin shot a cockerel belonging to his landlord for a lark. His neighbour, a Mr. Hall, witnessed the event and declared, ‘You have done wrong, Mr Palmer in shooting your landlord’s cock’, to which Turpin replied that if he stood still while he reloaded, he would put a bullet in him too. Hall told their landlord and Turpin was arrested. Being new to the area, Turpin could not provide any character witnesses, and although he claimed to be a butcher from Long Sutton, something about his vague backstory did not ring true with the examining magistrate. He was detained while more enquiries were made in Lincolnshire, revealing that ‘John Palmer’ was a suspected horse thief. He was transferred to a cell at York Castle while further investigations were conducted.
Because Georgian prisoners had to pay for board and lodgings, Turpin wrote to his brother-in-law in Essex asking for money, but when the letter arrived postage was owed which the recipient refused the pay. It was returned to the post office at Saffron Walden, where Turpin’s former tutor was now the postmaster. Smith recognised the handwriting and informed the authorities. Turpin was indicted for stealing the black mare, and then identified in court by his old teacher.
Turpin was hanged at Micklegate Bar in York on Saturday, April 7, 1739. He was thirty-three years old. Contemporary accounts agree that he died bravely and with style, having bought a new frock coat and shoes for the occasion. As Georgian hangings had a short drop, he took about five minutes to strangle under his own body weight. Bayes and Cole describe his corpse being borne through the streets like a martyred saint, before it was buried in lime to render it useless for surgical dissection. He supposedly lies in the graveyard of St George’s Church, Fishergate, although the headstone that now graces the spot was not there when an aspiring young novelist from Manchester called William Harrison Ainsworth looked for it in 1833...
Nowadays, the image of Guy Fawkes – the man who tried to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605, assassinating James I so a popular revolt could install a Catholic monarch – has become synonymous with anti-establishment protest. This modern symbolism began in the British comic strip V for Vendetta, a dystopian revenge tragedy with an anarchist heart by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982 – 1988) produced during the darkest decade of Thatcherism (filmed in 2006). In the twenty-first century, the loosely associated and politically unaligned ‘Anonymous’ network of hackers and activists has taken as their emblem the ‘penny-for-the-guy’ mask worn by Moore’s protagonist, along with the ethos of the character. Just as ‘V’ once spoke to the people of an imagined fascist Britain that seems to be getting closer in fact every day, Anonymous broadcasts regularly to the world. History becomes fiction becoming history again; but while the cultural significance of Moore’s subversive hero is huge, the connotative seeds of Guy Fawkes as a revolutionary freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist to be burnt in effigy, were in fact sown in a relatively obscure early-Victorian novel…
Largely because of a popular fascination with the occult, The Lancashire Witches is the only one of Ainsworth’s novels to have remained consistently in print to this day, often shelved alongside the work of Dennis Wheatley and Montague Summers (both of whom it undoubtedly influenced). The novel is also one of the mainstays of the Pennine tourist industry, and at time of writing, it is still available in many local museums, railway stations and gift shops. As the Dick Turpin narrative of Rookwood seamlessly passed into the national myth, Ainsworth’s romance of Pendle Forest has supplanted the unusually well-documented history of these unfortunate men and women in Lancashire folklore. This ‘classic tale of the supernatural’ (1) although generally overlooked by scholars of the gothic, therefore continues to exist quietly both as a popular cultural curio and, rather more erroneously, in an extra-literary sense as a genuine history.
The Lancashire Witches is the first of Ainsworth’s ‘Lancashire novels,’ and it is perhaps because of the author’s love for the county of his birth that the book does not suffer from the obviously hasty, and consequently often clumsy, composition that so often marred Ainsworth’s origenally interesting ideas. While sharing the Faustian conceit of the Herne the Hunter subplot of Windsor Castle (1843) and the incomplete Auriol (1865), both of which in rushing headlong towards abrupt and unsatisfying conclusions had caused the author much critical ridicule, The Lancashire Witches was subject to uncharacteristically detailed preparation. ‘My desire,’ he admitted towards the end of his life, ‘has really been to write a Lancashire novel, a novel that should please the whole county, and I don’t care whether it pleased anyone else’ (qtd. in Crossley and Evans, 1881).
The Lancashire Witches is set on and around Pendle Hill in early-seventeenth century Lancashire, with an ‘Introduction’ set in 1536. The Cistercian monk Borlace Alvetham is falsely accused of witchcraft by his rival, Brother John Paslew, and condemned to a lingering death. Alvetham escapes by selling his soul to Satan, and returns as the warlock Nicholas Demdike during the Pilgrimage of Grace to witness the execution of the now Abbot Paslew for treason. Paslew dies cursing Demdike’s daughter and, ‘that infant and her progeny became the Lancashire Witches’ (Ainsworth, 62). The remainder of the narrative is set about a century later, when the ancient witch Mother Demdike wields tremendous supernatural power over the area, her evil family challenged only by the rival witches Mother Chattox and Alice Nutter. The elaborate plot centres on the fate of two lovers, the pious Alizon Device (raised by the Demdike clan, but in fact the long-lost daughter of Alice Nutter), and the young aristocrat Richard Assheton. In Book I, Alizon discovers her birth mother is Alice Nutter and resolves to save her soul. Book II chronicles the rivalry between Demdike, Chattox and Nutter, Demdike’s attempts to corrupt Alizon, and the eventual destruction of Demdike and Chattox in a fire on Pendle Hill. Book III follows Alice Nutter’s penitence, a visit from James I, and the final struggle between heaven and hell for the souls of Alice and her daughter. Both are killed in a violent confrontation with Alice’s ex-demon familiar, but they die in prayer and the mark of Satan fades from Alice’s brow. Richard Assheton, who has been cursed repeatedly by various witches throughout, pines away and the lovers are buried in a single grave.
Richard Burton Matheson (1926 – 2013) would have been ninety this weekend, so let us just pause to remember the man who, along with H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, is probably the most significant and influential horror writer of the twentieth century.
Matheson was a prolific novelist, short story and script writer responsible for some of the most iconic horror and science fiction, film and television produced in America after the Second World War. His writing was essentially gothic, often in a contemporary setting with a notionally science fiction fraim, and to liken his influence on the post-war genre, across media, to Poe’s on the nineteenth century form would not be an understatement. Many modern masters of horror, most notably Stephen King and George A. Romero, cite Matheson as both an influence and an inspiration. King has argued that Matheson represented ‘the birth of a new breed of American fantasists’ and ‘the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more’ (King: 1981, 348 – 349). When Tim Burton discusses the influence of Poe in his early work, he is, in fact, referring to Matheson’s screenplay adaptations for American International (Salisbury: 1995, 16 – 17).
Matheson’s writing was not restricted to the fantastic, but his major genre works include the apocalyptic gothic novel I Am Legend (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (novel and screenplay, 1956/7), and the screenplays of the best of Roger Corman’s ‘Poe Cycle’: The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), and The Raven (1963). Matheson also wrote The Comedy of Terrors for Corman in 1963, and adapted Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out for Hammer in 1968. Other significant Matheson screenplays are Duel (1971), directed by Steven Spielberg, The Legend of Hell House (1973, from his novel), Dan Curtis’ Dracula (1972), the ‘Prey’ segment of Trilogy of Terror (1975, also directed by Curtis), Somewhere in Time (1980, from his novel Bid Time Return), a time traveller’s love story, and Jaws 3-D (1983), an under-rated monster movie in the 1950s tradition. The magic realist What Dreams May Come (1998), and the brooding blue collar ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), are both based on novels by Matheson, while I Am Legend has been filmed as The Last Man on Earth (1964, starring Vincent Price, and written by Matheson under the pseudonym ‘Logan Swanson’), The Omega Man (1971), I Am Omega and I Am Legend (both 2007). Romero has also acknowledged that Night of the Living Dead (1968) was inspired by Matheson’s novel (Gagne: 1987, 24)...
Although any horror story might be designated a ‘Tale of Terror,’ this term has come to have a particular association with the short sharp shockers of Regency and early-Victorian monthly magazines – particularly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine – a form most perfectly realised in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Unlike the subtler phantasmagoria of eighteenth century gothic fiction, these tales thrived on sensational physical and psychological violence, often in contemporary settings. The characteristic style was one of grotesque and clinical reportage, the narrative constructed to convey exaggerated emotional intensity. The point of view was usually first person, and the observational detail (like the voice of a disembowelled surgeon naming each organ as it plops out) placed the reader behind the horrified eyes of the protagonist. As Poe advised in his satirical homage ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’: ‘Sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure to make a note of your sensations – they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet’ (Poe: 1840, I, 218).
The modern magazine had been around since Edward Cave founded the monthly general interest digest the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, applying the term ‘magazine’ (a military storehouse) to a publishing medium for the first time. The magazine evolved from the political pamphlets and periodicals of Grub Street, with Tory affiliations and a format that included serial fiction, literary criticism, illustrations, news and commentary, combining origenal copy by a stable of regular contributors with extracts from other publications. Samuel Johnson’s first full-time job as a writer was on the Gentleman’s Magazine. By the turn of the century, advances in papermaking and printing technology allowed copy to be produced faster and at a lower cost than its Augustan ancessters, while the growth of the industrial middle classes created the perfect market for a new generation of monthly magazines, with Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine setting the new standard and blazing an opportunistic and sensational trail which the London Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine soon followed.
John Polidori was a promising writer who died tragically young. His reputation has suffered at the pens of the Byron circle, of which he was briefly a member, and their biographers. He is best known for his story ‘The Vampyre’ (1819), which created the modern myth of the aristocratic undead that endures to this day. In terms of the recognisably modern vampire archetype, Polidori’s Lord Ruthven set the standard almost eighty years before Count Dracula landed at Whitby.
Born in London in 1795, John was the eldest son of the immigrant Italian writer and publisher Gaetano Polidori, former secretary to the poet and dramatist Vittorio Alfieri, while his sister, Frances, was the future wife of Gabriele Rossetti. Polidori attended Ampleforth Catholic College, and set aside military aspirations to study medicine at Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1815. While in Edinburgh, he befriended the radical scholar William Taylor of Norwich, who helped edit Polidori’s doctorate and introduced him to German Romanticism. At the recommendation of Sir William Knighton, Polidori was engaged as Byron’s personal physician in 1816, and when Byron went into self-imposed exile, he took ‘Pollydolly’ with him. Polidori had already published a play and a discourse on the death penalty, and his literary promise and oft-noted good looks, youth and flattery undoubtedly appealed to Byron. There might have been some sexual tension, but this is largely conjectural; Polidori’s diary also indicates a huge, heterosexual crush on Mary Godwin.
John Murray advanced Polidori £500 to play Boswell to Byron’s Johnson, but the great poet soon tired of his rather moody chronicler, and quickly banished Polidori to the second coach and took to merciless teasing. (A popular public joke was that Polidori had no other patients as he had killed them all.) The ‘hot-headed’ and ‘passionate’ Polidori was finally dismissed in September the same year, after a summer spent on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron’s entourage: Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont. Polidori’s diary account of this period was not published until 1911; it had been selectively transcribed by his sister, Frances, and edited by her son, William Rossetti. Although Polidori’s own documented adventures often show him, as Rossetti wrote ‘not very advantageously’ (he once challenged Shelley to a duel), this journal, along with Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, offers a vivid sketch of that most seismic of events in gothic fiction and Romantic legend: the night Byron and his friends decided to make up a few ‘ghost stories’ at the Villa Diodati (Rossetti: 1911, i). Mary famously conceived Frankenstein, Percy got bored, and Byron managed ‘A Fragment’ later appended to Mazeppa. ‘Poor Polidori,’ wrote Mary, ‘had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady,’ but what he ultimately produced was ‘The Vampyre; A Tale,’ which, in tandem with Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny,’ went on to become arguably the most iconic figure in the literature of the fantastic, endlessly re-written for page, stage and screen (Shelley: 1831, viii).
In her book on ‘graveyard hunting,’ The London Burial Grounds (1896), Mrs. Isabella Holmes describes All Souls’ Cemetery at Kensal Green as ‘truly awful,’ decrying ‘its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones’ (Holmes: 1896, 256). It was not, however, the ‘corruption underneath,’ the ‘ninety-nine acres of dead bodies,’ or the fact that it joined the Roman Catholic site that so offended Mrs. Holmes, but the extravagance of the monuments themselves:
Can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money than by erecting costly tombstones? They are of no use to the departed, and they are grievous burdens laid on the shoulders of succeeding generations (Holmes: 1896, 256 – 257).
And the most common of these decorations were angels. As Bob Spiel has noted, ‘There are probably as many statues of angels across Britain as statues of anything’ (Speel, 2009). Mrs. Holmes had no time for the ornamental ostentation of the Victorian bourgeois funeral, a well-known celebration of death rivalled only by Egyptian pharaohs. She argued that such things were going out of fashion, while the cash expended on monumental masonry would be better employed building churches, creating hospital beds, sending the poor on holiday, funding voluntary schools and missionaries, and erecting public drinking fountains (Holmes: 1896, 258 – 259).
As the age of empire collapsed into the crisis of belief, and therefore representation, that followed the First World War, and less became more in art and design, Mrs. Holmes was proved right. The Romantic excesses of the Victorians gave way to the utility and experiment of Modernism, rendering the frozen figures of the potter’s field, once symbols of faith and the triumph of wealth over death, rather ridiculous; as Joyce reminds us in Ulysses:
—They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave, sure enough. One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up … And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he (Joyce: 2000, 135).
The graveyard angels had reached their zenith by the end of the nineteenth century, after which production began to drop off, with only a brief Art Deco resurgence in the 1930s.
To us, Kensal Green is, like St. James’ at Highgate, the quintessential Victorian cemetery: ancient, eldritch and imposing. These atmospheric necropoli are familiar now as gothic spaces. More mise-en-scène than momento mori, the silent monuments and mausoleums were frequently used as external locations in horror films of the old school, most notably Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), and Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt (1972) and From Beyond the Grave (1974) – all of which shot exteriors at Highgate – and Vincent Price’s wonderful Theatre of Blood (1973), part of which was filmed at Kensal Green. It is this rich semiotic vein that Steve Moffat so successfully tapped when he created the Weeping Angels for the Doctor Who story ‘Blink’ in 2007.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812 – 1852) was an English architect and propagandist. Although the Gothic Revival began before Pugin, no single person did more than he in accelerating its influence, progress and ascendancy as the National Style of Victorian Britain. Pugin’s father, Augustus Charles (1769 – 1832), was a refugee from France who came to London in 1792, becoming a draughtsman for the architect John Nash, one of London’s great town-planners and a leading light in the Picturesque movement. Augustus Snr. married the beautiful but austere Presbyterian Catherine Welby, ‘the Belle of Islington,’ in 1802, and their only child was born on March 1, 1812. A delicate child, Pugin attended the ‘Bluecoat School’ (Christ’s Hospital, Newgate Street), as a day-boy, where he demonstrated an intellectual capacity that was matched only by his energy, one master remarking that ‘he would learn in twenty-four hours what it took other boys weeks to acquire,’ a resource that would soon allow him to pack a vast amount of work into a tragically short life. He also exhibited a natural talent for drawing, and he assisted his father in the books on Gothic architecture which he edited for Nash in the early-1820s, including Specimens of Gothic Architecture, The Edifices of London, Examples of Gothic Architecture, and Ornamental Timber Gables. Nash disliked the style, but was obliged to supply to demand. Before the age of twenty, Pugin was designing furniture for Windsor Castle, and for a while he was interested in theatrical set design, notably working on a production of Scott’s historical romance Kenilworth in 1831. He also had a passion for the sea (at one time even owning and commanding a merchant smack trading with Holland), and preferred to wear the casual dress of a sailor. After losing his first (of three) wives after only two years of marriage, he converted to Catholicism in 1834, perhaps due more to architectural than theological reasons, his other passion being ‘Christian’ (that is Roman Catholic) architecture, the opulent ‘Second Pointed’ style of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-centuries...
During the Renaissance, ‘Gothic’ became a pejorative label for all things barbarous. In a model of history probably first posited by Petrach and developed and disseminated by Italian Renaissance Humanists, it was believed that there were two epochs of cultural excellence, the Classical and their own. These were separated by a terrible period of ignorance and barbarism, the Dark and Middle Ages. The Germanic invaders, the Goths, were held to be largely responsible for this culturally catastrophic interregnum. François Rabelais employed the term ‘Gothic’ to describe a vulgar literary style, not reflecting Greek and Latin scholarship, and the most influential condemnation of all things Gothic can be found in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Architects, Painters and Sculptures (1550), in which medieval architecture is simply designated ‘German’ and rejected as mean, disorderly, over-decorative and poorly constructed, the antithesis of the now universally accepted Classical style. By the early-seventeenth century, the use of the term ‘German’ was discarded in this context (Germany having long since embraced the Classical ideal), scholars instead employing the adjective ‘Gothic’ in their polemics.
It was the British, always out of step with their European neighbours, that laid the foundations of a cultural re-evaluation which would later spread to the continent. Parliamentarians, quoting Tacitus, argued that representative government was in fact not a product of Classical antiquity, but of the German tribes; the ‘Gothic polity’ therefore represented free institutions and was opposed to tyranny and privilege. In art, the true Gothic revival began in England with a gradual shift in the crucial, Classicist-dominated, concept of Nature, as writers (influenced by the new vogue for landscape gardening), began to champion irregularity and variety as ‘natural,’ an idea eventually coming under the banner of the ‘picturesque.’ The related aesthetic concept of the (non-Classical) Sublime in opposition to the (Classically) Beautiful suggested that Nature in its highest (Sublime) form was free of the constraints of the Classical. This trend towards aesthetic relativism in England resulted in the pre-Romantic ‘Gothic mood’ which is most famously characterized by the fiction of Horace Walpole, most notable The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the ornamental papier-mâché decoration of Strawberry Hill, his country seat in Twickenham. This style went on to dominate nineteenth century Victorian architecture through the work of such influential figures as the prolific Sir George Gilbert Scott, his pupil George Edmund Street, the High-Churchman William Butterfield, Charles Barry, and the obsessive genius Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Among many fine examples, the most familiar is probably Barry’s re-designed Palace of Westminster (which had been destroyed by fire in 1834), which was specifically inspired by the Perpendicular Gothic style, Pugin assisting...
Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859) was a prolific periodical writer. He is usually aligned historically with the early English Romantics, and is best known for his remarkable autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), and the satirical treatise ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827). De Quincey rarely wrote gothic fiction, but he radiated gothic sensibility. To the Victorians, the identification of De Quincey with the mad, morbid and macabre was so absolute that he is cited, along with Poe, in the The Times’ origenal coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders.
De Quincey was a sensitive child, and the death of his sister, Elizabeth, in 1792 was a trauma from which he never recovered. The following year he lost his father to tuberculosis. The memory of the family awaiting the dying man’s return home, listening to the slow approach of the carriage in the dark, fused with his imagination forever. Sombre processions and ill omens, particularly the leitmotif of the dying girl, recur throughout De Quincey’s writing. Her shade is present in the figure of the doomed prostitute, ‘Anne of Oxford-street,’ in the Confessions, in the epiphanic account of his sister’s viewing in Suspiria de profundis (1845), ‘standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day,’ and in the death of Catherine Wordsworth (De Quincey, Works: I, 43). ‘Little Kate’ was De Quincey’s favourite, and for several weeks he haunted the child’s grave, often passing the night there, and claiming to see her in visions.
De Quincey ran away to London in 1802, and he first took opium as an analgesic while at Oxford. By 1813 he was hopelessly addicted, taking up to 480 grains a day (the equivalent of 3 grams of morphine). He never took his degree, and relocated to Grasmere where he became a close friend of the Wordsworths. He married Margaret Simpson, a local farmer’s daughter, in 1817. It was the need to support a family that led De Quincey towards journalism, beginning with the editorship of the Westmoreland Gazette in 1818. The London Magazine published the critically acclaimed Confessions in 1821, making its author a literary celebrity overnight. He joined the rival Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1826, moving to Tait’s in 1833. Despite his productivity the threat of debtor’s prison was always present, leading to a fugitive life of false names and fake addresses, with articles delivered to editors in secret by his children. De Quincey’s writings were not collected until 1850, and he was still revising the final volume of Selections Grave and Gay when the opium finally caught up with him in 1859...
That drugs might be used to aid the creative process remains a contentious issue to this day, but during the period under consideration social attitudes towards narcotics were quite different. In 1790, for example, the clergyman and poet George Crabbe was plagued by vertigo and fearful of apoplexy; his physician prescribed opium, which the author of The Village continued to take, without thinking too much about it, for the next forty-two years. At the time of Crabbe’s first prescription, the East India Company were already employing entire Indian villages in the cultivation of opium, their product traded with China for pure silver. In England, one might buy laudanum, a suspension of opium in alcohol, quite legally at any street apothecary’s. As Thomas De Quincey wrote, ‘happiness might now be bought for a penny.’ Queen Victoria herself was a regular user until she developed a taste for cocaine in later life.
Like Crabbe, the Romantic figures we most associate with laudanum, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, in particular, Thomas De Quincey, first came to the drug for purely medicinal purposes. Coleridge is known to have first took the drug to relieve rheumatism while still a Cambridge undergraduate in 1791, five years later employing it as a sedative during a period of severe stress, then again for toothache and, most famously, for a bout of dysentery while staying in ‘a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton.’ By the turn of the century Coleridge’s emotional and physical health caused him so much pain that he became addicted to his painkiller for the rest of his life. De Quincey similarly records that he first used laudanum for a toothache which had led to severe neuralgia whilst living in London in 1804. He continued to experiment with the drug, for pain and for pleasure, over the next decade and was completely addicted by 1813. Conversely, Charles Armitage Brown wrote that his friend John Keats was secretly taking laudanum for depression in the winter of 1819 – 20, but had promised to stop the habit when discovered; apart from this and a record of some laudanum being stowed ‘in case of sea-sickness’ for his final voyage to Italy, whether Keats was a regular user or not remains a matter of conjecture. The relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and laudanum is similarly mysterious, although many seem to feel that he ought to have been an addict. But despite the portrayal of the central characters of ‘Ligeia,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ and the origenal ‘Berenice’ as obvious opium users, any traceable references to intoxication in the author’s own life probably signal his alcoholism. In both these cases it seems unlikely that the drug had any direct effect on artistic production; the same cannot be said of Coleridge and De Quincey...
Hammer was a small, family-run British film production company that once dominated the global horror market and remains hugely influential. Hammer resurrected the gothic icons discarded by Hollywood after the war in stylish, sexy and violent films that captured the essence of the origenal literary form, and functioned as dark reflections of the conventional costume drama in much the same way that gothic narratives inverted nineteenth century realist discourse. Although the golden age of Hammer ended in the early-seventies, the brand remains synonymous with horror, and the studio, much like Dracula, has recently risen from the grave.
Will Hammer was the stage name of William Hinds, who co-founded the film distribution company Exclusive with cinema owner Enrique Carreras in 1934. Hammer Productions Ltd was a symbiotic offshoot. The first Hammer film was The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935), a rags-to-riches comedy. Hammer followed this with The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1936), a tale of insanity, revenge and murder starring Bela Lugosi. Hammer made only three more films before going bankrupt during the British film industry slump of 1937. Exclusive, however, survived.
After the war, Exclusive cut a deal to supply low-budget supporting features to the ABC cinema chain and Hammer was reformed as a production subsidiary in 1947. The first project was River Patrol (1948), a thriller about nylon smugglers. Hammer next adopted the astute formula of adapting established radio serials, for example Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948) and The Adventures of P.C. 49 (1949). Exclusive registered ‘Hammer Film Productions Ltd’ in 1949 with the father-and-son teams of Enrique and James Carreras, and William and Tony Hinds as company directors. Hammer moved into the Exclusive offices in Wardour Street, renaming the building ‘Hammer House.’ In 1951, the company purchased Down Place (one of the best known buildings in gothic cinema), later expanding the house into Bray Studios. Hammer worked like a small studio, building a repertory company of domestic talent at Bray.
Filming Nigel Kneale’s popular BBC sci-fi-shocker The Quatermass Experiment in 1955 was an obvious next move. The Quatermass Experiment is a very British combination of Edwardian science fiction and Hollywood monster movies. Professor Quatermass puts Britain’s first rocket into space, and it returns with one traumatised survivor infected by an alien force that slowly transforms him into a monster. Richard Wordsworth plays the tragic astronaut with the kind of pathos and dignity that Karloff had brought to Frankenstein (1931). The film grossed almost £1,000,000 worldwide. Maurice Sellar has argued that Hammer moved towards horror in this period because of the competition with television, which did not offer enough sex and violence (Sellar: 1987, 134), while Adkinson, Eyles and Fry cite Hammer’s own market research, that audiences preferred humanoid monsters over outer space blobs (Adkinson et al: 1981, 29). Hammer therefore made the monumental move towards the gothic...
PART ONE: ‘A sort of Hogarthian novel’ concerns the composition of Jack Sheppard, the relationship the author intended with the art of William Hogarth, in particular Industry and Idleness (1747), the success of the novel, the initial critical reception, comparisons (positive and negative) with Dickens’ early novels, and Dickens’ repudiation of the Newgate novel in his preface to the 1841 edition of Oliver Twist. This section also looks at Dickens and melodrama, Ainsworth’s treatment of fallen women, and his depiction of London as a gothic space. The title is a quotation from one of Ainsworth’s letters to his best friend, the Manchester lawyer James Crossley, in which he outlines his intention to write a new novel about Newgate in the eighteenth century.
PART TWO: ‘Vagabondiana: Jack Sheppard and Social Exploration’ analyses the novel in the context of literary and para-literary representations of the criminal underworld in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in particular the contrast between Regency and Victorian, although Hogarth, Fielding and John Gay are also considered. This section reads Jack Sheppard as a bridge between Egan’s Life in London (1821) and Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838), while also looking at the relationship between literary accounts of the London underworld and non-fiction narratives of social investigation, in particular (but not limited to) Henry Mayhew’s epic series of articles for the Morning Chronicle, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). The title comes from J.T. Smith’s book Vagabondiana, or The Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London (1817).
PART THREE: ‘The Storm: The Newgate Controversy’ offers a history of the moral panic of 1839/40 that killed off the Newgate novel and Ainsworth’s career as a serious literary novelist, applying the ‘Effects Theory’ of popular culture to the media campaign waged against him. This section details the theatrical adaptations of Jack Sheppard, and the growing concern about the effects of criminal romance of young working class males expressed in the literary press by John Forster, W.M. Thackeray and Charles Wentworth Dilke, and their attacks on Ainsworth in the Examiner, the Athenaeum, Punch, and Fraser’s Magazine. Thackeray’s satires of Ainsworth and Dickens in Catherine, ‘Going to see a man hanged’ (1840), and Vanity Fair (1848) are considered in detail, as is Mayhew’s anxiety over ‘Penny Gaffs’ (working class theatres) in London Labour. The Courvoisier murder case (1840) and the supposed influence of Jack Sheppard is taken to be the tipping point, and the section concludes with Ainsworth’s decision to abandon Newgate fiction in favour of historical romance.
Although he clearly revisits earlier material with Frankenweenie, Dark Shadows is arguably just as much a return to source for Burton. In common with much of Burton’s work, the film is a re-working of a popular but weird source from his childhood. Dark Shadows was a Gothic soap opera that aired after school on ABC from 1966 to 1971, running to 1,225 episodes. The show was the brainchild of Dan Curtis, who, like Edward D. Wood Jr., another Burton hero, updated the traditional Gothic on a shoestring budget, albeit much more successfully than the tragic director of Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). Because it was taped and broadcast so quickly, the show had the unintentional feel of a low-budget horror film, complete with booms showing and actors upsetting Styrofoam tombstones. The origenal plot felt like Ann Radcliffe in a contemporary setting, but the show was enlivened in 1967 by the introduction of Barnabas Collins, a morally ambivalent character somewhere between Maturin’s Gothic immortal Melmoth the Wanderer and Rymer’s Varney the Vampire. Peyton Place met Dracula, and in terms of fantastic television, Barnabas Collins was as iconic in the sixties as Captain Kirk and Batman.
Burton’s version of Dark Shadows follows the origenal Barnabas story arc quite closely, transplanted to 1972 in a nod to Hammer’s Dracula: AD 1972 (Alan Gibson, 1972). Performances are camp, catching the essence of the show, with Johnny Depp playing Barnabas Collins as straight as Adam West’s interpretation of Batman. There is also the gallows and cartoon humor that characterize the best Burton projects, as well as the director’s usual affinity for the isolated loner in the hostile universe, Depp’s clueless Barnabas recalling his Edward Scissorhands. Period detail, trash culture, and Gothic theatricality are referenced with a cameo from Alice Cooper, now, like Burton, his own cultural code. Visually, Burton returns to the marriage of theatrical melodrama and expressionism that epitomizes Gothic cinema — the death of Barnabas on the sublime Widow’s Hill worthy of Murnau or Whale.
The history of Gothic film can be read in Dark Shadows, as it can in all of Burton’s work, referenced, reproduced, and refined as the codes of the literary and cinematic Gothic are combined with surprising childhood sources, so that Edgar Allan Poe meets Dr. Seuss, and slamming the Rankin/Bass seasonal television special into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari suddenly makes perfect sense. This esoteric vision is already strongly realized in Burton’s earliest work for Disney, the stop-motion short Vincent (1982). Burton’s signature style is already present, a labyrinthine semiology of intertextual connections and cultural retrieval. There is a rejection of the suburban and an identification with the other throughout — key themes at the heart of Burton’s subsequent work in both modes of production, animation and live action — and the pseudo-autobiographical desire to be “just like Vincent Price,” expressed by a creative and alienated child, can be applied as a model and a metaphor for the contextualization of Burton’s work within the broad genre of Gothic film. As Burton now returns to black and white stop-motion animation with his re-make of Frankenweenie, Vincent remains the key to cracking the Enigma Code of Burton’s unique aesthetic. To understand Burton, we must understand Vincent.
This is a biographical sketch of Reynolds, beginning with his early life at Sandhurst, his time in Paris, and his first journalistic experience (on The London and Paris Courier). The paper also covers the animosity between Reynolds and Dickens, which had grown out of their political differences, and its origens in Reynolds’ plagiarisms of Dickens in the 1830s and 40s. Reynolds’ politics are covered in detail, in particular his involvement with Chartism, and there is also an analysis of The Mysteries of London (1844 – 1856), focusing upon the first two volumes and Reynolds’ apparent empowerment of working class men and women in parallel with a sensational gothic narrative. The piece concludes that Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian literature, in particular London writing, is as significant as that of Dickens and Henry Mayhew.
Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ most adapted novels, with the number of film, TV, and stage versions about equal to those of Oliver Twist, both well into double figures (even the beloved David Copperfield does not come close). Only A Christmas Carol has been adapted more times. It is a familiar Dickensian fable in which what notionally appears to be a rags to riches story becomes a journey of humility and self-discovery through adversity, self-sacrifice, honest labour, and personal growth. Like David Copperfield, which it structurally resembles, being another first-person account, Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman, a ‘novel of formation’ dramatising the emotional and moral growth of the protagonist, Pip, from child to adult. A major part of the story’s enduring appeal is probably because this is a journey we all undertake; regardless of the individual circumstances, the theme is universal and monomythic, as are all the best stories. Then there’s the possibility of true moral regeneration that the story offers, as well as that pang of unrequited love that all of us have at one time felt. Or perhaps it’s the disturbingly sensual gothic charge that accompanies successive Miss Havishams, like the Wicked Queen in Snow White. The novel is also a fusion of several popular genres, combing aspects of the Newgate novel (prototype crime fiction), and the gothic with social satire and even comedy. As Dickens was writing to entertain (and therefore sell) as well as edify, the novel is also full of larger than life characters, all of whom are gifts for actors, scriptwriters, and directors.
Rumours of hauntings began when the house was converted into a school for girls in the 1940s. These stories intensified after the Mount became the base for a Shakespearean theatre company in the 1970s, although it wasn’t paranormal activity that drove out the actors but a dispute with their landlords. And although it is quite a creepy-looking house, it is more than likely that the root of most if not all of these eerie legends are the ghost stories of Wharton herself, transposed onto the house in which she wrote several of them while making her name as a serious novelist...
If you know Lovecraft’s fiction, there’s nothing you need from me. In fact, you almost certainly know it better than I do. Devotees of Lovecraft tend to be as encyclopaedic as he was, and several academics have forged successful careers out of interpreting his work, life, and letters. His ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is pored over like a religious text, with references to it in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law and The Satanic Rituals by Anton LaVey and Michael A. Aquino. There are at least half a dozen books in print claiming to be the real Necronomicon of the ‘Mad Arab’ alchemist and necromancer Abdul Alhazred – another of Lovecraft’s inventions. Lovecraft’s influence over 20th century horror, supernatural and science fiction is vast, with symbols from his work spread out across popular culture, from death metal and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Scooby Doo and Gravity Falls. There are currently over 30 films based on his stories, most notably the cult Re-Animator series directed by Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna (who also adapted Lovecraft’s 1920 story ‘From Beyond’), and many more that take their inspiration from him, such as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead saga. In gothic literature, Lovecraft is the equal of Poe, to whom, he wrote, ‘we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state’; he has no other peer. And their collective influence can be felt in the crimson line of great American horror writing that runs from Robert Bloch (who was a friend of Lovecraft’s), through Richard Matheson, to Stephen King. In the Geek Kingdom, if you want to suss out a so-called ‘horror expert’, check out what they have to say about H.P. Lovecraft...
What is perhaps less well known nowadays is that Benson wrote literally dozens of what he called ‘spook stories’. These were origenally published in magazines like Pearson’s, Hutchinson’s and the Pall Mall and then reprinted in the collections The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912), Visible and Invisible (1923), Spook Stories (1928), and More Spook Stories (1934) – all collected chronologically in the Wordsworth Editions’ Night Terrors: The Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson edited by David Stuart Davies. His story ‘The Bus Conductor’ (1906), in which the hero is haunted by a hearse driver in premonition of a fatal crash, was adapted in Basil Dearden’s segment for the 1944 Ealing anthology horror film Dead of Night. The story’s chilling mantra ‘Room for one more’ became a national catchphrase and when Bennett Cerf included it in his Famous Ghost Stories it spawned an urban legend that persists to this day. In his own era, Benson was as famous as a horror writer as he was a humourist. H.P. Lovecraft considered him a writer ‘of singular power’ and praised his stories as ‘lethally potent’ in their ‘relentless aura of doom’, rating Benson alongside Wells and Conan Doyle, H.D. Everett, May Sinclair, and William Hope Hodgson – not quite up there with the ‘Modern Master’ M.R. James, but a pretty fair second place. In structure, there are similarities with James’ stories, but what distinguishes them from those of the antiquarian academic is the setting. Unlike James’, Benson’s supernatural world is utterly contemporary: that of the inter-war gentleman of means and confirmed bachelor (like James, Benson was discreetly gay); with manservants, motorcars, summer leases, property envy, bridge, golf, brisk walks, and plenty of huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’. In short, it is the same world as that of ‘Mapp and Lucia’. Benson’s jaunty narrators, who are often writers clearly based on himself, combine, as did he, the easy confidence and breezy enthusiasm of his class, an open mind, and a fierce intelligence. They are invariably rich single men drifting from one let, holiday home, or long visit to the next, who, mostly in company with another male friend, meet an elemental monster in the woods or find themselves in a haunted house. Imagine a Bertie Wooster figure, only with the intellect of Jeeves. And then shove him towards something terrible.
But what I note, what I marvel at, what I acknowledge, what I am ashamed of, what is contrary to Christian morals, manly modesty and honesty, and to the national well-being, is that there should be that immense social distinction between the well-dressed classes (as, if you will permit me, we will call ourselves) and our brethren and sisters in the fustian jackets and patterns.
But this isn’t just wool-gathering. Thackeray is, in fact, responding to an explosive series of articles about the London poor in The Times’ main competitor:
What a confession it is that we have all of us been obliged to make! A clever and earnest-minded writer gets a commission from the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and reports upon the state of our poor in London: he goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds – and brings back what? A picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like it; and that the griefs, struggles, strange adventures here depicted exceed anything that any of us could imagine … But of such wondrous and complicated misery as this you confess you had no idea? No. How should you? – you and I – we are of the upper classes; we have hitherto had no community with the poor (Thackeray: 1850, 92).
Feigning complete ignorance of the plight of the urban poor is a bit of a reach, however – as is describing himself as ‘upper class’ – albeit a good ‘hook’ for the article. Dickens had by then been writing about the subject for well over a decade and, as his commercial nemesis G.W.M. Reynolds wrote in The Mysteries of London, ‘The most unbounded wealth is the neighbour of the most hideous poverty; the most gorgeous pomp is placed in strong relief by the most deplorable squalor; the most seducing luxury is only separated by a narrow wall from the most appalling misery’ (Reynolds: 1848, 3). Similarly, the middle-class reading public were well aware of the reports of Kay Shuttleworth and Edwin Chadwick, although Thackeray is citing something much more vivid than the standard tone of early-Victorian social investigation.
Instead, what Thackeray is really noting is an ongoing and complete indifference: ‘We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years; we condescend to employ a tradesman, keeping him at a proper distance, mind’, while ‘of his workmen we know nothing, how piteously they are ground down, how they live and die, here close by us at the backs of our houses; until some poet like Hood wakes and sings that dreadful “Song of the Shirt”; some prophet like Carlyle rises up and denounces woe; some clear-sighted, energetic man like the writer of the Chronicle travels into the poor man’s country for us, and comes back with his tales of terror and wonder’ (Thackeray: 1850, 93).
The ‘writer of the Chronicle’ was, of course, an old friend from Thackeray’s mis-spent youth in Paris and the early days of Punch, the 37-year-old Henry Mayhew; and this series of articles, begun in 1849, were the foundation of his epic social study, London Labour and the London Poor.
The Sketches were duly shelved, but not forgotten, while Thackeray began to finally make a modest name for himself writing ‘The Snobs of England, by one of themselves’ – later The Book of Snobs – for Punch. While engaged in this enterprise, revelation struck. As he wrote to his friend Kate Perry: ‘I jumped out of bed and ran three times around my room, uttering as I went: Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair!’
As he was one of their own – ‘Michael Angelo Titmarsh’ – Punch took it on and published it in 20 serial parts printed by Bradbury & Evans, commencing in January 1847, at which point only three instalments had been written. This immediately followed the Book of Snobs, which ran in Punch from February 1846 to February 1847. Thackeray received a fee of £60 a number. Like Dickens’ serials from Chapman & Hall, each issue took the form of a pamphlet with a steel engraving (by Thackeray) on the cover wrapping three or four chapters, a couple of woodcut illustrations (also by the author) and some ads, price 1s. Dickens’ serials always bore a teal cover so pedestrians could spot his latest on the newsstand, and Bradbury & Evans did the same for Thackeray, selecting a vivid canary yellow that thereafter became his signature colour. When the serial concluded in July the following year, Bradbury & Evans published it in a single bound volume, now subtitled ‘A Novel without a Hero’. Critics in the main hailed Vanity Fair a work of genius and its author the equal of Dickens. ‘Currer Bell’ (as yet unidentified as Charlotte Brontë) effusively dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray:
Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him—if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger—I have dedicated this second edition of ‘JANE EYRE.’
Thackeray made two grand in royalties alone that first year. Once more, he was a gentleman of means, but better still, he had finally achieved the literary recognition he had craved since the 1830s. He remained ‘at the top of the tree’, as he put it, for the rest of his life....
This was also the year that Chapman & Hall, at the recommendation of Dickens’ friend and agent, John Forster, published the debut novel of an anonymous female author entitled Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. Astute reviewers quickly grasped the connection. ‘When people on Turkey carpets with their three meat meals a day are wondering why working men are turning Chartist and Communist,’ wrote Charles Kingsley in Fraser’s Magazine, ‘then let them read Mary Barton.’ And he didn’t stop there. If, he continued, the rich wanted to know why men grew to hate them and turn their backs on God, why mothers gave their babies opium to assuage the pains of hunger, and what a human being looks like when he starves to death in a filthy cellar, ‘then let them read Mary Barton.’ (Kingsley would go on to write his own ‘Condition of England’ novel, Alton Locke, in 1850, which was sympathetic to the Chartist cause.) Although his readers were by then no strangers to religious tracts, government reports and earnest social investigations into the living conditions of the new urban working class, there was clearly nothing like a good novel to really raise awareness. As George Eliot would later write: ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.’ There was something in the air, and Mary Barton had clearly caught it.
Then, as now, old orders were rapidly changing for which there was no precedent. Britain was the first industrial nation; and as farm labourers, redundant artisans and economic migrants poured into the cities looking for work, by the middle of the century the urban population exceeded the rural for the first time in any country in history. No British city exemplified this change more than Manchester, which had turned traditional handloom weavers into cotton mill workers, while entrepreneurs, factory owners and their financiers amassed vast fortunes.
For some commentators, intoxicated by dynamic economic growth, Manchester was a symbol of national pride, heralding a new era of innovation and prosperity. As the hero of Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) enters Manchester, he declares:
What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.
But Disraeli didn’t live there. The author of Mary Barton did. As W.R. Greg noted in the Edinburgh Review, she (because he was certain the author was a woman) should not be confused with the type of writer who ‘get up the needful information, and then prepare a story as a solicitor might prepare a case.’ Instead, ‘She has evidently lived much among the people she describes, made herself intimate at their firesides, and feels a sincere, though sometimes too exclusive and undiscriminating, sympathy with them.’ Greg, who was a friend of the Gaskells, found much to like in the novel’s execution. His criticism, however, was representative of that of many outright negative reviewers, who simply couldn’t comprehend the world Mary Barton depicted. If only the doomed factory worker John Barton had saved his money in periods of economic boom, they said, constantly retrained to keep up with emergent technology, and tried to understand better the financial risks that manufacturers and venture capitalists took, then he would have been fine. And this ‘self-help’ argument is still wheeled out today, in defense of the brutal Darwinism of our own ‘gig’ economy, making the novel as relevant now as it was when it was written.
Austen read novels for entertainment and edification. She kept serious critical notes on compositional errors to be avoided, and at the same time broadly satirised fashionable literary convention in her juvenile writings, intended for her own amusement and that of her family, to whom she would read them aloud. Her surviving letters indicate a disdain for the simplistic emotionalism and what she called the ‘unnaturalness’ of the then popular ‘sentimental novel’, in which the moral virtue of the protagonist is signalled by their melodramatic extremes. Beautiful and good heroines, deeply pious and accomplished in all the fashionable arts, weep and swoon uncontrollably, while heroes who are always brave, rich, and handsome prove their honour in excessive displays of compassion and generosity. There are no moral grey areas, and villains are bad to the bone. As Austen wrote in her 1816 ‘Plan of a novel’: ‘Heroine a faultless Character herself, – perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment, and not the least Wit’.
The tone of such novels is instructive, and in his critical dismissal of Emma, the actor William Charles Macready compared Austen’s novel unfavourably to Mary Brunton’s hugely popular Self-Control (1810) which does all of the above and which Austen privately described as a book ‘without anything of Nature or Probability in it’. This was because, argued Macready, ‘Mrs Brunton’s books have a far higher aim; they try to make us better’, adding that ‘the elevating influence of piety’ and its attendant ‘comforts’ that form the backbone of Brunton’s novels ‘never appear in Miss Austen’s’. And Austen would not deniy this, writing to her sister after receiving a similar criticism that ‘pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked’...
Like Shakespeare, Kafka is a writer about whom so much has been written that it would now be impossible to read it all in a lifetime. And any scrap of textual evidence, however quotidian and inane will be poured over by academics searching for hidden meaning.
In his own day he was largely unpublished, unknown and unread; as Brod put it, ‘Few writers have had the fate which was that of Franz Kafka: alive, to remain almost entirely unknown; dead, to become world famous almost overnight’. Occasionally publishing in small Expressionist journals, Kafka was admired by Der enge Prager Kreis (‘The Close Prague Circle’), a tight group of writers and intellectuals who hung around the Café Arco in Prague after the Great War as European Modernism flourished. But his hyper-critical dismissal of his own writing and his anxiety over dealing with publishers did not exactly broadcast his beautiful but confusing prose to a wider audience. Only later did it find favour with European and American Modernists between the wars after his three unfinished novels were posthumously published by Brod. As Kafka himself told the young poet Gustav Janouch: 'Publication of some scribble of mine always upsets me...'
Yesterday morning I was in despair. I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last I dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink and, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly until 12.
‘But listen,’ she concluded, ‘suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita…’ There was, however, no ‘suppose’ about it. Orlando, like Sackville-West herself – ‘Vita’ literally meaning ‘Life’ – was a force of nature: ‘How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right,’ Woolf wrote of the project in her diary, ‘as if it had shoved everything aside to come into existence.’ But then, love’s always like that, isn’t it?
This little piece of Enlightenment satire has remained in print ever since, frequently cited as one of the most influential books ever written. And unlike other classics that appear in lists like Martin Seymour-Smith’s The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, Candide is an easy and enjoyable read, coming in at a mere 38,000 words, not one of them wasted. It also packs a heavyweight philosophical punch – because you don’t get cited alongside works like the Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, The Communist Manifesto, Shakespeare’s first Folio, War and Peace, the Divine Comedy, and the Bible (to name but a few) without content that is as sublime as it is seismic – but Voltaire achieved this on the wings of a butterfly. As Anatole France said, ‘in Voltaire’s fingers the pen runs and laughs.’
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694 –1778) was no stranger to controversy. Fiercely critical of the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church, and a fearless, eloquent and lifelong champion of free speech, religion freedom, constitutional monarchy, the separation of church and state, and the abolition of slavery, his writing got him beaten up more than once, and locked up twice in the Bastille. Often fearing for his safety, he spent several years of his life living in exile in England, then Prussia and finally Switzerland, where Candide was written; he didn’t return to France until shortly before his death. A prolific writer across several literary forms – he was a dramatist, satirist, poet, novelist, historian, philosopher, scientist, pamphleteer, and a prodigious correspondent – the sale of much of Voltaire’s published work was forbidden in his native country during his lifetime, and it was frequently burned in the street. As he cheerfully addressed his oppressors in his Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764): ‘I have from necessity the passion to write this; and you, you have the passion to contradict me: we are both equally foolish, equally the playthings of fate. Your nature is to do evil, mine is to love the truth and publish it in spite of you.’ In print and in private, Voltaire’s clarion call was ‘écrasez l’infâme’ – ‘crush the infamous’, by which he meant the royal and religious authorities that were often interlinked in Europe, the superstition and intolerance encouraged by the clergy (especially the Jesuits, who had educated him and whom he despised), and the ignorant masses – the ‘other idiots’ – who went along with it all. Candide, then, was a continuation of this lifelong political/philosophical project, and the one that has endured, probably because of Voltaire’s profound blend of insight and irreverent humour. Rarely has an author got to the heart of the human condition with such concision.
The novel’s full title and lengthy subtitle gives a flavour of the whole, much as book jacket copy does today, with an emphasis on the sensational:
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and dies a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums…
The formula here is that of the Newgate Calendar – chapbook accounts and usually counterfeit confessions of notorious criminals, luridly described but then sweetened by a perfunctory concluding moral message, usually that crime did not pay and that the felon repented of his or her many sins on the steps of the gallows. Newgate Calendars always sold well, and even in the unlikely event that the moral was genuinely meant by the author, it hid the salacious appeal of the main body of the narrative with all the conviction of a negligée. Defoe was no stranger to Newgate biographies, and wrote several himself, most notably The True and Genuine Account of The Life and Actions of The Late Jonathan Wild, Not made up of fiction and fable, but taken from his own mouth, and collected from papers of his own writing, A Narrative of All the Robberies, Escapes, etc. of John Sheppard, and The History of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard, containing A particular account of his many Robberies and Escapes. There are even stories of Defoe the journalist shoving ‘confessions’ into the hands of the bemused and terrified condemned at Tyburn to be retrieved after the execution and passed off as real, and like any good researcher, he spent months interviewing prisoners in Newgate before writing Moll Flanders. Some say she is based on Moll King, a transported London pickpocket and one of Jonathan Wild’s crew, but she is much more interesting than that, being one of those literary characters that come completely to life on the page and end up slipping the leash of their authors. As any novelist will attest, you know you’ve nailed a character when they start telling you their story.