CLASS AND GENDER IDENTITY IN "MALE GOTHIC,"

FROM WALPOLE TO BYRON

NIDA DARONGSUWAN

PHD

THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE

JANUARY 2008
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

List of Illustrations IV

Acknowledgements V

Abstract VI

INTRODUCTION 1

Class and Gender Identity in Late-Eighteenth and

Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain 6

The "Male Gothic" 17

CHAPTER 1 Horace Walpole and the "Aristocratisation" of the Gothic 25

Walpole's Sense of the Gothic 26

The Castle ofOtranto 35

The Mysterious Mother 52

Nineteenth-Century Responses to Walpole's Work 64

CHAPTER 2 William Beckford: "Epater Ie Bourgeois" 70

Biographical Memoirs and The Vision 72

Vathek 79

The Episodes ofVathek 95

The 1790s and After 103

CHAPTER 3 Matthew Lewis: "Lewisizing" Gothic 116

Lewis and the Culture of Sensibility in the Early 1790s 117

The Monk 125

..
n
 Lewis after The Monk Scandal 141

CHAPTER 4 "Drawing from Self': Lord Byron 164

Constructing Authorial Identity: From Hours of Idleness

to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I-II 166

The Turkish Tales 178

Leading the "Satanic School": Manfred and Other Works 193

CONCLUSION 214

BIBLIOGRAPHY 224

111
 LIST OF ILLUSTRA TIONS

Page

PLATE 1 Portrait of a Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian, by

Thomas Phillips in 1814. © Queen's Printer and Controller
of HMSO, 2004. UK Government Art Collection.
Reproduced from Robert Beevers, The Byronic Image:
The Poet Portrayed (Oxford: Olivia, 2005) 29 173

PLATE 2 Byron, engraving after George Sanders' portrait of 1809

by William Finden in 1830. Reproduced from Beevers,
The Byronic Image 12 179

PLATE 3 Portrait ofa Nobleman, by Thomas Phillips in 1814.

John Murray Archive, London. Photo: National
Portrait Gallery, London. Reproduced from
Beevers, The Byronic Image 25 190

PLATE 4 Byron, engraving after the drawing by George Harlow by

Henry Meyer. Published 30 January 1816 by T. Cadell &
W. Davies, Strand, London. Reproduced from
Beevers, The Byronic Image 69 212

IV
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest gratitude is to my supervisor, Dr. Jim Watt, who has guided me with
expertise and patience, and has given me encouragement throughout the four years
of my research. I would like to thank also the members of my Thesis Advisory
Panel, Dr. Emma Major and Prof. Harriet Guest, along with my external examiner,
Dr. Angela Wright, for valuable thoughts and constructive advice on my thesis.

I am grateful to the Royal Thai Government for selecting me as a recipient of

the Thai-UK Collaborative Research Network scholarship. Specific thanks go to my
senoir colleagues at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Assist. Prof. Dr.
M. R. Kalaya Tingsabadh, Assist. Prof. Dr. Sudaporn Luksaneeyayawin, and Assoc.
Prof. Dr. Pachee Yuvajita, who encouraged me to apply for the scholarship, without
which I would not be able to do a PhD in the UK.

My interest in the eighteenth century has increased from a number of

research seminars and conferences held by the Centre for Eighteenth-Century
Studies. It has been a pleasure to study in the warm and friendly environment here.
My special thanks go to Jinghuey Hwang, my closest eighteenth-century comrade;
Koji Yamamoto, for his enthusiastic comment on my conference paper; Jinat and
Angus Whitehead, for hosting the few but memorable dinners, along with lively and
engaging conversation.

Thanks also to my Thai friends at the University of York, particularly Pairoj

Wilainuch, Nattama Pongpairoj, Manu Deeudom, Sittiphol Viboonthanakul, and
Taweesak Kritjaroen, who have made my stay abroad more like "home." Friends
studying in other universities in the UK-Tongtip Poonlarp, Sirirat Na Ranong,
Raksangob Wijitsopon, Jiranthara Sriouthai, and Nawaporn Sanprasert-have shared
their experience, making me feel that I am not alone in this lenghty PhD project.
Thanks too to Poonperm Paitayawat for literature and theatre conversation, and for
having been such a wonderful London host.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family and Pitch
Tiranasawas for their unwavering love, support, and great confidence in my abilities.
With heartfelt gratitude and affection, I dedicate this thesis to my parents.

v
 ABSTRACT

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate works by major male writers of Gothic
fiction-namely, Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis and Lord
Byron-in the context of the changing social and cultural climate of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The "male Gothic," as I will argue,
represents a kind of social performance, and it is a subgenre of fiction in which there
is a persistent engagement with questions of class and gender identity. Between
around the 1760s and the 1820s, Britain started to witness the gradual decline of
aristocratic cultural hegemony and a more vigorous self-assertion of the middle
classes, which sought to regulate aristocratic "excess." Examining the self
representation of the authors in question, alongside their morally and sexually
transgressive works, this thesis will consider the "male Gothic" as a literary category
that made possible the performance of implicitly oppositional class and gender
identities, and provided a means of resisting emergent "middle-class" ideologies and
values. Such a notion of "resistance," however, I will argue, also needs to be seen in
the context of the writers' various attempts to offer their works to the public as both
legitimate and pleasurable, and hence takes the form of an often playful vacillation
between the licensed and the subversive, rather than any more absolute and
uncompromising form of cultural opposition. Concluding by looking at the diverse
but increasingly hostile reception of Byron's work in the 1820s and 1830s, this thesis
will consider the backlash against the "male Gothic" more generally around this
time, and it will suggest that Byron's work marks the high-point and, perhaps, the
end-point of the genre.

VI
 INTRODUCTION

Since the publication of David Punter's seminal work, The Literature of Terror

(1980), "a flood of critical material,"! to use Punter's words, has established Gothic

fiction as a genre that not only embraces wide-ranging themes, features and

functions, but also invites different, often competing theoretical approaches to

analyse its development and transformation across history and cultures. As

psychoanalysis and queer theory have increasingly gained momentum in literary

studies, there has been an attempt to examine Gothic works written by male writers

as a tradition in which the portrayal of protagonists' exploits is explained in terms of

the authors' psychological experience, and in particular their deviation from a

normative heterosexuality. Timothy Mowl's biography, Horace Walpole: The Great

Outsider (1996), is perhaps the most obvious example of such an enthusiasm for

"queering" the male Gothic. 2 Drawing the reader's attention to Walpole's private

correspondence with his male friends, Mowl contends that Walpole was "a

homosexual who consorted with other homosexuals and bisexuals of his class."3 The

Castle of Otranto (1764), as Mowl puts it, reflects Walpole in "a state of febrile

excitement" after William Guthrie's attack on his intimate relationship with Henry

Seymour Conway-a public "outing" of Walpole, as Mowl calls it-in A Reply to

the Counter Address; Being a Vindication of a Pamphlet Entitled, An Address to the

! David Punter, preface, The Literature of Terror, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1996) viii.
2 Other examples are Raymond Bentman, "Horace Walpole's Forbidden Passion," Queer
Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York UP,
1997); Jill Campbell, '''I Am No Giant': Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among
Men," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 39.3 (1998): 238-60; Max Fincher,
"Guessing the Mould: Homosocial Sins and Identity in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto,"
Gothic Studies 3.3 (2001): 229-45; Adam Potkay, "Beckford's Heaven of Boys," Raritan 13.1 (1993):
73-86; and Lauren Fitzgerald, "The Sexuality of Authorship in The Monk," Romanticism on the Net
36-37, Nov. 2004-Feb. 2005,28 Nov. 2005 <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n 36-37/011138
ar.html>.
3 Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: Murray, 1996) 4.

1
Public, on the Late Dismission of a General Officer (1764), which probably made

Walpole consider it "expedient" to "bring out a rip-roaring, red-blooded romance

that included threats of rape in gloomy cellars and portray[ ... ] normally sexed young

men falling in love, normally, with beautiful high-born maidens in distress."" While

Mowl's reference to homosexuality is anachronistic, so too is his description of

Walpole as an "outsider" inaccurate: as a son of a former Prime Minister, Walpole

was from his childhood a member of elite circles, serving in Parliament for twenty-

seven years and maintaining connections with many illustrious social and political

figures of his time.

Queer readings such as Mowl's may offer new perspectives on Gothic

fiction, but they often downplay the significance of other kinds of context. A more

theoretically and historically informed criticism has been advanced by the literary

scholar George Haggerty, whose recent book, Queer Gothic (2006), discusses the

genre in the light of Michel Foucault's history of sexuality and ideas articulated in

psychoanalytical studies. 5 Since Gothic fiction, in Haggerty's words, "offered a

testing ground for many unauthorised genders and sexualities," it might be seen to

function as "a historical model of queer theory and politics: transgressive, sexually

coded, and resistant to dominant ideology.,,6 Haggerty's remark about the emergence

of the literary Gothic in the late eighteenth century, coinciding with modern concepts

of sexuality, is worth expanding to include other aspects of cultural transition in this

period. 7 Focusing on constructions of class and gender identity, my thesis will

4 Ibid. 186.
5 Haggerty's earlier works on the subject are "Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth
Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis," Studies in the Novel 18.4 (1986): 341-52; and Men in
Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1999).
6 Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006) 2.
7 As Haggerty puts it, "It is no mere coincidence that the cult of gothic fiction reached its apex at the
very moment when gender and sexuality were beginning to be codified for modem culture." See
Queer Gothic 2.

2
present "male Gothic" writing in the larger context of the changing social and

cultural climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This categorisation of the "male Gothic," it is worth noting, IS done

retrospectively. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the literary

category of "Gothic" romance was itself yet to be decisively established, and readers

did not necessarily gender different types of romance. In Northanger Abbey (1818),

for instance, Isabella Thorpe is at ease to name Eliza Parsons's The Castle of

Wolfenbach (1793) and Regina Maria Roche's Clermont (1798) alongside Francis

Lathom's The Midnight Bell (1798) and Peter Teuthold's translation The

Necromancer (1794) under her list of "horrid" novels. 8 Isabella's arrogant brother,

John, however, distinguishes Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) as the only

"decent" novel that came out after Henry Fielding'S Tom Jones (1748).9 Since

Lewis's novel was criticised for its lurid sexual content and immorality, John's

praise of The Monk is constituted on the ground that it is more daring and

provocative than other works, which he regards as "full of nonsense and stuff."IO

Though John does not put novels into categories, his remark shows that

contemporary readers somehow recognised Lewis's work as a different kind of

fiction, distinct, at least, from Ann Radcliffe's Gothic works that Austen's heroine

admires.

Similarly acknowledging the difference between Lewis and Radcliffe, several

modem critics attempt to impose gendered paradigms of the Gothic, each comprising

specific tropes and features. Kate Ferguson Ellis, for example, marks out "the

masculine Gothic" as a male writers' tradition, central to which are the male

protagonist and the theme of exile and alienation from both domestic and public

8 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Marilyn Butler (London: Penguin, 1995) 37.
9 Ibid. 45.
10 Ibid.

3
spheres. I I Paying particular attention to The Monk in his analysis, Robert Miles

views the male Gothic as offering a literary aesthetics of the visual where men are

voyeuristic gazers and women, as Miles puts it, "become the convenient, stigmatised

other, responsible for the fragility, and irrationality, of the masculine self."l~ The

most detailed characterisation of the male Gothic is perhaps Anne Williams's Art of

Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995), which argues for a male Gothic formula that

features an overreaching villain-hero, explicit and unexplained supernatural agency,

and horrifying crimes that revolve around female suffering and, sometimes, pleasure

derived from female victimisation. 13

This thesis takes into account the male-centred plot as a "self-evident" trope

of the male Gothic. It also acknowledges motifs explored by the scholars above as

dominant in male writing, all the while keeping in mind that there is no such thing as

a simple and straightforward gendered classification of the genre. Recent studies of

the female Gothic by E. J. Clery and Gary Kelly, for example, have emphasised the

diversity of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women's Gothic (which

includes a tale of female sexual desire and violence like Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya,

or The Moor [1806]), and such critics have disputed the monolithic categorisation of

feminist academics in the 1970s and 1980s who saw the female Gothic as focusing

on women's physical and psychological oppression in a male-dominated society.14

There are likewise varieties of the male Gothic during this period. Apart from

II Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic
Ideology (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989) xii-xv.
12 Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester UP,
2002) 58.
13 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 99-107.
14 E. 1. Clery, Women's Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Tavistock: Northcote House,
2000), and Varieties of Female Gothic, ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols (London: Pickering, 2002). For
discussion of the female Gothic by feminist critics, see Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London:
Women's P, 1976); Juliann Fleenor, The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden, 1983); and Kate Ferguson
Ellis, The Contested Castle.

4
Walpole and Lewis, numerous male authors in this period also wrote fictions that we

might now classify as "Gothic" and that are varied in themes and features-works

including William Godwin's Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb

Williams (1794), Percy Bysshe Shelley's Zastrozzi: A Romance (1810) and St.

Irvyne: or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811), Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of

Lammermoor (1819), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and James

Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

What I mean when I refer to the "male Gothic" here is a sub genre of fiction

particularly associated with four major writers: Horace Walpole, William Beckford,

Matthew Lewis and Lord Byron. Instead of attempting to pin down tropes of the

"male Gothic," what this thesis does is to investigate roles that these tropes played

beyond their literary context so as to address the historical and cultural significance

of the subgenre. As I will argue, "male Gothic" writing differs from other Gothic

works written by men in its persistent engagement with questions of class and gender

identity. The historical backdrop of my thesis will be a series of cultural shifts

between around the 1760s and the 1820s, a period during which, as many historians

have claimed, Britain started to witness the gradual decline of aristocratic cultural

hegemony and a more vigorous self-assertion on the part of the middle classes,

which sought to regulate aristocratic extravagance or excess, in all its

manifestations. 15 This thesis will be concerned to examine the different ways in

which the "male Gothic" provided certain writers with a means of resisting these

emergent "middle-class" ideologies and values. The "male Gothic," as I would like

15 See, for example, Colin Jones and Dror Wahnnan, eds., The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain
and France, 1750-1820 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English
Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740-1830 (London: Weidenfeld, 1987); Linda Colley, Britons:
Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992); and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall,
Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London: Routledge,
1987).

5
to argue, therefore, is a literary category that is also a fonn of social production,

making possible the perfonnance of implicitly oppositional class and gender

identities.

CLASS AND GENDER IDENTITY IN LATE-EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY-

NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

Colin Jones and Dror Wahnnan describe the period between 1750 and 1820 as an era

of "cultural revolutions."16 In opposition to Marxist historians such as Eric

Hobsbawm who mark the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the French Revolution

in France as the key points in western history that engendered modem capitalist,

bourgeois society, Jones and Wahnnan claim that "these revolutionary developments

can perhaps be thought of most fruitfully less as primarily social, economIC, or

political transfonnations than as cultural ones.'m Instead of focusing on

socioeconomic and political changes, they are interested in the role that language and

representation played in shaping conceptions of modem society, pointing out how

the categories of class, gender and race were discursively constructed. Along with a

range of other cultural historians, they argue for "the shift of focus from supposedly

'objective,' anterior social reality, and the impersonally observable aspects of the

social process, to their representations, to the historically specific constructions of

the meanings attributed to such realities."18

The idea that this was a period of "cultural revolutions" is a feature of

numerous historical accounts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

16 The phrase is from Jones and Wahrman's title of the book The Age of Cultural Revolutions.
17 Jones and Wahrman, "Introduction: An Age of Cultural Revolutions?" 3.
18 Ibid. 10.

6
over the past two decades or so, although these accounts vary sometimes in their

periodisation and in their points of emphasis. Gerald Newman, for example, sees the

period from 1740 to 1830 as giving birth to what he calls "the rise of English

nationalism."19 Britain in the eighteenth century, as Newman puts it, was a

"monarch[y] of the ancien regime, dominated in church and state by hereditary or

quasi-hereditary oligarchies": this was a period in which the country still upheld an

"aristocratic culture" which generally valued privilege by birth, rank and wealth~

patronage; conspicuous consumption; a continental education; and the idea of

cosmopolitanism, in particular the diffusion of languages, manners and customs

from France and Italy.20 However, Newman also observes that by the mid-1750s

there began to emerge a counter discourse, a "nationalist philosophy, anti-French and

anti-aristocratic, linked to sharpening moral, social and historical concems."~1 As

commercial growth made Britain a more prosperous society, social commentators

became increasingly apprehensive of the negative consequences of such

advancement. The adulation of foreign cultures was a subject that was widely

discussed by moralists and critics, generating a growing dislike of aristocrats and

those who imitated their lifestyle. John Brown, for example, famously described

members of the nobility and gentry as living in a state of "vain, luxurious, and selfish

EFFEMINACY," censuring them as promoting "the general Habit of refined

indulgence" rather than the "Spirit of Religion, Honour, and public Love," in his

Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757).22 Likewise, in An Essay

on Modem Luxury (1765), Samuel Fawconer attacked luxury and French fashion as

"eradicat[ing] ... patriotic affections" and causing the disappearance of "national

19 The phrase is from Newman's title of his book The Rise of English Nationalism.
20 Newman, Rise of English Nationalism 11-13.
21 Ibid. 73.
22 qtd. in David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale UP,
1990) 215.

7
spirit."23 Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" (1770) laments how the pomp

and extravagance of the upper strata and wealthy townsmen spread their influence

and destroy "rural virtues" such as "[ c]ontented toil," "hospitable care," "connubial

tenderness," and "piety."24 Representations of "macaronis," profligate young men

affected by continental manners and tastes after their return from the Grand Tour,

were commonplace in 1770s caricatures, which, as Diana Donald puts it, "associated

[them] with the extremes of contemporary male fashion-[the] high toupee and huge

powdered 'club' of hair or bag wig, ultra-tight but lavishly patterned, coloured and

ornamental dress, and often a large nosegay."25 Many other satirical prints,

particularly in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, attacked aristocratic

debauchery and decadence, and were conspicuously aimed at individuals such as the

Prince of Wales and Lady Buckinghamshire, or at aristocratic groupings such as

Carlton House, the Pic Nic Society and the Society of Dilettanti. 26

Similarly focusing on the heightened sense of British patriotism In the

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Linda Colley elaborates further on the

upper classes' response to the emergent anti-aristocratic culture that Newman has

identified. She stresses that the American War of Independence (1775-83) and the

French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1789-1815) together provided the

"main ideological threat" that "challenged the political and/or religious foundations

upon which Great Britain was based, and threatened its internal security and its

commercial and colonial power.'m To Colley, Britain's defeat in America coupled

with the threat posed by revolutionary France "called into question the competence

23 qtd. in Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1996) 79.
24 Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village," The Complete Poetical Worlcs of Oliver Goldsmith, ed.
Austin Dobson (London: Frowde, 1911) 36, lines 398,403-05.
25 Donald, Age of Caricature 80.
26 See Donald, Age of Caricature 98-108.
27 Colley, Britons 4.

8
of the British governing elite," turning the last two decades of the eighteenth century

into a crucial period that brought about what she tenns a "cultural reconstruction" of

the ruling class. 28 British elites, in other words, did not diminish in size in the late

eighteenth century, but they "set about re-ordering their authority, their image, their

ideas and their composition," so that they not only "reshaped the exercise of power

in Great Britain" but also "contributed to a substantial change in the content of

British patriotism."29 Though anti-aristocratic feeling had been evident since the mid-

eighteenth century, it was, according to Colley, only from the 1780s that the

denunciation "enter[ ed] the mainstream of political discourse in Britain, where it was

popularised through the journalism of Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, Thomas Spence

and ... William Cobbett."30 To counter the criticism concerning their self-promotion

and extravagance, British elites became more enthusiastic to present themselves as

patriotic and socially responsible, to demonstrate, as Edmund Burke put it, that "a

true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it."3l

While aristocratic hedonism persisted well into the Regency period in certain

circles of the nobility, more and more members of the elite were concerned to direct

their behaviour and lifestyle towards the public good. An increasing number of

aristocrats, as Boyd Hilton shows, engaged in local governmental administration,

and the proportion of those involving themselves in military service steadily rose

from 1780 to 1823. 32 Many members of the upper classes also lent their support to

local industries and manufactures,33 and can therefore be seen increasingly to have

28 Ibid. 148, 164. David Cannadine similarly refers to the period between the 1780s and the 1820s as
one of the "renewal, re-creation and re-invention" of the British aristocracy in Aspects of Aristocracy:
Grandeur and Decline in Modem Britain (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994) 10.
29 Ibid. 149.
30 Ibid. 152.
31 qtd. in Colley, Britons 155.
32 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006)
137. Hilton's statistics are taken from David Cannadine's Aspects of Aristocracy 22.
33 Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 138.

9
merged with, rather than seeking to distinguish themselves from, the middle classes.

Instead of taking a Grand Tour, they were inclined to practise domestic travel. Many

turned their interest from continental to native art, acting as patrons of British artists

in order "to assert," as Colley puts it, their "status as arbiter[s] and guardian[s] of the

national culture."34 Some prominent aristocratic officers commissioned distinguished

painters to portray themselves as war heroes, while others became more obsessed

with wearing military unifonns which exhibited their social position as well as their

patriotic sentiment. 35 The new ethos that the ruling elite seemed to have adopted

from this period onwards, Colley argues, is that of "[ r]elentless hard work, complete

professionalism, an uncompromising private virtue and an ostentatious patriotism."36

One index of this shift is the fundamental change in male fashion itself: wigs,

luxurious trimmings and brightly coloured silks gave way to natural hair, regimental

or simple, sombre frock coats. By the early nineteenth century, as Aileen Ribeiro and

Valerie Cumming assert, "[t]he paradigm was no longer the male peacock, but a

soberly dressed worker, a merchant, a banker, a professional man, whose calling was

expressed in his understated, impeccably cut clothing."37

In parallel with this realignment of class relations III this period is the

coalescence of more nonnative ideas of gender identity, similarly defined in

exemplary tenns. If, as Michael McKeon puts it, eighteenth-century British society

presents "less an orderly taxonomy than a fluid continuum of male gender types," it

is fair to say that from about the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the conduct of the

34 Colley, Britons 172.

35 See Colley. Britons 177-87.
36 Ibid. 192.
37Aileen Ribeiro and Valerie Cumming, The Visual History of Costume (London: Batsford, 1989)
22.

10
upper classes was subject to an increasingly moralistic scrutiny.~' Many writers at

this time claimed not only that the upper classes displayed a luxurious refinement but

that they were in fact unmanly too. John Brown's criticism, mentioned earlier,

associated the nobility with "selfish EFFEMINACy."39 Samuel Fawconer's Essay on

Modem Luxury likewise regarded an undue interest in dress and appearance as

feminine, explaining how the widespread emulation of French fashion and manners

deprived Britain of "national spirit" as well as destabilising its traditional gender

roles: "For want of preserving a necessary decorum, we may observe one sex to

advance in masculine assurance, as the other sinks into unmanly delicacy

[becoming] effeminate fribbles.,,40 Even when "male Gothic" writers such as

Walpole and Beckford presented themselves as patriotic, their exhibitionism induced

later critics, particularly in the nineteenth century, to view them as unmanly (though

it has to be remarked that these criticisms no longer reflected on the nation as a

whole in the same way as in the works of Brown and Fawconer in the 1750s and

1760s). Walpole's eclectic collections of curiosities in Strawberry Hill, for example,

was criticised by the anonymous writer of Descriptions to the Plates of Thames

Scenery (1818) as "proceed[ing] from the structure of his mind ... or his physical

constitution, which was naturally weak ... [and] had little of masculine energy or

mental capaciousness."41 Likewise, Beckford's passion for collecting trifling art

objects such as dishes, Japanese lacquerware, painted enamels and porcelain,

signaled a sort of unnatural consumption: William Hazlitt referred to Fonthill Abbey

and its collections in The London Magazine for November 1822 as "a desart of

38 Michael McKeon, "Historic ising Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England
1660-1760," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.3 (1995): 313.
39 qtd. in Spadafora, The Idea of Progress 215.
40 qtd. in Donald, Age of Caricature 79.
41 Unsigned account from Descriptions to the Plates of Thames Scenery Engraved by W. B. Cooke &
G. Cooke (1818), Peter Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1987)
251.

11
magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy-

shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly, and, at the same

time, most worthless, in the productions of art and nature."42

Just as certain forms of "aristocratic" display were viewed with increasing

suspicion during this period, so too was private sexual conduct subject to public

scrutiny. In early modem society, sodomy, according to Tim Hitchcock, was "a kind

of elite libertinism particularly associated with the court," and in the eighteenth

century was widely practised among the lower and middling sorts, as can be seen

from records of London molly houses. 43 In his study of the eighteenth-century

discourse on male sexualities, Ed Cohen asserts that before the eighteenth century

sodomy was classified as a religious violation alongside witchcraft, apostasy and

blasphemy.44 Accounts of legal proceedings in the second half of the eighteenth

century, however, manifest that it became a major criminal offence, denoting not

heresy but an "unnatural practice[ ... ]," "a symptom of behavioural deviations," and

an act that could harm the "laws of manners" as well as the individual concerned. 45

Another factor that further contributed to this shift is the evangelical revival which

began to develop from the 1780s onwards, and which reinforced the ideas of

domesticity and monogamous, heterosexual relationships that would become

normative during the nineteenth century. Building on E. P. Thompson's study of the

English working class, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall point out that the

"evangelical revival, in which the home was central, made 'the religious idiom the

42 qtd. in Boyd Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son: A Study of William Beckford (London:
Centaur, 1962) 244.
43 Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) 65.
44 Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New

York: Routledge, 1993) 103.

45 Ibid. 113-14.

12
 cultural nonn for the middle class. "'46 While men were expected to be impeccable as

family leaders who were imbued with morality, love and sympathy, women had to

be subordinated, serving them as wives, mothers and daughters. 47 Outside the family,

this new mood of public moral earnestness led to the establishment of reform

organisations such as the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty's

Proclamation against Vice and Immorality (1788) and the Society for the

Suppression of Vice (1802), which in tum contributed to a larger culture of

surveillance, scrutinising deviant practices.

The "male Gothic" writers I will be considering here can be seen in different

ways to diverge from this emergent model of nonnative heterosexuality and

masculinity. Beckford was involved in a notorious sexual scandal with the teenaged

William Courtenay-"a Grammatical mistake ... in regard to the genders," as the

Morning Herald proclaimed in 178448-which resulted in his ostracism and the

failure of his application for a peerage. The passionate language that Walpole used in

his pamphlet to defend the reputation of his cousin Conway was seen by Guthrie as

"c[ oming] forth from a female quiver," as if to suggest an ulterior motive to

Walpole's conduct. 49 Byron's clandestine relationship with his half-sister and other

women was later condemned by many sections of British society, and the rumours

concerning his sexual involvement with men and boys, as Fiona MacCarthy

observes, likewise spurred him to seek a voluntary exile abroad. 50

Another way of tracing the "cultural revolutions" that many historians have

identified in this period, and which will illuminate my account of "male Gothic"

46 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes xviii.

47 Ibid. 108-13.
48 qtd. in Guy Chapman, Beckford (London: Hart-Davis, 1952) 185.
49 William Guthrie, Reply to the Counter Address; Being a Vindication of a Pamphlet Entitled, An
Address to the Public, on the Late Dismission of a General Officer (London, 1764), English Short
Title Catalogue Microfilm: reel 3865, no. 5. 6-7.
50 Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: Murray, 2002) 275.

13
writers, IS to consider the history of the masquerade. As urban entertainments,

masquerades were usually organised in assembly rooms, private houses, or popular

public sites such as Vauxhall or Ranelagh Gardens in London, where people

socialised in disguise, dressing and wearing masks as members of different classes,

professions, genders, races and even species. Mingling people of different sexes. the

masquerade, as Terry Castle remarks, encouraged sexual freedom: while women

could attend unaccompanied by their husbands or female chaperones, and be at

liberty to get to know any male strangers, men could exploit this opportunity to

seduce young ladies or make contact with prostitutes, who also frequented the

scene. 51 Costume and masks allowed participants to trangress normal gender and

sexual codes. While some cross-dressed, others assumed liberatory styles of

femininity and masculinity. Walpole himself was a regular attendant of masquerades,

noting in one of his letters in 1742 that he dressed as "Aureng-zebe," the leading

character who is lusted after by his stepmother in John Dryden's play, Aureng-Zebe,

or the Great Mogul (1675).52 Byron was also fond of this public entertainment, and

even once masqueraded as a woman at the Athens carnival in 1809. 53

The masquerade can be seen as a licensed space where men and women

about town were able to indulge in potentially proscribed forms of gender and sexual

performance. For Wahrman, the masquerade offers a perfect microcosm of what he

has influentially termed "the ancien regime of identity," in which gender and other

social categories were "occasionally mutable" and "potentially unfixed."54

Wahrman's study illustrates that away from the formal confines of the masquerade,

51 Terry Castle, Masquerades and Civilisation: the Canivalesgue in Eighteenth-Century English

Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986) 32-33.
52 Walpole to Horace Mann, 18 Feb. 1742, The Letters of Horace Walpole. Fourth Earl of Orford, ed.
Peter Cunningham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Grant, 1906) 132.
53 MacCarthy, Byron 114.
54 Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modem Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century
England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004) xiii, 40-41.

14
the fluidity of gender and identity was also apparent in everyday life: actresses in

"breeches parts" on stage, representations of gender-ambiguous men and women in

paintings and caricatures, and famous living figures such as Hannah Snell, the

female soldier, and the cross-dressing diplomat Chevalier D'Eon provide only a few

examples. 55 The theatricality of society rendered the eighteenth century a period of

"identity play," according to Wahrman, where "alternatives to the prevalent norms"

were "viable, tolerable, unthreatening, at times even appreciable."56 Nevertheless,

along with the declining popularity of the masquerade in the 1780s and 1790s, this

kind of identity play gradually faded away from British society in the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries. While Wahrman attributes the cause of this change to

the American crisis in the late 1770s, when the revolutionary colonists' subversive

use of the language of disguise rendered the former plasticity of identity too

troubling,57 the growing disapproval of identity play, as I will argue, was also

generated by social circumstances within Britain, in which an advancing ideology

began to foster the prioritisation of an individual's moral quality over self-display.

A culture that ran against the "ancien regime of identity" and helped to

fortify concepts of normative gender and sexual identity is the culture of sensibility,

which, according to G. J. Barker-Benfield, was a specifically eighteenth-century

phenomenon, "a culture of reform" that centred on "the aggrandisement of feeling

and its investment with moral value."58 Deriving its meaning from philosophical and

medico-physiological discourses, "sensibility," as Janet Todd puts it, denoted "the

capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for

55 See Wahrman, Making of Modern Self, Chapter 1: "Varieties of Gender in Eighteenth-Century

England" 7-44, and Chapter 2: "Gender Identities and the Limit of Cultural History" 45-82.
56 Ibid. 159, 14.
57 See Wahrman, Making of Modern Self, Chapter 6: "The Ancien Regime and the Revolution" 218-
64.
58 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) xix, xxvi.

15
suffering."59 It celebrated a person's innate virtue over external qualities such as

appearance, rank and possessions. 60 The concept of sensibility, as McKeon asserts,

affinned the shift from the aristocratic "status assumption that birth automatically

dictates worth" to "a class conviction that birth and worth are independent

variables."61 This emphasis on worth also helped redefine aspects of gender and

gender relations, locating virtue primarily in women, who were believed to be more

emotionally susceptible than men, and therefore possessed of a greater refonnative

power. In Pamela (1740-41), for instance, Samuel Richardson famously depicts his

heroine's moral distinction through her emotional sensitivity, which not only helps

her escape being raped by her master but also to refonn his libertine behaviour.

Many writers, particularly women, followed Richardson, using the plot of a virtuous

heroine pursued and endangered by malevolent, often aristocratic, men in their

novels. In the 1760s and 1770s sensibility was also transferred to men in the figure

of "the man of feeling," exemplified by Dr. Primrose in Oliver Goldsmith's The

Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Harley in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling

(1771 )-emotional, benevolent and at odds with their hostile, selfish, materialist

society. "Male Gothic" fiction was antagonistic to such sentimental novels, focusing

much more on victimising villains rather than morally upright heroes, and, in

Lewis's case, in The Monk, even offering a libertine version of Ann Radcliffe's

heroine of sensibility. One of the things I want to consider in my thesis is the way in

which "male Gothic" writing offered a site for the "identity play" that Wahrman

associates with the early to mid-eighteenth century-a space in which writers were

able to deviate from social and cultural nonns that were becoming more and more

established.

59 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986) 7.

60 McKeon, "Historicising Patriarchy" 314.
61 Ibid. 303,314.

16
THE "MALE GOTHIC"

Although the central claim of my thesis is that "male Gothic" writing might be seen

as a form of resistance to the overlapping "cultural revolutions" I have just sketched

out, a number of complicating factors also need to be considered at the outset. While

I will go on to look at the "aristocratic" self-presentation of the writers discussed in

this study, it is necessary to emphasise that they were not all born into aristocratic

families: notwithstanding their titles, Walpole succeeded his nephew as the fourth

Earl of Orford late in his life, and Byron acquired his lordship from his uncle at the

age of ten, rather than at his birth; these writers in fact belonged to the new self-

styled upper class whose affluence and social status enabled it to compete with the

aristocracy by imitating its manners and habits. Whereas Beckford and Lewis were

originally from middling families, and obtained vast fortunes from their West Indian

plantations, Walpole's and Byron's parents were products of intermarriage and

assimilation between the aristocracy and the middle classes. Sir Robert Walpole,

from the landed gentry, married a wealthy Baltic timber merchant's daughter, while

Captain John Byron, a naval officer, married a young Scottish heiress. It is important

to acknowledge too that many members of these families held prominent public

roles, and expected future generations to do the same. While Sir Robert Walpole was

the first prime minister, the most powerful statesman of his day, Lewis's father was

appointed Chief Clerk in the War Office and, later, Deputy-Secretary at War.

Beckford's father was twice elected as Lord Mayor of London and even presented

the Grand Remonstrance in 1770 to counter George Ill's political interference in the

Wilkes affair. One of his most memorable speeches in the House of Commons, in

November 1761, interestingly, sided with the emergent middle classes:

17
 the middling people of England as the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant,
t?e cou~try ~entlema~, they wh~ .bear all the heat of the day. ... They have a
nght, SIr, to Interfere. III th~ condItIon and conduct of the nation .... [They] are a
good natured, well-IntentIOned and very sensible people who know better
perhaps than any other nation under the sun whether they are well governed or
not. 62

The sons of these men, however, can all be seen to have rebelled against the

responsibility that their parents expected them to assume. After a brief spell in

Parliament, they all retired from the political scene and spent most of their time

pursuing other concerns. Though Walpole never lost his interest in politics, he

assumed a detached role as a mentor of Conway, and an amateur writer of political

memoirs; to his contemporaries, he presented himself as an arbiter of taste who built

a "Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill and published several works on art history and

criticism. Beckford was primarily known as the writer of the wildly imaginative

Oriental tale, Vathek (1786), and as a zealous art collector and self-promoting

spendthrift, who planned to make his Fonthill Abbey a more extravagant Gothic

monument than Walpole's "bauble" at Strawberry Hill. During the period of

conservative reaction against the French Revolution in Britain, Lewis, though the

son of a Tory MP, aligned himself more with aristocratic liberal Whigs. While his

first Gothic novel, The Monk, followed the tradition of French philosophical

pornography, his dramas, many of which were outlined upon French and German

works, deliberately pandered to the popular taste for spectacle and sensationalism,

provoking censure from critics, many of whom thought that he violated both moral

and aesthetic values. Byron was likewise a liberal Whig, particularly distinguished in

Europe for his involvement with the revolutionary liberation movement in Italy and

62 Richard B. Sheridan, "Beckford, William (bap. 1709, d. 1770)," Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, Oxford UP, 2004. Online ed., May 2005. 14 Apr. 2006. <http://www.oxforddnb.com/
view/articleIl903>.

18
 later the Greek War of Independence. In Britain, though, he was better known for his

extra-marital affairs and incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh,

and for his writings, which playfully presented images of the author as a captivating,

glamorous figure, critical of social and religious orthodoxy.

Reading these male writers' Gothic fictions, one will find protagonists who

variously involve themselves in incest, adultery, rape, murder and homoerotic play.

If novels in the "female Gothic" tradition tend to focus on the figure of the

endangered heroine, "male Gothic" writers commonly appeal to the Faust myth,

adapting its characterisation of the high-born protagonist who errs yet daringly

refuses to give up, and readily faces the outcome of his criminal deeds. Despite the

fact that these works punish their protagonists in the end, they tend to be sympathetic

towards, sometimes even celebratory of, their characters' overreaching, transgressive

energy. Like the masquerade, the Gothic might be seen as an arena in which writers

were able to perform proscribed forms of social and sexual behaviours. These

performances were complicated further, however, by the different attempts which

writers made to offer their works to the public as both pleasurable and legitimate.

Walpole, for example, disguised his first edition of The Castle of Otranto as a

translation of a medieval Italian manuscript. The second edition, with its revelation

of Walpole's authorial identity, proved the first a hoax, but at the same time made a

claim to literary merit by presenting itself as a "new species of romance,,63 that

combined elements from both the medieval romance and the novel, and which even

paid tribute to Shakespearean tragedy in its tone and characterisation. Lewis

similarly employed the pose of anonymity in the first edition of The Monk and later,

after revealing his identity, disingenuously renounced the novel as a juvenile

63 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, ed.
Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003) 70.

19
amusement. Beckford and Byron furnished their writings with footnotes which

interwove their extravagant stories with historical realities and, in the case of Byron.

with his travels in the East. These authors' various efforts to legitimise their work

mean that the "male Gothic" should be seen to display not so much an absolute and

uncompromising form of cultural "resistance," but more a vacillation between the

serious and the playful, the licensed and the subversive.

Following Wahrman, we might say that writers of "male Gothic" were

concerned to experiment with ways of remaining in the "ancien regime of identity."

Nevertheless, it is necessary to discriminate between these different engagements

with the Gothic and its conventions. This is not merely because their writings were

produced in different socio-historical conditions, but because their individual

agendas also prompted them to distinguish their works from those of other writers,

including their "male Gothic" counterparts. The first chapter of the thesis will focus

on Walpole and his "aristocratisation" of the Gothic as a recreational space.

Walpole's "aristocratic" self-representation, I will argue, does not straightforwardly

reject an emergent insistence on sobriety and public-spiritedness; instead,

fundamental to Walpole's Gothic works is the conjunction of a desire for respect and

approval from the public on the one hand, and a will to differentiate himself and his

work on the other. My analysis of Walpole will build on Harriet Guest's notion of

the Gothic as an "extrapolitical" realm that allowed eighteenth-century readers to

delight in it because of its historical specificity, and thus not completely dissociate

themselves from the rationality and superiority of the classical. 64 As an admirer of

the "Augustan" revision of classical poets, Walpole's engagement with the Gothic

did not automatically imply any antagonistic relation to the classical-an important

64 Harriet Guest "The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory after 1760," Beyond
Romanticism: Ne~ Approach to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale
(London: Routledge, 1992) 123.

20
point that disputes modem critics' assumption that Walpole and other early Gothic

writers were precursors of the Romantic movement which rebelled against the

authoritative classical mode in British literature. 65 But while other Gothicists and

medieval revivalists in the period were preoccupied with historical authenticity,

Walpole was especially interested in playfulness and experimentation. His

remodelling of his villa at Strawberry Hill, for instance, was presented as a private

diversion, as Walpole combined Gothic style with modem methods of interior

decoration, turning a simple country house into a fanciful and fashionable residence

of a man of leisure. The first edition of The Castle of Otranto was also offered to the

public as a spoof of a counterfeited medieval text. Walpole's portrayal of incest and

family secrets can be seen as a satirical take on the culture of sensibility and the idea

of domesticity-themes that he later returned to in a more provocative manner in

The Mysterious Mother (1768). Part of this chapter will pay attention to the prefaces

and postscripts of Walpole's novel and drama that functioned to legitimise his

unconventional content with accompanying claims to literary merit, patriotic

affiliation, and adherence to classical rules. Walpole's notion of "private" pleasure, I

will argue here, following Guest, was made possible by the way that he displayed his

familiarity with a recognised "public" standard of taste.

In contrast to Walpole, Beckford was more ambitious and less discreet in

offering his works to the public. My second chapter will explore the trajectory of

Beckford's works to see how they were shaped by events and pressures that

Beckford encountered at different times in his life. It will start in the 1770s, during

which Beckford produced his adolescent jeux d'esprit, Biographical Memoirs of

Extraordinary Painters (1780) and The Vision (written 1777, published 1930), and it

65 Robert Kiely, for example, sees Walpole and other male Gothic writers such as William Be~kford,
William Godwin and Charles Maturin as precursors of the Romantic tradition in the noyel, In The
Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1979) 1-2.

21
will go on to focus on his Oriental tales of the 1780s, in the context of his concern

with critical reception and the establishment of his distinctive authorial identity.

Despite its moral framework and his contemporaries' face-value reading of it I will

argue, Vathek (1786) departs from other moralistic pseudo-Oriental writings in its

depiction of its morally unrestrained hero, and in its playful engagement with the

Oriental more generally; instead, Vathek perhaps shows more kinship with Anthony

Hamilton's French burlesques of fantastic, Oriental fictions, thereby demonstrating

Beckford's cultural ambition to establish himself as a literary avant-gardist who

brought novelty to the genre. His Episodes of Vathek (written 1783-86, published

1912) explores more blatantly and extensively the theme of sexual transgression,

presenting Beckford as antagonistic to the anti-aristocratic discourse that was

advancing the values of moral probity and sexual restraint. At the same time,

however, Beckford, like Walpole, was also concerned to safeguard his image and

reputation. While his liberal politics and hostility to the culture of sensibility are still

evident in his later anonymous satires, Modem Novel Writing (1796) and Azemia

(1797), Beckford now turned his artistic interests to the presentation of Fonthill

Abbey, also assuming a series of patriotic poses in an effort to rehabilitate himself.

Whereas Walpole and Beckford regarded writing as a recreation and

distanced themselves from the market, Lewis was eager to establish himself as a

professional writer. My third chapter will discuss Lewis's various works to see how

his revision of the "male Gothic" ultimately transferred "male Gothic" writing from

an exclusive and elite to a popular realm. Most of his early works were written as

satires of contemporary women's writing, and his best-known work, The Monk, is a

libertine reworking of Ann Radcliffe's celebrated Gothic romance, The Mysteries of

Udolpho (1794). As well as revising a number of "Gothic" antecedents, Lewis also

22
worked in the tradition of "philosophical" pornography, but while The Monk clearly

has a strong political resonance, as I will argue, it remains difficult to pin down its

politics. After the scandal that The Monk caused, Lewis seemed to become steadily

less engaged with politics, seeking instead to annoy critics and to pander to the

popular taste for sensationalism and theatrical effects. In doing this, though, as I will

show, he sought to keep alive the memory of the original scandal surrounding The

Monk, continually revisiting features of or scenes from that work, and fashioning

himself as a deliberately irresponsible writer, who embraced the nickname he was

given-"Monk Lewis."

Chapter four will examine Byron in the light of the "male Gothic" tradition I

have discussed, a tradition which, I will argue, offers a more illuminating means of

contextualising his work than regarding him as a "Romantic" writer. Byron

transformed the figure of the Gothic villain-hero into the so-called Byronic hero,

who embodies aspects of Byron's personality and his liberal, oppositional stance.

The interplay between his life and writing, I will argue, encouraged an identification

with his heroes (albeit that Byron playfully denied this in his prefaces and notes),

which, in turn, further reinforced the connection between him and his protagonists. I

will read Byron's early works such as the first two cantos of Childe Harold's

Pilgrimage (1812) and the Turkish tales (1813-14) alongside his travels in Southern

Europe and the Levant, in order to consider the fictionalisation of the poet which

these works offer. After his separation from his wife in 1816, Byron seemed to be

less concerned with securing public favour, and his play, Manfred (1817), I will

claim, might be seen to dramatise a sympathetic picture of Byron as a remorseful,

self-exiled husband, at the same time as it provides a response to Caroline Lamb's

moralistically Faustian novel Glenarvon (1816). Involving himself in revolutionary

23
activities in Italy and Greece, Byron's writing became increasingly provocative, as

he appeared to present himself as an icon of rebellion, not only against political and

religious authority, but also conservative moral and sexual values. While Byron was

highly esteemed in Europe as a supporter of independence movements, however. his

writing and self-presentation met with less approval in the reactionary society of

nineteenth-century Britain. As I will demonstrate towards the end of the chapter.

contemporary responses to the works of Byron and Sir Walter Scott sometimes

celebrated Scott's heroes as exhibiting a "healthy" masculinity in contrast to the

"disease" exhibited in Byron's work. 66 I will conclude by investigating the

posthumous reception of Byron alongside the severe backlash against other "male

Gothic" writers such as Walpole and Beckford in the nineteenth century. While

many contemporary readers of the writers I will be discussing took their works at

face value, and did not interrogate the poses which they performed, it is fair to say

that in later criticism the playful self-representation of these writers was viewed with

increasing suspicion and disapproval.

66See Ina Ferris's discussion of reception of Scott and Byron in The Achievement of Literary
Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 242-43.

24
 CHAPTER 1

HORACE WALPOLE AND THE "ARISTOCRATISATION"

OF THE GOTHIC

In his history of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark pointed out that Walpole "did not

so much popularise as aristocratise Gothic," as he adapted his historical and

architectural knowledge to the prevalent taste for flimsy, decorative Gothic and

Chinoiserie styles, and presented the improvement of his villa at Strawberry Hill as

the product of amusement rather than craftsmanship.! Central to Walpole's interest,

as James Watt similarly puts it, was "to fashion an 'aristocratic' identity-not simply

reducible to his privileged social position-in all of the fields (architectural,

antiquarian, literary) in which he operated."2 This chapter aims further to elaborate

on the relation between Walpole's "aristocratic" self-fashioning and artistic

production, focusing particularly on The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious

Mother. Like his "aristocratisation" of the Gothic at Strawberry Hill, Walpole's

engagement with the Gothic in his fiction reveals an attempt on his part to create a

licensed realm of playfulness and experimentation. This process of "licensing,"

however, also involved Walpole in acknowledging and accommodating other current

literary and cultural traditions. To defend his daring performance with Otranto, for

example, Walpole aligned his novel with Shakespeare's works, attacking

contemporary French writer such as Voltaire, and thereby appealing to the national

mood of patriotic fervour after Britain's victory in the Seven Years War. In the

I Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Murray. 197 ... ) 61.
2 James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1999) 13.

UN1VE . :TY\
OF Y25 I

I'SF
.' ...
 postscript to his play, Walpole similarly allied himself with a "natiye" tradition of

drama, while also asserting that his play had been composed according to the

classical rule of dramatic unities. Fundamental to Walpole's Gothic writing,

therefore, is the sometimes incongruous conjunction of his desire for respect and

acceptance from the public on one hand, and his appetite for innovation and novelty

on the other. In the light of this, my analysis of Walpole's engagement with the

Gothic will seek to attend to his apparently ceaseless quest for social distinction,

while at the same time challenging what historians such as Gerald Newman have

presented as the rigid division between an aristocratic culture of self-promotion,

hedonism and extravagance and a reactive, "middle-class" culture of restraint and

responsibility. 3

WALPOLE'S SENSE OF THE GOTHIC

The term "Gothic" was extensively used in the eighteenth century, and its meanings

were various, depending on the context in which it was applied. 4 Richard Terry has

observed an apparent "rivalry" between the two literary traditions of the classical and

the Gothic, the popularity of the latter being attributed by many scholars to the

increasingly widespread reaction against the rules and rationality of classicism. 5 In

the case of Walpole, however, the relations between the Gothic and the classical are

more complicated than this. Referring to Richard Hurd's influential contribution to

3 See Newman, Rise of English Nationalism 73.

4 For the meaning and the application of the term "Gothic" in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, see, for example, Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1952), and Alfred LongueiL
"The Word 'Gothic' in Eighteenth Century Criticism," Modem Language Notes 38.8 (1923): 453-60.
5 See Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660-1781 (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2001), Chapter 9: "Classicists and Gothicists: the Division of the Estate" 186-323.

26
the so-called romance revival, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), for

example, Harriet Guest has shown that the Gothic and the classical in this period

were not always straightforwardly antithetical categories: glossing Hurd, Guest

argues that the historical specificity of the Gothic in fact guaranteed the rationality

and superiority of the modem reader, enabling him to delight in Gothic literature

"because it [was] only true and real in relation to specific historical moments and

circumstances."6 In the 1760s and l770s, as Guest argues, the Gothic signified-

among other things-a licensed space in which there was "a complex of shadowed

relations between the extrapolitical and the feminine, the trivial and the illicit, the

corrupting and the pleasurable."7 An habituated familiarity with the classical in many

ways made possible an involvement with the Gothic, therefore, since it legitimised

the pleasure that one could experience in the imaginative extravagance of historically

distant fictions.

Guest's analysis helps explain why Walpole's dealing with the Gothic

precluded any antagonism towards the classical. In his correspondence, Walpole

showed little appreciation for medieval literature, affirming that he preferred "all arts

when perfected" and that he "love[ d] Chaucer better in Dryden and Baskerville, than

in his own language and dress."g While admiring the Greeks and the Romans,

Walpole's literary taste privileged the neoclassical or "Augustan" revision of

classical poets, as he asserted to John Pinkerton when he wrote that Nicolas

Boileau's The Lutrin (1674), Samuel Garth's The Dispensary (1699) and Alexander

Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714) provided "standards of grace and

6 Guest, "Wanton Muse" 123.

7 Ibid. 120.
g Walpole to John Pinkerton, 26 June 1785, Selected Letters (London: Den~, 19~6) 106-07. H~re.
Walpole is perhaps referring to Dryden's reworking of Chaucer and other wnters m ~a~les AncIent
and Modem (1700), and to John Baskerville, the printer who introduced modem pnntmg types to
several old texts.

27
elegance, not to be paralleled by antiquity."9 One of Walpole's earliest \vritings.

Aedes Walpolianae: or, A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton-Hall

in Norfolk, The Seat of the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford

(1743), is a panegyric on his father's taste for Renaissance and neoclassical fine arts.

The book is a catalogue of Sir Robert's collection of pictures, mostly by Old

Masters. Its Dedication exalts the magnificent construction of the Palladian

Houghton Hall: the "grandeur of the whole building," as Walpole stated, was an

index of his father's "wealth," "power," and, above all, "true nobility."lo

Walpole's complex relationship with his father might be seen as the ground

upon which his indulgence in the Gothic was built. At the outset, Walpole seemed to

have followed his father's footsteps. In 1741, he was elected an MP for the borough

of Carlington in Cornwall, and then was re-elected for Castle Rising and King's

Lynn in 1754 and 1757. His political career, however, was, as W. S. Lewis has

noted, "erratic." I I For one thing, his views and conducts were centred on his strong

attachment to his father and his personal alliance with his cousin, Henry Seymour

Conway. For another, he was not active in Parliament, making only a few speeches,

the most memorable of which was probably his maiden speech in 1742 which

expressed a vigorous opposition to a motion for an inquiry into his father's

administration. His passion for politics, though it never waned, was rather expressed

in forms that, according to Archibald Foord, "absolved him from public

accountability for his words," since he gave his advice personally to Conway and

9 Walpole to Pinkerton, 26 June 1785, Selected Letters 219. .'

10 Horace Walpole, The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, vol.2 (1798; HIldeshelm: Verlag,
1975) 223.
11 W. S. Lewis, Horace Walpole (London: Hart-Davis, 1961) 70.

28
 voiced his political concerns mostly in private correspondence and memOIrs, or

occasionally in anonymous pamphlets. 12

It is worth noting that the time when Walpole entered Parliament coincided

with the decline of his father's power. After Sir Robert's resignation in 1742 and his

death in 1745, Walpole witnessed the succession of Henry Pelham and his brother

the duke of Newcastle, both of whom he disliked for what he believed to be their

intrigues and betrayal of his father's ministry. At this point, Walpole seems to have

started to divert his interests away from politics, boasting to Horace Mann in June

1747 of his "retir[ing] to a little new farm ... just out of Twickenham."13 The house,

later named Strawberry Hill, was to become a preoccupation of Walpole, as he

developed a lavish plan of improving it into a "Gothic castle," a process which took

from 1749 to 1776. 14 In his letter to Conway, he enthusiastically spoke of the place

as "a little play-thing-house that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, ... the prettiest

bauble you ever saw."15 Walpole's reference to the idea of "play" and to the

diminutive dimensions of the house suggests that he regarded Strawberry Hill as a

trifle or a sport, which provided him with a means of retirement from the supposedly

corrupting political sphere. Walpole likewise presented his later involvement with

the Gothic as an escape from his "public" political concerns. In the summer of 1764

when he composed Otranto, Walpole mentioned to William Cole that he "was very

12 Archibald Foord, "The Only Unadulterated Whig," Horace Walpole: Writer, Politician, and
Connoisseur: Essays on the 250th Anniverary of Walpole's Birth, ed. Warren Hunting Smith (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1967): 34. Walpole's anonymous pamphlets include the satirical tract, A Letter from
Xo Ho, A Chinese Philosopher at London, at his Friend Lien Chi, at Peking (1757) in which he
attacked the government's brutal treatment of Admiral Byng on the loss of Minorca; A Counter-
Address to the Public, on the Late Dismission of a General Officer (1764) in which he defended
Conway upon his voting against the government's persecution of John Wilkes and its oppressive
issuing of "the general warrants"; and his ironic Account of the Giants Lately Discovered (1766)
which showed his opposition to the Stamp Act and Britain's colonial interest in America.
13 Walpole to Horace Mann, 5 June 1747, Letters, vol. 2, 85.
14 Walpole to George Montagu, 3 Sept. 1763, Letters, vol. 4, 111.
15 Walpole to Henry Conway, 8 June 1747, Letters, vol. 2, 86.

29
glad to think of anything rather than politics."16 The Gothic, in this sense, is

"extrapolitical" in that Walpole represented it as a sidestepping or liberation from his

public responsibility. Walpole's parliamentary occupation helped to license his

private and sportive indulgence in the Gothic. The Gothic, in other words, is not

straightforwardly opposed but, as Guest asserts, "supportive, complementary to the

public seriousness of classical truth" and "political reality."17

It is important here to distinguish Walpole from other Gothicists or romance

and medieval revivalists in the period. In their writings, scholars such as Richard

Hurd and Thomas Warton attempted to invest the Gothic with cultural significance

by reviving the customs of chivalry and celebrating medieval romance as crucial to

the development of English literature, hence presenting the Middle Ages as the fount

of national culture. 18 Warton, for example, discussed Spenser's epic in Observations

on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1754) with a detailed analysis of the origin of

romances-a project which was carried on and extended into a large-scale socio-

historical account of ancient customs, manners and literature in the four-volume

History of English Poetry (1774-81). Walpole, on the other hand, often expressed

indifference towards this "national" sense of the Gothic. While regarding Spenser as

"tedious," "a John Bunyan in rhyme,,,19 he was also contemptuous towards the

pedantic approach of Warton, confiding to William Mason that he "never saw so

many entertaining particulars crowded together with so little entertainment and

vivacity" as in Warton's History of English Poetry.20 Before Letters on Chivalry and

Romance, Hurd published Moral and Political Dialogues (1759), presenting a long

16 Walpole to William Cole, 9 Mar. 1765, Letters, vol. 4, 328.

17 Guest, "Wanton Muse" 127.
18 Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: the Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century
(London: Athlone, 1964) 43.
19 Ibid. 173.
20 Walpole to William Mason, 7 Apr. 1774, Selected Letters 193.

30
(and unresolved) debate between the figures of "Addison" and "Arbuthnot."

concerning the character of the present age. In this case, however, Walpole criticised

Hurd for not being historically minded, censuring him in a letter to Henry Zouch in

February 1760 as "a most disagreeable writer" whose Moral and Political Dialogues

was "void of all veracity," since Hurd did not "give himself the least trouble to

counterfeit the style of anyone [of his characters]" despite his affirmation that they

were "the genuine productions of the speakers. "21

In his postscript to the Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors (1758),

Walpole vehemently opposed any idealised conception of the medieval period. From

the beginning, he claimed to "defraud my country of any sparkle of genius that

glimmered in our ages of darkness," drawing upon the horrific account of John

Montacute, Earl of Salisbury in the fourteenth century to justify the reason why the

earl was dropped out of his list of illustrious authors.22 Whereas Montacute was

portrayed as a chivalric lover and a gallant knight in the poems of Christina of Pisan,

his admirer, and in William Dugdale's account, Walpole relied on historical

evidence from Thomas Walsingbam, who stated that Montacute was a confidential

tool of King Richard II-an accomplice in the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, the

king's uncle, and a treacherous soldier who subsequently attempted to assassinate

Henry of Lancaster. Walpole, in his postscript, argued for a more careful reading of

"the sublimated notions of chivalry" and the refined portrait of the Middle Ages

"commonly conjured up by the pen of a romantic lady," and instead persuaded his

readers to pay closer attention to other "coarse evidence," "devoid of sentiment," like

historical facts.23 In contrast to those attempts to rewrite the past as an era of glory

21 Walpole to Henry Zouch, 4 Feb. 1760, Letters, vol. 3, 289-90.

22 Walpole, Works, vol. 1,560.
23 Ibid.

31
and heroism, Walpole can be seen to contend for a more soberly historical image of

the Gothic, in all its vulgar detail.

Just as the term "Gothic" carried numerous meanings in the culture at large,

then, so too did it mean different things for Walpole, depending on the context in

which it was invoked. Although Walpole never presented himself as a historian, he

often criticised others' accounts of the past for their lack of historical authenticity. In

the fields of art and literature, by contrast, Walpole saw the Gothic in more sportive

terms, as a category signifying aesthetic freedom, creativity, and playfulness; in a

letter to William Cole in July 1778, for example, Walpole admitted that he "like[d]

chivalry and romance" since "[t]hey all furnish one with ideas and visions ... A

Gothic church or convent fills one with romantic dreams."24 As I have already

suggested, this sportiveness is most obviously evident in Walpole's "Gothic castle"

at Strawberry Hill. By the time that Walpole started redecorating his house in 1749,

Gothic architecture was already in fashion, as an article in The World in 1753

attested: "[ a] few years ago ... everything was Gothic; our house, our beds, our

books, our couches were all copied from some parts or other of our old cathedrals."25

Indeed, as Clark observed, Walpole was not the innovator of Gothic style in

architecture, but rather the first person who made use of the Gothic as a site of

"aristocratic" frivolity and display.26 "Strawberry Hill," according to Paul Langford,

"was to Horace what Houghton had been to Sir Robert."27 The difference between

the architectural styles of Houghton Hall and Strawberry Hill was remarked on by

Walpole in his letter to Mann in 1750: "The Grecian is only proper for magnificent

24 Walpole to William Cole, 12 July 1778, Letters, vol. 7, 94.

25 qtd. in Clark, Gothic Revival 53.
26 See my reference to Clark earlier on page 23. ,,' .
27Paul Langford, "Walpole, Horatio , fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797), Oxford DIctIonary of
National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004, Online ed. May 2005, 6 Aug. 2006. <http:,/www.oxforddnb.
comlview/article/28596> .

32
and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments, look ridiculous

when crowded into a closet or a cheesecake-house. The variety is little, and admits

no charming irregularities."28 While the classical design of Houghton confirmed Sir

Robert's status as a public, political icon, the "variety" and "irregularities" of

Walpole's Gothic "cheesecake" house were to be complementary to the self-image

that he sought to project, of a man of taste and leisure.

Walpole presented the remodelling of Strawberry Hill as a private diversion.

It started from Walpole's and John Chute's expeditions to copy details from ruins,

castles, cathedrals and old manors. Later they invited Bentley to help with the design

of the building and together formed the "Committee of Taste" that would transform

an old country house into Walpole's delightful Gothic villa. While Walpole admired

the "gI00mth,,29 of Gothic buildings, his house was not so dismal or ancient as it was

assumed to be. As Walpole put it in his preface to A Description of the Villa of Mr.

Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-

Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex with an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures,

Curiosities, &c (1774), the house "was built to please my own taste" and "to realise

my own visions."30 The copies and Gothic specimens that Walpole collected were

newly combined and "applied to chimney-pieces, ceilings, windows, balustrades,

loggias, & C."31 Although most of Strawberry Hill's interior designs were based on

copies of Gothic architecture, Walpole used different materials such as wood, paper

and plaster to imitate what had been originally done in stone. His adoption of the

28 Walpole to Horace Mann, 25 Feb. 1750, Letters, vol. 2, 198.

29 The term was first used in his letter of 27 April 1753 in which Walpole described to Horace Mann
his "satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals" on his "Gothic" house. Letters,
vol. 2, 327.
30 Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert
Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex with an Inventory of the
Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c (London: Gregg, 1964) iv.
31 Ibid. i.

33
French papier-mache, the use of paper and stucco for wall and ceiling decorations,

was not only modem and innovative but also heterogenous-ranging from the stone-

coloured wall with "Venetian prints" to the light, baronial balustrade similar to that

of the staircase at Rouen Cathedral, and the fan-vaulted ceiling, based on Henry

VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey.

Clark presents the eclecticism and frippery of Walpole's Gothic as a

"Rococo" style, a "purely decorative" and "disorderly" style in which attention was

paid to small details rather than the whole architectural structure. 32 Maintaining only

a superficial connection between its Gothic decorations and their original models,

Walpole's sham Gothic castle amazed many uninitiated visitors far beyond their

expectation. When the French "Duc de Nivernois" entered the Tribune, for example,

he was reported to have "pull [ed] off his hat," but was suddenly disappointed by the

scene in front of him, exclaiming "Ce n'est pas une chapelle pourtant" after having

realised that the room did not actually resemble a chapel. 33 Indeed, most of the

chambers were not only embellished with modem, costly furniture, but also crowded

with numerous collections of paintings, accessories and curiosities. Letitia-Matilda

Hawkins, one of Walpole's neighbours at Twickenham, observed that the house was

"anything but habitable."34 Walpole himself admitted to his niece Mary Berry late in

his life that "every true Goth must perceive that they [the rooms] are more the works

of fancy than imitation. "35

Walpole, nevertheless, did not present Strawberry Hill as a truly private

residence. Later when the house was more fully furnished, Walpole offered it as a

museum, issuing tickets, rules and catalogues for general visitors-though in so

32 Clark, Gothic Revival 50.

33 Walpole to Horace Mann, 30 Apr. 1763, Letters, vol. 4, 73.
34 Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches and Memoirs (1822), Sabor, ed.,
Horace Walpole 253.
35 qtd. in Clark, Gothic Revival 61.

34
doing he rather delighted in astounding his visitors Gust as he did with the Duc de

Nivemois) with his lavish, unconventional architectural style. At the beginning,

Walpole seemed to rejoice in blending "sharawadgi" or the Chinese lack of

symmetry in the construction of his house and garden. But, as David Porter has

argued, when Chinoiserie in architecture began to go out of fashion in the late 1750s,

Walpole was quickly to "repudiat[ e] his earlier belief in the possibility of productive

architectural synthesis between east and west" and, in his correspondence and other

writings, attempted to purify the Gothic of any foreign influence and reestablish it as

a substantial British style. 36 While taking Strawberry Hill as a site for architectural

experimentation, Walpole was careful to protect his image as a man of taste with a

strong sense of patriotism. This conjunction of experimentation and patriotism is

also characteristic of Walpole's literary Gothic works, in which patriotic

protestations offered a licence to stake a claim to novelty.

THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO

Walpole's playful literary engagement with the Gothic is most obviously seen in the

two prefaces to Otranto. In the frontispiece of the novel's first edition, Walpole

presented his work as a translation by "WILLIAM MARSHALL" of an Italian

manuscript written by "ONUPHRIO MURAL TO, CANON of the Church of St.

NICHOLAS at OTRANTO."37 In the preface, the editor/translator states that the

work, printed in 1529 in the "black letter," was found "in the library of an ancient

36 David Porter, "From Chinese to Goth: Walpole and the Gothic Repudiation of Chinoiserie,"
Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (1999): 52.
37 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 57. Subsequent references to Otranto will be given in parentheses
after quotations in the text.

35
Catholic family in the north of England" (59). Suppositions about the time in which

the story might have been written follow, along with an erudite but unresolved

discussion concerning this historical background, the adoption of Spanish names for

minor characters, the author's writing style, and so on; subsequently suggesting that

the work might have been composed during the Reformation, the editor/translator

then states that "an artful priest" may have "avail[ ed] himself of his abilities as an

author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions" (59).

Numerous writers in the 1760s expressed an interest in the recuperation of

"ancient" literature. Between 1760 and 1763, for example, James Macpherson

offered a series of translations of the Scottish Celtic epics of Ossian, while shortly

afterwards Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765.

In 1769, Thomas Chatterton published his transcription of what he claimed to be a

work by a fifteenth-century clergyman from Bristol named Thomas Rowley. Like the

works of Macpherson and Chatterton, which were later proved to be counterfeits,

Walpole's pseudo-Gothic story exploits the idea of deep historical provenance as a

mask for original composition. But as Nick Groom points out, writers such as

Macpherson were also preoccupied with the "question of origins" of their poems,

hence their antiquarian research into the cultural and historical context of their

writings in copious notes, prefaces and accompanying dissertations. 38 Walpole, on

the other hand, had little sympathy towards such works, expressing his scepticism

about the authenticity of Ossian39 and refusing to be Chatterton's patron since he did

not believe that Rowley's poems were genuine fifteenth-century productions.

In Otranto, Walpole does not seem to pay serious attention to the antiquarian

dimension of his writing; while presenting a text which purports to be "ancient," he

38 Nick Groom, The Making of Percy's Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) 67-68.
39As Walpole told George Montagu in his letter of 8 December 1761: "Fingal is come out ... I cannot
believe it genuine ... " Selected Letters 187.

36
can instead be seen to mock or ridicule other contemporary forgeries. If Otranto is to

be compared with anything, it is perhaps more fruitful to read it alongside his later

publications such as Hieroglyphic Tales (written 1766-72, published 1785), in the

context of his propensity for "private" diversion. Like the first preface of Otranto,

Walpole's preface to the Hieroglyphic Tales includes the editor's descriptive

observations on the tale's origin, but here they are so blatantly exaggerated that they

can only be regarded as a fantastic mockery of near-contemporary forgeries. His

ascription of the tales to "Kemanrlegorpikos, son of Quat,"40 for example, heavy-

handedly parodies Macpherson's claim that his Gaelic poems are works of Ossian,

son of Fingal. Since Macpherson's Ossianic poems were revealed to have exploited

themes and references from classical materials, Walpole playfully declared his tales

to be of the same nature, stressing that his prose translation of Homer "shall make

him [Homer] so unlike himself that nobody will think he could be an original

writer," and that it will eventually be "preferred to the Illiad" (107). The six tales, as

Walpole put it in his letter, were initially written as a "private entertainment" for

Caroline Campbell, the niece of Lady Ailesbury.41 The humour was largely based on

Walpole's exaggerated accounts of figures such as the loquacious and erudite

princess Gronovia, who recounts "troubles that have agitated Europe for these last

two hundred years, ... the doctrines of grace, free-will, predestination, reprobation,

justification & c," (112) to an emperor in "A New Arabian Night's Entertainment," a

burlesque of Scheherazade's narration in the original tale. "Mi Li. A Chinese Fairy

Tale," by contrast, is filled with references to people in Walpole's circle such as

Caroline Campbell and Lady Ailesbury, as well as to General Conway's Chinese

40 Horace Walpole, Hieroglyphic Tales, The Castle of Otranto and Hieroglyphic Tales, ed. Robert
Mack (London: Everyman, 1993) 107. Subsequent references to Hieroglyphic Tales will be given in
parentheses after quotations in the text.
41 qtd. in Frank, ed., "Horace Walpole: A Brief Chronology," Otranto and Mysterious Mother 39. No
description is given concerning the letter, except that it was written in August 1766.

37
 garden. These tales, not surprisingly, perplexed those on the outside of this circle

when they were first published; as Charles Burney noted in the Monthly Review

(1785), they testified to their author's "odd fancies," with many allusions "extremely

sarcastic, personal, and sometimes profane. "42

Like Hieroglyphic Tales, Otranto was not a translation but an amusing spoof

of a counterfeited ancient text. As he confided in his letters to Joseph Warton and

William Mason, the novel was "begun without any plan at all. "43 The origin of the

tale, as he related to Cole, was "a dream" in which he imagined himself encountering

"a gigantic hand in annour" on the "uppennost banister" of the staircase of his

Gothic castle, and which prompted him to start writing and then become "so

engrossed" in his work that he completed it "in less than two months."44 Together

with his emphasis on the novel as "a little story-book" and a "trifle,,,45 Walpole's

allusion to its rapid composition and the dream set in his own house positions

Otranto alongside Strawberry Hill as "a play-thing" or jeu d'esprit that Walpole

indulged in during his leisure hours. The work, moreover, was initially circulated

among Walpole's acquaintances, thereby becoming an entertaining subject of

conversation among his "in-crowd." George James Williams, for example, told

George Selwyn that after reading the novel he was dazzled by the grotesque "ghosts

and enchantments" in the story and believed that Walpole must have written it

"when he had some feverish disposition in him."46 Knowing that the "extraordinary"

book was Walpole's creation, Mason expressed his appreciation of the delightful

spoof, asserting to Walpole that if "it proves me your dupe, I should be glad to be

42 qtd. in Mack, ed., "Walpole and His Critics," Otranto and Hieroglyphic Tales 162.
43 Walpole to Joseph Warton, 16 Mar. 1765; and Walpole to William Mason, 17 Apr. 1765, Letters,
vol. 4, 331, 343.
44 Walpole to William Cole, 9 Mar. 1765, Letters, vol. 4, 328.
45 Walpole to William Cole, 28 Feb. 1765; and Walpole to Joseph Warton, 16 Mar. 1765. Letters,
vol. 4, 327, 331.
46 George James Williams to George Selwyn, 19 Mar. 1765, Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 66.

38
duped agam every year of my life. "47 Otranto, in this sense, was contrived by

Walpole in order to advance his "aristocratic" self-fashioning, by appealing to a

small clique of knowledgeable readers, while at the same time confusing all others.

In the novel's second edition in April 1765, Walpole revealed his authorial

identity and supplied another preface to defend his earlier performance. The subtitle

"A Gothic Story" that he added to the new edition refers to the novel's broadly

medieval setting, but it also suggests further nuances of meaning, as the first part of

this chapter has shown, in connection to Walpole's particular conception of the

Gothic. Like his "Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill, Walpole's "Gothic" novel might

be seen to function as a locale for eclecticism and experimentalism-a space in

which he could deviate from and even subvert what was held to be conventional in

literature. As he stated in his preface to the second edition,

It [Otranto] was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and
the modem. In the fonner, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter,
nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.
Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been
damned up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if, in the latter species,
Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been
totally excluded from old romances. (65)

As in Samuel Johnson's The Rambler (No.4, 1750), prose fiction was often divided

into the "old" and "new" styles of romance. The latter, better known now as the

novel, was explained by Johnson to "exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by

accidents that daily happen, in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities

which are really to be found in conversing with mankind."48 The verisimilitude of the

novel, according to Johnson, helps fortify the reader's knowledge of nature and life,

47 Walpole to William Mason, 17 Apr. 1765, Letters, vol. 4, 343.

48 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate
and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1969) 19.

39
and is therefore preferable to the old romance, which, containing "wonders" and

"incredibilities," is "the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas" and is

suitable only for "the young, the ignorant, and the idle."49 Whereas Johnson

maintained a clear-cut division between fancy and realism, Walpole saw the

possibility to reconcile the two opposing elements in his Gothic work, proclaiming in

his preface that he had created "a new species of romance" (70).

As I have already mentioned, the term "Gothic" in the work's subtitle carries

potentially patriotic meanings. In his second preface, Walpole claimed that he

aligned his narrative with Shakespeare's tragedies, Hamlet and Julius Caesar, in

which there was a tonal mixture of buffoonery in the domestics and solemnity in the

main protagonists. He attacked Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare in his new

commentary on Pierre Comeille's tragedies. While Voltaire censured Shakespeare's

combination of the comic and the tragic as unrefined and "intolerable" (67), Walpole

pointed out that Voltaire himself had earlier defeated his own principle in his

comedy, L'Enfant Prodigue (1736), and in the prefatory letter to Scipione Maffei

which was prefixed to his translation of Maffei's Merope (1743). For Walpole,

Voltaire's erroneous judgement of Shakespeare not only itself disproved the

allegedly superior taste of the French in drama, but would also "reduce poetry from

the lofty effort of imagination, to the puerile and most contemptible labour" (69). In

this sense, Walpole presented his Gothic romance as a domain in which British

literary creativity was battling against the constrained imagination of the French.

Publishing Otranto only a year after the end of the Seven Years War, Walpole

capitalised on the widespread patriotic sentiment in Britain, and further legitimised

his jeu d'esprit, as upholding a national tradition of writing.

49 Johnson, Rambler 19-21.

40
 Despite his apparent explanation of the motives behind the first edition of

Otranto, however, Walpole's second preface arguably seeks to confound readers as

much as the first. Whereas the second preface speaks of harmonising the

supernatural and the probable, for example, the tale itself clearly undercuts any such

sense of harmonious balance, such that in the work's opening scene the wedding

ceremony of Prince Conrad and Isabella is interrupted by an ancient, gigantic helmet

which crushes Conrad to pieces. The narrator's account of the "enormous helmet"

offers a grotesque description of it being "an hundred times more large than any

casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of

black features" (74). The helmet, which resembles the one on the statue of Alfonso

the Good in the church of St. Nicholas, is to Manfred the symbol of legitimacy,

representing the rightful owner of Otranto who now vengefully claims the castle

back from him and his grandfather, who had usurped it in Alfonso's time. To ensure

the continuation of his lineage, Manfred decides to divorce his wife and to marry

Isabella. He pursues Isabella along the labyrinthine passages of the castle, and is

obstructed by his grandfather's portrait which "utter[s] a deep sigh and heave[s] its

breast" (81), before quitting the panel and marching along the gallery to escort

Isabella out of Manfred's hands. In a similarly preposterous manner, the narrative

ends with the colossal Alfonso bursting the castle into ruins, ascending towards

heaven and announcing that Theodore, the hero, is Otranto' s true heir.

The marvellous looms large in Walpole's text. It is so essential to the plot

that without the help of it, the story could not be resolved. Walpole's supernatural

romance pioneers the use of a "dark," medieval setting, and themes of family secrets

from the past, in Gothic fiction; as Walpole himself indicated in his first preface, his

story was built upon the moral assumption that "the sins of fathers are visited on

41
their children to the third and fourth generation" (61). However, instead of

consisting of what Hurd called "solemn fancies" or the "machinery to produce the

sublime,"50 Walpole's highly distinctive brand of the supernatural tends towards the

ludicrous; despite his stated attempt to induce "pity" and "terror" (60), his blatantly

extravagant romance, as Watt asserts, "constantly hovers on the verge of bathos."51

Walpole not only presents the supernatural in an apparently flippant manner, but also

makes characters who encounter its effects seem ridiculous, thereby undercutting

what he had claimed in his second preface about making them "think, speak, and act,

as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions"

(65). The villainous protagonist, Manfred, in particular, often comes across as a

comic character. When Theodore points out the resemblance between the lost helmet

on Alfonso's statue and the gigantic one in the courtyard, Manfred instantly accuses

him of being a necromancer and orders him to be imprisoned in the helmet itself.

The domestics, who enthusiastically echo Manfred's words, make the situation more

comic still, as the narrator explains how they, like Manfred, "never reflected how

enormous the disproportion was between the marble helmet that had been in the

church, and that of steel before their eyes; nor how impossible it was for a youth,

seemingly not twenty, to wield a piece of armour of so prodigous a weight" (77).

Persistently asking his servants during the search for Isabella whether "all the

pictures [are] in their places" (89) and whether they have seen or heard anything

unnatural, Manfred is less a threatening sexual predator than an absurd, cowardly

figure desperate for a wife who will produce him an heir.

The themes of feudal tyranny and the reestablishment of the legitimate line of

inheritance were commonplace in both old and new styles of romance. Before

50 Richard Hurd, The Works of Richard Hurd, D.D. Lord Bishop of Worcester, 1811, vol. 4 (New
York: AMS, 1967) 283, 295.
51 Watt, Contesting the Gothic 34.

42
Otranto, Thomas Leland had published Longsword, Earl of Salisbury in 1762. The

narrative, based on ancient English history, recounts the misfortunes of Lord

William, Earl of Salisbury, the second son of Henry II, and his return from France to

England to claim his title and estate back from the usurping Lord Raymond. While

Leland apologised for the freedom he took in "altering or enlarging" the historical

account in the Advertisement,52 his imaginary romance is thoroughly void of any

fabulous or supernatural element. His medieval background was commensurate with

the increasingly approved concept of chivalry, as the story repeatedly celebrates

Lord William's knightly courage as well as his "magnanimity and generous

humanity."53 Hence, the book was well received by the public, with one reviewer

stating that it was "a new and agreeable species of writing, in which the beauties of

poetry and the advantages of history are happily united."54 Walpole's fabricated

historical framework of Otranto, on the contrary, was more problematic than this

since it heavily relied on the marvellous. Whereas Walpole's acquaintances

understood the humour and triviality of the novel, other readers were rather

bewildered by it as they tended to take his novel at face-value alone. John

Langhorne, for example, changed his attitude towards Walpole's work after learning

that the extraordinary novel was not a product of the past, but a modem invention.

Whereas he commended the depiction of "human manners, passions, and pursuits" in

his unsigned review of the first edition of Otranto in the Monthly Review of

February 1765, his second review in May condemned the novel as inculcating "a

false taste in a cultivated period of learning" as well as "re-establishing the barbarous

52 Thomas Leland, Advertisement, Longsword. Earl of Salisbury: An Historical Romance, vol. I

(London, 1762), English Short Title Catalogue, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Group, 8
May 2006 <http://galenet.galegroup.comlservletiECCO>. No pag.
53 Leland, Longsword 35.
54 qtd. in E. 1. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999)
60.

43
superstitions of Gothic devilism!"55 Later, John Dunlop denounced Walpole's Gothic

novel in History of Fiction (1814): "What analogy have skulls or skeletons-sliding

panels-damp vaults-trap doors-and dismal apartments, to the tented fields of

chivalry and its airy enchantments?"56 For Dunlop, the only satisfactory answer was

to see Otranto as a parody or an anti-romance, like "Don Quixote," which "was

written to expose the romances of chivalry, by an aggravated representation of their

absurdities. "57

In addition to the marvels of old romances, the emphasis on morality and

probability in modem novels is also an object of Walpole's jest and ridicule. Otranto,

as he told Madame du Deffand in March 1767, was not "the book for the present age,

which seeks only cold reason."58 Indeed, Walpole had a rather low opinion of

contemporary fiction. Though it is now arguable whether or not the "rise of the

novel" specifically resulted from the expansion of the middle class (as Ian Watt

influentially suggested 59), Walpole's correspondence shows how he saw the genre as

well as other current types of writing as being increasingly dominated by "middling

writers" for whom, as he told the Countess of Ossory in September 1787, he had

"great contempt."60 Walpole found lohnson's overt concern with moral and

intellectual values as well as his scholarly literary style especially irritating, calling

lohnson's writing "absurd bombast" and describing him as an author with "neither

55 Monthly Review (1765), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 71-72.

56 John Dunlop, The History of Fiction (1814), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 99.
57 Ibid. 100.
58 Walpole to Madame du Deffand, 13 Mar. 1767, Frank, ed., Appendix A, Otranto and Mysterious
Mother 262.
59 See Ian Watt, .!.T.!!:he~R,gis~e~o!.!...f~th~e~N~o~v~e±!.I:~S~tu~d~ie~s~in!!.2:::::D~e~fo~e~,Ri~·c~ha~r~d~so~n~a~n~d~F-!.-'ie~ld=i~ng (London: Hogarth,
1987), Chapter 2: "The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel" 35-59. In this influential study,
Watt argues that "[t]he novel in the eighteenth century was closer to the economic capacity of the
middle-class additions to the reading public than were many of the established and respectable forms
of literature and scholarship" (42).
60 Walpole to the Countess of Ossory, 15 Sept. 1787, Letters, vol. 9, 110.

44
taste nor ear, [and no] criterion of judgement, but his old woman's prejudices. "61 As

for the renowned novelist, Samuel Richardson, Walpole was disdainful of the

sentimentalism and didacticism of his works, viewing Clarissa (1747-48) and Sir

Charles Grandison (1753-54) as "pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller,

and romances as they would be spiritualised by a Methodist teacher. "62 Though

Walpole was pleased with Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768), he thought

that the bawdy Tristam Shandy (1759-67) was "tiresome" as it "makes one smile two

or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours.

The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever attempted and

missed. "63

Referring to contemporary fiction as a whole, Walpole lamented to Monsieur

de Beaumont in a letter in March 1765 that "[t]he world is apt to wear out any plan

whatever."64 "Richardson," he added, had made the novel "insupportable" and this

was why "a god, at least a ghost, was absolutely necessary to frighten us out of too

much senses," hence his composition of Otranto. 65 The marvellous, however, is not

the only index by which Walpole defined his work against other mid-eighteenth-

century novels. His story fixes on the domestic crises of forced marriage and even

incest, and thus carries a shock-value that clearly sets it apart from other novels

published around the same time, works which pay tribute to an advancing morality

of companionate marriage and virtuous family life. Richardson's Pamela, though it

begins as a fiction about a heroine pursued by a malevolent gentleman, ends with the

reformation of the latter and the happy marriage of the couple. Richardson's

61 Walpole to William Mason, 19 Feb. 1781, Selected Letters 201-02.

62 Walpole to Horace Mann, 20 Dec. 1764, Selected Letters 196-97. Here, Walpole slightly
misrepresented Richardson, for he was not a bookseller, but a printer.
63 Walpole to George Montagu, 12 Mar. 1768; and Walpole to David Dalrymple, 4 Apr. 1760,
Selected Letters 180, 198.
64 Walpole to Monsieur de Beaumont, 18 Mar. 1765, Letters, vol. 4, 333.
65 Ibid.

45
emphasis on his heroine's virtue, as the subtitle of "Virtue Rewarded" attests,

embodies what Michael Mckeon terms the "progressive ideology" which sought to

transform the age-old aristocratic value of honour as (pre )determined by external

factors such as rank and pedigree. 66 The novels's focus on the heroines's moral

distinction and emotional sensitivity also participated in "the culture of sensibility"

which, as G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, purported to reform the immoral, and

libertine behaviour especially associated with men from the upper classes. 67 Female

virtue and sensibility, in this sense, did not only smooth over class difference but

also gave women reformative power-even in Clarissa, the heroine's virtue and her

death eventually result in her seducer's grief and repentance.

Walpole's Otranto, in contrast, turns women into two-dimensional characters

who largely occupy the subordinate role of victims. While a novel such as Pamela

intended to "set forth in the most exemplary Lights, the Parental, the Filial, and the

Social Duties,"68 Walpole's narrative seems to adopt a similar plan only to use the

sentimental language of love and loyalty so as to make the relationship between

family members absurd and unconvincing. Hippolita, for example, could be a mock

version of the submissive wife, as she willingly consents to Manfred's malicious

scheme of divorce and incestuous marriage, asserting to her daughter, Matilda, that

"[i]t is not ours to make election for ourselves; heaven, our fathers, and our

husbands, must decide for us" (142). Matilda, in her dying speech, is also a parody

of the dutiful daughter. Being stabbed by Manfred who mistakes her for Isabella, she

reprimands Theodore for cursing her father, calling him a "[c]ruel man!" who

"aggravate[s] the woes of a parent!," and praying to heaven to "bless my father and

66 Michael Mckeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1987) 131, 153.
67 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility xxvi.
68 Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2001) 3.

46
forgive him as I do!" (159). The marriage between Theodore and Isabella at the end.

moreover, is somehow a "forced" one since it is the death of Matilda that brings the

couple together rather than love and companionship, as Theodore persuades himself

that "he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could

forever indulge the melancholy that had taken the possession of his soul" (165).

In contrast to the heroine-centred world of Richardson's Pamela, Walpole's

Otranto focuses almost entirely on the overreaching villain, Manfred. Whereas

Johnson insisted that "vice ... should always disgust"69 and Richardson professed to

make "Vice... deservedly Odious" in his preface to Pamela,70 Walpole seemed to base

his villain upon the tragic hero of the Renaissance Faust myth. Like Faust, who

aspires beyond the limits of his knowledge, Manfred endeavours to transcend the

fate imposed on him by Alfonso the Good's curse attempting to marry his daughter-

in-law in order to preserve his lineage. Within the basic narrative structure of a tragic

drama (consisting of five chapters rather than acts), Walpole presented the downfall

of his protagonist in eccentric detail. Unlike Beckford and Byron, however, Walpole

did not seem to be much concerned to investigate transgressive criminality or

antinomian individualism. Despite the fact that Manfred is at times portrayed as a

suffering figure and a mixture of good and evil,71 he is also an absurd and

pantomimic character. He is no less a dignified villain than Theodore a chivalric

hero, for Theodore virtually has no chance to demonstrate his valour and even

commits a fatal error in wounding Isabella's father whom he mistakes for one of

Manfred's servants. His conduct is more like an echo of Don Quixote'S, especially

when he attempts to assume the role of a knight-errant: "I will die in your defence;

69 Johnson, Rambler 24.

70 Richardson, Pamela 3.
71 As Walpole explains, though Manfred is "[a]shamed ... of his inhuman treatment" of.Hippoli~,
"who returned every injury with new marks of tenderness and duty," he "curbed the yearnmgs of hIS
heart, and did not dare to lean towards pity." The Castle ofOtranto 93.

47
but I am unacquainted with the castle," as he told Isabella (84). As the story shows,

the only means to prove Theodore the hero and the rightful heir of Otranto is

genealogy.

Despite its bizarreness, Walpole's Gothic novel was well-received by

eighteenth-century readers. Its first publication, in particular, elicited a favourable

response from most reviewers. While the Critical Review (January 1765) doubted

whether the editor "speaks seriously or ironically" in the preface and whether the

novel was a "modem fabrick," it was willing to dispense with all the playfulness and

extravagance, and concluded that "the characters are well marked, and the narrative

kept up with surprising spirit and propriety."72 In the Monthly Review (February

1765), John Langhorne similarly noted "the absurdities of Gothic fiction" but at the

same time commended the "accurate and elegant" language and the "highly

finished" characters as evidence of the author's "keenest penetration" and "most

perfect knowledge ofmankind."73 His second review, as I mentioned earlier, focused

only on the problem of the supernatural as a modem fabrication, which was

disturbing to contemporary critics who strove to maintain a strict boundary between

fancy and realism. Over three decades later, T. J. Mathias considered the longer-run

popularity of Walpole's work, observing in The Pursuits of Literature (1796) that

"Otranto Ghosts have propagated their species with unequalled fecundity. The spawn

is in every novel shop."74 Indeed, Walpole's use of the marvellous, the historical

setting and the theme of the legacy of the past provided a ground upon which many

later writers were to create their Gothic fictions. Reeve and Jephson, especially,

claimed to have founded their works upon Otranto, and in doing so shed further light

on Walpole's attempt to construct an "aristocratic" identity.

72 Critical Review (1765), Frank, ed., Appendix B, Otranto and Mysterious Mother 289.
73 Monthly Review (1764), Frank, ed., Appendix B, Otranto and Mysterious Mother 290.
74 qtd. in Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) 45.

48
 In 1777, Reeve anonymously published The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic

Story and reintroduced it, with her name on the title page, as The Old English Baron:

A Gothic Story in 1778. Though calling her novel "the literary offspring of the

Castle of Otranto," Reeve criticised Walpole's supernatural in her preface, pointing

out that it "palls upon the mind" because "the machinery is so violent that it destroys

the effect it is intended to excite."75 The absurdity and improbability of Walpole's

romance, as she observed, "destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of

attention, excite laughter" (3). Her revision of Otranto would therefore entice the

reader to remain "within the utmost verge of probability" and the depiction of the

supernatural would be directed towards "good and useful purposes" (2-3). The

outline of the story chiefly concerns the mysterious death of Arthur, Lord Lovel, and

the usurpation of his title and property by his brother, Sir Walter Lovel. The true heir

of Lord Lovel and the hero of the tale, Edmund, is a servant of Baron Fitz-Owen, the

new tenant of Castle Lovel. Rumours about the haunted apartment spread among the

domestics and Edmund courageously spends three nights in the chamber, in which

he dreams of the former Lord Lovel and his wife, who inform him of the crimes of

the past and of his own true nobility. When Edmund's identity is disclosed and the

criminal punished, the castle is restored to Edmund who then becomes the next Lord

Lovel, and marries Baron Fitz-Owen's daughter.

Reeve's Gothic work transports Walpole's medieval Italy to the closer and

more familiar setting of western England in the reign of Henry VI. Like Leland's

Longsword, Reeve's novel does not pay much attention to historical accuracy, but in

portraying the exercise of justice, gallantry and benevolence, it advocates a patriotic

view of Britain's glorious past, in contrast to Walpole's representation of a more

75 Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron, ed. James Trainer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) 3. Subsequent
references to the novel will be given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

49
disturbing-if also less specific-history. Supernatural agency is kept within the

realm of reason and probability in Reeve's work, for it manifests itself only in

dreams, which are endowed with the useful function of uncovering the past and

assisting the hero to restore his family. Reeve's reiteration of Edmund's outstanding

attributes and moral decency also underscores the concept of virtue and its reward,

suggesting that Edmund's nobility is not only the product of genealogy but also his

innate goodness. As Watt has argued, in accordance with Gary Kelly, '"Reeve

soberly asserted the potentially reformist agency of romance," making The Old

English Baron '"project both an ideology of merit and a polished masculinity back

into the past, so as to prefigure and endorse the future ascendancy of 'bourgeois' or

'feminised' values and virtues."76

In April 1778 the Critical Review acknowledged The Old English Baron to

have "claim[ed] a place upon the same shelf with The Castle ofOtranto."77 Indeed, to

Walpole, Reeve clearly presented herself as a competitor; as he wrote to Cole in

August 1778, Reeve's preface "directly attacks the visionary part" of his novel. 78

Though not having "the smallest inclination to return that attack," Walpole

vigorously remarked to Cole how the work was "stripped of the marvellous; and so

entirely stripped, except in one awkward attempt at a ghost or two, that it is the most

insipid dull nothing you ever saw."79 Whereas Reeve affirmed that Otranto only

"makes one laugh," Walpole retorted that her novel "certainly does not make one

laugh, for what makes one doze, seldom makes one merry.,,80 In his letter to Mason,

he similarly condemned The Old English Baron for "reduc[ing]" his romance "to

76 Reeve, Introduction, Old English Baron xxiii-iv.

77 qtd. in E. J. Clery, Women's Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Tavistock: Northcote
House, 2000) 30.
78 Walpole to William Cole, 22 Aug. 1778, Frank, ed., Appendix A, Otranto and Mysterious Mother
264.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.

50
reason and probability!,,81 Walpole offered his earlier Anecdotes of Painting in

England (1760) as a collection of "curious trifles," presenting himself as an editor

who assembled the materials of the antiquarian George Vertue, placed them in order,

and organised them in a more "polished" manner, thereby transforming V ertue' s

scholarly history of English art into the work of a connoisseur, an object for the

reader's leisure rather than serious study.82 In offering The Old English Baron as a

revision of Otranto, Reeve arguably performed a similar kind of trick on Walpole

himself: Reeve can be seen as an interloper who did not merely thrust herself into the

sphere of Gothic romance, which Walpole implied belonged solely to himself, but

also meddled with the identity he sought to project by converting its playfulness and

fluidity to rigidity and seriousness.

Robert Jephson's dramatic adaptation of Otranto, The Count of Narbonne

(1781), on the other hand, shows how Walpole's Gothic extravagance could be

rewritten as a probable story without jeopardising the author's self-representation.

When Jephson gave the draft of his work to Walpole in January 1780, Walpole

complimented him on "having made so rational a play" out of his "wild tale. "83

Jephson "had the address to make it coherent," as Walpole put it, "without the

marvellous, though so much depended on that part. "84 Indeed, J ephson left out all the

supernatural spectacle, implying to the reader that Edmund (or Conrad in the novel)

dies because he accidentally falls from a cliff and that the deposition of Count

Raymond (Manfred) results from Godfrey's battle for a just inheritance, not from the

divine interference of the gigantic Alfonso. Characters were based upon those in

Walpole's original version but were given new names, some of which were

81 Walpole to William Mason, 8 Apr. 1778, Letters, vol. 7, 51.

82 Walpole, Works, vol. 3, 5.
83 Walpole to Robert Jephson, 27 Jan. 1780, Letters, vol. 7, 318.
84 Walpole to Robert Jephson, 25 Jan. 1780, Letters, vol. 7,316.

51
borrowed from Walpole's The Mysterious Mother. The connection that these two

works share is the idea of family secrets and domestic tragedy, with children as

victims of parental crimes of incest and murder. While Walpole himself intended to

keep The Mysterious Mother unstaged, the permission that he gave Jephson to use

his characters' names suggests that Walpole might be indirectly promoting his closet

play to a wider audience-it is worth noting that Jephson's drama was produced in

the same year that Walpole published his play for the second time, after his limited

fifty-copy edition in 1768. Though Walpole tried to distance himself from the

commercialism of the theatre, he was also impatient to see the success of the play,

assuming the role of Jephson's patron, dealing with the Covent Garden manager over

its production, attending rehearsals, and lending a suit of armour for the

performance. 85 Jephson's play, in this respect, became a channel for Walpole's self-

promotion, helping him maintain his authority as the writer of both The Castle of

Otranto and The Mysterious Mother.

THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER

A few years after the first publication of Otranto, Walpole revisited the theme of

domestic trauma in his tragedy, The Mysterious Mother. As soon as he finished

writing the play, he wrote a letter to Montagu in April 1768, warning his friend that

he "would not bear the subject," although, he added, "Mr. Chute, who is not easily

pleased, likes it, and Gray, who is still more difficult, approves it."86 The story is that

of a mysterious, guilt-ridden Countess of Narbonne, who, upon the return of her long

85 Paul Baines, "Jephson, Robert (173617-1803)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
UP, 2004, 7 July 2006 <http://www.oxforddnb.com!view/articleI14768>.
86 Walpole to George Montagu, 15 Apr. 1768, Letters, vol. 5,95.

52
banished son, Edmund, and his marriage with her ward, Adeliza, becomes delirious,

confesses to them her past crime and in agony stabs herself to death. The Countess's

confession in the last scene reveals that sixteen years earlier on the night of her

husband's death she had tricked her son by substituting herself for his beloved

damsel to gratify her sexual appetite. Adeliza, as the wretched mother relates to

Edmund, is the "[ f]ruit of that monstrous night! "-"thy daughter, sister, wife! "87 The

crux of Walpole's tragedy is therefore centred on the double incest that turns the

simple consanguineous relationship between the Countess and her son into a more

complicated "picture of domestic woes" (31), as Walpole indicated in the prologue.

The theme of incest would not have been unfamiliar to eighteenth-century

British audiences. Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, which Walpole referred to in his

prologue, had pervaded the literary and theatrical spheres for centuries. Walpole's

allusion to this classical Greek precedent might be seen as an attempt to legitimise

his dealing with the potentially dangerous and transgressive subject of family

romance. In Oedipus, however, the incest of Jocasta and her son is unintentional.

Earlier in 1675, Dryden staged his play, Aureng-Zebe, or the Great Mogul, in which

the stepmother's incestuous lust for Aureng-Zebe is not only denounced by the

virtuous Aureng-Zebe himself but is also shown to be entangled with the political

issue of Aureng-Zebe's succession to the throne. In 1677 Racine revised the classical

story of Phedre in which Phedre's passion for her stepson, Hippolyte, is, as Richard

McCabe points out, similarly intensified by "[t]he prospect of power," since "Phedre

plans to use the crown as bait apparently legalising incest through royal

87 Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, Otranto and Mysterious Mother 245-46; Act 5, scene 6,
lines 75 and 12. Subsequent references to the play will be given (with act, scene and line numbers in
parentheses) after quotations in the text. Line numbers are provided for references to the prologue.

53
prerogative-although her husband's death does not, in itself, alter her kinship to his

son."88

The Countess's crime of incest in Walpole's play, on the other hand, IS

purely motivated by her insatiable sexual desire. As Paul Baines has argued, The

Mysterious Mother is "an Oedipal drama which out-Hamlets Hamlet by rendering

the desire for incestuous union between son and mother a conscious and

consummated wish (at least on the mother's part)."89 In the second preface to Otranto

Walpole had referred to the influence of Hamlet. While he seems to have based the

apparition of Manfred's grandfather upon Hamlet's encounter with his father's

ghost, Walpole exceeded Shakespeare by making his supernatural machinery more

extravagant and grotesque, for example with Ricardo's walking portrait. In the

prologue to The Mysterious Mother, he again celebrated Shakespeare's presentation

of "Hamlet's spectre" (7) on stage. Unlike his novel, however, Walpole did not

delineate any ghost in his play, but made it more shocking than Shakespeare's in his

portrayal of the desiring female character. The claim that he had followed canonical

writers, therefore, functioned to vindicate his deviation from regular or "standard"

practices, including those of Shakespeare. By exploring the psychosexual dimension

of the Countess's character, Walpole made it clear to his readers that her horrendous

crime was a deliberate one. As the Countess relates to Edmund, the "eighteen

months" (5.6.43) that her fond Count is away from her causes her to be in a fit of

sexual frustration. As soon as the report of the Count's return reaches her, her

passionate longing for her husband is "in all its warmest colours," and her

"impatience" increases "almost to sickness" (5.6.47-48). When the dead body of the

88 Richard McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature's Law 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993)
270.
89 Paul Baines, '''This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt': Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest:'
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 291.

54
Count is delivered instead on the next day, the Countess becomes, in effect, so

frantic that when her attendant discloses her secret meeting with Edmund that night,

the Countess, with "such a tumult" in her "madding blood" (5.6.68), takes the

opportunity and replaces herself as the damsel to appease her unsatiated lust.

Walpole's choice of tragedy might again be seen as a product of his class-

consciousness. Instead of privileging the "middle-class" concepts of repentance and

reformation, Walpole prioritised the classical tragic figure of the erring, yet noble,

protagonist. Unlike the comic and grotesque Manfred, the Countess is much more

realistic and human. If there was to be any literary ideal that Walpole looked up to, it

was, perhaps even more than the work of Shakespeare, Racine's Phedre (a play that

Walpole highly regarded as "the finest tragedy in my opinion of the French

Theatre"90), in which the heroine is presented not as a moral exemplar but an

individual with passions, emotional conflicts, guilt, and remorse-all of which make

her sympathetic and, as Racine put it, "neither entirely guilty nor altogether

innocent."91 Indeed, the Countess's rationality and righteousness are presented as

redeeming features that elevate her above common criminals. From the outset, the

Countess is depicted as a pious queen who regularly prays for her dead husband in

the abbey and gives food and money to monks and the poor; as a peasant affirms to

Florian, Edmund's friend and attendant, "I never knew a woman! But lov'd our

bodies and our souls too well" (1.1.33-34). If Walpole's play deals with politics, it is

not within the family, but between the Countess and the two Catholic monks who

attempt to instill superstitious beliefs in the Countess and aim to make her repent her

mysterious past deeds as a means to weaken her ruling power. The Countess, on the

other hand, indignantly refuses to give in to their ministrations via confession.

90 Walpole to William Mason, 19 Feb. 1781, Selected Letters 202.

91 qtd. in McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature's Law 269.

55
Mocking their credulity and rejecting all religious practices, she defiantly declares

that her crime is too immense for any penance, and that the only way left for her is to

suffer until death will free her from her woes. The anti-Catholic sentiment that

Walpole ascribed to the Countess, together with her benevolence, courage and

rationality, makes her a more attractive character than others in the play, despite her

cnme.

The Mysterious Mother can be seen to subvert increasingly "normative"

notions of the family. As John Ramsbottom explains, this understanding of the

family "required that wives be economically dependent, confined to the home, and

committed intellectually and spiritually to their own subordination."92 The role of

women in the family at the same time became more important, though, as they came

to be valued for their ability to foster love and stronger emotional attachments

between family members, thereby helping to create what Lawrence Stone has

famously described as the affectionate nuclear family.93 In Walpole's play, on the

other hand, there is no father figure, and an estranged relationship between mother

and son. In place of a submissive wife and tender-hearted mother, Walpole created a

rather hybridised character of a commanding and virile female protagonist, who tells

Edmund: "This state is mine.! Learn to command, by learning to obey.! Tho' frail my

sex, I have a soul as masculine/ As any of thy race." (3.3.166-69) Like Manfred

whose tyrannical power causes him to transgress the conventional role of the

protective father, the Countess's incestuous deed, as Clery observes, "deranges all

stable kinship identities" and creates a dysfunctional family, as she announces to

92 John Ramsbottom, "Women and the Family," A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H.
T. Dickinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) 209.
93 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Abridged ed. (London:
Penguin, 1977) 149.

56
Edmund: "Lo! Where this monster stands! thy mother! mistress!/ The mother of thy

daughter, sister, wife!" (5.6.11-12).94

In her article on The Mysterious Mother, Clery elucidates how Walpole's

play engages with two apparently contradictory models of femininity in the

eighteenth century. The self-conscious, sexual desire of the Countess, as Clery

asserts, implicitly endorses the pre-modem sexual concept that the desire for sexual

pleasure is a fundamental physical attribute of both men and women. 95 In the

eighteenth century, this model was accompanied by a growing medical interest in

female psychology, from which emerged the claim that continued sexual deprivation

in women could lead to frustration and insanity, a condition called nymphomania. 96

Walpole's illustration of the Countess's hysterical, sexual frenzy was commensurate

with this kind of speculation: it reasserted the notion that female sexual desire was

nonnal, but also demonstrated how it could endanger the traditional patriarchal

structure and kinship system within the family. At the same time, another coexistent,

puritanical version of femininity and female sexuality held that women were

"naturally passionless," and celebrated "timidity, modesty, refinement, passivity,"97

qualities which were to be further valorised during the evangelical revival that began

in the 1780s and 1790s, and which were to become nonnative during the nineteenth

century. It is not surprising that Walpole's play, written in the transitional period

between the decline of the old belief and the emergence of the new, nonnative model

of femininity, elicited disapproval rather than praise from contemporary readers.

Frances Burney, for example, felt an "indignant aversion" against the play.98 She

94 E . .J. Clery, "Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire,"
Essays and Studies: The Gothic (2001): 37.
95 Ibid. 33.
96 Ibid. 34-35.
97 Ibid. 39.
98 Fanny Burney's diary, 28 Nov. 1786, Frank, ed., Appendix B, Otranto and Mysterious Mother 303.

57
noted in her diary in November 1786: "Dreadful was the whole! truly dreadful! a

story of so much horror, from atrocious and voluntary guilt, never did I hear!"99

Mason, who had read the play in 1769, was astonished by the subject-matter and

proposed an alternative version of the play by having the Countess commit incest as

a result of "ill-grounded jealousy" rather than deliberate intent, something which

would merely raise, as Mason put it, "disgust and indignation" towards the

character. 100 Walpole, however, refused to accept Mason's proposed alteration,

insisting on the Countess's volition, which he said constituted "the singularity" of

the play.l0l Jealousy would show the weak constitution of the Countess and would

weaken the appeal of her character. It would also reduce Walpole's tragedy to a

distinctly un-Walpolean moral narrative of misconduct and punishment.

In March 1768, Walpole wrote to Madame du Deffand that his tragedy "does

not resemble this century's prim and conventional tone": "[t]here is nothing but

unveiled passions, crimes, repentance, and horrors."102 Because of its shocking theme

and narration, Walpole kept his work unpublished and circulated it only among his

close acquaintances. News of a pirated edition of The Mysterious Mother reached

Walpole in 1781 and he took the opportunity to publish an authorised version of the

play. To reassert his self-image as an at once "aristocratic" and respectable author,

and to defend the potentially transgressive subject of the play, Walpole employed

multiple forms of legitimisation. In his preface, he directly presented the work as a

private possession: "[i]t was written several years ago; and to prevent the trouble of

99 Ibid.
100 William Mason to Walpole, 8 May 1769, Frank, ed., Appendix A, Otranto and Mysterious Mother
270.
101 Walpole to William Mason, 11 May 1769, Letters, vol. 5, 165. .
102 Walpole to Madame du Deffand, 11 Mar. 1768, Frank, ed., Appendix A, Otranto and Mystenous
Mother 268.

58
reading, or having it transcribed, a few copies were printed and given away" (169).1113

Because of the "disgusting" and "disagreeable" story, he had "done everything in his

power to suppress the publication" (169). However, he claimed, once the copies

were circulated and "different editions ... advertised," he resolved to offer it to the

public from his own original text for fear that more "surreptitious" publications

might worsen the reputation of his play (169). As with Otranto, Walpole first

presented The Mysterious Mother as a private amusement, and thus staked a claim to

innovation without having to involve himself in the precarious and indecent business

of theatrical production.

When Lady Diana Beauclerk gave him seven drawings from his tragedy, he

kept them in a cabinet in the Beauclerk Tower at Strawberry Hill inaccessible to

other people except his close friends and distinguised visitors. As he told Mason in a

letter in July 1777, the cabinet was especially "hung on Indian blue damask" with

gilt "ceiling, door and surbase" and a window of "two brave fleur de lis and a lion of

England, all royally crowned in painted glass.,,104 "The cabinet," Walpole stated

further, "is to be sacred and not shown to the profane, as the drawings are not for the

eyes of the vulgar.,,105 This emphasis on the exclusivity of the drawings is continuous

with Walpole's reference to his playtext in his letter to Montagu in October 1769,

when he told Montagu to secure his copy of the play "under lock and key" since "it

is not at all food for the public," who reflected "a total extinction of all taste."106 In

Walpole's correspondence, the language of class distinction is especially evident, for

103 Here I refer to the page number as appeared in Otranto and Mysterious Mother. Subsequent
references to Walpole's preface and postscript of The Mysterious Mother are from this source and
will be similarly given in parentheses after quotations in the text.
104 Walpole to William Mason, 6 July 1777, Letters, vol. 6,452.
lOS Ibid.
106 Walpole to George Montagu. 16 Oct. 1769, Letters, vol. 5, 197.

59
Walpole made it clear that his play belonged only to people of good taste, not the

masses.

When the work was offered for public view, however, it was also necessary

for Walpole to make his play agreeable to readers at large. His postscript,

accordingly, offers an earnest defence of the play. While admitting that the subject

was "more truly horrid than even that of Oedipus," and that it "should never be

practicable" to present it in a theatre, Walpole maintained that the "terror and pity"

that his play afforded also made him unable to "resist the impulse of adapting it to

the scene" (251). The tension between Walpole's distancing himself from his

offensive subject-matter and his attempt to legitimise that subject-matter recurs

throughout the postscript, and these two poses, I would like to argue, are

indispensable to Walpole's presentation of the play. They are, like his two prefaces

to Otranto, complementary to each other: while his "aristocratic" self-projection

allowed him to deal with potentially transgressive matters, his stated adherence to

recognised or "public" standards of taste, in tum, gave him a licence to offer his

"private," "recreational" work to the public. In the postscript, therefore, Walpole

authenticated the story by vaguely arguing that the play's incest plot was based on a

real circumstance that happened to a female confessioner of the Archbishop John

Tillotson in the seventeenth century-an account that he had heard "when very

young" (252). Clery observes that the incest account had been commonplace since

the thirteenth century, especially in the French verse called "dits" which served as

"pro-Church propaganda" to encourage the idea of salvation through confession, that

is, subjection to religious authority.l07 Walpole's drama, on the other hand, was more

in accordance with the Queen of Navarre's thirtieth tale of the Heptameron (1558),

107 Clery, "Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother" 30.

60
which Walpole briefly acknowledged as having a coincidental parallel with his

narrative setting, but which, as Clery points out, appeared to bear a more significant

resemblance to Walpole's tale in its secular emphasis on the passion and emotion of

the mother. 108 While protecting Walpole against any critic's charge of plagiarism, the

brief reference to the Queen of Navarre's tale served to encourage the reader to view

his play in the religious, moral context of Tillotson's anecdote, thereby more safely

sheltering Walpole's subversive content.

In the postscript, Walpole also introduced the character of the Countess as

"certainly new" for the stage (254). As he elaborated, he was careful to associate

"sense, unbigotted [sic] piety, and interesting contrition" with the Countess, before

unravelling the horrifying mystery at the end, "in hopes that some degree of pity

would linger in the breasts of the audience ... and that a whole life of virtue and

penance might in some measure atone for a moment, though a most odious moment

of a depraved imagination" (253). The contrast of vice and virtue in the Countess,

along with the "prejudice[ ... ]" that the audience should have "in her favour" (253),

was generated from Walpole's desire to "strik[e] a little out of the common road, and

to introduce some novelty on our stage" (255). He further justified this innovative

performance, asserting that he had delineated the play according to Aristotle's

dramatic unities of time, place and action. The potentiality of staging the play was

hence reiterated, with Walpole's affirmation that it should take "not above two or

three hours" of representation with only one shift of scene, and that all actions

"tend[ ... ] to bring on the catastrophe," the story never being "interrupted or diverted

from its course" (255).

108 Ibid. 30.

61
 Towards the end of the postscript, Walpole attacked French dramas as

"[ e]nslaved ... to rules and modes" (255); their growing influence on the British

theatre, he stated, would make the British stage "cramped by the rigorous forms of

composition" (255). As he told Madame du Deffand, his play was "a kind of Gothic

which would not be found in your [French] theatre,"109 for, indeed, Walpole's Gothic

represents the commingling of different-and sometimes controversial-elements.

In effect, Walpole allied himself with earlier British dramatists such as Shakespeare,

Dryden, Thomas Otway and Nicholas Rowe, who were, to him, more liberal in their

dramatisation of dangerous passions and tragic incidents. Walpole expressed a

similar patriotic sentiment in his prologue, in which he championed native literature

over French neoclassical drama, denouncing French tragedies as "drowsy taler s]"

(21) that "seldom startle" (16), since they never staged deaths or other such striking

events, unlike Shakespeare's theatrical representation of the murder of Banquo or the

appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's father. As in the second preface to Otranto,

Walpole appealed to this national dramatic tradition in order to license his work:

"Free as your country, Britons, be your scene!/ Be Nature now, and now Invention,

queen!" (9-10).

As I have argued in this chapter, then, Walpole had a facility with different

registers, which he moved between in order to appeal to different audiences. While

striving to maintain his position among the social and cultural elite, he also assumed

a number of patriotic and socially responsible poses in order to elicit favourable

responses from other readers. Timothy Mowl's designation of Walpole as "The

Great Outsider"llo therefore over-simplifies his position, and over-exaggerates the

extent to which he occupied this marginal and maverick position throughout his

109 Walpole to Madame du Deffand, 11 Mar. 1768, Frank, ed., Appendix A, Otranto and Mysterious
Mother 268.
110 The phrase is from Mowl's title of his book Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider.

62
lifetime. Walpole's experiment with unconventional architectural styles and literary

themes appears for the most part to be limited to the 1750s and the 1760s, and, by

the 1790s, the terrifying consequences of the French Revolution caused him to revise

his former liberal Whiggism. His correspondence with Hannah More, in particular,

shows Walpole's admiration of More's charitable activities and her fervent

evangelicalism. In a letter of August 1792, for example, he contrasted "Saint

Hannah" with the radical Mary Wollstonecraft whose writing, Walpole stated, was to

be "excommunicated from the pale of my library."I11 To see Walpole as a

straightforwardly "anti-bourgeois" writer is therefore to overlook some of the

nuances of his self-representation, and perhaps in particular the trajectory of his

works as a whole.

After Walpole's 1781 authorised edition, The Mysterious Mother appeared

again in 1791 in pirated versions (based on the 1781 edition) in London and Dublin,

and in 1798 in Mary Berry's edition of The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of

Orford. The play received two reviews from The Monthly Review in 1797 and 1798,

both of which expressed a high opinion of Walpole as a noble and respectable

author. The 1797 review, for instance, attributed the pirated edition to the late "Earl

of Orford, better known as the Hon. Horace Walpole; under which designation all his

literary labours were accomplished, and all that portion of life passed which can be

desirable to man."112 Walpole's legitimisation of the play seemed to be successful,

for both reviewers were able to ignore the incest theme and to privilege the work's

other literary merits that Walpole indicated in his postscript. The 1797 Monthly

Review praised the playas an example of "an excellence nearly unimpeachable" that

"will convince the English public how very possible it is to unite all the energies of

III Walpole to Hannah More, 21 Aug. 1792, Letters, vol. 9, 383, 385.
112 Monthly Review (1797), Frank, ed., Appendix B, Otranto and Mysterious Mother 293.

63
genius with all the graces of art."l13 Despite its subject-matter which "excites more

disgust and horror than pathos," the 1798 review took Walpole's postscript into

account and concluded that it "will perhaps sufficiently apologise for some of the

most objectional parts," stating that "the intrinsic merit of the work itself seems not

only to preclude cavil, but to extort applause."114 Indeed, in the eighteenth century,

Walpole's extravagant and eccentric literary production seems to have been for the

most part acceptable to critics and readers-a very different response from that of

critics in the nineteenth century, as I will go on to show in my concluding section.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RESPONSES TO WALPOLE'S WORK

In his preface to the tragedy Marino Faliero (1820), Lord Byron honoured Walpole

as "the father of the first romance [Otranto] and of the last tragedy [The Mysterious

Mother] in our language.,,1l5 Since Byron also exploited the theme of incest and

rejected the romance and novelistic convention of companionate, heterosexual

relations in his works, he regarded Walpole's The Mysterious Mother as an ideal of

drama, describing it as "a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. "116

Byron's praise of Walpole's tragedy is particularly striking in the gendered language

that he used. Admiring the powerful scenes of love and guilt, Byron classified The

Mysterious Mother as a manly performance, in contrast to other "puling"-whining,

flimsy, nonsensical, and therefore effeminate-"love-play[s]." In the same preface,

Byron drew attention to Walpole's social position (hence asserting his own) by

113 Ibid. 295.

::: Monthly Review (1798), Frank, ed., Appendix B, Otranto and Mysterious Mother 2?6.
George Gordon Byron, Preface to Marino Faliero, Lord Byron: The Complete PoetIcal Works, ed.
Jerome McGann, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986) 305.
116 Ibid.

64
pinpointing the literary merits of Walpole's works and argumg that Walpole

deserved "a higher place than any living writer, be he who he may."117 Coleridge, on

the other hand, severely criticised The Mysterious Mother in The Table Talk in

March 1834. He condemned the playas "the most disgusting, detestable, vile

composition that ever came from the hand of man," and, in tum, marginalised it as a

manifestation of deviant masculinity, affirming that "[n]o one with a spark of true

manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it."118

Besides Byron, there were other admirers of Walpole in the nineteenth

century. Walter Scott, for instance, preferred the marvel and miracle of Walpole's

Otranto to the "explained supernatural" mode of subsequent Gothic writers such as

Ann Radcliffe, and extolled Walpole's "poetical talent" in The Mysterious Mother,

despite his acknowledgement of the "radical defect" of the "unnaturally horrid"

double incest theme.ll9 Many other responses, however, concurred with Coleridge's

in their prioritisation of the serious, moral, and practical ends of artistic works.

Especially after some of Walpole's private correspondence was published (first in

Mary Berry's 1798 edition of Walpole's works and later in several collections and

editions of his letters), critics and readers increasingly viewed Walpole in the context

of his "aristocratic" frivolity, and the language that they used often employed the

anti-aristocratic vocabulary that I discussed in my Introduction. This backlash

against Walpole and his work presented him as an unmanly figure motivated by a

highly suspect desire for attention. In the nineteenth century, almost every branch of

Walpole's artistic achievements was received negatively. An 1818 unsigned account

of Strawberry Hill in Descriptions to the Plates of Thames Scenery, for example,

117 Ibid.
118 Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Coleridge, (1835), Sabor, ed., Horace
Walpole 148.
119
. See Scott's Introduction to The Castle ofOtranto (1811), and his "Remarks on Eng l'IS h Traged"
y
In The Modem British Drama, vol. 1, in Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 88-99, 147.

65
maintained that Walpole's Gothic villa was not only built to exhibit "taste" and

"superior polish and amusement" but also to solicit "flattery."120 Naming the place "a

cabinet of curious prettiness," the writer interpreted Walpole's ostentation as an

index of his character, proclaiming how "little of masculine energy or mental

capaciousness" his house contained, since it "proceeded from the structure of his

mind ... or his physical constitution, which was naturally weak."121 Such a

feminisation of Walpole's Gothic style was similarly evident in Hawkins's

Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches and Memoirs in 1822. Condemning "the

incongruity of the material with the style of the building," Hawkins equated

Walpole's modem, artificial Gothic work with feminine weakness, as she described

how "his external decorations"-"so childish and so little able to face injury"-

"frequently provoked the wanton malice of the lower classes, who, almost as

certainly as new pinnacles were put to a pretty Gothic entrance, broke them off."122

The Castle of Otranto also began to lose its appeal among the nineteenth-

century public. The novel was reprinted and twice included in library series, and in

1834 it was published along with Beckford's Vathek and Lewis's The Bravo of

Venice, a fact which suggests that Walpole was still acknowledged as a literary

pioneer who contributed to the development of Gothic fiction. The number of

individual publications of Otranto dramatically decreased, nonetheless, from eleven

editions between 1764 and 1800 to three editions in the nineteenth century. Attitudes

towards the novel became more hostile, too, particularly regarding its treatment of

the supernatural. William Hazlitt, for example, thought the novel "dry, meagre, and

without effect," calling its supernatural effects "the pasteboard machinery of a

120 Unsigned account from Descriptions to the Plates of Thames Scenery Engraved by W. B. Cooke
& G. Cooke (1818), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 251.
121 Ibid. 250-51.
122 Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches and Memoirs (1822), Sabor, ed.,
Horace Walpole 253.

66
pantomime," "a matter-of-fact impossibility," and "a fixture" that could only "shock

the senses, and have no purchase upon the imagination."123 Hazlitt's comment

anticipated the only two dramatic adaptations of Otranto in the nineteenth century:

Gilbert A'Beckett's "Grand Romantic Extravaganza" at the Haymarket (April 1848),

and the unperformed The Castle of Otranto; or, Harlequin and the Giant Helmet. A

New Romantic Comic Pantomime (1854).124 Unlike Jephson's The Count of

Narbonne, these adaptations reflected the low opinion of the public towards

Walpole's novel, downgrading his original tragedy to tawdry comic pantomime.

While admiring the novelty of Walpole's Gothic romance, Scott noted in the

Quarterly Review in April 1818 that it "cannot surely be termed a work of much

power.,,125 In reading Walpole's letters, Scott remarked, "we perpetually discover a

laborious effort to introduce the lightness of the French badinage, into a masculine

and somewhat rough language. "126 All his writings, as Scott put it, were of "a French

marquis ... to whom it might be permitted to take up a pen for an idle hour, but not to

retain it until it soiled his fingers.,,127 The marginalisation of Walpole's mode of

performance is obvious here, as Scott opposed "French" frivolity and effeminacy to

British sobriety, simplicity and manliness. In the same manner, Thomas Green wrote

in his diary in February 1799 of Walpole's "playful ease" with his writings,

betraying "a sickly fastidious delicacy, on the very verge of affectation."128 Like

several other critics, Green deployed the rhetoric of disease which, notwithstanding

Walpole's displays of patriotism, portrayed his playfulness and "aristocratic" self-

representation as corrupting of British masculinity. Isaac D'Israeli saw Walpole'S

123 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Comic Writers (1819), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 101. .
124 Frank, ed., "Publication History ofOtranto and The Mysterious Mother," Otranto and Mystenous
Mother, 46.
125 Quarterly Review (1818), Sabor, ed .. Horace Walpole 178-79.
126 Ibid. 179.
127 Ibid.

128 Thomas Green's diary, 28 Feb. 1799, Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 170.

67
dilettantish literary works as evidence of luxury and effeminacy, referring to them as

"plants of sickly delicacy, which could never endure the open air, and only lived in

the artificial atmosphere of a private collection."129 Thomas Babington Macaulay, in

his review of Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann in 1833, even compared

Walpole's writings to ''piite-de-fois-gras'' which "owes it[s] excellence to the

diseases of the wretched animal which furnishes it, and would be good for nothing if

it were not made of livers preternaturally swollen."130 Macaulay ridiculed Walpole's

multiple forms of self-representation, which he claimed were a function of Walpole's

exhibitionism. Like Madame du Deffand who named her friend "l'hieroglyphe

Walpole,"131 Macaulay castigated Walpole's protean, undecipherable character. As

he put it, Walpole was "the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious,

the most capricious of men ... His features were covered by mask within mask. When

the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever

from seeing the real man."132

In a changing society in which the middling ranks and their more rigid moral

and sexual precepts were increasingly gaining hold over society at large, Walpole's

penchant for fluid, plural and, sometimes, subversive forms of representation could

not but provoke a sharp reaction. Walpole was not alone in appealing to the Gothic

as a means of asserting an "aristocratic" identity, however. Later in the 1780s,

William Beckford transformed Walpolean Gothic into extravagant Oriental romance.

His Vathek and its accompanying "Episodes," as I will argue in the next chapter,

dramatically reworked the norms and conventions of the eighteenth-century Oriental

tale, and in the process glorified the "old regime" of aristocratic excess, highlighting

129 Isaac D'Israeli, Calamities of Authors (1812), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 283-84.
130 Edinburgh Review (1833), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 312.
131 qtd. in Morris R. Brownell, The Prime Minister of Taste: A Portrait of Horace Walpole (New
Haven: Yale UP, 2001) 303.
132 Edinburgh Review (1833), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 312.

68
their protagonists' transgressive conduct, and thereby taking the rebellious,

subversive potential of the Gothic to a new extreme.

69
 CHAPTER 2

WILLIAM BECKFORD: "EPATER LE BOURGEOIS,,1

I fear I shall never be half so sapient, nor good for anything in this world, but
composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and
writing a journey to China or the moon. 2

So Beckford wrote to Lady Catherine Hamilton from Paris, during his return to

England from the Grand Tour in 1781. As is also true of Walpole, Beckford's artistic

interests were bound up with his desire to divert from, if not to rebel against, the

responsible, parliamentary life that his family had set out for him. From a very early

age, Beckford's imaginative works were deemed by his elders as illicit. At 11 he was

compelled to bum what his tutor called his "splendid heaps of Oriental drawings,

&C."3 His romantic and fanciful travel diary, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and

Incidents, was also suppressed by his family in 1783 as incompatible with his future

political occupation. After Beckford entered Parliament as an MP for Wells in 1784,

his passion for the arts did not wane but, on the contrary, developed into a full-blown

pursuit of reputation. During this time, he regularly corresponded with Samuel

Henley upon his writing of a series of Oriental tales, Vathek and its episodes, which,

Beckford hoped, would establish him as a distinguished author of Oriental fiction.

Beckford's involvement in politics was therefore not much different from Walpole'S

in that it helped to license his more trifling and sportive engagement with literary

composition-though it has to be noted that his parliamentary career was abruptly

1 The phrase is from Herbert Grimsditch' s Introduction to the 1958 edition of Vathek, qtd. in Dan J.
McNutt, The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and
Selected Texts (Folkstone, Kent: Dawson, 1975) 286.
2 qtd. in Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (Stroud: Nonsuch, 1979) 96.
3 Ibid. 40.

70
ended by the scandal of his sexual affair with William Courtenay, the event that

resulted in Beckford's ostracism, and meant that for the rest of his life he was never

quite integrated in English society.

In his introduction to Vathek in 1958, Herbert Grimsditch remarked that

Beckford's Oriental romance reflected the author's propensity to shock or ''t~pater Ie

bourgeois.,,4 It is worth noting here that Beckford's father was a Whig merchant who

inherited a vast fortune from West Indian plantations and, as many contemporaries

believed, entered Parliament mainly to guard his interest in the price of sugar;5

Beckford's mother, on the other hand, was a committed evangelical, mocked by her

son as a member of the "Methodistical dowagers."6 In what follows, I will argue that

Beckford's "aristocratic" self-fashioning might be read as a product of his

upbringing, since he at once sought to efface his family's mercantile background and

defined himself in his writings against emergent conceptions of morality, sobriety

and restraint. This chapter will explore the trajectory of Beckford's works to see how

they were shaped by events and pressures that Beckford encountered at different

times in his life. It will start from the 1770s, in which Beckford produced his

adolescent jeux d'esprit, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters and The

Vision, and it will go on to concentrate on his Oriental tales of the 1780s during

which time Beckford became more concerned with reader reception and the

establishment of his distinctive authorial identity. Following his preoccupation with

his social rehabilitation in England after the Courtenay scandal, Beckford's

bourgeois-baiting inclinations seem to be less obvious in his works from the 1790s

onwards. While his liberal political position is still evident in his anonymous satires,

4 Herbert Grimsditch, Introduction to Vathek (1958), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel

286.
5 Fothergill, Beckford of F onthill 15.
6 qtd. in Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 37.

71
Modem Novel Writing and Azemia, Beckford also turned his attention to the

presentation of Fonthill Abbey, and assumed a number of striking if idiosyncratic

patriotic poses.

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS AND THE VISION

Beckford claimed to have written Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters

(1780) as early as 1777, when he was 17.7 It originated as a private diversion, with

Beckford telling Cyrus Redding that he aimed partly to parody "the ridiculous

memoirs and criticisms on certain Dutch painters of whom he had read in 'Vies des

Peintres Flamands,'" and partly to mock his housekeeper's improvised and absurd

explanations of paintings to Fonthill visitors. 8 Among Beckford's juvenilia,

Biographical Memoirs was probably the work most approved by his family, since it

reflected Beckford's precocious knowledge of art and literature, and also his social

status as a member of the upper class who had an easy familiarity with well-known

paintings as a result of his education and his father's collection of Old Masters. This

work established Beckford's position as an amateur writer for whom writing was a

recreation rather than an occupation or a serious mission to win public favour. John

Lettice, Beckford's tutor, admired the memoirs' "beauties of no common sort" and,

7 Philip Ward, Introduction, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), by William

Beckford (Cambridge: Oleander, 1977). No pag.
8 Cyrus Redding, Memoirs of William Beckford of Fonthill, Author of "Vathek" (1859), \'~l: L
Beckfordiana: The William Beckford Website, 2005, Centre international d'etude du XVIIIe steele,
Ferney-Voltaire, 18 Oct. 2006 <http://beckford.c18.netlbeckfordiana.html>.

72
with the plan of their publication in mind, delightedly remarked that he did not

"imagine common readers entirely competent to [judge] them."9

The book is divided into five mini-biographies of different painters. All the

main five characters are fictitious, but in all his narratives Beckford also introduced

real figures such as Gerrit Dou, Hans Memling and Francis van Cuyck van

Mierhop,IO hence producing a ludicrous burlesque of artists and painting schools,

especially Flemish realism, and of the standard, biographical approach to art. The

artist of his second story, Og of Basan, for example, is said to be so absorbed in

wild, picturesque landscape painting that he decides to live a primitive life in a

cavern. In the fifth story, Watersouchy, friend of the still life painter Francis van

Cuyck van Mierhop, is said to have mastered the same branch of painting,

portraying "the most perfect fillet of veal that ever made the mouth of man to

water," and writing essays that take more than fifty pages to "describe exactly the

masterly group of the gossips, the demureness of the maiden aunts, the puling infant

of its swading-cloths, the gloss of its ribbons, the fringe of the table-cloth, and the

effect of light and shade on a salver adorned with custard-cups andjelly-glasses.,,11

Biographical Memoirs is Walpolean in its playfulness and in the obvious

pleasure that the writer takes in confounding his readers' expectations. Beckford

inserted an editor's advertisement, which praises the anonymous author's depiction

of "nature and art, together with some sketches of human life and manners," which,

in the biographical form, is more reliable and convincing than that in novels and

romances. 12 Far from being a realistic representation of painters and their works,

however, the book is an art spoof or satire, central to which is, as Malcolm Jack

9 qtd. in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: Heinemann.
1910) 69.
10 Ward, Introduction, Biographical Memoirs.
II Beckford, Biographical Memoirs 124-25, 128.
12 Ibid., "The Editor's Advertisement." No pag.

73
notes, Beckford's juvenile, "high-spirited sense of fun" and desire to "mock all that

is held serious by his elders."13 To Beckford, it was a "laughable book."14 Many of

his contemporaries, though, were not only perplexed by but also hostile towards the

work, as is evident in the Monthly Review's notice of it in 1780:

On the first view of this perfonnance, it naturally occurs that the Author meant
to draw some modem or living characters; but if such was his intention, we
confess that we are not [among] that class of readers who can identify anyone
of them in this mingled mass of true and fictitious history. The Author,
however, is by no means a bad or uninfonned Writer. In his performance the
Reader will meet with some good descriptions, and some humour; which last
however, loses its effect, through the 'ill humour' into which the Reader is
continually thrown, by the vexatious obscurity that pervades the whole work. 15

Like Walpole's Otranto hoax, Beckford's attempt to dupe his readers met with some

critical disapproval. While the reviewer here might be seen to acknowledge the

satirical agenda of Beckford's work, he also refused to endorse or acquiesce in

Beckford's project, defiantly proclaiming himself "not of that class of readers" who

would be amused with the writer's playfulness, which he diagnosed as the effect of

"ill humour."

Unlike the frivolous and archly sophisticated Biographical Memoirs, The

Vision, also written in 1777, might be read as a product of Beckford's naIve and

personal imaginative investment in the Orient. It was dedicated to his art teacher,

Alexander Cozens, and considered by Beckford as a confidential work, with

Beckford warning Cozens not to show his writing to anybody, since "the greatest

number of readers would despise, ridicule or make neither head nor Tail of it.,,16 In

The Vision the Orient can be seen to offer Beckford an ideal world and a means of
-=-=.=----:~=,

13 Malcolm Jack, Introduction , Vathek and Other Stories: A William Beckford Reader, by William

Beckford (London: Pickering, 1993) xxiii-xxiv.

14 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 72.
15 Monthly Review (Dec. 1780): 469.
16 Chapman, Beckford 46-47.

74
escape from his future adult responsibilities. His fancy was inspired by bizarre.

fantastic stories about the East that Cozens often related, as well as by the wild

landscape of Switzerland that he was exposed to during his Grand Tour in 1777-78.

As Beckford told his sister Elizabeth in April 1778, this was a period in which he

was "enraptured with the orientals," an indulgence that he classified as an

"amusement" opposed to the "occupation" represented by his studies. 17 His letters of

this period, particularly to Cozens, are filled with exotic names and characters, and

relate how Beckford immersed himself in "phantastic visions," imagining himself,

for instance, wandering "in Africa, on the brink of the Nile beneath the Mountains of

Amara,"18 while declaring how "firmly" he "resolved to be a Child forever."19

When Beckford wrote The Vision, different kinds of Oriental fictions, both

translations and imitations, would already have been familiar to contemporary

readers. At the start of the century, many writers adopted exotic, fabulous and

supernatural elements from "original," translated narratives, but at the same time

subordinated those elements to a moralistic or philosophical function.20 Joseph

Addison's "The Vision of Mirzah," No. 159 of The Spectator (1 September 1711),

for example, relates the story of the Egyptian Mirzah who, under the guidance of a

"genius," meditates upon the vision of people crossing a bridge above a river, and is

enlightened by its allegory of human misery, mortality, and eternal life after death.

Richard Steele's "The History of Santon Barsisa" in The Guardian, No. 148 (31

August 1713) employs the Faustian framework of the devil's temptation of Santon

Barsisa to seduce a princess in order to illustrate the Santon's moral weakness and

subsequent punishment-the framework that Matthew Lewis later used to legitimise

17 qtd. in Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 48.

18 b
Iid.64.
19 Ibid. 67.
20 See Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York:
Columbia UP, 1908) xxvi.

75
his sexually explicit Gothic novel, The Monk (1796). Like Addison and Steele,

Samuel Johnson wrote instructive Oriental tales in The Rambler and The Idler. His

famous History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), which will be discussed

further in the next section of this chapter, focuses on the theme of the inescapability

of discontent. John Hawkesworth, an editor of and major contributor to The

Adventurer, later reworked Johnson's philosophical fiction into a moral, domestic

tale of rivalry between two brothers, and the triumph of virtue over vice, in Almoran

and Hamet (1761).

By the time that Beckford wrote his Vision, then, didactic Oriental tales had

for some time been advancing both the consolations of religion and the moral values

of sobriety and restraint. As Ros Ballaster has argued, the idea of Oriental despotism

proved especially fruitful to eighteenth-century writers, as it allowed them further to

develop "plots, structures, [and] themes from the 'English' novel," above all perhaps

the "models of 'reformed' masculinity and heroic femininity."~l In The History of

Nourjahad (1765), for example, Frances Sheridan had her female characters reform

the despotic protagonist, who, after being granted wealth and immortality by a

genius, "gave himself up to pleasures, ... threw off all restraint, ... [and] plunged at

once into a tide of luxurious enjoyments."n Clara Reeve, in her preface to The

Progress of Romance (1 785), argued that narratives of a marvellous nature could

provide as much "useful instruction" and "rational and elegant amusement" as

modem novels,23 and her revision of The Castle of Otranto sought to transform

21 Ros Ballaster, "Narrative Transmigrations: The Oriental Tale and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century
Britain," A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R.
Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) 76.
22 Frances Sheridan, The History of Nourjahad, Oriental Tales, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1992) 131. .
23 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manne.rs; With Rem~rks
on the Good and Bad Effects of it, on them Respectively; In a Course of Everung ConversatIOns
(Dublin, 1785), English Short Title Catalogue Microfilm: reel 19512, no. 03, xvi.

76
Walpole's extravagant Gothic fiction into a didactic tale of virtue rewarded and

domestic felicity re-established. In The Progress of Romance, Reeve suggested,

through the character of Euphrasia, a list of meritorious modem tales, which

included Rasselas, Almoran and Hamet, and Nourjahad. 24 She also published as an

appendix to this work "The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," which celebrates

the courageous Charoba, who, with the help of her maidservant, succeeds in

defending herself and her people against the tyrannical king Gebirus.

Beckford's The Vision, however, is markedly different from prevIOUS

Oriental tales written in English. To begin with, it revolves around a figure that we

are encouraged to read as Beckford himself. In the form of a first-person narrative,

the work relates how the young hero, named William, steals out of his house one

night to wander in some woods, when he suddenly enters a very different realm;

initially, the description of William's wandering alternates between realistic pictures

of his natural surroundings and his surreal, dreamlike vision of them. The

autobiographical resonance of the tale is clear, as the hero contemplates the future

which is mapped out for him, consisting of "cabinets and councils," "debates," and

"watchful consultations," and determines that he will "resist them," and will not let

them deprive him of "the midnight moon" or the pleasures of the imagination. 25 The

narrator then meets Moisasour, a Bramin, and the "emerald-eyed" (9) Indian,

Nouronihar, in a grotto. As an intruder in this hidden world, William accepts the

Bramin's challenge to go through an initiation rite in exchange for a secret

knowledge of remote, Eastern antiquity. Despite knowing that the "purification" (12)

will involve acute, though momentary, sufferings-that he has to encounter

"flames," "severe shocks," and "dreadful suspense" (12)-William is firm in his

24 Ibid. 60-61. . .
25 William Beckford, The Vision, Vathek and Other Stories 5. Subsequent references to The VISIon
will be given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

77
decision. After the initiation, he is rapidly transported to the splendid subterranean

"halls of the glorious" (21), which, in contrast to the hell-like Hall of Eblis in

Vathek, welcome the young narrator into a paradisiacal realm. The rest of the

narrative meticulously depicts William's sensual (though not sexual) pleasures, as he

is invited by Moisasour and Nouronihar to view a variety of wonderful, secret

grottos; to see magnificent valleys of ancient Africa; to taste exquisite juices of

exotic fruits and vegetables; and to hear the unknown mysteries of the Bramins who

live in the centre of the earth. At times, the narrator's penetration into these

forbidden secrets is described along with his sense of guilt-"a strange mixture of

pleasure and pain" (6)-and fear that he may have to face another initiation, which,

according to Moisasour, could be "Death" itself.26 Nevertheless, William's pact with

the Bramin secures his innocence rather than damnation. Ecstatic sensation, not the

prospect of imminent ruin, is what sustains his narration. The story breaks off at the

point where William happily reunites with Nouronihar in a grotto, in which both

delight themselves in music and sumptuous food-a promise of further voluptuous

pleasure that Beckford's tale might have embellished had he finished it.

Though not written for publication, The Vision is a groundbreaking work.

Instead of presenting his characters as entirely Oriental, or portraying his hero as a

prisoner of his barbarous Eastern counterparts as earlier captivity narratives had

done, Beckford introduced the theme of a European's pact with an Oriental, who, in

the story, is intellectually superior to the young protagonist. Rather than separating

the Occidental from the Oriental, Beckford seemed to be interested in the blending

of the two: though there is no sexual relationship between William and Nouronihar

in the story, the intimacy between the two suggests that such a relationship might

26 Here I quote from Beckford, The Vision (1777), Beckfordiana: The William Beckford Website,
2005, Centre international d'etude du XVlIIe siecle, Ferney-Voltaire. 19 Oct. 2006 <http://beckford.
c 18.netlbeckfordiana.html>.

78
have been developed had Beckford continued the narrative. While Beckford

broached the Faustian theme of the overreacher's quest for secret knowledge, he did

not give any hint of the punishment-or moral reformation-in which such a

process might culminate. Beckford's youthful Orientalism, moreover, is distinctive

in its visionariness, which continually draws the reader's attention to various exotic

and fanciful images of the subterranean halls, enchanting grottos, and so on.

Whether satirical or experimental, Beckford's first works were defined against

current literary convention. In the 1780s, as my next section will demonstrate,

Beckford revised this distinctively adolescent method in tum, his work at once

paying tribute to the didactic framework of the Oriental tale and more insistently

exploring the transgressions of its protagonists.

VATHEK

In his notes to The Giaour (1813), Byron praised Vathek for its "correctness of

costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination" and viewed it alongside

Johnson's Rasselas, stating that the latter's "'Happy Valley' will not bear a

comparison with the 'Hall of Eblis."m Byron's eulogy of Vathek distinguishes

Beckford's elaborate Oriental description from the generalised exoticism of other

tales, and his contrast between Johnson's "Happy Valley" and Beckford's "Hall of

Eblis" also draws attention to the role of didacticism and the metaphor of the journey

in the two tales, as the former marks the beginning of Rasselas's search for a purpose

in life while the latter the punishment of Vathek and the end of his quest. In this

27George Gordon Byron, The Giaour, Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1986) 246-47.

79
section, I will argue that the renowned eccentricity of Beckford's tale is best

understood by considering both its literary predecessors and its contemporary

reception.

Byron's juxtaposition of Johnson's tale and Beckford's is worth exploring

further. In Rasselas, Johnson's fabular framework is evident from the start, as his

first paragraph entreats the reader to "attend to the history of Rasselas prince of

Abissinia" as a lesson for those "who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy,

and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform

the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied

by the morrow."28 The Happy Valley is the luxurious place where all Abissinian

princes and princesses reside but where Rasselas finds himself trapped in a state of

ennui. After conversing with Imlac, a man of learning, he is curious to see the world

outside and decides to leave the valley to make his "choice of life" (56), as he tells

Imlac, hoping that in the choice he makes he will be better contented. The journey

allows Rasselas to witness various conditions of men and it finally disabuses him of

his illusions, making him realise that discontent is an inevitable and inescapable fact

of human life.

Vathek's journey, on the other hand, is of a totally different nature from that

of Rasselas. While Rasselas's thirst for knowledge is motivated by his desire for a

contentment beyond the transient, worldly pleasure of the Happy Valley, Vathek's

curiosity is grounded solely upon his ignoble, insatiable need for sensual

gratification. In Beckford's tale, Johnson's Happy Valley is rewritten as the complex

of Palaces of the Five Senses, offering Vathek infinite pleasures from music,

perfume, women, food and expensive curiosities. Vathek's belief is that of a

28 Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven: Yale UP,
1990) 7. Subsequent references to Rasselas will be given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

80
hedonist who rejects Islamic precepts and thinks that it is unnecessary "to make a

hell of this world to enjoy paradise in the next."29 While living his life in extreme

decadence, Vathek is tempted, not by deep, enlightened conversation with a wise

man, but by the allure of the black merchant, or Giaour, who presents him dazzling,

curious objects, and later persuades him to abjure Mahomet in exchange for the

promise of treasures in the Palace of Subterranean Fire. Vathek'sjourneyto Istakhar

encompasses blasphemous and vicious acts to prove him an absolute hedonist and an

enemy of Mahomet. The highbrow, philosophic, and spiritual quest of Johnson's

Rasselas was therefore transformed by Beckford into the sensational adventure of

Vathek which ends with the severe punishment of the caliph's "unrestrained

passions and atrocious deeds" (120) in the Hall of Eblis.

The figure of Vathek seems to derive in large part from the cultural

stereotype of the Oriental despot. Since the seventeenth century, historical accounts

such as Paul Rycaut's Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668) and History of

the Turkish Empire (1678) portrayed, according to Ballaster, eastern emperors'

"degeneracy in the seraglio, in the shape of sexual excess, the influence of favourites

... and a retreat from political and domestic concerns."30 Schahriar, the sultan in the

frame tale of the Arabian Nights, is also a brutal and oppressive monarch who

marries a different woman every night and has her executed in the morning. In

English Oriental tales, portraits of Oriental despotism were pervasive, but they were

subordinated to the moralising purposes of the writers concerned. Rasselas, as

Srinivas Aravamudan puts it, is "the Enlightenment's benevolent counterpart to the

Oriental antitype," since "the prince's curiosity is that of the scholar's disinterested

29 William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 1. Subsequent
references to Vathek will be given in parentheses after quotations in the text.
30 Ballaster, Fabulous Orients 47.

81
equanimity or the enlightened despot's urge to use his absolute power to do good."3J

In Sheridan's tale, Nourjahad's decadence and Faustian aspiration for eternal life

and riches are finally checked, as he repents and becomes a philanthropist. While the

political and sexual tyrants in Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet and Reeve's

"History of Charoba" are punished, their wickedness is counterbalanced and

subdued by the virtue of good characters.

Beckford's Oriental despot looms large in the text. Virtuous and pIOUS

characters such as reverend santons and mullahs are introduced in the narrative, but

they serve primarily as victims of the caliph's mischief. While he is presented as an

evil tyrant, Vathek is also a source of entertainment and laughter. His character was

drawn in part from Barthelemy D'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale in which the

terrifying historical Caliph Vathek was described as possessing "a baleful eye" with

which "even on his deathbed he directed an angry glare at one of his attendants,"

making the man instantly "los[ e] consciousness and collapse[ ... ] on another

attendant near him."32 Beckford's opening paragraph similarly focuses on the

"baleful eye" of the caliph, but the way in which this is described reduces the

supposedly sublime character ofVathek to the level of absurdity:

His figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry, one of his eyes
became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon
him it was fixed, instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear,
however, of depopulating his dominions and making his palace desolate, he but
rarely gave way to his anger. (1)

Vathek's overreaching aspiration-"he wished to know everything; even sciences

that did not exist" (3)-points to the Faustian framework that Beckford earlier

31 Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham: Duke UP.
1999) 205, 206.
32 qtd. in Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans 214.

82
alluded to in The Vision. The structure of Vathek, however, is more complete in its

presentation of the protagonist's transgressive behaviour and his punishment. While

The Vision's "William" represents Beckford's adolescent wish to escape from his

future public responsibility, and is only a naIve intruder on Moisasour's secret (but

also seemingly benign) world, the Caliph is a considerably more complicated figure.

Through his character, there are obvious ways in which Beckford transformed the

archetypal narrative of Faust. As Aravamudan asserts, Vathek obviously lacks those

noble qualities such as stoicism, "[ c]onsistency," or even "honor" that would

identify him as a Faustian tragic hero.33 In the story, he proves an unrestrained,

infantile and impulsive character whose aspiration is dominated solely by his base

appetite for sensual gratification. As Beckford's hyperbolic narration attests, Vathek

is capable of consuming "three hundred" exquisite dishes daily (7), and is unabashed

at grovelling upon the ground to lap water from a fountain when plagued with

tormented thirst. While the Giaour's mention of subterranean treasures extracts

Vathek's earnest promise to take a journey to Istakhar, the voluptuous life with

Nouronihar at Fakreddin's palace equally diverts the caliph's attention, retaining

him at the Emir's until Carathis comes to remind him of his deal with the Giaour.

Beckford can be seen to take pleasure in confounding and toying with his

readers' expectations. The general conception of Oriental sexual despotism, evident

in images of female slaves in seraglios, is reversed in the comical scene when

Vathek's carriage catches fire and "one of his Ethiopian wives" rescues him by

"clasp[ ing] him in her arms" and "thr[ owing] him upon her shoulder, like a sack of

dates" (48). The effects of effeminacy in Beckford's tale are also presented without

any moralistic gloss. Gulchenrouz, for instance, is described as "the most delicate

33 Ibid. 21 7.

83
and lovely creature in the world" (65) who spends most of his time in the harem

dancing, playing music, writing verses and occasionally wearing a woman's dress

that makes him even "more feminine" (66) than his cousin, Nouronihar. Though he

is despised by his elder relatives, Gulchenrouz's innocence is preserved to the end of

the story, as Beckford had him saved from Carathis by the good old genius who

confers upon him happiness and "the boon of perpetual childhood" (98).

Homoeroticism in Vathek is likewise so exuberantly delineated that the work

appears to be celebrating such sexual excess. When the caliph lures fifty "lovely

innocents" (25) to be the Giaour's sacrificial victims, in particular, his pederastic

preferences become a hilarious entertainment, as he commands the boys to undress

so as to reveal "the suppleness and grace of their delicate limbs" (26), while he

himself gradually strips off his expensive, glittering clothes and accessories, and

offers them as prizes to the naked boys to fetch and simultaneously fall into the

gulph where the Giaour is awaiting. Beckford, furthermore, seemed to revise the

figure of Nouronihar as she had appeared in The Vision. Instead of being a

representative of exotic charm and delight, N ouronihar in Vathek is "full of wanton

gaiety" (57), conspiring with her servants to tease Bababalouk, Vathek's chief

eunuch, and make him fall from his swing into the bath and slip and "dance like a

jack-pudding" (59). Far from being an agent of moral reform like heroines in so

many other Oriental tales, Nouronihar is a negative influence that leads Vathek to

his ruin, as her desire for the beautiful carbuncle of Giamschid compels her to press

Vathek to resume his journey and search for the treasures of the pre-adamite sultans.

Functioning as the tempter who offers Vathek moral choices, the Giaour

seems to be modelled upon the Oriental supernatural agent of the genie who

possesses magical powers, a figure who would have been familiar to readers brought

84
up on the Arabian Nights. At the outset, the Giaour presents himself as an Indian

merchant whose bizarre appearance is as irresistibly curious and attractive to Vathek

as his splendid merchandise. As Beckford put it, the caliph is astounded by his

"blacker than ebony" body, his "huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands," and his

"hideous" laugh revealing "long amber-coloured teeth, bestreaked with green" (6).

Beckford's grotesque representation of the Giaour is, indeed, an exaggerated version

of Eastern tales' marvel and miracle: when Vathek is irritated by his "horrid

grimaces" and "loud shouts of laughter" (18), and starts to kick him down the steps

of his throne, for example, the Giaour is ludicrously described as collecting himself

into a ball, drawing the caliph and other people to follow and repeat their kicking:

[B]eing both short and plump, he [the Giaour] collected himself into a ball, and
rolled round on all sides, at the blows of his assailants, who pressed after him,
wherever he turned, with an eagerness beyond conception, whilst their numbers
were every moment increasing. The ball indeed, in passing from one apartment
to another, drew every person after it that came in its way; insomuch, that the
whole palace was thrown into confusion and resounded with a tremendous
clamour. (18)

Vathek was originally written in French, and the extravagance of the work,

its veering between the sublime and the ridiculous, seems to have much more in

common with a French tradition of satirical Orientalism than with its more earnest

and moralistic English counterpart. French Oriental fiction, most famously

represented by the works of Montesquieu and Voltaire, as Jack explains, "had

always served the satirical purpose of mocking society and its institutions and

debunking all that was held precious by the political elite."34 As for Vathek and the

Episodes of Vathek, Beckford was particularly influenced by his uncle Anthony

Hamilton's Oriental tales, such as Fleur d'Epine and Les Quatres Facardins, which

34 Jack, Introduction, Vathek and Other Stories xix.

85
satirise, according to Roger Lonsdale, "the vogue for the Arabian Nights and their

imitators at the French court."35 During his composition of the tales, Beckford

himself jokingly stated to William Henley in a letter of April 1782 that "I think

Count Hamilton will smile upon me when we are introduced to each other in

paradice [sic].,,36 Hamilton's Les Quatres Facardins (translated as The History of the

Four Facardins in 1760), for instance, includes marvellous figures such as a hairy

giant and an old man with a three-foot beard, as well as the severed anns of a fair

princess spinning on a wheel of ebony, and the adventures of one of its heroes to

find shoes that fit her tiny feet. Like Vathek, Hamilton's tale seems to embody a

simultaneous fascination with and disdain for Oriental fiction. In Britain, where

critics tended to focus more on the moral and philosophical merits of Oriental tales,

this kind of playfulness was commonly stigmatised as unmeaning French frivolity.

When Matthew Lewis translated and revised the Four Facardins in 1808, the Critical

Review categorised it as "a farrago of nonsense," referring to Count Hamilton's

original version as a "whimsical species of composition" which "abounded in some

Parisian coteries during the time of Louis the fourteenth" and "must have furnished

very pleasant pastime to the particular societies for whose amusement they were

immediately composed.,,37 The review further compared Hamilton's work to

Walpole's burlesques of Oriental fiction, the Hieroglyphic Tales, which were

acceptable only on the grounds that they were written as a private recreation on the

part of the author: "these trifles," the reviewer asserted, "we believe were merely

intended by him [Walpole] for the Christmas amusement of some young ladies who

35 Lonsdale, Introduction, Vathek xxvi-vii.

36 qtd. in Lonsdale, Introduction, Vathek xxvi. .
37 Critical Review (Dec. 1808): 355-66, British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database of Productt?n,
Circulation & Reception, 2004, Cardiff U, 25 Sept. 2006 <http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.ukltttle
Details.asp?titIe= 1808 A071 >.

86
honoured him with their company and good-humour, and were brought to light only

by the aid of editorial industry. "38

Vathek, however, was not written exclusively for a French audience. When

Beckford was still writing the episodes, he told Henley in March 1785 how he hoped

that the latter would "one day or other introduce" his "plants," his Oriental tales, to

the "English soil."39 As Beckford's correspondence with Henley shows, his plan was

to publish first the original French Vathek and its episodes, and then their English

translations. These Oriental tales were thus part of Beckford's cultural ambition to

establish himself, not only as an author, but also a literary avant-gardist who brought

novelty to English fiction. As I have already suggested, though, Beckford

experimented within what would have been to readers an already recognisable

literary form. While Beckford indulged his readers in the comic and preposterous

adventures of Vathek, he attempted to familiarise the tale's conclusion by appearing

to uphold the didacticism that characterises most eighteenth-century tales written in

English. The final pages of the novel are filled with sublime, terrifying images:

Istakhar and the Halls of Eblis, the tale reveals, are where Vathek and Nouronihar,

like the pre-adamite Kings before them, meet their final damnation, "plunge [d] ...

into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish"

(119-20). The story ends with a moralising closure: "Such was, and such should be,

the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be, the

chatisement of that blind curiosity ... and such the dreadful disappointment of that

restless ambition ... " (120).

Beckford's warning to the reader to curb their "curiosity" and "ambition"

echoes Johnson's principal moral in Rasselas which, from the start, similarly

38 Ibid.
39 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 128.

87
cautions its readers to avoid "listen[ing] with credulity to the whisper of fancy, and

pursu[ing] with eagerness the phantoms of hope" (7). At the same time, though,

Beckford can be seen to invoke lohnson's didacticism in order to undercut it. He

reminds the reader that "the condition of man upon earth is to be-humble and

ignorant" (120), but while the debauched and voracious caliph is punished as "a prey

to grief without end and remorse without mitigation," the languid, ignorant and

effeminate Gulchenrouz is safe in "undisturbed tranquillity" and the "pure happiness

of childhood" (120). In contrast to his collaborator Henley, Beckford seems not to

have taken the moralisation of his Oriental narrative entirely seriously. It is striking

nonetheless that many if not most of the early reviews of Vathek took its conclusion

at face-value, and read the work as if it were a moral Oriental tale: The European

Magazine (1786), for example, commended the novel as imparting a "moral of the

greatest importance,"40 while The Gentleman's Magazine (1786) also praised "the

morality of the design, and the excellence of the execution" which "entitle it

[Vathek] to universal attention."41

For other contemporary critics as well as for later generations of readers,

however, Vathek's closing tableau did not contain the distinctive and indeed bizarre

features of the rest of the work. Along with its "sublime" conclusion, another feature

that Beckford's contemporaries distinguished in the novel was his often elaborate

Oriental description, authenticated (though not always reliably so) by the copious

notes that accompany the tale: while the European Magazine (1786) praised the

author for being so "well acquainted with the customs of the East,"42 the

Gentleman's Magazine (1786) commented on the writer's "most extensive

erudition" in the work's annotations, and the Critical Review (1786) pointed out the

40 European Magazine (1786), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 305.

41 Gentleman's Magazine (1786), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 305.
42 European Magazine (1786), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 305.

88
"intimate knowledge of oriental customs" which made the reviewer suspect that the
43
work was not a translation at al1. Unlike his imaginative Vision and other earlier

and contemporary Oriental romances, Beckford's visionary style in Vathek

incorporated a great deal of historical and cultural detail about the East. While his

main character was built upon the historical figure of the Cailph Vathek described

by D'Herbelot, other descriptions in the tale were supported by learned, factual

accounts collected from Oriental tales, scholarly essays, dissertations and travel

books. As meticulously referenced in the explanatory notes, Beckford's Oriental

representations include minute details of eastern geography, religion, customs and

manners. It is an Orientalism that induced Byron to extol it (as I have already

shown) for its "correctness of costume,"44 and which made Vathek a pioneering

pseudo-Oriental fiction that featured, according to Nigel Leask, "cultural typicality,"

specific and authentic detail, rather than the generalised exoticism of other Oriental

romances written in English.45

In a survey article on literature and empire in the long eighteenth century,

Saree Makdisi writes that Vathek is a transitional work that "signalled a momentous

shift in British attitudes towards non-European cultures."46 The Oriental tale after

Vathek, Makdisi puts it, "would ... not be something merely to be enjoyed for the

sake of it, not a form that one could innocently take advantage of in order to impart

moral and intellectual precepts," but instead would be "drafted to the cause of

British national and imperial self-definition," as knowledge of the East came to

43 Gentleman's Magazine (1786) and Critical Review (1786), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic
Novel 304-05.
44 Byron, The Giaour 247. . ....
45 Nigel Leask, "'Wandering in Eblis': Absorption and Containment in RomantIC ExotIcI~m,
Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter 1. KItson
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 180. . ' rh
46 Saree Makdisi, "Literature, national identity, and empire," The Cambndge CompanIon to _Eng IS
Literature 1740-1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 6).

89
signify imperial power, an essential factor that differentiated the educated Western

(British) reader from their uncivilised Eastern subjects ..n Leask similarly stresses

that the dense footnotes which so often accompanied British Orientalist

representation from Beckford's Vathek onwards marked a new aesthetic treatment

of the East, since they functioned to prevent the reader from being absorbed in the

exotic by translating the Oriental otherness of the fictional narrative into a familiar

Western "ethnological or historiographical discourse" that guaranteed the reader's

positional and intellectual superiority. 48

Beckford's work, however, complicates any straightforward opposition

between absorptive imaginative content on the one hand and serious scholarly

containment on the other. Many annotations to Vathek, I would argue, might be read

as extensions of the bizarreness of Beckford's fiction. Though some of Henley's

notes were based on historical anecdotes, they were themselves sometimes as

extraordinary as Beckford's imaginary tale. While relying on Elias Habesci's State

of the Ottoman Empire, Henley's note on dwarfs, for example, seems as much a

trifle to amuse the reader as a piece of scholarly investigation: "If a dwarf happen to

be a mute," as Henley put it, "he is much esteemed; but ifhe be also an eunuch, he is

regarded as a prodigy; and no pains or expense are spared to obtain him" (139).

Elsewhere, however, Henley incorporated into his Orientalist research extensive

parallels with Biblical, classical, and Renaissance texts, turning Beckford's Oriental

romance into a compendium of universal history and culture. Beckford, in the 1816

edition of Vathek, substantially reduced Henley's classical and English references,

while in some notes providing instead Hebrew etymologies that added a further level

of information. Although Henley suggested to Beckford that he should ha\'e

47 Ibid. 65.
48 Leask, "'Wandering in Eblis'" 180-81.

90
punished Carathis more severely, Beckford refused to make any such change,

explaining in his 1816 note that her peculiar punishment-she is "glanced off in a

rapid whirl that rendered her invisible" (119)-was "very applicable" for her. There

seem to be no specific principles underpinning the annotation of Vathek, and some

of the notes, including those written by Henley as well as Beckford, confound

readers as much as the narrative itself.

Through Vathek's epicurean devotion, Beckford's tale continuously dazzles

its readers with a variety of sumptuous Oriental objects. As Andrew Elfenbein

argues, Vathek can be seen to represent Beckford's "brilliance as a collector. "49 In

real life, Beckford's wealth allowed him to become, in Elfenbein's words, "the

champion collector of his day," known for his consumption of luxurious products

such as China dishes, Japanese lacquer, ebony furniture, porcelain, Old Master

paintings, prints, and metalwork. so Throughout Beckford's novel, Vathek is likewise

presented as a consumer. Exquisite delicacies such as "lamb ala creme" (55), "cakes
baked in silver ovens," and "grapes from the banks of Tigris" (49) are elaborately

described in the notes and explained as examples of the most splendid Eastern food.

Like his account of the "balm of Mecca," consisting of "oils perfumed with the

odours of flowers" (142), Beckford's detailed description of "baths of rose water,"

the perfume of which "breathes a richer fragrance than is known" to the "more

humid climates" of the West (141), accentuates the sensuality of Oriental luxury for

the reader. Earlier Oriental tales illustrated the excessive consumption of Eastern

rulers, but often with a critical or moralistic gloss. Johnson's Happy Valley, for

example, is described as a palace of "blissful captivity" (3) that confines Rasselas in

the illusive bounds of pleasure and hence in a state of discontent. NOUljahad's

49 Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: the Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia
UP, 1999) 48.
50 Ibid. 41.

91
preoccupation with "the beauties of... seraglios; the delicacies of ... table; and the

excellence of ... musicians" is portrayed by Sheridan as "lazy and effeminate," a

behaviour that is later reformed with Nourjahad's return to a more simple lifestyle

and his distribution of his wealth to help the poor. 51 Beckford's account of a

stereotypical "Eastern" sensuality, by contrast, carries little in the way of

accompanying critique, appearing instead to extol, rather than reprobate, the culture

of conspicuous consumption and libertinism, in opposition to other Oriental writings

which are more moralistic and anti-aristocratic in their agenda.

As well as accentuating a stereotypical "Oriental" sensuality, however,

Beckford also dealt in a much less familiar or digestible register of exotic detail:

when the caliph's carriage catches fire en route to Istakhar, for example, Vathek has

to endure execrable food such as "a roasted wolf; vultures a la daube; aromatic herbs
of the most acrid poignancy; rotten truffles; boiled thistles: and such other wild

plants, as must ulcerate the throat and parch up the tongue" (49). This kind of detail

further testifies to Beckford's sense of his work as a fabulous Oriental fiction rather

than a serious, moralised romance or the product of research alone. Beckford was

clearly concerned to maintain this idea of his work, noting in his copy of Stanhope's

Greece in 1823-24 that he wrote Vathek in "two days and a night;,,52 ten years later

he told Redding that he composed Vathek "at one sitting" and that it took him "three

days and two nights of hard labour" ("I never took off my clothes the whole time").53

Although his correspondence with Henley shows in detail their collaboration on

Vathek from 1782 to 1786, Beckford's overstatement of his rapid composition of

Vathek reiterated his concern not to be associated with anything resembling hard

work; Beckford's reference to his "hard labour" ironically suggested that the tale

51 Sheridan, History of Nouriahad 127, 131.

52 qtd. in Lonsdale, Introduction, Vathek xiii.
53 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 124.

92
had been dashed off and carried out, as Robert Kiely puts it, "in a passionate fit of

genius,"54 rather than with the intellectual outlook of a scholar or the view to

pecuniary interest of a professional writer. When Henley appeared to be engrossed

in annotation, Beckford reminded him in his letter in April 1786 that "[n]otes are

certainly necessary, and the diss[ ertation] I myself should very much approve but

fear the world might imagine I fancied myself the Author, not of an Arabian Tale ,

but an Epic Poem. "55 Beckford, in other words, did not want to be pinned down as a

specific kind of author. If he had to be labelled as anything, he would prefer to be

considered a writer of imaginative Oriental fiction, not an editor, who, like Henley,

made use of Oriental narrative as a site for the display of professional scholarship.

As I suggested at the outset, one way of explaining Beckford's complex

relation to his work is to consider its autobiographical resonance. There seems to be

a personal connection between Beckford and his best-known Oriental tale, as Lady

Hamilton noted when she stated that "Vathek was his favourite": "To abuse Vathek

he deemed a personal insult."56 During his lifetime, Beckford seemed to encourage

the identification between himself and the caliph. His lavish lifestyle at Fonthill

Abbey, for example, was seen as an enactment of the life of his luxurious Oriental

hero; as Byron called Beckford "Vathek! England's wealthiest son" in his first canto

of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812),57 and the reviewer of Italy; with Sketches of

Spain and Portugal in the Quarterly Review (1834) similarly observed that

Beckford's "voluptuousness of temperament" and "capricious recklessness of self-

indulgence" would "lead the world to identify him henceforth with his Vathek. "'~

Even when Beckford moved to Bath, his Oriental-like Lansdown Tower, the exotic

54 Kiely, Romantic Novel in England 50.

55 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 135.
56 qtd. in Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son 94. . '") 5
57 George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Major Works 31: Canto 1, stanza 22, lIne _7 .
58 Quarterly Review 51 (1834): 429.

93
specimens of trees that he planted, and his habit of travelling, in Fothergill's words,

"en prince" or with a train of servants and carriages, continued to maintain the

association between the Caliph and himself. 59

Later in 1838 Beckford wrote on the fly-leaves of one of his books that '"I

wrote V[ athek] immediately upon my return to London at the close of this romantic

villegiatura,"60 referring to the Christmas party in 1781 where Beckford, his close

friends and relatives indulged themselves at Fonthill Splendens. This private

spectacle was specifically designed by Philippe de Loutherbourg, then a

scenographer at Drury Lane, who transformed the Egyptian Hall of Fonthill into

what Beckford called "a realm of Fairy, or rather, perhaps, a Demon Temple deep

beneath the earth set apart for tremendous mysteries."61 Experimenting with optical

illusions and artificial light, Loutherbourg produced a theatrical effect that absorbed

spectators into the scenery, with Beckford noting how "[t]he glowing haze investing

every object, the mystic look, the vastness, the intricacy of this vaulted labyrinth

occasioned so bewildering an effect that it became impossible for anyone to

define."62 Referring to "strains of music" and the "vapour of wood aloes ascending

in wreaths from cassolettes placed low on the silken carpets in porcelain salvers of

the richest japan," Beckford remarked on the "delirium of delight" and "combination

of seductive influences" that he and his friends "conceived but too easily.,,63 As lain

McCalman observes, this represents a mise-en-scene of "sensual intoxication" not

far removed from the exquisite pleasures that Beckford's protagonist experiences in

59 Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 323.

60 qtd. in Chapman, Beckford 102.
61 qtd. in Lonsdale, Introduction, Vathek xi.
62 Ib'd ..
1 • xu.
63 Ib'd .
1 . Xl.

94
 64
The Vision. Like Beckford's Oriental fiction, Loutherbourg's spectacle served as a

licensed space in which he could deviate from social convention. Beckford's

account of the 1781 Christmas party, though probably exaggerated. induced

twentieth-century biographers such as Boyd Alexander, Guy Chapman, and Brian

Fothergill to identify him with Vathek, who, as they point out, is similar to the

author in his impetuosity and general unorthodoxy (as well as his love of towers).t>5

Characters such as Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz, numerous critics have pointed out,

are also reminiscent of his cousin Louisa and William Courtenay.66

THE EPISODES OF V ATHEK

Although Vathek's journey ends with his eternal damnation in Istakhar, Beckford

did not actually complete his best-known work. Beckford returned to the theme of

Faustian trangression in his Episodes to Vathek, the three shorter tales that Beckford

initially imagined would be incorporated into the original French version of Vathek,

had Henley not published his English translation in June 1786 (causing Beckford to

hastily publish his French edition in France in the same year and to revise Henley's

English version and publish it in London in 1816). Even more than Vathek,

Beckford's Episodes display his libidinal investment in the East.

These tales seem to tone down the playfulness and the jocular air of Vathek,

except perhaps in the last episode which contains grotesque figures such as the lean,

64 lain McCalman, "The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the
Spectacle of the Sublime," Romanticism on the Net 46, May 2007, 27 Nov. 2007 <http:// W\\\\.
erudit.org/revue/ronl2007/vIn46/0 16129 ar .htm1>.
65 See Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son 92; Chapman, Beckford 109; and Fothergill, Beckford of
Fonthill 126-28.
66 See Chapman, Beckford 109; and Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 128-29.

95
eight-feet-high "hennit of the Great Sandy Desert," and the "Palm-tree-climber" on

the Ostrich Isle who "refused to come down [the tree] without knowing why he was

summoned."67 This tale, titled "The History of the Princess Zulkais and the Prince

Kalilah," however, is unfinished, and the protagonists also develop an incestuous

relationship and are strongly detennined to rebel against the authority of their father

and the rigid precepts of Islam. The remainder of this section will primarily examine

the first two tales, also the most complete, of the Episodes. Presenting their

characters' ultimate condition as similar to that of Vathek and Nouronihar, these

narratives omit the concluding moral statement and either drop out or compress the

characters' punishment to only a few sentences. These tales focus almost entirely on

their characters' sensational crimes and adventures. Beckford here revived the first-

person narration with which he had experimented in The Vision, and these tales

appear similarly autobiographical, allowing him once again to play out transgressive

identities.

Central to the first episode, "The History of the Two Princes and Friends, Alasi

and Firouz," is the homoerotic relationship between the two title characters, whose

crimes, the narrator (Alasi) states, are not engendered by "ambition" (like Vathek's),

but by the "sweet sentiments of friendship" (151) that he feels for the 13-year-old

boy, Firouz. Like Beckford himself and "William" in The Vision, Alasi, at the age

of 19, ignores his elders' instruction and his future public duties as the king of

Kharezme: "You lack neither wit nor judgement," Alasi's father tells him, as he

urges him to "use them to suppress your desires when they draw you too much

toward frivolous designs that are not without danger" (151). But whereas William's

exploration leads to his innocent pursuit of Moisasour's exotic, subterranean world,

67 William Beckford, Episodes of Vathek, Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek, ed. Kennet? W.
Graham (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001) 300, 321. Subsequent references to the Episodes \\111 be
given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

96
Alasi's "desires" are more destructive, as they are more clearly opposed to social

convention, thereby rendering the first episode darker and more disturbing than The

Vision and Vathek. Alasi's transgression is the love that he has for Firouz, who is

influenced by an evil spirit called Magus, a worshipper of the religion of Zoroaster;

as Graham notes, the term "giaour" also means a follower of Zoroastrianism. 68

Beckford's use of the theme of the Faustian pact with the devil again serves to

liberate his protagonists from the restriction of dominating religious and social

mores. In The Vision it allows William to indulge in supernatural Oriental visions,

and in Vathek it promises the caliph possession of the pre-adamite treasures.

In his first "Episode," by contrast, Beckford made Zoroastrianism an ideal

world that sanctions same-sex relationships, and that would enable the princes to

live in eternal bliss together. Firouz's love not only frees Alasi from his state duties,

but also causes him to reject Princess Roudabah, his betrothed match. Under

Firouz's malicious spell, Roudabah commits adultery with Amni, the son of a vizir.

Roudabah's speech to Alasi depicts her as an enemy of the domestic ideology of the

dutiful, subservient wife: "As Firouz is to Alasi, so my lover is to me. I am Alasi' s

equal. I may be permitted as well to have a favourite" (169). Roudabah's "brazen

discourse" (169), as Alasi puts it, prompts him to separate from her and to take his

revenge on her by destroying her village and people. Alasi' s dissatisfaction with his

heterosexual match thereby offers him a licence to turn to a homosexual alternative

and to place his faith in Zoroastrianism. When the Magus tempts him to embrace the

religion of Zoroaster in order to enjoy "a happy eternity" with Firouz in the Palace

of Subterranean Fire (182-83), Alasi does not hesitate to accomplish criminal deeds

as sacrifices to his new god. Through the love of Alasi and Firouz, Beckford's tale

68 Graham, Introduction, Vathek with The Episodes ofVathek 26 (note 2).

97
can be seen to subvert those ideas of morality, domesticity and companionate

heterosexual relations that were often promoted in contemporary novels and Oriental

fictions. As custodians of social and religious propriety, aged, pious and learned men

are no longer a laughing stock as in Vathek, but hapless and pitiful victims of his

protagonists. The mullah who teaches the Koran to Alasi is transformed into an ass ,

and later killed by Firouz, while the old santon, who provides food and lodging to

Firouz, is also cruelly massacred by a furious mob which believes the two princes'

false accusation concerning his apparent impieties.

The story of Alasi and Firouz that I am here referring to was recently

translated and published by Kenneth Graham in his 2001 edition ofVathek and The

Episodes of Vathek. As Graham asserts, it derives from what he believes to be the

original, suppressed manuscript which has long been ignored, since Beckford also

produced a revised version of the same story-a version which was published by

Lewis Melville in the first edition of the Episodes to be published, in 1912.69

Juxtaposing the suppressed and revised versions, Graham's publication has shown a

significant alteration that Beckford made to his original story. In the middle of his

revised version, Beckford revealed the malicious, seductive Firouz to be Princess

Firouzkah, the disguised daughter of Filanshaw, King of Shirvan and friend of

Alasi's father, hence recasting his characters' transgressive, same-sex relationship to

a conventional, heterosexual one. This alteration may have been calculated to protect

Beckford's reputation after the Courtenay scandal, but, for Graham, it supplied only

"weak motivations for [the couple's] rebellion and atrocity. "70 Beckford's

suppressed version may be more outrageous in its overtly homosexual content, but

the trope of transvestism should not be regarded as simply defective and

69 Ibid. 23.
70 Ibid. 23-24.

98
unconvincing, since Beckford's display of the passionate love between Alasi and the

disguised Firouz subtly and wittily entertained homoerotic episodes within a

heterosexual framework. In other words, it toyed with the reader by suggesting the

possibility for gender play and sexual transgression, thus undermining sexual

decorum without breaking it-employing a "male Gothic" strategy similarly found

in works such as Lewis's The Monk and Byron's Turkish tales (1813-14).

Beckford's second episode, "The History of Prince Barkiarokh," concerns

the overreaching Barkiarokh, who exploits the innocent and benign Peri Homalouna

and works his way to become the king of Daghestan before being eventually

punished by Eblis. The interwoven narratives of Barkiarokh and Homalouna,

according to Graham, are constructed upon two popular novelistic plots: while

Barkiarokh's roguish adventures match the picaresque form of the novel, the

education of the naIve, inexperienced Homalouna follows the format of the

Bildungsroman. 71 What Beckford did, however, was to experiment with these

already recognisable literary forms so as further to explore proscribed sexual

behaviours. Barkiarokh's narrative starts with a contest that his father holds among

his three sons to find a good wife for them. With the help of the innocent

Homalouna, Barkiarokh wins his father's favour and obtains a magic ring, which he

uses to deceive morally upright characters, trampling on them and becoming the

most evil character in the story (he lures Princess Gazahide into marriage after

murdering her father, for example). Barkiarokh's sexual appetite is especially

startling, since he not merely neglects his first wife Homalouna to marry Gazahide,

but also commits adultery with statesmen's wives, indulges in an act of necrophilia

with the dying and heartbroken Gazahide, and unashamedly shows an incestuous

71 Ibid. 29.

99
desire for his own daughter, Leilah. Unlike in other picaresque novels, which usually

end with the refonnation of the hero and hI'S mamage

. t0 a VIrtuOUS
. woman,

Barkiarokh remains unrefonned.

At the same time, Beckford's narrative provides no reward for meritorious

deeds. The tale's Bildungsroman narrative portrays the celestial Peri HomaYouna as

an apprentice with the detennination to do good to mankind on earth. Her

interventions in human matters, however, tum out either to deepen misery or to

benefit the wrong person, as she admits that her "acts of benevolence" have "often

be[en] much misplaced" (216-17). Her most misplaced benevolence of all, apart

from her love and kindness towards Barkiarokh, is the guidance that she gives to

Queen Gulzara, who, having promised her father never to marry, follows

HomaYouna's advice by rejecting her lover but later dies of grief. What the reader

learns from HomaYouna's narrative is the inconstancy and unreliability of the human

condition. Such a "moral" can, perhaps, be read as Beckford's ironic response to

Johnson's philosophical claims about the inescapability of discontent in Rasselas. If

HomaYouna's rigid adherence to righteousness and morality results in self-inflicted

pain and sorrow, in other words, it might perversely seem reasonable for Barkiarokh

to choose to live his life in an entirely contrary way.

Barkiarokh, indeed, pays no attention to the concepts of virtue and

benevolence that govern HomaYouna's life. His violent acts can be seen as a

rebellion against, and hence liberation from, the moral and sexual probity that

constrains human beings. Instead of following Islamic precepts, Barkiarokh

worships "Babek Horremi," a supporter of Zoroastrianism, "surnamed the Impious.

because he believed in no religion at all, and preached a universal subservience to

enjoyment, and to every conceivable kind of pleasure" (279). Throughout the story

100
Barkiarokh is fully aware of his hypocrisy and vice, yet still wants to prove himself

an absolute and thorough villain, taking advantage of Homaiouna's generosity and

even planning to destroy her in order that he can further satisfy his insatiable, lustful

ambition without her obstruction. Departing from the Bildungsroman framework,

Beckford destabilised the idea of "virtue rewarded" which was prevalent in most

eighteenth-century English Oriental fictions. His use of the picaresque, on the other

hand, allowed him to toy with the reader's hope for Barkiarokh's reform and instead

throw in increasingly brutal, sensational crimes, hence taking Barkiarokh's

hedonism to extremes until the final scene when Homaiouna saves Leilah and lets

Barkiarokh fall into the subterranean palace of Istakhar.

As I have shown, the Episodes of Vathek reworks constituent features of The

Vision and Vathek, such as the overreaching protagonist and the idea of the Faustian

pact with the devil, in order to explore proscribed forms of gender and sexual

behaviour. The sympathetic, though sometimes also ludicrous, depiction of

Beckford's protagonists is distinctively different from illustrations of Oriental

despotism in other contemporary writings. Instead of endorsing any idea of reform,

Beckford's Oriental tales-along with their sheer, amoral energy-can be seen

implicitly to celebrate the "aristocratic" culture of hedonism, epicureanism and

libertinism. The fabular framework of Vathek and the Episodes further enabled

Beckford to publish his narratives, making them to some extent a legitimate

imaginary site that enabled deviation from the increasingly rigid moral and sexual

"standards" of the time.

Following Byron's praise of his Oriental description in the notes to The

Giaour, which reinvigorated the sale of Vathek, Beckford published his 1816 edition

of the tale. Throughout his life Beckford prized Vathek and the Episodes, and

101
considered them as earners of his literary reputation. In his conversation with

Redding in 1838, Beckford boasted that he intended to publish the Episodes and to

have his manuscripts sold for over 1,000.72 Despite Byron's admittance of his being

"a strenuous and public admirer" of Vathek, Beckford regarded him as a competitor

and second-rate writer, confiding to the bookseller George Clarke in 1834 that his

Episodes, "if ever [they] emerge from Hades into daylight, will reduce Byron's

Corsairs ... to insignificance."73

In spite of his bold assertion of his superiority over Byron, however,

Beckford did not publish the Episodes. Neither did he entrust himself solely to the

revival of Vathek's reputation, which rather became increasingly negative in the

more rigid moral climate of the 1790s and the early nineteenth century. While

Vathek was admired by younger writers such as Byron and Benjamin Disraeli

(whose eastern romance, Alroy, was influenced by Beckford, and who confessed to

the latter in 1834 how he had been "very much ... obliged" to him74 ), many critics

and readers rejected the work altogether as morally harmful. Hester Thrale, for

example, noted in her diary in January 1791 that Vathek was "a mad Book ...

written by a mad Author," and censured Beckford's "luscious descriptions" of the

effeminate Gulchenrouz, before changing subject to take in the gossip about the

author's life after the Courtenay scandaP5 Henry Crabb Robinson called Vathek
76
"one of the most odious books I ever laid eyes on" in his dairy in 1834. The

Southern Literary Messenger observed in the same year that the author, though of

"extraordinary genius," delineated such "[0 ]bscene," "blasphemous," and "shocking

72 Melville, Life and Letters 145.

73 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 146,333.
74 qtd. in Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 345.
75 Hester Lynch Thrale, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (1942). McNutt,
Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 304.
76 Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers (1938), ~1cNutt.

Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 303.

102
pictures" that they "are in no wise redeemed by the beauty and simplicity of oriental

fiction."77 In 1835 the magazine endorsed its earlier criticism of Vathek, also

agreeing with the verdict of the Western Monthly Magazine, which stated that the

tale was "extravagant," "the sentiment pernicious, and the moral bad. "78 Back in

Britain, however, with Beckford increasingly concerned with his social

rehabilitation after the Courtenay scandal, he seemed to modify his self-

representation somewhat, as I will argue in my final section.

THE 1790S AND AFTER

Throughout his life, Beckford seemed to be reluctant to align himself with any

politically oppositional constituency. In his early days, he was a friend of and

educated alongside William Pitt the Younger, an alliance that seemed to augur well

for Beckford's parliamentary career. During his period of exile, Beckford attempted

to become an English ambassador to Portugal, and offered himself as a negotiator

for peace between France and Britain when the war broke out in 1793. Both

diplomatic efforts were unavailing, however, since his request to be presented to

Maria I of Portugal was declined by the British Minister, Robert Walpole; his

proposal of a peace agreement between France and Britain was also rejected by

Pitt. 79

Beckford's writings of the 1790s seem more overtly politicised than his

earlier Oriental tales , as is evident in his attacks on Pitt in his satires, Modem Novel

Writing, or the Elegant Enthusiast (1796) and Azemia: A Descriptive and

77 Southern Literary Messenger (1834), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 306.

78 Southern Literary Messenger (1835), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 307.
79 Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 188,238-39.

103
Sentimental Novel (1797).80 While scholars regard these works as most obviously

exhibiting Beckford's oppositional, liberal Whig politics,81 it is worth pointing out

that Beckford's social and political views here were expressed tacitly, for both

novels were published anonymously and were not identified by contemporary critics

as his productions. In Azemia, Beckford inserted an "Ode, Panegyrical and Lyrical,"

condemning Pitt's decision to engage in the war as causing death and the starvation

of "[t]wo thirds of th[e] nation."82 In Modem Novel Writing, the hero Henry

Lambert dreams that he "was thrown upon an island in the Atlantic ocean" in which

"the men who had thus seized the reigns of authority published an order forbidding

all persons to assemble, or even to murmur."83 This is a direct reference to Pitt's

Seditious Meeting Act in 1795 which, for Beckford, was similar to other illiberal

measures such as the Traitorous Correspondence Act which compelled him to

immediately return to England in 1796, lest his stay and contact with the French be

deemed treasonable. At the end of the book, Beckford added an address to the

British Critic, a pro-government periodical, further attacking Pitt's oppressive

administration and the effect of war on the poor. The attention that Beckford paid to

class differences at times sounds radical:

Owing to your [the readers'] animated exertions, and the vigorous measures of
your patrons, you may soon hope to see the happy inhabitants of this prosperous
island express by one opinion, ... [that] great men shall eat bread in peace, and
the poor feed on barley cakes in silence. Every person in the kingdom shall

80 Jack, Introduction, Vathek and Other Stories xvi.

81 See Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son 144-46; and Jack, Introduction, Vathek and Other
Stories xxv-vi.
82 [William Beckford], Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel (1797), by J. ~. M. Je~,
Modem Novel Writing (1796) and Azemia (1797): Fascimile Reproductions (G~inesvIll~, Flonda:
Scholars' Facsimiles, 1970) vol. 2, 15. Subsequent references to Azemia will be gIven (wIth volume
and page numbers in parentheses) after quotations in the text. .
83 [William Beckford], Modem Novel Writing, or the Elegant Enthusiast (1796),. by Lad~ Har:n et
Marlow, Modem Novel Writing (1796) and Azemia (1797): Fascimile ReproductIOns (Game~~I~le,
Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1970) vol. 2, 99,101. Subsequent references to Modem No\el \\tntmg
will given (with volume and page numbers in parentheses) after quotations in the text.

104
 acknowledge the blessings of a strong, regular government; while the absurd
doctrine of the Rights of Man, shall be no more thought of, or respected, than
the rights of horses, asses, dogs, and dromedaries. (2, 231)

Such political engagement, however, constitutes only one aspect of Beckford's

writings in the 1790s. As the titles of his fictions suggest, they primarily deal with

contemporary novels. For some modem critics, the satirical aspect is intrinsic to

most of Beckford's literary works, since in whatever genres he engaged with he

relentlessly defined himself against what was considered as conventional or

respectable by the reading public: Modem Novel Writing and Azemia, as James

Folsom has pointed out, are satires of the Gothic and sentimental novel, just as

Vathek is of the Oriental tale and Biographical Memoirs of the biographical

approach to art history and criticism. 84 These works responded in particular to the

popularity of sentimental novels, especially those of female authors who became

increasingly prominent in the second half of the eighteenth century. Beckford

himself was particularly hostile to women writers, sarcastically commenting in 1821

on how he wished "the super-literary ladies of the present period" had "pass[ ed] a

little more of their time at cross stitch and yabble stitch" than "por[ing] over the

mazes of their interminable scribblenations."85 Under the pseudonyms of Lady

Harriet Marlow and J. A. M. Jenks, Beckford parodied female writers and their

emphasis on heroines' virtue and sensibility, declaring to his readers in Azemia that

he attempts to "relate a story which will favour so much of the feebleness of a

feminine mind" (1, ii), and, in Modem Novel Writing, that he "endeavoured to unite

correct, delicate, and vivid imagery to an animated moral sensibility" (1, ii).

84 James Folsom, "Beckford's Vathek and the Tradition of Oriental Satire," Criticism 6 (1964).
McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 281.
85 qtd. in Kiely, Romantic Novel in England 43.

105
 In Modern Novel Writing, Beckford parodied the familiar Bildungsroman plot

of a work such as Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) by building his novel around the

orphan heroine, Arabella Bloomville, who enters sophisticated London society and

encounters a number of incidents before finding out her true identity, uniting with

the hero, and achieving domestic contentment. Like Evelina, Arabella is raised by a

guardian in the countryside but eventually proves to be the sole heiress of the

Countess of Fairville whom she later meets in London. Beckford made his story

even more improbable than Burney'S, using the contrived machinery of the

birthmark, and having the Countess accidentally discover her long lost daughter by

noticing "that strawberry" on Arabella's arm-an event which prompts the two of

them to burst into tears, before entering an embrace that lasts "upwards of seven

minutes and a half, before either of them could speak" (2, 6-7). Such expressions of

feminine sensibility are indeed ridiculed throughout Beckford's satire. In the episode

"A Polite Circle," for instance, the emotional outpourings of his characters are

blatantly exaggerated, as is the case when Lucinda's heartfelt gratitude towards the

kindness of the Countess of Fairville not only causes her to shed a "lucid drop" that

"quivered upon the eyelid," and "let[ ... ] fall her teacup upon the floor" and faint, but

also moves the Countess herself to be "bathed in tears" (l, 25-26). In her

correspondence with Arabella, Amelia's narration of her persecution at the hands of

the libidinous Lord Mahogany can also be seen to mock virtue-rewarded romances,

as his attempts at seduction fail, not because of his yielding to Amelia's virtue, but

his own fright "at the terrible manner she was taken with the fit" (1, 124).

In contrast to Arabella, Azemia, the female protagonist of Beckford's second

satire, is a Turkish woman, the daughter of Hamet-beig of Constantinople, who. on

her way to Marseilles is seized by the British Captain Josiah Wappingshot, then

106
taken to England and put under the care of Mrs. Periwinkle. The opening of Azemia

can be seen obliquely to engage with the Oriental captivity narrative, in which, as

Joe Snader remarks, one or more English characters, "[u]sually merchants and

seamen," are captured by Orientals, "voic[ing] indignant denunciations of the

'despotic' and 'barbaric' peoples who have interrupted their trade in alien waters."'o

By having an Oriental woman captured by British invaders, Beckford's story

reversed the generic norm of the Oriental captivity novel which, according to

Snader, sought to delineate the captives' "self-reliant efforts to regain native

'English liberties' ... against a detailed representation of the Orient as debased and

despotic";87 Beckford presented the British as brutal and covetous imperialists, as is

attested by the names of Captain "Wappingshot" and his ship the "Amputator,"

along with the seizure of Azemia's vessel and its "cargo of figs, coffee, [and] raw

silk" (l, 12-13).

The Oriental narrative pattern of "an individual's exposure to, isolation within,

and resistance to an alien and oppressive environment," as Snader observes, is

correspondent with the pattern of those novels with naIve or persecuted female

protagonists who find themselves estranged from the society they are placed into,

"whether we consider Pamela's confinement in the various houses of Mr. B., ...

Evelina's experience in the fashionable world, or Emily St. Aubert's confinement at

Udolpho."88 Beckford's Azemia satirises such a pattern in contemporary fictions. In

the note to an episode depicting a masquerade, for example, Beckford stated that he

was tempted to delineate the scene after the "two most celebrated writers (Fielding

and Madame D' Arblay)" (2, 119). But whereas Fielding's and Burney's portrayal of

86
. FIctIon,
Joe Snader, "The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early Enghsh . . , ' !::.l~g~ee:.!!n~===---
E" ht th-Century
Fiction 9 (1997): 268.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid. 272-73.

107
masquerades "generally produces a great variety of adventures, and almost as

generally an elopement, or an enlevement of the heroine," Beckford declared that "I

choose it should be otherwise" (2, 126), Instead of being disconcerted by the

masquerade scene like Fielding's and Burney's naIve heroines, Azemia can instantly

discern the artificiality of masquerade performers, stating that it is "a melancholy

sight to see" people "dressed up so little like reasonable beings, and squeaking

nonsense, with such deformed masks on, that they seemed to try both in their minds

and persons to libel human nature" (2, 164-65).

Azemia, moreover, shows similarities with the much favoured virtue-in-

distress protagonist and the Gothic romance heroine, who is often a foreigner cast

out in another country or surroundings. As is the case with her counterparts in other

contemporary novels, especially those of Ann Radcliffe, Azemia's sensibility and

purity are manifested in her closeness to nature. In her pensive mood she usually

takes a walk amid beautiful scenery and composes poetic lines. Whereas natural

descriptions allow female writers to insert verses and hence to exhibit their

cultivated taste in poetry, the incongruity between the character's circumstances and

the interspersed lines is satirised by Beckford, as he put it in his footnote:

Let not my readers object to the probability of Azemia's writing English verses;
or, if they should, let them recollect, that some of our celebrated heroines,
though born in another country, and two or three centuries ago, write most
pathetic and polished poetry in very pretty modem English. (1,45)

Throughout the novel, Beckford can be seen to imitate a number of

Radcliffean Gothic scenes, describing the abduction and incarceration of Azemia by

the villain, and her confrontation with banditti in the forest, before she is safely

rescued by the hero. Beckford's illustration of Azemia in the dark lumberroom of

108
Mrs. Periwinkle, in particular, is a burlesque of the Radcliffean mode of the

"explained supernatural" by which rational, natural explanations are proyided in the

end to explain away mysteries that at first seem to involve the supernatural. In

Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), what appears to be a bloody corpse

found by Emily St. Aubert behind the veil is revealed to be only a wax figure-an

effigy of a human being, "a momento mori"-long kept in the castle. Likewise, "the

figure of an old man" with a white beard, withered hands and long nails, "sitting in a

long dark robe" (1, 53) and nodding to Azemia in the lumberroom, was explained by

Beckford as neither "a real ghost" nor "even a wax-work figure" (1, 54). As if to

outdo Radcliffe's surprising revelation, Beckford related to his readers that the

"ghastly and terrific" figure is in fact a plaything, "a large Chinese Mandarin,

damaged in its voyage to Europe, and which had nodded ever since in the museum

of Mrs. Periwinkle" (1, 54). Beckford's parody of Emily and the wax figure shows

his irritation with the decorousness of novels by Radcliffe and other female writers,

works in which the unveiling of mysteries at the end functions to keep readers'

fantasies in check and to teach them to judge things rationally. As Beckford

sarcastically proclaimed, "may I not be allowed a few extraordinaries"-"a castle or

two, or an abbey-a few ghosts, provided I make them out afterwards that they were

not ghosts, but wax-work and pasteboard" to "beat up my literary pap with as

innoxious ingredients as the most straight-laced matrons, or rigid elders, can

recommend for their babes and sucklings" (2, 64-65).

The tale "Another Blue-Beard!" that Mrs. Chesterton asks Azemia to read,

moreover, is crowded with familiar Radcliffean Gothic motifs such as the hollow,

murmuring noise in the closet, the apparition behind the curtain, the spectre in the

dark passage, and bloodstains on the floor. While Beckford's work did not explain

109
away the supernatural element, maintaining that the female spectre is \1r.

Grimshaw's murdered wife who helps Eleanor, the heroine, escape from the manor,

he emphasised that the narrative is "an old manuscript" found in an ancient manor

(l, 151), hence pastiching the legitimising strategy that had been used by Gothic

writers since the time of Walpole and Otranto. As Beckford reiterated, "[t]he story is

so well authenticated, that it may serve ... to substantiate the notion of ghosts and

specters, which, as readers seem tired of all representations of actual life, and going

fast into the childish horrors, impressed by ignorance and superstition seventy or a

hundred years ago, may possibly be very acceptable" (1, 139).

Once published, Beckford's anonymous novels were recognised by

reVIewers as humorous satires of contemporary fictions. The Monthly Review

(1796) called Modem Novel Writing a "burlesque" of "the ordinary run of our

circulating-library novels," and a "literary mimicry" that "has so happily produced

its full effect, without the formality of censure, or the trouble of criticism."89 The

Monthly Mirror (1797) regarded Azemia as a "hasty production of a person of

talent" who "ridicule[s] ... the modem romance" and "the hackneyed sensibility

which is so abundantly distributed to the heroes and heroines of all our novels."90

For critics, the mockery and laughter that Modem Novel Writing and Azemia

generated presented both works as sportive and frivolous writings. In other words, if

Beckford remained concerned to define himself and his work against "middle-class"

values, his antagonism towards contemporary novelists in his 1790s works took the

form of satire or comic imitation and is therefore different from Vathek and the

Episodes, which are darker in tone and appear to celebrate their male protagonists'

licentious, hedonistic lives.

89 Monthly Review (1796), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 308.

90 Monthly Mirror (1797), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 309.

110
 During the time when Beckford was back to England and was concerned

with rehabilitating his reputation, his interest shifted from Oriental writing to a more

obviously prominent artistic field, that of architecture. Indeed, in the nineteenth

century, Beckford seems to have worked hard to reestablish his reputation and to

gain respect and acceptance from society. Between 1796 and 1822, he busily

engaged himself in the construction and improvement of Fonthill Abbey, paying

tribute to the contemporary taste in Gothic architecture, which, by the early

nineteenth century, had departed from Walpole's decorative style and become more

bound up with a surge of archeological enthusiasm and an ongoing craze for the

picturesque and the sublime. 91 As Redding noted, Beckford contemptuously referred

to Walpole's Gothic castle as a mere plaything, calling Strawberry Hill "a miserable

child's box-a species of gothic mousetrap--a reflection of Walpole's littleness."<i~

In contrast to Walpole's toylike Stawberry Hill, Fonthill Abbey was a structure of

considerable dimension. The Abbey, as Charles Eastlake describes, was outlined as

a cruciform building with the principal edifice 312 feet long, the cross structure 250

feet, and the octagonal tower at the centre 278 feet high.93 It was designed by the

renowned architect, James Wyatt-"a scenic artist," who, as Clark puts it, "believed

that Gothic should have a sudden, overwhelming, emotional effect, and that this was

best achieved by an unimpeded vista."94

Beckford's and Wyatt's purpose, it seems, was to make use of the sheer scale

and space of the Abbey to provide the viewer with a range of different spectacles.

One of these is the spectacle of a real Gothic cathedral, a scene that evoked what

91 Clark, Gothic Revival 67-68, 72-82.

92 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 299. . . 6 '")-6 ~
93 Charles L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872; LeIcester: LeIcester UP, 1978) - ..
94 Clark, Gothic Revival 86.

111
Uvedale Price referred to as "religious awe," 95 as well as encouraging visitors such

as Samuel Rogers to refer to Beckford, in his letter to Lord Byron in February 1818.

as "the Abbot of Fonthill."96 More importantly, whereas Walpole framed his Gothic

castle as a trifle and a sport, Beckford much more ambitiously presented his Fonthill

as an important national landmark, using it as a venue for the grand reception of the

"Hero of the Nile," Horatio Nelson, in 1800. As Fothergill and Brockman remark,

the Nelson fete was specifically motivated by the peerage that Beckford hoped could

be obtained through Sir William Hamilton, upon whom Beckford promised to settle

compensation for the loss of treasures that the latter had loaded on the navy ship

Colossus. 97 The fete was consequently as much the glorification of a national hero as

a demonstration of Beckford's self-image as a patriotic figure. As Brockman

describes, the three-day celebration included the heralding of Nelson by Fonthill

volunteers; the playing of the anthem Rule Britannia; bonfires; the magnificent

procession of Lord Nelson from the old Fonthill to the Abbey; and an evening of a

splendid, medieval banquet and entertainments. 98 Colley points out that Nelson

himself was obsessed with the pomp of his medals and uniforms to the level of

affectation. 99 In a similar way, the spectacle and showiness of Beckford's Nelson

reception was calculated to impress the public, and can be seen as part of his attempt

to regain his reputation in England.

To conclude this chapter, I would like to move ahead two decades in order to

consider a final instance of how Beckford span the circumstances of his life. The

sale of Fonthill Abbey and its collection in 1822 is another instance of how

95 Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son 176.

96 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 239. . . .
97 Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 257; and H. A. N. Brockman, The CalIph of Fonthlll (London.
Laurie, 1956) 115-16.
98 Brockman, Caliph of Fonthill 117, 123.
99 Colley, Britons 183.

112
Beckford span circumstances-though in this case, a financial embarrassment-in

such a way as to present a particular image of himself. From the outset, he decided

that the sale had to be specially organised by Christie's with tickets of admission and

auction catalogues listing the treasures. Since Beckford had never opened his house

to the public, the viewing of the Abbey was described by contemporary accounts as

a "rage," an event that turned into "Fonthill Fever."loo The Morning Post described

the sale as causing "a public sensation" and the Times reported on the "variety of

scenery, elegance of architecture, novelty of situation" and the costly furniture

which "astonish[ed] everyone."IOI Probably to conceal his need for money, Beckford

boasted that the sale items were merely "superfluous furniture" which "Horace

Walpole would not have suffered in his toyshop at Strawberry Hill"102-a statement

that reaffirms the rivalry between Beckford and Walpole, and Beckford's self-

representation as a great collector of works of art.

After the Fonthill sale, Beckford settled in Bath in 1825 and built Lansdown

Tower on Lansdown Hill. Instead of using Gothic models, Beckford turned to the

classical Greek for his tower, while planning his interior decoration, as Fothergill

suggests, after "the somewhat heavy, over-furnished style of the Victorians."103 Later

in his life Beckford to some extent adjusted to early Victorian society. He no longer

took an interest in literary Orientalism, and instead sought to revise his long

suppressed travel diary, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, leaving out

passages of fanciful reverie, and giving the work the new title of Italy, with Sketches

of Spain and Portugal (1834). His other travel book, Recollections of an Excursion

100 Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son 193. .

101 qtd. in Megan Aldrich, "William Beckford's Abbey at Fonthill: from the PIcturesque to lth~
Sublime," William Beckford, 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, ed. Derek E. Ostergard (~e\\
Haven: Yale UP, 2002) 127-29.
102 qtd. in Melville, Life and Letters 320.
103 Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill 319.

113
to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha, was published in 1835. By shifting

from fiction to travelogue, Beckford perhaps sought to reestablish his literary

reputation with a more respectable genre of writing. Indeed, these two works

achieved a notable success, especially his Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal,

which caused the Quarterly Review (1834) to assert that "Mr. Beckford's Travels

will henceforth be classed among the most elegant productions of modem

literature.,,104 In the same review, the writer also commended Beckford's taste for art

and architecture, stating that despite his "over-pampered luxury," Beckford was "at

least a male Horace Walpole; as superior to the 'silken Baron,' as Fonthill '" was to

that silly band-box which may still be admired on the road to Twickenham."105

Beckford's reputation, tarnished ever since the Courtenay scandal, was, as I

have shown, partly recovered late in his life. As was also true of Walpole,

Beckford's longevity enabled him to re-examine and to alter his self-presentation to

suit the changing circumstances that he encountered. In the l780s, when Beckford

was aspiring to become a distinguished author, his Oriental fiction was calculated

both to create a sensation and to serve as a licensed space to play out various

transgressive identities. In the 1790s and the nineteenth century, Beckford was

primarily concerned with his social rehabilitation-a process which, as the chapter

has shown, encompassed a revision of his uninhibited juvenile writing and the

assumption of patriotic poses in his representation of Fonthill Abbey. While

Beckford was more ambitious and less discreet than Walpole in offering his works

to the public, he can still be seen to be similarly preoccupied with his social position

and respectability. As the next chapter will elaborate, Mathew Lewis was to take a

very different path from Beckford and Walpole. Whereas his Gothic novel, The

104 Quarterly Review 51 (1834): 456.

105 Ibid. 429-30.

114
Monk..-'. was implicitly bound up with the tradition of French philosophical

pornography and testified to his alliance with aristocratic liberal Whigs, severe

criticisms of Lewis's writing rather caused him to be more blatantly provocatiye,

and to present himself as a popular playwright who catered to his audience taste for

stage effects and sensationalism.

115
 CHAPTER 3

MATTHEW LEWIS: "LEWISIZING"l GOTHIC

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge read The Castle Spectre in 1798, he commented on

the play, in a letter to William Wordsworth, that "[t]here are no felicities [of

language] in the humorous passages; and in the serious ones it is Schiller Lewis-

ized-i.e. a flat, flabby, unimaginative Bombast oddly sprinkled with

colloquialisms."2 Coleridge's reference to the "serious" passages of the play

pinpoints Lewis's borrowing from the "Sturm und Drang" works of Friedrich

Schiller, whose plot dealing with a conflict between two brothers, and domestic

tyranny, in his famous Die Rauber (1781, translated as The Robbers in 1795) seemed

to provide a framework for Lewis's play and many other dramatic works in the

period. The Castle Spectre was not simply based upon the German model, however,

but was also, as Coleridge noted, "Lewis-ized," that is "admirably managed for stage

effect,"3 or designed to match the taste of the English popular audience, in the

process making Schiller's original "flat, flabby" and "unimaginative." This chapter

will focus on the way in which all of Lewis's works might be seen to manifest the

"Lewisizing" of which Coleridge complained. Most of his early works, as I will

show, were written as satires of the culture of sensibility, and The Monk, in

particular, is a libertine revision of Ann Radcliffe's celebrated Gothic romance, The

Mysteries ofUdolpho. As I will argue, the libertinism of The Monk can be read as an

1 Here I borrow the verb to "Lewisize" from Coleridge in his letter to Wordsworth in January 1798,
qtd. in Michael Gamer, "Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama," ELH 66 (1999):
835.
2 Ibid. 835.
3 Ibid. 836.

116
expression of Lewis's alliance with the liberal Whig circle of Charles James Fox and
4
the Hollands. In the counter-revolutionary climate of mid-1790s Britain, the themes

and images of feudal despotism in Lewis's novel clearly had a political resonance,

and Lewis's borrowings from French and German sources in The Monk likewise

seemed potentially subversive. His treatment of similar themes in subsequent works,

however, constituted a form of branding or self-promotion which might also be taken

as evidence of a kind of arrested development, as Lewis continually revisited scenes

and features of The Monk but without any apparent agenda other than to annoy

critics and pander to the popular taste for sensation. Ignoring what was thought

fitting and decorous, Lewis maintained his literary reputation by keeping alive the

infamy of The Monk. Whereas Walpole and Beckford thought of writing as a

recreation, and sought to distance themselves from the market, Lewis was eager to

establish himself as a professional writer, and his reworking of the "male Gothic"

ultimately consisted of transferring its status from an exclusive or elitist to a popular

realm.

LEWIS AND THE CULTURE OF SENSIBILITY IN THE EARLY 1790S

Lewis's engagement with the culture of sensibility is more extensive and notable

than that of other "male Gothic" writers. In The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters

from Lady Honoria Harrowheart to Miss Sophonisba Simper: a Pathetic Novel in the

Modem Taste, being the first literary attempt of a Young Lady of tender feelings

(written 1791, unpublished), Lewis satirised the Bildungsroman plot and the

4
My argument on the connection betweem LeWIS "
S l'b "
1 ertmIsm an
d h'IS alliance with' U
the Foxite
P
, , "
WhIgS here follows Markman Elhs In The HIStOry of GOthIC Ictlon' F" (Ed' b
m u 'rgh' Edmburgh ,
2000), Chapter 3: "Revolution and Libertinism in the Gothic Novel" 81-120,

117
epistolary fonn with his story of a naIve young country woman encountering

fashionable London society. In the less than 30 pages of the novel which remain, the

Effusions, like Beckford's Modem Novel Writing and Azemia, parodies expressions

of sentiment and sensibility. Honoria's melancholy, for example, is mockingly

exaggerated: "the trickling tears rolled down my cheek; the storm of sighs

involuntarily escaped from my trembling breasts;-I was in torment, I was agitated, I

was agonised, and I had not the least appetite to my breakfast."5 Her kindness, as

Sophonisba remarks, extends to an "old turkey-cock," which, "pursued by Doll Trot,

the cookmaid, fled to your [Honoria's] anns for shelter, and found a refuge in hiding

himself under your dress" (265)-a claim which also carries an obvious sexual

connotation. This notion of sensibility as "perfonnance," to adopt Robert Markley's

term, had already been explored by writers such as Fielding, who suggested that

displays of virtue could also be a vehicle for self-promotion, as in the case of

Shamela's entrapment of her master through blushes and tears in Shamela (1741).6

Lewis similarly suggested that physical appearances can be deceptive, and as in the

case of Honoria calculated and motivated by vanity, as when she describes her

reaction to "the numerous beaux who were loading me with compliments" at a ball:

I nodded to one smiled at a second, smirked at a third, and cried 'he!he!' to the
praises of a do~en (ah! how little did the sensations of my bosom accord with
the juvenile joy, which darted delusive beams from my eyes, and played
bewitching upon my blooming cheek) '" (252-53)

5 Matthew Lewis, The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowheart to Miss
Sophonisba Simper: a Pathetic Novel in the Modem Taste, being the first literary attempt. of a Young
Lady of tender feelings The Life and Correspondence ofM. G. Lewis. With many pieces ill prose and
verse never before published, by Margaret Baron-Wilson, vol. 2 (London: C~lbu~, 1839) ~47.
Subsequent references to the Effusions will be provided in parentheses after quotatIOns I~ the text. ..
6 Robert Markley "Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatncs ofYlrtue.
, .. N b nd Laura BrO\\l1
The New 18th Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. FelICity uss aum a
(New York: Methuen, 1987) 219.

118
 The theatricality of sensibility is likewise evident in Lewis's comedy The

East Indian, in the character of Lady Clara Modish, whose "appearance of protecting

a friendless orphan [Zorayda, the heroine]," as Lewis put it, "flatters that ostentatious

sensibility, which it is her passion to display on every occasion."7 The play (written

in 1792 and staged at Drury Lane in 1799), as Lewis stated in his Preface (1800).

was based on Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761).8 While

his plot similarly revolves around a young heroine and her marriage problems, it

presents a different treatment of the fonner and a wishful, though rather unethical,

solution to the latter. Through her mother's advice, Sheridan's Sidney Bidulph

succeeds in resisting her passion for Orlando Faulkland and twice declines his

proposals, finding that he had previously had an affair with the pregnant Miss

Burchell. Sheridan's novel, dedicated to "THE AUTHOR OF CLARISSA AND SIR

CHARLES GRANDISON,,,9 obviously took on and explored further the cult of

sensibility that had been made popular by Richardson's novels. Like Pamela and

Clarissa, Sidney Bidulph is set up as a moral exemplar, and her afflictions serve to

elicit empathy from readers, as Sidney'S sister, Cecilia, asserts at the end of the

novel: "Her natural disposition ever sweet and complying, was improved by her

sufferings into a patience very rare in woman; and a resignation imbibed at first from

a rigid education, was heightened by religion into an almost saint-like meekness and

humility" (466). Lewis, however, paid scant attention to the moral function of his

heroine. Though a truly generous and modest woman, Zorayda can be seen as

morally ambivalent, as she elopes from India to England with her married lover,

7 Matthew Lewis, The East Indian: a Comedy. In Five Acts (London, 1800), English Short Title
Catalogue Microfilm: reel 585, no. 15,4.
8 Ibid. 3. (I
9 . . . K·· t d Jean Coates eary
Frances Sheridan Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bldulph, ed. PatrICia os er an . h _'
, I ·11 b vided In parent eses
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 3. Subsequent references to the nove WI e pro
after quotations in the text.

119
Beauchamp, who puts her in the care of the vain Lady Clara Modish. After scenes

depicting the Modishes and their friends which satirise fashionable society, the play

ends with the reunion between Zorayda and her father, a wealthy East-Indian

proprietor, and the marriage between Zorayda and Beauchamp which is made

possible by the news of Beauchamp's wife's death. Lewis's work not only created a

socially and morally transgressive heroine, but also brushed aside the notions of

regulated passion and conjugal fidelity which are central to the didacticism of

Sheridan's novel.

As a comic drama, as Lewis admitted in his preface, The East Indian was in

part modelled upon Richard Brinsley Sheridan's highly successful The School for

Scandal (1777),10 using the return of a long lost relative (Zorayda's father) to bring

about the denouement of the plot and enable the marriage between the hero and the

heroine. Unlike Sheridan's comedy, events in Lewis's work hang loosely together

and the humour is rather stale. When Lewis sought to stage the play, his main

purpose seems to have been to attract public attention with a work which, as he

boasted in his prologue, he wrote before he turned sixteen. Challenging his critics to

"damn it!" if his work "prove[d] worthless,"11 Lewis laid bare the appetite for

provocation and scandal which will form the main focus of this chapter.

In the 1790s, debates about the idea of sensibility were complicated further

by the French Revolution and its aftermath. In this period, sensibility became a

highly contested term and a politically charged concept; as Chris Jones argues, it was

"a site of contention between radical and conservative discourses.,,12 particularly in

response to Edmund Burke's highly sympathetic account of the apparent persecution

of Marie Antoinette in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), English

10 Lewis, The East Indian 3.

II Ibid. 6; Prologue, lines 37-38. . . 1d 1993) 6.
12 Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas In the 1790s (London. Rout e ge.

120
radicals mounted an attack on Burke's sentimental language and his defence of

social hierarchy.13 In Rights of Man (1791) , for example , Thomas Pame

. cntIclses
. ..

Burke's description of the French queen as "not affected by the reality of d·IS tress ...

but by the showy resemblance of it," for Burke seems to "pit[y] the plumage, but

forget[ ... ] the dying bird," sympathising with the French monarch and ignoring the
14
suffering of common people. Mary W ollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights

of Men (1790), also considered Burke's denunciation of the Revolution to be

somehow fake and effeminate: "Even the Ladies, Sir," she addressed Burke, "may

repeat your sprightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your

sentimental exclamations."15 Following on from this, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of

the Rights of Woman (1792) discussed the perilous effects that an "over exercised

sensibility" has on women, calling it a "false refinement" generated by a patriarchal

system that results in women's frailty and self-indulgence, and the prioritisation of

feeling over reason (130-31).

Because of the increasingly negative perception of sensibility, many women

writers in this period were particularly concerned to lay stress upon the importance

of the regulation of feeling. Reformists such as W ollstonecraft and Mary Hays

stressed the importance of the education that would develop women's rationality and

independence. Wollstonecraft's first heroine, Mary, for example, is a woman with

"thinking powers,"16 who teaches herself to read philosophical texts and is able to

criticise the injustice of marriage. In Maria, or the Wrongs of Women (1798),

13 See Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven:
Yale UP, 2003) 60-65'. Burke famously recounts the scene of the intrusion of "[a] band of cruel
ruffians and assassins" into the French queen's bedchamber in Versailles Palace (60). .
14 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other PohtIca .. I WntIllgs,
.. d Mark Philp
e .
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 102. . fW
15 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the RIghts 0 oman,
An History and Moral View of the French Revolution, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford U~, 19~3) 6.
.
Subsequent references to RIghts of Woman wIll·be·provI
ded III . parenth eses after quotatIOns III the
text. -
16 Mary Wollstonecraft, Advertisement, Mary, A Fiction (London: Routledge/Thoemmes. 199:-) 3.

121
Wollstonecraft opposed the mamage laws, depicting Maria as confined by her

abusive husband in a private madhouse. Maria, however, is also an example of what

Wollstonecraft tenned a "creature [ ... ] of sensation" (131) in her Rinhts

e.!..!
of Woman.

Her indulgence in the reading of old romances and sentimental novels invigorates

her passion for her fellow prisoner, Henry Damford, who, as some of

Wollstonecraft's notes on the novel's conclusion suggest, later abandons Maria and

their daughter in misery. The heroine of Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796),

is similarly nurtured with tales and romances that inspire imagination and

unrestrained feelings. As the "offspring of sensibility," Emma has a deep affection

for Augustus, who is already married to another woman, but with her rationality and

self-control, she is finally subdued to reason and marries her long-time suitor

Montague for "rational esteem," not "romantic, high-wrought, frenzied emotions.'m

While similarly drawing the reader's attention to the issue of women's

emotional restraint and self-discipline, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho is

not as overtly political as Wollstonecraft's and Hays' works, and instead of using a

contemporary social and historical background, adopts a remote "Gothic" setting in

sixteenth-century provincial France and Italy. Radcliffe's heroine is moreover

directly influenced by the instruction of her father, who teaches her a "general view

of the sciences" and "elegant literature," believing that these will give Emily a "well-

informed mind" and a cultivated taste in the arts, and who also warns her against

"the dangers of sensibility," which can lead to "self-delusion" rather than

happiness. 18 As an exemplary figure, she is distinguished from other female

characters who typify both a lack and an excess of sensibility. Her refined emotion is

17 .
Mary Hays, MemOIrs of Emma Courtney, ed . Man'1 yn L . Brooks (P eterborough'. Broadview. 2000)
36, 197. 1998) 6 80
18 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries ofUdolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobn!e (Oxford: ?xfo.rd UP. "
Subsequent references to the novel will be provided in parenteses after quotatIOns III the text.

122
contrasted with the "indelicacy" (124) and "coarse and unfeeling" (112) disposition

of her aunt, and the self-indulgence and violent passions of the murderous Signora

Laurentini. Robert Miles, however, has paid attention to the vast space that Radcliffe

gave in the novel to Emily's visionary imaginings of the supernatural and the hidden

crimes of adultery and murder, calling Emily a "transgressive spectator," whose

attempt to uncover forbidden patriarchal secrets "reflect[ s] her unconscious thought

processes and her transgressive impulses.,,19 While Emily's suspicions and anxieties

are all implicit, Radcliffe eventually resolved the "mysteries" of her novel, providing

natural explanations for seemingly supernatural events and revealing that the affair

initially hinted at took place between Laurentini and the Marquis de Villeroi, not her

father, hence returning Emily and the reader to the world of reason and domestic

happiness.

Udopho, as James Watt observes, was warmly welcomed by conservative

critics who approved Radcliffe's model of the explained supernatural, "drawing

attention to the parallel between credulity or superstition and revolutionary idealism,

and implicitly equating rationalising explanation with a recovery of the rule of

law."20 Along with Nathan Drake who picked out Radcliffe for special praise, Robert

Bisset, a contributor to the Anti-Jacobin, regarded Radcliffe's Gothic writing as

legitimate, for she did not depict ghosts, but "the effects of the belief of ghosts on the

human imagination."21 Whereas Wollstonecraft's model of a rational female was

rejected by Richard Polwhele as akin to an "unsex'd woman,"22 and while Hays'

Emma Courtney was criticised by the Tory British Critic as being too much absorbed

19 Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995) 137.
140.
20 Watt, Contesting the Gothic 116.
21 Ibid. 116-17. .. . ' . h 1790s
22 qtd. in Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: PolItIcs, Gender, and SentImentality In t e
:.>

Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 9.

123
in "the sophistries of Rousseau, Helvetius, and writers of that class,":!3 Radcliffe's

heroines escaped such hostile criticism, and, as in the case of Emily St. Aubert.

upheld the idea of female filial obedience. Albeit that critics now recognise

Radcliffe's fiction to be rhetorically complex, it seems that many if not most of her

contemporaries saw her as a writer of escapist romance, untainted by the idea of

revolution.

In the same year that Lewis wrote The East Indian, he told his mother that he

had commenced "a Roma[nce] in the style of the Castle of Otranto.":'-l In his letter

dated 18 May 1794 from the Hague, he confided to her that he had "again taken up"

the romance and was "induced to go on with it by reading 'the Mysteries of

Udolpho, '" which, he thought, was "one of the most interesting Books that ever have

been published."25 In the same letter, Lewis commented further: "[I]t is not very

entertaining till St. Aubert's death. His travels to my mind are uncommonly dull,

and, I wish heartily that they had been left out, and something substituted in their

room."26 Indeed, in writing The Monk, Lewis dropped the lengthy natural description

which situated Radcliffe's heroine in the pastoral, blissful world of La Vallee, and

which made her romance appeal to the contemporary taste for picturesque painting

and tourism. Instead, Lewis filled his novel with sensational adventures and

appalling crimes, twisting Radcliffe's plot of family secrets and exposing his

heroines both to the supernatural and to victimisation by his villain-hero. Though

Lewis's work did not explicitly deal with contemporary events, the backlash against

its explicit content, as the next section will show, branded him a potentially

dangerous upstart.

23 qtd. in Gary Kelly, Women. Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 108.
24 Louis F. Peck, The Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1961) 189.
25 Ibid. 208.
26 Ibid. 208-09.

124
THE MONK

When the second edition of The Monk was published, the Whig M. P. Charles James

Fox, as Walter Scott noted, "paid the unusual compliment of crossing the House of

Commons that he might congratulate the young author, whose work obtained high

praise from many other able men of that able time. "27 Fox's appreciation of Lewis's

novel is not surprising if we consider the latter's political and social alliances and

affiliations. Though serving as an attache to the British Embassy at the Hague,

Lewis did not endorse the anti-French and anti-revolutionary politics of the Pitt

administration in the early 1790s; instead, as he told his mother, he was plagued by

"the Devil Ennui," finding an outlet for his boredom in the coterie of the aristocratic

French emigres-"the very best society of Paris," as he put it-who entertained him

with lively conversation and kept him up to date with events in France. 28 At home,

Lewis was also inactive in his role as an MP, making but one speech in support of

the mitigation of punishment of prisoners committed for debe9 Unlike his father,

who was an anti-abolitionist and a loyal member of Pitt's government, Lewis was an

admirer of Fox and was probably influenced by Fox's politics as much as his

hedonistic lifestyle. As a son of the Baron and Baronness of Holland and a direct

descendant of Charles II, Fox, outside Parliament, led an extravagant life in pursuit

of pleasure. He was notorious for his affairs with women and his passion for

gambling. He befriended the lecherous Prince of Wales and, as L. G. Mitchell

asserts, was pointed out by George III as "beyond morality" and as the prince's

27 qtd. in Peck, Life of Lewis 43.

28 Ibid. 210, 212.
29 Ellis, History of Gothic Fiction 107.

125
"tutor in debauchery."30 Fox was also the uncle of Henry Richard Fox, the third

Baron of Holland, who had known Lewis since he was a student at Oxford. Holland

House in Kensington, where Lewis was a frequent visitor, was well-known as a

centre of Whig politicians, social elites and distinguished writers. The circle shared

liberal political attitudes: the Hollands and Lewis, in particular. were fervent

supporters of the abolition of the slave trade. Most members of the set, moreover.

were aristocrats and this is perhaps what Lewis found most agreeable to his taste. as

Scott remarked that Lewis was "fonder of great people ... either as a man of talent or

a man of fortune. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth."31 His best-

known work, The Monk, which I will now examine, can in many ways be read as a

product of the liberalism and libertinism of this Whig circle.

From the outset, Lewis's work explores the physical manifestations of his

heroine's sensibility. In the opening pages of The Monk, Antonia is portrayed as

exhibiting "unexampled sweetness," "delicacy and elegance."32 Her "sensibility of

countenance" is at the same time strikingly sensual:

Her skin, though fair, was not entirely without freckles; her eyes were not very
large, nor their lashes particularly long. But then her lips were of the most rosy
freshness; her fair and undulating hair, confined by a simple ribband, poured
itself below her waist in a profusion of ringlets; her neck was full and beautiful
in the extreme; her hand and arm were formed with the most perfect symmetry:
her mild blue eyes seemed an heaven of sweetness, and the crystal in which they
moved sparkled with all the brilliance of diamonds. She appeared to be scarcely
fifteen; an arch smile, playing round her mouth, declared her to be possessed of
liveliness, which excess of timidity at present repressed. (15)

30 L .G. Mitchell, "Fox, Charles James (1749-1806)," Oxford Dictionary of National ~iogra~hY.
Oxford UP, 2004, Online ed., Jan. 2006, 30 Jan. 2006 <http://www.oxforddnb.comlvlew/artlde/
10024>. 2-
31 qtd. in D. L. Macdonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000) 10
03. . . 998) l"-
32 Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. Christopher Maclachlan (London .. PenguIn, 1 -
. I b 'd d . th
13. Subsequent references to the novel wIl e provl e In paren es es after quotatIOns In the text.

126
It seems, however, that Antonia does not recognise her sexual attractiveness and. in

her aunt's words, "is totally ignorant of the world" (15). Lewis therefore sets up

Antonia as a victim, incessantly emphasising her naivety as the aspect of her beauty

that most attracts the lustful Ambrosio. Antonia's innocence upon the subject of

love, for example, inflames the monk's carnal desire, as he describes her "melting

eye" and "blushing cheek" as "enchanting" and "voluptuous" (224). By exposing

Antonia to Ambrosio's victimisation, Lewis can be seen to reverse the Radcliffean

Bildungsroman plot which protects the heroine from what Antonia suffers in The

Monk. As Lorenzo forewarns Antonia at the beginning, her entrance into society will

soon lead her to "discover the baseness of mankind" (22).

Lewis's work seems to attribute Antonia's frailty to her mother's

overprotective upbringing and education. Elvira's rule for Bible reading, in

particular, is that the Bible must be expurgated, with "all improper passages either

altered or omitted" since "[m]any of the narratives can only tend to excite ideas the

worst calculated for a female breast: every thing is called plainly and roundly by its

name; and the annals of a brothel would scarcely furnish a great choice of indecent

expressions" (223). Lewis's focus on the unrefined language of the Bible is

provoking, especially when Elvira is said to prefer chivalric romances such as

"Amadis de Gaur' and "The Valiant Champion, Tirante the White" (223) to it. As

Jacqueline Pearson has argued, the reading of an expurgated or edited version of the

scripture was recommended by educationists and writers such as Sarah Trimmer and

Frances Burney D' Arblay, and was widely practised by many young female readers

of the period. 33 Lewis's novel, in this respect, can be read as a playful but also

critical engagement with conservative understandings of female education. As

33Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1999) 45.

127
Pearson argues, in offering a libertine narrative in ~~..:.=~. . Iy
The Monk Lew"IS mgemous

"defends his own blatantly transgressive text as having infonnative functions for the

virtuous female reader: had she been allowed wider reading, Antonia might have

acquired enough worldly wisdom to suspect Ambrosio."34 Indeed, Antonia is not

aware of Ambrosio's diabolical intention and is cruelly raped and murdered by him.

The subversive potential in Radcliffe's novel, to adopt Ian Duncan's term, is

"literalised" in Lewis's,35 for Emily's fear of rape and her suspicion about family

secrets are externalised in The Monk, as the story unfolds that Ambrosio is Elvira's

long lost son, so that his crimes come to encompass both matricide and incest.

In the character of Leonella, however, Lewis returned to a more conventional

satirical treatment of sensibility as fraudulence. The physical expression of modesty

and the preference of country simplicity over urban corruption-both prevalent in

the description of the heroine in novels by Radcliffe and Burney-were cynically

presented in Leonella as mere performances aiming to capture Don Christoval's

attention. While waiting for the arrival of Don Christoval in Elvira's house, for

instance, Leonella is ridiculed as wearing "a pastoral dress," reading Montemayor's

Spanish pastoral romance, Diana, and assuming "airs of modesty" with her "blush

and tremble" and "her eyes cast down to receive, as she expected, [his]

compliments" (176). By contrast, in his illustration of Matilda, Lewis made the

theatricality of sensibility threatening to conventional constructions of gender and

sexuality. Matilda's disguise as a young novice, Rosario, both conceals and

legitimises Lewis's exploration of homoeroticism in his novel-a mode similarly

adopted by Beckford in his Episodes of Vathek and by Byron in his Turkish tales.

The conversation between Ambrosio and Rosario in the grotto of the abbey-garden

34 Ibid. .
35 Ian Duncan, Modem Romance and the Transfonnation of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott and DIckens
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 31.

128
resembles that between lovers, as the latter wishes to unveil his suffering and

Ambrosio expresses his willingness to listen and help; as he confesses, "I perceive

sensations in my bosom till then unknown to me; I found a delight in your society

which no one's else could afford" (54). In the convent Matilda hires a painter to

paint her image as the Madonna, whose beauty increases Ambrosio's "wonder and

adoration" (39). When she reveals her true identity as a woman and threatens to stab

herself, tearing open her clothes and half exposing the "dazzling whiteness" of her

breast, Ambrosio finds it impossible to resist the temptation:

[H]is eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb: a sensation till
then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight; a raging fire
shot through every limb; the blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild
wishes bewildered his imagination. (60)

The "sensation till then unknown," referred to in the passage above and in the

grotto scene points to the sexual awakening that Ambrosio experiences when he sees

Matilda, both as the disguised Rosario and a woman. If Antonia is untutored in

human malevolence, Ambrosio is likewise ignorant of Matilda's artful perfonnance,

which renders her, as Ambrosio later puts it, a "dangerous," "seducing object" (71).

Matilda's sexual advancement and her influence over him afterwards dissolve the

traditional conception of passive, subservient femininity.36 Nevertheless, Lewis's

depiction of the desiring woman is to some extent legitimised by the moral

framework of devilish temptation. As Lewis admitted in the novel's Advertisement,

his romance was outlined upon "the story of the Santon Barsisa" (6), a tale by

Richard Steele about the devil's allurement of a santon to seduce a young princess,

published in The Guardian in August 1713. Whereas Steele's narrative is just two

36 Ellis, History of Gothic Fiction 86.

129
pages long, Lewis's takes up three volumes, with graphic descriptions of seduction,

rape and murder. As a result of its loose didactic framework, however, The Monk

was favourably received by many of its early reviewers. The Monthly Mirror (1796).

for instance, described the story as "masterly and impressive," praising the

"strong[ ... ] passions ... finely delineated and exemplified in the progress of artful

temptation working on self-sufficient pride, superstition, and lasciviousness."37

While Lewis asserted that his theme of demonic temptation was based upon

Steele's "Santon Barsisa," the Monthly Review (1797) noted that it also seemed to

be plagiarised from the more recently published work of the French author, Jacques

Cazotte, Le Diable Amoureux (1772, translated as The Devil in Love in 1793).38 In

Cazotte's novel, the protagonist, a Spanish soldier and a dabbler in magic, is lured by

Beelzebub in disguise as the beautiful Biondetta. As Louis F. Peck points out, the

subject of devilish temptation through a seductress was commonplace even before

the publication of Le Diable Amoureux,39 but what made Lewis's novel so like

Cazotte's narrative in the eye of his contemporaries was probably the vivid and

sensuous detail of the allurement. Whereas Lewis described the "dazzling whiteness"

of Matilda's breast, which is unveiled with the "moon-beams darting full upon it"

(60), for example, Cazotte's text was translated thus: "the brightness of the moon

displayed to my view her polished limbs, and its rays appeared more brilliant from

the reflection."40 Lewis later disputed the charge of plagiarism in his postscript to

Adelmom, the Outlaw (1801), playfully claiming that he "had not read" Cazotte's

novel before he published The Monk, that Beelzebub's attempt at seduction differs

from Matilda's because it "fail[sJ of success," and that the French novel

37 Monthly Mirror (1796), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 249. . 406

38 Louis F. Peck, "The Monk and Le Diable Amoureux," Modem Language Notes 68.6 (1953). .
39 Ibid. 407.
40 Ibid.

130
corresponds, if at all, with "only the two first chapters" of his romance . 41 It IS,
.

indeed, difficult to say whether Lewis did copy Le Diable Amoureux, but he

obviously did not follow the English tradition, which tended to concentrate much

more on the didactic end-point of such a story rather than the graphic and descripti\'e

process of temptation itself.

Cazotte's sensational style might be seen to bear witness to a French

pornographic tradition, which, according to Lynn Hunt, had flourished since the

1660s, and played a vital role in the development of European pornography.42

particularly between the 1740s and the 1790s, French pornographic publications, as

Hunt argues, became increasingly political, aiming to "criticis[e] the status quo at a

time when the status quo was weakening," starting from the failure in the War of

Austrian Succession in the late 1740s up to the period of the French Revolution. 43

Eighteenth-century French pornography, as Robert Darnton has elucidated, sold

along with other forbidden religious, philosophical and political writings that

purported to challenge or attack the Old Regime and conventional social and moral

values. 44 Many writings, engravings and portraits claimed to base their stories on

reports of the trials concerning the sexual misdemeanors of French priests, and on

scandals about the licentious private lives of courtiers. Others were fictional, but

their similar plots and sensational narration equally fed the public's scepticism and

41 Matthew Lewis, Adelmorn, the Outlaw; A Romantic Drama (1801), English Prose Drama F.ull-
Text Database (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1996), Literature Online, 1 Jan. 2006 <http://hon.
chadwyck.co.uklsearch>, vii. . " . f
42 Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Moderruty, 1500-1800, The InventIOn 0
Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone,
1996) 21.
43 Ibid. 34-35. Hunt's argument about the War of A~strian S~ccession here follows ~argaret C.
Jacob's essay "The Materialist World of Pornography" m InventIOn of Pornography, 157-_02.
44 '
Robert Darnton . f P R 1 t· France (New York: Norton.
, The ForbIdden Best-Sellers 0 re- evo u IOnary
1996) 4.

131
antagonism towards the monarch and the church. 45 French pornography was also

categorised under the heading of "philosophical books," a phrase that served as more

than a trade jargon since it connoted the libertine "philosophy" that these books

offered in their quest for freedom from institutional despotism and restrictiYe

religious and sexual mores-the word "philosophy," as Darnton points out, is related

to the French tenn "philosophe," meaning "freethinker.,,46

In addition to the resemblance to Cazotte's novel which I have described,

Lewis's association of the Church with sexual activity and crime is reminiscent of

contemporary French anticlerical pornography, most famously exemplified by the

writings of the Marquis de Sade. His La Philosophie dans Ie boudoir (1795), for

example, simultaneously advances the causes of atheism and republicanism. As the

novel throws off Christian spiritual concepts and instead celebrates sexual pleasure

as the real essence of human existence, it inserts a pamphlet, "Fran9ais, encore un

effort, si vous voulez etre republicains," to affirm Sade's support of political, as well

as sexual, freedom.47 Although Lewis's work was written in a different context and

lacks the systematic political resonance that propelled Sade's narration, it

nonetheless seems to embrace the same kind of libertinism inherent in Sade's

writing. As Angela Wright asserts, there is a close connection between subjects and

ideas in The Monk and Sade's Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu (1791), which

Lewis read during his stay in Paris in 1791. 48 Sade, like Lewis, inverted the

45 For details about the varieties of porno graphical writing of the eighteenth century, see, for example,
Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers; Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: the Development of
Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); and Lynn Hunt, ed.,
Invention of Pornography. .
46 Darnton Forbidden Best-Sellers 21 90. On libertinism of The Monk and the French RevolutIOn,
, , . . N I" 81
see Ellis, History of Gothic Fiction, Chapter 3: "Revolution and Libertinism In the Gothic ove -
120.
47 John Phillips, Sade: The Libertine Novels (London: Pluto, 2001) 70. ., nk d
48 Angela Wright, "European Disruptions of the Idealised Woman: Matthew LeWIS S The Mo an
the Marquis de Sade's La Nouvelle Justine," European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960, ed.
Avril Horner (Manchester: Manchester UP 2002) 40.

132
conventional Bildungsroman plot by depicting his virtuous and naIve heroine's

entrance into the world, and the disastrous consequences of rape, sexual abuse and

unjust accusations of theft and murder. When Justine seeks refuge in a mon as tery,

for example, she is tortured and brutally raped by the monks. Antonia's innocence

likewise causes her to be victimised by the abbot, Ambrosio, whose rape is described

with Sadean violence:

He stifled her cries with kisses, treated her with the rudeness of an unprincipled
barbarian, proceeded from freedom to freedom, and, in the violence of his
lustful delirium, wounded and bruised her tender limbs. Heedless of her tears,
cries and entreaties, he gradually made himself master of her person, and
desisted not from his prey, till he had accomplished his crime and the dishonour
of Antonia. (328)

The delineation of Justine's misfortunes, as Sade put it in his dedication to

his friend Marie-Constance Quesnet, was "to show Vice everywhere triumphant and

Virtue the victim of its sacrifices."49 Along with this "moral," Sade rejected the idea

of divine providence and presented to his readers the subjective and unreliable nature

of "virtue." As Sade showed, Justine is repeatedly humiliated and taken advantage of

by people who are supposed to be the guardians and defendants of goodness and

justice such as monks, noblemen and magistrates-his attack was clearly aimed at

the corruption and absolutism of social, political and religious authorities. However,

while Sade made libertinism a part of his critique of the ancien regime, Lewis's

engagement with politics is rather more ambiguous and erratic. It is likely, as Wright

argues, that Lewis's Gothic novel influenced and encouraged Sade, who praised The

Monk in his famous essay, "Idee sur les romans" (1800), to revise Justine and

publish its sequel, La Nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suivi de

49 Marquis de Sade, Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791 ), Justine, Philosophy in the
Bedroom and Other Writings (London: Arrow, 1991) 455.

133
l'histoire de Juliette, sa soeur In 1797. 50 What Sade did, it seems, is to develop

further scenes and images in Lewis's work in accordance with his political

philosophy. Whereas Ambrosio's idolisation of the Madonna results from Matilda' s

supernatural charm, women who extol and emulate the dress and manner of the

Madonna in La Nouvelle Justine become, like Justine, victims of malignant

characters and are directly denounced by Sade as representing the erroneous practice

of religious idolatry: "It is," as Sade's narrator put it, "essential that fools stop

worshipping this ridiculous idol of virtue, which until now has only repaid them with

ingratitude. "51 While Lewis similarly destabilised the notion of virtue's reward in his

characterisation of Antonia, the moral ending that he added to the novel's second

edition-"Lady, to look with mercy on the conduct of others, is a virtue no less than

to look with severity on your own" (386)-100sely relates to the peripheral episode

of Ambrosio's and the prioress of St. Clare's punishment of Agnes, hence

functioning to legitimise Lewis's libertine mode of narration rather than to make a

direct political statement.

It is perhaps most fruitful to consider Lewis's delineation of religious tyranny

in The Monk as reasserting his alliance with the liberal Foxite Whigs who positioned

themselves against the reactionary British government, rather than to regard his

writing as straightforwardly endorsing the Revolution or any radical agenda. Lewis's

image of Agnes's confinement in a gloomy secret dungeon of the church-

"chained," "shut out from the world of light," and provided with the "simplest and

coarsest" food, "just enough to keep together body and soul" (348)-might have

been influenced by French revolutionary dramas. His interest, however, tended to lie

in the arresting spectacle of such a scene, as he wrote to his mother from Paris in

50 Wright, "European Disruptions" 40-41.

51 qtd. in, and translated by, Wright, "European Disruptions" 51.

134
September 1792 that he found the presentation of a woman and her child, "hid in a

cavern in her jealous husband's house ... without food ... till they are perishing with

hunger," in the play Camille ou Ie Souterrain (1791), one of the "most affecting

things I ever saw."52 In the same letter, Lewis mentioned to his mother his translation

of Jacques Marie Boutet de Monvel's Les Victimes Cloitrees (1791)/3 which

similarly exhibits scenes of subterranean captives and which Lewis later adapted and

staged as Venoni, or, The Novice ofSt. Mark's in 1808. Moreover, Lewis's image of

the mob, who direct their vengence against the prioress, is notably ambivalent. While

appealing for justice, his "band of rioters" is also destructive, uncontrolled and

ferocious:

They tore her from one another, and each new tormentor was more savage than
the former. They stifled with howls and execrations her shrill cries for mercy,
and dragged her through the streets, spuming her, trampling her, and treating
her with every species of cruelty which hate or vindictive fury could invent.
(306)

Lewis's illustration of the bloodthirsty crowd is read by Ronald Paulson as

representing a liberal Whig's fear of popular movements, at a time when the French
54
Revolution was no longer as warmly welcomed in Britain as it had initially been.

His novel, as Paulson observes, "is far removed from the morally clear-cut

renderings of anticlericalism exemplified by the drames monacals popular in the

theatres of Revolutionary Paris. "55

It is important to examine Lewis's use of sixteenth-century Catholic Spain as

his setting. In Britain, fear and hostility towards Catholicism had been entrenched for

centuries. In the Protestant English imagination, Catholicism was associated with

52 qtd. in Baron-Wilson, Life and Correspondence, vol. 1, 61.

53 Ibid.6l. . UP 1983) ')1~
54 Ronald Paulson, Representations of the Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven. Yale. --- .
55 Ibid. 219.

135
superstition, irrationality, and rigid and repressive monastic orders. Catholic

countries, moreover, were also linked to sexual excess: a number of accounts of the

Grand Tour in the eighteenth century mentioned extramarital relationships,

prostitution and sodomy as commonplace in continental countries, and some writers

even reported of sexual activities in places such as monasteries and convents. 56 It

was, therefore, not a coincidence that Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole would

choose medieval Italy as a site to depict Manfred's incestuous sexual aggression.

Lewis's novel likewise locates religious and sexual crimes in a Catholic country. His

portrayal of these scenes, as I have elaborated, is so graphic and descriptive that

Lewis could be seen to take pleasure in or even (as Haggerty puts it) "celebrate"

such sexual excess and violence, the Catholic background offering a licence for

Lewis to explore various transgressive forms of sexual behaviour. 57 Indeed, Lewis's

anti-Catholicism (like Walpole's) seems quite perfunctory, at least when considered

alongside Charles Maturin's substantial engagement with monasticism and other

Catholic tenets in his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in which references to recent

circumstances in Ireland alert readers to the growing conflict between Anglo- Irish

Protestants and the Catholic majority.

Catholicism, moreover, offers a framework in which Lewis could make his

protagonist, Ambrosio, sympathetic to his readers. Like Walpole, who presented

Manfred's despotic attempt to preserve his lineage as resulting from the crimes that

his grandfather commits, Lewis depicted Ambrosio as a victim of his repressive

56See Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Cen~I?' (Strou~: .Sutton,
1992) 189-201; and Haggerty, Queer Gothic, Chapter 4: "The Horrors of CatholICIsm: RelIgIOn and
Sexuality in Gothic Fiction" 63-83. For a discussion of anti-Catholicism and t~e devel.opmen~ °E
English pornography, see Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books, Chapter 6: "AntI-Cathohc Erotica
126-60. . d th
57Haggerty Queer Gothic 70-71. Paulson also sees the scenes of Ambrosio's rape of Antoma an e
, . d d· " ki
lynching of the prioress as filled WIth "sexual release an sa I.sm, a n o . ').,d f "fulfillment and
satisfaction of unrestricted power over another person." RepresentatIons of the RevolutIOn ~2_.

136
Catholic upbringing. Ambrosio's character, as it is suggested in the novel, is not

naturally bad, but a product of his restricted monastic education: "Instead of

universal benevolence '" he was taught to consider compassion for the errors of

others as a crime of the blackest dye" and "was suffered to be proud, vain, ambitious,

and disdainful" (204). His matricide and incestuous sexual violence are, in Paulson's

words, an "act of liberation," a "sexual liberty and fulfillment" that he cannot attain

in the austere and secluded environment of the monastery. 58 Like other "male

Gothic" writers, Lewis incorporated in his narrative the theme of a Faustian pact

with the devil, portraying Ambrosio's sexual desire as being aroused by the

temptation and the supernatural power of Matilda. The severe punishment of

Ambrosio in the end, while serving as retribution for his brutal crimes, is somehow

disturbing in its excess, as he is thrown down from "a dreadful height," suffering

with "broken and dislocated limbs" on a river bank, where "[m]yriads of insects"

drink his blood and "eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eye-

balls with their crooked beaks" till he becomes "[b ]1ind, maimed, helpless, and

despairing" (376). The seven-day torment that Ambrosio undergoes, and his death,

can be read as Lewis's ironic inversion of God's creation of the world and

providence, which, in Ambrosio's case, does not promise him a happy ending. The

subversiveness of Lewis's novel, though apparently overlooked by many of its early

readers , troubled Radcliffe and induced her to rewrite it in The Italian (1797), in

which she not only saved her heroine from murder and rewarded her with a happy

marriage, but also toned down Lewis's provocative narration by severing the ties

between the crimes of an individual and his institutional upbringing. "Schedoni," as

E. J. Clery remarks, "committed all his crimes as a layman, and only subsequently

58 Paulson, Representations of the Revolution 221.

137
joined a religious order as a method of concealment: a rebuttal, then, of the cliche of

the monk whose twisted nature is a result of his unnatural monastic existence. "59

Under the cloak of anonymity, Lewis could safely lay before the public his

libertine fiction and, as I have earlier mentioned, elicit admiration from early

reviewers. The revelation of his authorship, when the title "MP" was added to his

name in the second edition, however, turned most critics against him, as they

expressed disapproval of the co-existence of Lewis's status as a member of

Parliament and as a writer of such a lascivious romance. This is obvious in the

Critical Review (1 797), in which Coleridge censured Lewis's passage about Antonia

reading the Bible as blasphemous, and sarcastically concluded: "Yes! The author of

the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR1-we stare and tremble."60 In the same

review, Coleridge remarked on Lewis's presentation of "a libidinous minuteness"

and "the most voluptuous images," denouncing the novel as "a poison for youth and

a provocative for the debauchee."61 Likewise, the Monthly Review (1797) referred to

its "obscenity" that "renders the work totally unfit for general circulation," and the

European Magazine (1797) considered it as conveying "neither originality, morals,

nor probability" to the reader. 62

Of all critics in the 1790s, T. J. Mathias perhaps most emphatically identified

the political resonance of The Monk. 63 In the fourth dialogue of The Pursuits of

Literature (1797), Mathias criticised Lewis-"[ a] legislator in our own parliament, a

member of the House of Commons of Great Britain, an elected guardian and

defender of the laws, the religion, and the good manners of the country"-as having

59 E. J. Clery, Introduction, The Italian, by Ann Radcliffe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) xii.
60 Critical Review (1797), Macdonald and Scherf, eds., Apppendix C, The Monk 399-402.
61 Ibid. 401. G tho
62 Monthly Review (1797) and European Magazine (1797), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century 0 IC
Novel 250. ° ° th d (L don
63 T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem III Four DIalogues, 7 e. on .
1798) 346.

138
"neither scrupled nor blushed to depict, and to publish to the world, the arts of lewd

and systematic seduction, and to thrust upon the nation the most open and

unqualified blasphemy against the very code and volume of our religion."!>-l The

threat that Lewis's novel posed to Mathias, as Clery suggests, is that it thrived on

popular consumption in a similar way to the works of radical and reformist writers. 65

Mathias's account of Lewis followed his attacks on Paine's Rights of Man and

"unsexed" female writers, suggesting that Lewis's work, like those of radicals and

reformers, was undermining the nation's political and social stability. As he stated in

the opening of his dialogue, "LITERATURE, well or ill conducted, is THE GREAT

ENGINE by which ... all civilised states must ultimately be supported or

overthrown."66 By comparing Lewis with Edmund CurB, who was pilloried for

printing obscene books in 1728, and with John Cleland, whose pornographic

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49) was rebuked by the Privy Council,

Mathias's reference to earlier prosecutions seemed to argue for a more or less similar

legal punishment of the distribution of Lewis's work, which he likewise regarded as

an obscene libel (a category which, in the eighteenth century, did not distinguish

between pornography, blasphemy, and political radicalism67 ).

Following this deluge of criticism, Lewis expurgated the fourth edition of

The Monk in 1798, deleting the passage about the Bible and either leaving out

sexually explicit terms such as "lust" or "voluptuousness," or substituting them with

milder ones such as "pleasure" or "luxury". The alteration was superficial and

Lewis's libertine content was still largely intact, nonetheless, and the novel remained

a target of attack and controversy for decades; not long after its first publication, The

64 Mathias, Pursuits of Literature 239.

65 Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction 163.
66 Mathias, Pursuits of Literature 238.
67 Hunt, "Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity" 16.

139
Monk provided its author with the appellation "Monk Lewis," which, according to

Margaret Baron-Wilson, Lewis did not object to, even telling his mother in a letter

that he was "just as well pleased with that name as with any other."68 Though Lewis

admitted in a letter to his father in February 1798 that the work was a mere

adolescent diversion, hence written with "high imprudence,"69 he very often

expressed pride in his novel, and was irritated when others adapted his story and

presented it as morally purified. James Boaden, for instance, staged it as Ambrosio in

1798, with Matilda as a virtuous woman in the disguise of a monk, and Ambrosio as

an heir of a nobleman who later abrogates his monastic vows and marries Matilda.

Articulating his annoyance at Boaden's happy, "companionate-marriage" ending,

Lewis expressed his contempt for the play to Scott: "Ambrosio is made a good sort

of Man, and finishes by marrying Matilda! There's the very Devil's own invention

for yoU!,,70 Whereas Michael Gamer saw the name "Monk Lewis" as stigmatising for

the author who, he asserts, incessantly "attempt [ed] to defuse the scandal produced

by The Monk,"7! I would argue that Lewis also made use of this reputation to

establish himself in the theatre. As he continually revisited themes and images of

The Monk in his later plays and fictions, Lewis's subsequent works, as the next

section will show, were dependent on his first novel, and his self-defence against the

scandal that novel generated was part of his increasingly indiscreet and provocative

self-presentation.

68 qtd. in Baron-Wilson, Life and Correspondence, vol. 1, 185. . J

69 Lewis to his father, 23 Feb. 1798, Macdonald and Scherf, eds., Apppendix C, The Monk ~( 8.
70 qtd. in Peck, Life of Lewis 30.
71 Gamer, "Authors in Effect" 849.

140
LEWIS AFTER THE MONK SCANDAL

Despite the scandal of The Monk, Lewis sought to maintain his literary fame by

shifting to a more popular field of entertainment, the theatre. The Castle Spectre. his

first work after The Monk, similarly reworked features from earlier Gothic fictions ,

including The Monk itself, to appeal to the audience. However, Lewis's revision of

the Gothic in his play was done in a very different manner from that in The Monk

and seems to have been intended to convey a rather different effect. First of all, it

should be noted that Lewis's play would have been classified by his contemporaries

as a melodrama-a subcategory of the "illegitimate drama," initially prospering

alongside pantomimes, farces, burlesques and other kinds of entertainment in

London's minor theatres.72 In the 1790s the melodrama was increasingly popular in

its infusion of music, songs, comic scenes and spectacles into sensational romance

plots. With the enlargement of Covent Garden in 1792 and Drury Lane in 1794, the

incorporation of melodrama with traditional, "legitimate" performances of tragedy

and comedy in both patent theatres quickly brought about wider audiences and

bigger profits. 73 Lewis's The Castle Spectre is evidence of the rise to prominence of

illegitimate drama in this period. First staged at Drury Lane in December 1797, it

became a sensation, running for forty-seven nights, but also drew much critical

attention from reviewers, who seized upon the "illegitimacy" or generic

heterogeneity of Lewis's play. The St. James Chronicle, for example, called The

Castle Spectre "a drama of a mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical," and

72 For an extensive account of illegitimate theatre, see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London,
1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). .
73 Michael R. Booth, Richard Southern, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker and Robertson Dav1es, The

Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 6 (London: Methuen, 1975) 42.

141
the Monthly Magazine considered it "a tragedy-pantomime."-~ Far from

endeavouring to regain his reputation, Lewis's shift from novel to melodrama was to

make himself even more unpopular with critics, as his staging of an illegitimate play.

as I will show, deliberately confounded their expectations of seeing a traditional,

proper tragedy in the patent theatre of Drury Lane.

In the prologue, Lewis made it clear that his play is of a mixed character.

While its outline-that of "false friendship, hopeless love, or faith betray"d"-

belongs to the genre of tragedy, its characters, as Lewis asserted, are "from

Shakespeare's comic school" comprising "[t]he gossip crone, gross friar, and gibing

fool" as well as "a virgin fair and lover brave. "75 Such a combination is indeed

reminiscent of a number of Gothic romances, especially Walpole's The Castle of

Otranto which aimed to delineate a mixture of the tragic and the comic, an attempt

no less pioneering than its blending of the "old" and "new" styles of romance,

something which Walpole sought to legitimise with reference to Shakespeare. It is

indeed likely that Walpole's novel provided a germ of inspiration for Lewis's writing

of The Castle Spectre, as the latter is similarly centred on a usurping tyrant, Osmond,

who murders his brother, Earl Reginald, to become the lord of Conway Castle, and

then forces his niece into a marriage with him. Like Manfred, Osmond is capable of

being both evil and remorseful: as the story unfolds, it appears that his behaviour

results from his unrequited love for Reginald's wife, Evelina, whose death is the

source of his perpetual suffering and violent passion for her daughter, Angela.

Lewis, however, did not seem to develop Walpole's Gothic villain-hero beyond its

comic potential. For example, Percy's disguise as Earl Reginald in armour,

74 qtd. in Moody, Illegitimate Theatre 50; and Macdonald, Mo~ Lewis 182. ~
75 Matthew Lewis, Prologue, The Castle Spectre, Seven GOthIC Dramas 1789-182?, ed. J.effrey . .
Cox (Athens: Ohio UP, 1992) 152, lines 36-38. Subsequent references to the play WIll be.gIven ~ft~r
quotations in the text. Since line numbers are not provided in the source, page numbers will be gl\t:o
instead (after the semicolon) along with act and scene numbers.

142
"extend[ing] his truncheon with a menacing gesture and descend[ing] from the

pedestal" (2.l; 171) to scare Osmond away from Angela, was (as Lewis admitted) a

direct borrowing from the episode of "the animated portrait in The Castle of

Otranto" (2.1, Lewis's note; 172), and was therefore a literalisation and visualisation

of The Castle of Otranto' s pantomimic effect. Osmond, moreover. can also be seen

as Lewis's revision of Ambrosio, only with his behaviour sarcastically described as

predestined: "Nature," as Osmond declares, "formed me the slave of wild desires',

and Fate, as she frowned upon my cradle, exclaimed, 'I doom this babe to be a

villain and a wretch! '" (2.3; 175). Lewis's footnote on Osmond's character was a

pre-emptive strike at hostile critics who might regard his empathy with the morally

defiant villain as associated with rebellion:

I think it necessary to observe to my readers, that the foregoing speech is not

meant to contain a moral sentiment, but to display the false reasoning of a guilty
conscience.-If I were not to make this explanation, I should expect to see it
asserted that the whole Play was meant to inculcate the doctrine of Fatality.
(2.3, Lewis's note; 175)

To make his play more extravagant, Lewis included in it the scene of Percy's

escape, by means of leaping from the window of the prison tower into Motley's boat.

Lewis's remark about the event being based on the historical German account of the

renowned eleventh-century prison breaker, "Ludwig the Springer," is a mock

authentication that reveals his playful engagement with the convention of footnoting,

which here serves to justify the improbability of the scene, as Lewis provocatively

proclaimed: "I never said it was possible, I only say it's true!" (2.3, Lewis's note;

180). Lewis's play, in this sense, is Walpolean in its ludicrous, over-the-top display

of the marvellous. In the same way that John Dunlop, in History of Fiction (1814),

criticised Walpole's Gothic paraphernalia of "skulls or skeletons-sliding panels-

143
damp vaults-trap-doors-and dismal apartments" as absurd and unconnected to

"the tented fields of chivalry and its airy enchantments,"76 the Monthly Review

(1798) censured Lewis's theatrical machinery as indiscriminate and lacking ordering

principles:

What do you call it?-a drama, it seems, it must be, we cannot but regret that an
author, whose talents seem designed for better things, should condescend to
make us stare at Groves, and Suits of Annour, and Pedestals with Names, and
the River Conway, and in short, whatever presented itself to his imagination. 77

The incident of Percy's escape, as Jeffrey Cox notes, "was thought not only

improbable but also undignified," particularly for a prominent actor like John

Kemble, who, as the Times (1798) observed, was reduced to a mere "harlequin" in

the play.78 Indeed, Walpole's and Lewis's deviation from the high culture of tragedy

was viewed by late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century critics as disparaging to

the morality and cultivated taste of the nation. Like William Hazlitt, who went on to

refer to Walpole's supernatural elements as "the pasteboard machinery of a

pantomime" which was "done upon false principles of taste," the British Critic

(1798) condemned Lewis's playas displaying "a kind of nonsensical curiosity about

the grossest improbabilities," while the Analytical Review (1798) considered it

"humiliating to the pride of our national taste. "79

What critics found most offensive in The Castle Spectre, it seems, was

Lewis's presentation of Evelina's ghost on stage. Its first appearance is in the

Oratory in which, according to Lewis's stage direction, there "stands a tall female

76 John Dunlop, The History of Fiction (1814), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 99.
77 Monthly Review (1798), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 254. . ."
78 Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas 180; Cox's addition after Lewis's note on "LudWIg the Spnnger.
79 William Hazlitt Lectures on the Comic Writers (1819), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 10 I: an.d
d
British Critic XI 798) and Analytical Review XXVIII (1798). McNutt, Eighteenth-Century GothIC
Novel 253.

144
figure" in "white garments spotted with blood," and with a "pale and melancholy

countenance" (4.2; 206), pointing to Reginald's picture as if to hint to Angela to sa\'e

her father. With the help of the organ's sound, "a full chorus of female voices" and

"a blaze of light [that] flashes through the Oratory" (4.2; 206), Lewis's

representation of the ghost could not be more blatant to the eyes of his audience and

must have been calculated to produce a remarkable effect. In the final scene

Evelina's ghost rushes upon Osmond to stop him from killing Reginald, enabling

Angela to stab her villainous uncle-thus functioning as a deus ex machina that

apparently served to heighten the audience's sensation at the end of the performance.

As Lewis boasted in his postscript to the play, the ghost was received "with

increased applause" (224)80 each night that The Castle Spectre was performed. The

Monthly Mirror (1798) also noted the play's "extraordinary popularity" that mainly

derived from "the happy management the author has exhibited in the paraphernalia

of his spectre" and "the air of romance he has given to the principal situations."81

Though most critics objected to the ghost and noticed that the drama could do

without its literal representation, they agreed that it hugely contributed to the play's

commercial success since it seemed to pander to the popular taste for spectacle and

sensationalism. 82 Wordsworth observed how the play "fitted the taste of the audience

like a glove" and contemptuously emphasised the considerable profit that Lewis's

work drew from spectators, despite its lack of substantial literary merit: "The Castle

Spectre is a Spectre indeed. Clothed with flesh and blood of £400 received from the

80 Page number from Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825 will now be given in parentheses
when I refer to the postscript of The Castle Spectre.
81 Monthly Mirror (1798), McNutt. Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 254. ." .. ..
82 Monthly Mirror (1797), for example, said that the ghost was of "no neceSSIty. The ~ntIsh C,ntIc
(1798) even sarcastically remarked that the play seemed to be written onl~ for the dlsp.lay llt t~e
ghost: "the spectre from which it is named, instead of being necessary, contnbutes n?,t a ,l:ttle ~o t e
plot of the drama, and might be omitted without any change, except the show. Su: t-.1L0iutt.
Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 253.

145
treasury of the theatre it may in the eyes of the author and his fri en d appear very

lovely.,,83 While calling the play "a mere patchwork of plagiarisms," Coleridge also

acknowledged that "they were well worked up, and for the stage effect make an

excellent whole."84

Lewis's engagement with the supernatural here is distinctly different from in

The Monk. His novel, as I have earlier suggested, can be read as a take on the

Radcliffean Gothic tradition. Lewis's account of the Bleeding nun, for example,

reverses Radcliffe's "explained supernatural" plot by substituting the sham ghost

(Agnes in disguise as the Bleeding nun) with a real one. The appearance of the dead

Beatrice de las Cisternas, as Raymond describes, is appalling: "Her countenance was

long and haggard; her cheeks and lips were bloodless; the paleness of death was

spread over her features; and her eye-balls, fixed stedfastly [sic] upon me. were

lustreless and hollow" (140). Lewis's delineation of the supernatural is as graphic as

his images of the victimised heroines. In contrast to Radcliffe's romances, Lewis's

Gothic narrative carries with it a heightened shock-value, as Sade asserted in his

"Reflections on the Novel" ("Idee sur les romans") in 1800, when he wrote that amid

the surrounding political turmoil and readers' jaded interest, "the romantic novel was

becoming somewhat difficult to write" and authors such as Lewis had to "call upon

hell," or the machinery of murder, imprisonment and ghosts, to capture the reader's

attention. 85 Lewis's Gothic horror in The Castle Spectre, on the other hand, was more

bathetic than terrifying. While Lewis seemed to revive the theme of aristocratic

oppression and, specifically, images of the tormented Agnes, in his representation of

Reginald in the dungeon, "pale and emaciated, in coarse garments, his hair hanging

83 qtd. in Macdonald, Monk Lewis 181; and Peck, Life of Lewis 76. .
84 Samuel Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956-71), McNutt EIghteenth-
Century Gothic Novel 245. .
85 Marquis de Sade, "Reflections on the Novel" (1800), Macdonald and Scherf, eds., AppendIX C,
The Monk 415.

146
wildly about his face, and a chain bound round his body" (5.3; 212), his insertion of

Evelina's ghost in the scene (running wildly on stage) also made his play hover on

the verge of a comic burlesque. The incident in the hidden passage where Father

Philip's groan terrifies Alice was noted by Lewis as having been influenced by the

episode of Emily and Doroth6e in the marchioness's bedchamber in Udolpho, but,

unlike Radcliffe's "terrific scene," his was "intended to produce an effect entirely

ludicrous" (3.3, Lewis's note; 192). While many reviewers censured the

improbability of the drama, Lewis responded in his postscript to the playtext that

"because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists[,] ... that is the very reason she

[Evelina's ghost] may be produced without danger" (223)-emphasising that for

him, there was nothing at stake in his presentation of the supernatural, aside perhaps

from irritating moralising critics.

Lewis's introduction of slaves in his medieval English setting was an obvious

anachronism, and, along with his presentation of ghost and villain-hero, rather served

to annoy critics than to give a larger analysis of their social or political resonance.

Lewis's description of Osmond's slave, Hassan, for instance, incorporates anti-

slavery sentiment, as Hassan bemoans that:

I have been dragged from my native land, from a wife who was every thing to
me, to whom I was every thing! Twenty years have elapsed since the~e
Christians tore me away: they trampled upon my heart, mocked my despair,
and, when in frantic terms I raved of Samba, [they] laughed, and wondered how
a negro's soul could feel! (1.2; 161)

Lewis's sympathetic depiction of Hassan was in fact a subject of controversy. and in

the printed Larpent performance version, Hassan's speech concerning his slave

147
condition was marked for omission, as Cox puts it, "presumably by the examiner. "",

The Monthly Mirror (1797) also opposed Lewis's "introduction of Africans" into his

"Gothic story" as well as his "allusion to the Slave Trade."87 Lewis's response was

even more provocative, since he later published the play, as he affirmed in the

postscript, "almost verbatim, as originally written" to counter those "erroneous

assertions" of his play being "violently democratic" (221-22). Hassan's speech could

be disagreeable to many Britons, but his anguish, as Felicity Nussbaum argues, "is

partially excused because of his capacity for strong sentiment," and the negroes,

overall, "remain peripheral to the plot, though their obvious victimisation could be

interpreted as justifying the return of freed blacks to Africa rather than as an

indictment of slavery which is not mentioned in the play."88 Lewis himself disowned

any responsibility for his ambivalent staging of the Africans, playfully claiming in

the postscript that the representation of skin colour in his story was devoid of any

cultural significance: "I thought it would give a pleasing variety to the characters and

dresses, if 1 made my servants black; and could 1 have produced the same effect by

making my heroine blue, blue 1 should have made her" (223).

Lewis's anachronistic insertion of the Africans in his drama differs from his

much more detailed description of his Jamaican slaves in his final work, Journal of a

West India Proprietor (written between 1815-18, published posthumously in 1834),

in which Lewis's concern over the improvement of the slaves' condition portrays

him as a benevolent, paternalistic proprietor. The genre of the journal itself reflects

Lewis's self-fashioning as a travel-writer, another form of self-presentation by which

he perhaps sought to re-establish himself as a respectable author-for Coleridge, for

86 Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas 150, 161 (note 36).

87 Monthly Mirror (1797), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 253: and Cox, ed .. Seven
Gothic Dramas 16 (note 36). . th>
88 Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender III l:
Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 232.

148
example, Lewis's Journal was "by far his best book, and will live and be popular."~'!

The Journal, however, was not the only work that showed Lewis's serious

engagement with the social and political climate of his time. In 1799. Lewis

dedicated to Fox The Love of Gain, a satirical poem in imitation of the thirteenth

satire of Juvenal. In 1806, he wrote "Lines Written on returning from the Funeral of

the Right Hon. C. J. Fox" in which he revered Fox as a fervent supporter of the cause

of India, American independence, religious freedom, abolitionism, and peace with

France. Though The Castle Spectre seemed to invoke themes and images with

political meanings, they were offered without any clear-cut underlying agenda, apart

from piquing critics and gratifying the public thirst for sensationalism. Despite

Lewis's affiliation with the liberal Foxite Whigs, it is difficult to pin down the

political resonance in his fictional writings, since Lewis's self-representation as a

writer after The Monk scandal (except in his Journal) became increasingly involved

with his alliance with the public and an outright identification of himself against

critical authority. Lewis's "desire to maintain his profile as a literary enfant terrible,"

as Watt asserts, "ultimately overrode any concern with more direct political

intervention" in his fictions.90 As Lewis declared in his title-page of Adelmom, the

Outlaw; A Romantic Drama (1801), quoting William Paley, "[nJothing is a trifle,

which contributes to the harmless amusement of multitudes."91 Defiantly waging war

with critics, he made it clear in his postscript to the play that he was indifferent to

their opinion: "they take so much trouble with productions which I thought from

their nature not worthy to cost me any,-they convert that into a source of so much
"92
labour to them, which to me was merely a source 0 f amusement ...

89 qtd. in Peck, Life of Lewis 169.

90 Watt, Contesting the Gothic 99.
91 Lewis, Adelmom, title page.
92 Ibid. x.

149
 An important reason why Lewis was renounced by contemporary critics was

his persistent use of German sources during a period when translations and

adaptations of German literature in England were subject to intense scrutiny and

dispute. In the 1790s and the early l800s, German fictions, as Watt explains,

"became guilty by association" with an "excess of both sentiment and rationality" as

well as with the democratic inclination of famous authors such as Schiller and

Kotzebue, whose writings popularised images of outlaws and secret societies that

worked to undermine the power of established governments and constitutions. 93

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800 complained of the popularity of

"sickly and stupid German Tragedies," hinting at both the spread of German works

and the threat they represented to the British canon of respectable authors such as

Shakespeare and Milton. 94 Lewis was distinguished from other borrowers of German

writing in the period, not only in his indiscriminate use of German sources, but also

in the way that he "Lewisized" them, or, in other words, adapted his sources to

match the popular taste of his audience. Coleridge's Osorio (1798), based upon the

German plot of an outlaw's revenge against his tyrannical brother, was rejected by

the manager of Drury Lane since, as Byron told John Murray, it "did not appear at all

practicable" to the theatre. 95 Joanna Baillie also adopted the revenge theme in De

Monfort (1798). Removing the murder scene off stage, Baillie's tragedy was

applauded by critics, but not her audience, as a reviewer noted: "The audience

yawned in spite of themselves and in spite of the exquisite poetry, the vigorous

93 Watt, Contesting the Gothic 75-76. . _

94 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth and Colendge; the Texts of
the 1798 Edition with the Additional 1800 Poems and the Prefaces, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones
(London: Routledge, 1991) 249. , . "
95 Byron to John Murray, 12 Oct. 1817, Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron s Letters and Journals, \ 01. -

(London: Murray, 1973) 267.

150
paSSIOn, and the transcendent acting."96 Lewis's The Castle Spectre similarly

highlights the overthrow of a tyrannical usurper. But if the play contained any

German characteristics, they seemed to be outweighed by Lewis's introduction of a

ghost and theatrical effects, hence diluting the democratic social and political

ideology that Lewis's contemporaries would attribute to German literature. Lewis

was known as a populariser of German literary influence, as an anonymous writer in

the Courier reflected in October 1818, five months after Lewis's death in Jamaica: he

was "a profligate," "a reckless defiler of the public mind," "a leader in this northern

invasion [of German popular writing], and he triumphed in the common degradation

of the English genius."97

Lewis's engagement with his sources is indeed erratic. In the advertisement

to The Monk, Lewis explained that his depiction of the Bleeding Nun derived from

"a tradition still credited in many parts of Germany" (6). The poem "Alonzo the

Brave and Fair Imogine," which recounts the story of the unfaithful Imogine and the

revenge of her phantom lover Alonzo, though its source was not acknowledged by

Lewis, is claimed by Syndy Conger to have been based on Gottfried August

Burger's famous ballad "Lenore" (1773).98 Both were included in The Monk to

heighten the effects of horror, as Agnes (in disguise as the Bleeding Nun) turns out

to be the dead Beatrice who disrupts Raymond's plan of elopement, while the poem

"Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine" that Antonia reads increases her fear of the

spectre of her dead mother. Lewis republished both works (with the Bleeding Nun

rewritten as a ballad) in Tales of Wonder (1800), playfully describing "Alonzo the

Brave and Fair Imogine" as "Original-M. G. Lewis," and "The Bleeding Nun" as

96 qtd. in Paul Baines and Edward Bums, Introduction, Five Romantic Plays, 1768-1821 (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000) xix.
97 qtd. in Peck, Life of Lewis 174-75.
98 Macdonald and Scherf, Introduction, The Monk 13.

151
"founded on the fourth chapter of the Romance of 'Ambrosio , or the Monk ."'99

While the poems are part of Lewis's collection of translations and imitations of old

supernatural ballads, Lewis's treatment of them is dubious, as the volume also

contains his own parody of "Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine," "Giles Jollup the

Grave and Brown Sally Green," along with other burlesques such as the annonymous

"Cinder King" and George Colman the younger's "The Maid of the Moor; or, the

Water Fiends."

During this period, a time when there was an increasing interest in old

ballads, Walter Scott, who collaborated with Lewis on Tales of Wonder, was

preoccupied with providing the historical provenance of his contributions, and was

later renowned for his own ballads and poems that helped reinvent Scottish culture.

Lewis's interest in this ballad revival was very different, however, and he told Scott

that what he counted most in Tales of Wonder was "a Ghost or a Witch," "a sine-

qua-non ingredient in all the dishes, of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin

repast."IOO Whereas most of the ballads served to pander to the popular taste for

supernatural horror, Lewis's parody of "Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine" did not

only draw the reader's attention once again to The Monk but, as Lisa Wilson

observes, also "implicitly challenge [d] the critical establishment by poking fun at the

one piece of his work of which they consistently approved."lol As the Anti-Jacobin

Review (1801) remarked, Lewis's poetical talents "are strangely perverted, and he

99 My references to Lewis's Tales of Wonder here are from the 1887 edition of Tales of Terror an?
Wonder (London: Routledge, 1887) 124, 244. This edition is the one most available now, though It
has to be remarked that Lewis is probably not the author of Tales of Terror, an anonymous parody of
Tales of Wonder which came out in 1801 and was later issued and sold by Lewis's publisher along
with Tales of Wonder in a single volume. On Lewis's authorship and Tales of Terror, please see
Elizabeth Church, "A Bibliographical Myth," Modem Philology 19.3 (1922): 307-14.
100 qtd. in Watt, Contesting the Gothic 85.
101 Lisa M. Wilson, '''Monk' Lewis as Literary Lion," Romanticism On the Net 8, Nov. 1997,19 Feb.
2007 <http://users.ox.ac.ukl-scat0385/1iterary.html>.

152
sometimes seems even to be employed in throwing a ridicule upon himself."II)~ The

writer of the Poetical Register (1801) likewise repudiated Lewis's inclusion of

parodies in the volume, noting that they were "evidently designed to ridicule the

present taste for the wonderful" and that it was "difficult to decide whether they are

meant to be serious or ludicrous."103

The eclectic display of the spectacular and the ludicrous is similarly central to

Lewis's novel, The Bravo of Venice: A Romance (1805). Claiming that the narrative

was translated from the Gennan Abaellino, der grosse Bandit (1794) by Johann

Heinrich Zschokke, Lewis transfonned his source material to such an extent that his

version can be read as a burlesque of a "typical" German terror romance. The outlaw

hero, Abellino, is first introduced as a mysterious, fearful villain-"hear the name of

Abellino ... tremble!"104 Lewis's subsequent description of Abellino's appearance,

however, is so exaggerated that he becomes more of a comic character. "His mouth,"

as Lewis put it, "was so wide, that his gums and discoloured teeth were visible" and

his "eye (for he had but one) was sunk deep in his head, and little more than the

white of it was visible; and even that little was overshadowed by the protrusion of

his dark and bushy eye-brow" (30-31). Even the narrator himself playfully confesses

that he doubts "whether this repulsive physiognomy exprest stupidity of intellect, or

maliciousness of heart, or whether it implied them both together" (31).

While Lewis burlesqued the stereotypical Gennan Gothic villain-hero III

Abellino, he reprised his own fictional character, Ambrosio, in Matteo, the bandit

chief in the novel. Matteo is not only "educated in a monastery" (46), but is also a

product of a clandestine relationship paralleling that between Ambrosio and Antonia:

102 qtd. in Wilson, "'Monk' Lewis as Literary Lion."

103 Ibid.
104 Matthew Lewis, The Bravo of Venice: A Romance (New York: Amo, 1972) 11. Subsequent
references to this work will be given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

153
"my father," Matteo explains, "was a dignified prelate in Lucca, and my mother a

nun of the Ursuline order, greatly respected for her chastity and devotion" (46). In a

similar way to Ambrosio, Matteo's rebellious character was formed by his restricted

and unnatural upbringing: "What is virtue! What is vice? Nothing but such things as

forms of government, customs, manners, and education have made sacred" (43).

Apart from these expressions of resentment, however, Lewis did not provide any

further analysis of Matteo and his oppressed condition. Instead of being a

sympathetic character, Matteo is comically depicted as a boastful bandit leader and a

gigantic but weak figure who is easily thrown to the floor "as had he been an infant"

(34) by Abellino in a wrestling match; after only thirty or so pages, Lewis removed

him from the narrative by having him outwitted and killed by Abellino. Lewis's

portrayal of Rosabella, furthermore, mimics his illustration of Antonia in The Monk:

[H]er light and delicate limbs, envoloped in a thin white garment which fell
around her in a thousand folds; her blue and melting eyes, whence beamed the
expression of purest innocence; her forehead, white as ivory, overshadowed by
the ringlets of her bright dark hair; cheeks, whence terror had now stolen the
roses; lips, which a seducer had never poisoned with kisses ... the perfection of
female loveliness-Such was she ... (68)

In contrast to the case of Antonia, however, Rosabella's "uncommon beauty" (74)

prevents Abellino from killing her as Matteo has commanded, and instead induces

him to save her life.

With such pastiches of The Monk, Lewis not only took pleasure in altering

and playing with his source, but he also underscored the fact that his literary

reputation depended on the public recognition of himself as the author of that

notorious novel. The "villain" Abellino in The Bravo of Venice is revealed to be

Rosabella's handsome lover in disguise, a Neapolitan whose motivation in dealing

154
with bandits and politicians is to eliminate outlaws, expose conspirators and restore

justice. If there is any political resonance here, Lewis's work might be read as an

allegory of the Jacobin conspiracy against the Directory, followed by the coup d'etat

of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. Such allegorical potential is not pushed by Lewis,

however, and, as I have shown, is outweighed by the bizarreness of his characters

and story. While the British Critic (1805) remarked on the "improbability" of the

narrative, the Critical Review (1805) asserted that "Mr. Lewis was initiated into

learning by one of those histories of harlequin, where the turn up and turn down of

every leaf introduces the hero in a new situation, and creates fresh matter for surprise

and wonder. "105

In 1806 Lewis published Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts of Carlsheim and

Sargans. A Romance, translated from a German adaptation of Christiane Benedicte

Eugenie Naubert's work. In opposition to contemporary interest in the recuperation

of the Middle Ages and the notion of Gothic chivalry, Lewis's work, as its title

suggests, revisited The Monk's theme of feudal corruption: while the book

comprises four different but connected tales, each similarly revolves around stories

and images of domestic tyranny, monastic vice, bandits, confinement, and murder. A

tableau that continually recurs is that of female entrapment in a secret dungeon.

Urania in the first tale, for example, is imprisoned in the same dungeon as her

atrocious husband's first wife, who lay on "a wretched pallet" and "whose features

were totally unknown to us [Urania and Edith, her cousin], but whose appearance

excited in us the deepest sentiments of pity. "106 In the second tale, Helen relates her

105 British Critic (1805), McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 259; and Critic~l Review (180~):
252-56, British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & ReceptIon, 2004, CardIff
U,9 Feb. 2006 <http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.ukltitleDetails.asp?title= 1805A076>. nd
106 Matthew Lewis, Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts of Carlsheim and Sargans. A .Roman~e, 2 ed.
(London: Shury, 1807), vol. 1, 184-85. Subsequent references to this work will be gIven (WIth volume
and page numbers in parentheses) after quotations in the text.

155
misfortunes after being carried off by Count Donat who puts her in the com"ent

dungeon, placing "by her side a loaf of bread and a small flask of water ... flinging

the door after him in violence" (3, 140). The depiction of another female captiye in

the same dungeon, Emmeline, resembles that of Ambrosio's rape and tonnent of

Antonia: "Luprian, the unworthy Abbot of Curwald, who even under the protecting

roof of her [Emmeline's] father had insulted her by a declaration of his passion,

renewed his persecution with increased ardour in a place, which was completely

under his dominion" (3, 251-52); when Emmeline rejects him, she is "compelled to

endure a variety of the most cruel insults and injuries, and then '" dragged back to

her dungeon so exhausted with her sufferings, that she could scarcely be called

alive" (3, 252-53). Whereas most of Naubert's fictions were tied to their historical

and political context-his medievalism was employed to expose the sinister

activities of the fifteenth-century Secret Tribunal ofWestphalia l07-Lewis seemed to

be more interested in using Naubert's motif of feudal despotism to create a spectacle,

without analysing characters and their motivation as he did in The Monk. His

familiar images of female suffering, in other words, became Lewis's trademark, an

important part of his "branding" of himself after The Monk scandal. As the reviewer

of the Flowers of Literature (1806) proclaimed, the novel "contains so much of Mr.

Lewis's peculiar manner, that we suppose it to be an original composition. At all

events, he has considerably increased his reputation by producing it, notwithstanding

the fame he has already acquired."108

Lewis's adaptation of Monvel's Les Victimes Cloitrees on stage as Venoni,

or The Novice of St. Mark's in 1808 revised the themes of religious tyranny and

107 Terry Hale, "French and German Gothic: the beginnings," The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction, ed. Jerold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 67-68. .
108 Flowers of Literature (1806): 501-02, British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database. of ProduC~l?n.
Circulation & Reception, 2004, Cardiff U, 9 Feb. 2006 <http://www.british-fictlon.cf.ac.uk tItle
Details.asp?title=1805A076>.

156
monastic cnmes dealt with in The Monk, though it eschewed the lurid sexual

component that was intrinsic to that novel. The play focuses on the Prior

Coelestino's temptation of Venoni, the bethrothed lover of Joshepha, to quit the

world and retire to monkhood. While Coelestino's motive for secluding Josepha in

the convent is his "licentious passion" for the young bride, Lewis did not stage or

refer to Coelestino's seduction of Josepha, except in the Prior's ambiguous

mentioning of her as "in my power defenceless!"109 Instead, Lewis's interest was

shifted to the theatrical presentation of his hero and heroine in the adjoining

dungeons. In the third act, Venoni, after discovering the Prior's secret, is imprisoned

in the dark dungeon with a large iron-grated door in the back. Next to his dungeon

and separated by a wall is Josepha's cell which contains "a miserable pallet, at the

head of which is a block of stone supporting a basket, a pitcher, a small flask of oil,

and an iron lamp" (3.3; 89). The scene resembles that of the captured Agnes in the

dungeon, particularly when Lewis described the frantic Josepha on the pallet as "pale

and emancipated, with her hair disshevelled," uttering a loud cry and starting at

slightest noises "as if affrighted by some terrible dream" (3.3; 89).

Earlier in 1803 Lewis had attempted to stage the scene of female suffering in

The Captive: A Monodrama, or Tragic Scene. His presentation of the tormented,

chained, and delirious woman in the private madhouse of her "tyrant husband,"110

might have been inspired by Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Women, but

Lewis's emphasis was on the theatrical experimentation with a single scene of

intense mental and physical suffering, to produce striking effects, rather than on

109 Matthew Lewis, Venoni, or The Novice of St. Mark's (1809), English Prose Drama Full-~ext
Database (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1997), Literature Online, 31 Dec. 2005 <~ttp://hon.
chadwyck.co.uklsearch> 32; Act 2, scene 1. Subsequent references to the play will be ,given ~fter
quotations in the text. Since line numbers are not provided in the source, page numbers Will be given
instead (after the semicolon) along with act and scene numbers. .
110 Matthew Lewis, The Captive: A Monodrama, or Tragical Scene, Seven GothiC Dramas 1789-1825
226. Line numbers are not given in the source.

157
offering his audience a social commentary. As reported in the Monthly ~irror, the

image was "too strong for the feelings of the audience," causing "[t]wo ladies [to]

f[a]U into hysterics" and Lewis to withdraw the drama after a few more
111
performances. In Venoni, Lewis seemed to revise the scene with his presentation

of Josepha, and also made the ending more dramatic by placing two adjoined

dungeons on stage that allowed the audience to see at once his two protagonists, and

how Venoni, through a "secret" door, enters Josepha's cell and leads her out of the

place. Though the horrendous image of Josepha in torment terrified many spectators

and induced him to alter the scene by replacing Josepha's dungeon with a convent

room in which she is seen in the company of other nuns, and in her normal

condition, Lewis claimed, in his preface to the play's published version in 1809, that

the play was still "received with unqualified applause" and went through eighteen

successful performances before the burning down of Drury Lane theatre.

Lewis's adaptation of literary sources attests to the commercialisation of his

works, both written and performed. His last play, Timour the Tartar: A Grand

Romantic Melo-drama in Two Acts (1811), though not so dependent on The Monk

as other works that I have discussed, is one of the most obvious examples of Lewis's

alliance with the public and his identification of himself against custodians of the

literary and theatrical spheres. The drama was originally staged at Covent Garden as

an afterpiece, which, with the half-price system for latecomers, was intended to

attract a popular audience. His favourite theme of tyranny was still central to the

plot, but this time Lewis wrote a play that responded to the early nineteenth-century

craze for equestrianism, which, according to Gamer, was most apparent in a number

of gentleman's clubs associated with horse riding, coach driving, and military

111 qtd. in Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas 229 (note 16).

158
fashion in the period. 112 Previously in the same year George Colman the Younger's

Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity! had enthralled the theatre's audience with an

equestrian procession on the stage.1l3 To ensure his play's success, Le\\'is not only

offered a magnificent procession, but also, as he put it in the Advertisement ,

"substitute[ d] a combat on foot for one on horse-back."ll4 The story itself borrowed

the historical figure of the fourteenth-century Turkish conqueror, Tamerlane or

Tamberlaine, renaming him as Timour and illustrating his fall from power.

Christopher Marlowe had earlier been inspired by the same historical figure and

composed Tamburlaine the Great (1590) as a play in which Tamburlaine, though a

tyrant, is also a charismatic warrior and the faithful lover of Zenocrate. Lewis's play,

on the other hand, brushed aside the psychological interest of its character and

instead expanded on the grand theatrical effect of its wartime setting. The Oriental

background, as Lewis remarked, was to show "the magnificence of the Scenery and

Dresses" (19; 98).

The figure of an Oriental despot had been commonly employed in literature

and drama to allegorise contemporary British or European politics. Nicholas Rowe's

Tamerlane (1701), for example, was "nearly always" performed, as Jeffrey Cox and

Michael Gamer have noted, on the anniversary either of William of Orange's birth

on November 4 or of his landing in England on November 5 to commemorate the

1688 glorious revolution. 115 In Lewis's time, such a Turkish tyrant might be used to

allegorise Napoleon's usurpation of the French monarchy and his invasion of other

112 Michael Gamer, "A Matter of Turf: Romanticism, Hippodrama, and Legitimite Satifl~."
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28.4 (2006): 308-15.
113 Jeffrey N. Cox and Micheal Gamer, eds., The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Toronto:

Broadview, 2003) 97-98.

114 Matthew Lewis, Timour the Tartar: A Grand Romantic Melo-drama in Two Acts, The Broadview
Anthology of Romantic Drama 98, lines 12-13. Subsequent references will be given after quotations
in the text (with line and page numbers for the Advertisement; and act, scene, line and page numbers
for the play).
115 Cox and Gamer, eds., Broadview Anthology 99 (note 4).
European countries. Nevertheless, Lewis did not seem to pursue this allegorical

potential, despite the fact that the radical Examiner (1811) considered his illustration

of the downfall of Timour an "insidious attack on the reputation of

BONAPARTE."116 Such implicit patriotism appears again to have been trumped by

Lewis's insistent concern with his play's commercial success. While Lewis himself

did not encounter any financial problems in his life, he delighted in being seen to

write for money ahead of more "worthy" priorities such as the pursuit of a moral or

literary reputation. The episode of the combat between Sanballat and Kerim, for

instance, is irrelevant to the main plot but was conspicuously inserted to present a

well-trained horse, which, as Lewis described, "seizes Sanballat, and drags him to

the ground" and when Kerim falls, "leaps the Barrier, prevents Sanballat from

advancing, picks up the sword, and carries it to his Master" (1.3.scene description;

108). Equally sensational is the last scene on the tower terrace where Zorilda

disengages herself from Timour and plunges into the sea, only to be saved by her son

who rides his horse into and out of the water bearing Zorilda back to the fortress.

When the play caused offence to critics, it therefore did so on the ground of

its spectacular stage presentation rather than its political resonance. The reviewer of

the Morning Chronicle (30 April 1811) stated that the "horse-actors" in Timour the

Tartar exhibited a "new species of bathos" and "a whimsical sort of embarrassment,"

blaming what he saw as the decline of the British stage on its audience: "we may

venture to say that three-fourths of them came to see the horses-the horses-and

nothing but the horses."117 Likewise, the Dramatic Censor (May 1811) criticised the

playas "the worst attempt at that exploded thing called 'plot'" and attributed its

success solely to its "theatrical pomp," referring to it as another "experiment on the

116 Examiner (1811), Cox and Gamer, eds., Appendix, Broadview Anthology 349.
117 Morning Chronicle (1811), Cox and Gamer, eds., Appendix, Broadview Anthology 344.

160
public taste for scenery, horsemanship, and mummery. "118 Most notably, the

European Magazine related a stir in the theatre on the night of May 1, 1811 when "a

strong party. " threw a great number of hand-bills from the upper boxes, containing

(as we understood) some declamations against equestrian performances being

introduced at the regular theatre. "119 But these "hand-bills," as the review continued,

"met with a very unfavourable reception," for "most of them were tom to pieces with

indignation and those who had dispersed them were loudly hissed."120 Despite such

evidence of discontent over the equestrian exhibition, all the reviews asserted that

the performances ended with "a roar of approbation," and a "tumult of applause."J21

Following Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar, a number of mock hippodramas were

perfonned in other London theatres in the same year. 122 Though these plays

purported to ridicule Colman's and Lewis's use of horses for spectacle, they

somehow made their perfonnances even more spectacular and eclectic by including,

for example, more horses on stage, along with donkeys and mules; the public fad for

these dramas, as Gamer argues, testifies to the "unabated" popularity of Colman's

and Lewis's illegitimate productions. 123

As this chapter has shown, Lewis's investment in the "Lewisizing" of which

he was accused is evident in his efforts to cater for the popular taste for

sensationalism and spectacle. Lewis's defiance of critical authority was nonetheless

not expressed in the same manner throughout his literary career. While Lewis's

118 Dramatic Censor (1811), Cox and Gamer, eds., Appendix, Broadview Anthology 346.
119 European Magazine (1811), Cox and Gamer, eds., Appendix, Broadview Anthology 350.
120 Ibid.
121 These reviews are, for instance, The Morning Chronicle (1811), The Sun (1811), and The Times
(1811). See Cox and Gamer, eds., Appendix, Broadview Anthology 344-46.
122 These satirical performances are, for instance, Quadrupeds; or, The Manager's Last Kick!
(Lyceum, July 1811), Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh; or, The Rovers of Weimar (Haymarket, July
1811), Harlequin and Bluebeard (Sadler's Wells, July 1811), Four-in-Hand (Haymarket, August
1811), The Travellers Benighted (Haymarket, September 1811), One Foot by Land and One Foot by
Sea; or, The Tartar's Tartar'd! (Olympic, November 1811). See Gamer, "A Matter of Turf' 319-:~1.
123 Gamer, "A Matter of Turf' 319.

161
liberalism is exemplified by the libertinism of The Monk, and its antagonism

towards the Radcliffean female Gothic tradition, it became more erratic in

subsequent works, and was rather supplanted by Lewis's interest in literary and

theatrical effects. As Lewis's display of ghosts, crimes, dungeons and incarceration

became increasingly formulaic in his fictions after The Monk, it is not surprising that

reviewers would regard The Monk as "considerably the best of the works" by

Lewis.124 Byron famously described Lewis's reputation in English Bards and Scotch

Reviewers (1809):

Oh! wonder-working LEWIS! Monk, or Bard,

Who fain would'st make Parnassus a church-yard!
Lo! Wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow,
Thy Muse a Sprite, Apollo's sexton thou!
Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand,
By gibb'ring specters hailed, thy kindred band;
Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page,
To please the females of our modest age,
All hail, MP! From whose infernal brain
Thin sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train ... 125

Byron's satire sums up Lewis's self-representation as an unashamed author (and

MP) who deliberately turned the respectable world of literature into "a church-yard"

with his blatant and ludicrous staging of the supernatual ("gibb'ring spectres") as

well as his sexually licentious narration, which Byron sarcastically referred to as the

"chaste descriptions" of The Monk. Though satirical, Byron's verse reveals both the

pre-eminence and the mesmerising effects of the "wonder-working" of Lewis's

literary and dramatic productions. Byron's relationship to his reader is markedly

124 Review of Feudal Tyrants, Critical Review (1807). McNutt, Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel
260.
125 George Gordon Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Major Works 7, lines 205-14.

162
different from Lewis's, since he sought to maintain a distance from his audience

while at the same time creating a particular self-image through writing-a character

that, as the next chapter will elaborate, led the "male Gothic" to its zenith of

popularity as well as, perhaps, its end.

163
 CHAPTER 4

"DRAWING FROM SELF"]: LORD BYRON

Although there have been many critical studies of Byron, very few have set out to

examine the relation between the author's works and the popular literary mode of the

Gothic. Michael Gamer is perhaps the most recent scholar who has delved into the

subject. In Romanticism and the Gothic (2000), for example, Gamer takes up Robert

Hume's famous 1969 essay, "Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic

Novel," and elaborates on the continuities between the two genres, arguing for the

persistent influence that Gothic writing had on the development of the "higher"

culture of Romanticism. His essay, "Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in

Britain" (2002), places Byron alongside other Romantic writers such as Wordsworth,

Coleridge and Scott, focusing on how, amid the augmenting antagonism towards

Gothic fiction, these writers employed Gothic conventions and made more

"acceptably intellectual and ideological" uses of them. 2 While Wordsworth, for

instance, includes superstitious characters in Lyrical Ballads (1798) to delineate the

mental universe of ordinary rural dwellers, Byron's notes to The Giaour (1813), as

Gamer argues, serve to legitimise the sensational Gothic elements of the poem, and

tum his work into "a piece of oriental antiquarianism," a strategy similarly used by

] The phrase "drawing from self' was used by Byron in his letter to Thomas Moore on 2 January
1814, published as preface to The Corsair in 1814. My further discussion of the phrase is in the
section on the Turkish Tales.
2 Michael Gamer, "Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain," The Cambridge Companion to
Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 98.

164
Scott, whose annotation provides a historical and scholarly perspective on his

metrical romances. 3

Byron's notes, however, are presented as based on his direct, personal

experience in the East rather than on antiquarian research. The tone of his notes, as I

will discuss later, is also markedly different from that of other writers such as Scott

or Southey. As most of his contemporary readers agreed (despite Byron's denial), his

method of writing involves "drawing from self,"4 since in whatever Byron wrote he

seemed to encourage the reading of his life into his work. What distinguishes Byron

from other writers, as Andrew Elfenbein observes, is the prominent reputation

resulting from gossip, rumour, and scandal that surrounded Byron's life, and which

ran in parallel with the delineation of his heroes, making "Byronism," in Elfenbein's

words, a "cult" or a "phenomenon" embracing both Byron's personality and his

poems. 5 It is, in this sense, difficult to accommodate Byron with other canonical

Romantic writers, whose subjectivity was absent or at least more concealed in their

texts, and who seemed to be interested more in the aesthetic and philosophical

aspects of their works than in their self-projection.

Instead of seeing Byron as a "Romantic" writer, it is, as I will argue, more

illuminating to read him in the light of the "male Gothic" addressed by this study.

Like Walpole, Beckford and Lewis, Byron made use of Gothic themes and features

such as the Faustian narrative, the idea of "family secrets," and the

disguise/transvestism motif to try out socially and sexually transgressive identities.

Unlike other "male Gothic" authors (certainly Walpole and Lewis), however,

Byron's engagement with the Gothic served to orchestrate a reception that clearly

connected Byron with his heroes, in spite of Byron's attempts to legitimise his

3 Ibid. 99.
4 See note 1 above.
5 Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 9.

165
morally ambiguous works. Byron's heroes, moreover, developed in accordance with

the changing circumstances in Byron's life. This chapter will investigate Byron's

dealings with the Gothic, from the beginnings of his literary career when he sought

to establish himself as an author, to the period after his separation from his wife and

his self-exile in 1816, when he started to involve himself in revolutionary activities

in Italy and Greece and his writing became more blatantly provocative, representing

Byron as an icon of rebellion against political and religious authority, and

conservative moral and sexual values more generally. While Byron was highly

esteemed in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s as the bulwark of the Greek cause, his

work met with little approval in the reactionary society of Britain. The severe

criticism of Byron and his works, along with the growing backlash against other

"male Gothic" writers in the nineteenth century, showed how "male Gothic" identity

play was increasingly deemed to be threatening to moral and social decorum. In

Byron's work, then, we see what might be thought of as the high-point and also

perhaps the end-point of the "male Gothic."

CONSTRUCTING AUTHORIAL IDENTITY: FROM HOURS OF IDLENESS

TO CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE, CANTOS I-II

In 1807, Byron introduced himself to the public for the first time as an author, who,

like Walpole and Beckford, regarded his work as a private recreation rather than a

serious attempt to cater to the market and to earn a living. As Byron stated in the

preface to his revealingly titled collection Hours of Idleness, he saw his poems as

"trifles," the products of "a young man, who has lately completed his nineteenth

166
year," and who insisted that "[p ]oetry ... is not my primary vocation" for it serves

only "to divert the dull moments of indisposition, or the monotony of a vacant

hour."6 Such an emphasis on amateur status was of course a common gesture of

aristocratic writers, an assertion of their distance from the profession of writing. In

the case of the other "male Gothic" writers I have discussed (who, unlike Byron,

were not titled aristocrats), their "aristocratic" self-fashioning also served to license

their engagement with unconventional and, sometimes, outrageous subjects. Byron's

self-positioning in the preface to Hours of Idleness served to legitimise his juvenile

delinquency, as Caroline Franklin observes, via a "mock-modest plea for indulgence

on account of the writer's youth."7 Byron's libertine language is evident in a number

of the amorous poems that he addressed to ladies in his Southwell society: some had

appeared in his privately printed volume, Fugitive Pieces (1806), but their ribaldry

was suppressed or expurgated so that they became, as Byron noted, "miraculously

chaste" in his revised versions. 8 Many of the poems, moreover, were satires,

translations and imitations of classical models, and therefore presented Byron as an

educated author, who conformed to respectable literary standards. Central to critics'

concerns, however, was Byron's portrayal of himself as a young aristocrat, as Henry

Brougham remarked in his anonymous review in the February 1808 issue of the

Edinburgh Review:

Besides a poem ... on the family seat of the Byrons, we have another of eleven
pages on the self-same subject, introduced with an apology, 'he certainly had no
intention of inserting it;' but really, 'the particular request of some friends,' &c.
&c. It concludes with five stanzas on himself, 'the last and youngest of a noble
line.' There is a good deal also about his maternal ancestors, in a poem on

6 George Gordon Byron, Hours ofIdleness, Complete Poetical Works, vol. 1,32-33.
7 Caroline Franklin, Byron: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) 19. .
8 Byron to M. G. Pigot, 13 Jan. 1807, Letters and Journals, vol. 1, 103. The revised verSIOns that I
refer to are Poems on Various Occasions (1807) and Hours of Idleness.

167
 Lachin-y-gair, a mountain where he spent part of his youth, and might have
learnt that pibroch is not a bagpipe, any more than duet means a fiddle. 9

Irritated by the ostentation of Byron's idleness and his insistence on his rank

Brougham criticised Byron for being "peculiarly forward in pleading minority."lo As

the work did not offer anything beyond the author's egotistical self-portrait,

Brougham argued that Byron should "abandon poetry, and tum his talents, which are

considerable, and his opportunitites, which are great, to better account." I I

The damage that Brougham's review did to Byron was tremendous, as he

admitted to John Cam Hobhouse when he stated that he was "cut to atoms" by the

Edinburgh Review. 12 In 1809 Byron launched an anonymous satire, English Bards

and Scotch Reviewers, partly as personal revenge against the Edinburgh Review and

partly as a commentary on the contemporary literary scene. Byron based his poem on

Juvenalian satire, and proclaimed that he aligned himself with the "Sense and Wit"

of English neoclassical writers such as Pope, Dryden, Congreve and Otway.13 Apart

from his attack on the Edinburgh Review's critics and its editor, Francis Jeffrey,

Byron can be seen to uphold the "Augustan" emphasis on reason and experience

against recent poets such as Wordsworth (whose attachment to "simplicity" was

ridiculed by Byron), Coleridge (who relied too much on imagination and emotion),

and Lewis and Scott (both of whom Byron saw as pandering to the popular taste for

the supernatural).14 Despite his anonymity and his earlier disavowal of his desire to

pursue a literary career, Byron's criticism of contemporary writers in English Bards

inevitably located him within the public sphere of literary production and reception.

9 Edinburgh Review (1807), Andrew Rutherford, ed., Byron: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge, 1970) 31.
10 Ibid. 27.
II Ibid. 28.
12 Byron to John Cam Hobhouse, 27 Feb. 1808, Letters and Journals, vol. 1, 158.
13 Byron, English Bards, Major Works 3, line 45.
14 See Byron, English Bards, Major Works 7-8.

168
In the preface to the satire's second edition, Byron, while disclosing his authorship,

offered his work as "public property" with the aim, as he put it, "not to prove that I

can write well ... but ... to make others write better."15 The change in Byron's self-

representation in English Bards, as Franklin points out, marks Byron's significant

move from the private to the public-from writing as a jeu d'esprit to writing as a

profession; from works addressing an in-crowd to satires about "cut-throat

competition between professional writers for the marketplace."16 This does not mean

that Byron altogether discarded his interest in self-presentation, however, only that

instead of offering direct self-revelation, he was to adopt the practice of self-

mystification, masquerading as particular characters in his subsequent works, and

recreating the dialectic between life and writing, so as to strengthen his popularity

and his public persona as an author.

During the time that Byron wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold's

Pilgrimage (1812), he regularly corresponded with the writer Robert Charles Dallas

and the publisher John Murray concerning revisions, additions and corrections to his

work. While Hours of Idleness started off as a piece to be privately circulated among

a coterie, Childe Harold was composed for a wider audience, with whom Byron was

redefining his relationship and eager to establish a literary reputation. Whereas

Walpole playfully confounded his readers' expectations of what a "Gothic" work

should look like, Byron more straightforwardly positioned his poem against the

contemporary vogue for chivalry and romance. In the preface to his work, Byron

argued against any criticism which castigated his protagonist as being "very

IS George Gordon Byron, Preface, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron: Poetical Works, ed.
Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970) 113.
16 Franklin, Byron 36.

169
unknightly, as the times of the Knights were times of love, honour, and so forth. "17

Referring to works by writers as various as St. Palaye and Sir Joseph Banks, Byron

insisted that the Middle Ages "were the most profligate of all possible centuries"

(20). "The vows of chivalry," as he put it, "were no better kept than any other \'ows

whatsoever, and the songs of the Troubadours were not more decent, and certainly

were much less refined, than those of Ovid" (20-21). Byron seemed to take an

oppositional political stance here, asserting that "Burke need not have regretted that

... [the days of chivalry] are over," and referring to the "monstrous mummeries of

the middle ages" (21); the culture of chivalry, he suggested here, was all a

hypocritical fa<;ade, and figures such as Sir Tristam and Sir Lancelot were "poetical

personages," whose marvellous adventures were nothing more than "fable[s]" (21).

Like Lewis in Feudal Tyrants, Byron was cynical about any attempt to idealise the

distant past, and similarly employed the "Gothic" or "medieval romance" to engage

with unconventional and sometimes proscribed forms of moral and sexual behaviour.

In Childe Harold, Byron reconfigured his readers' ideas of romance by

incorporating more factual accounts of modem times. He set his poem against

contemporary events in Europe, claiming that it was written "from the author's

observations" during his travels in "Spain, Portugal, Epirus, Acamania, and Greece"

(19). While the work does not resemble a medieval romance, it also "constitute[s] a

radical transformation of the popular genre of travelogue," as Jerome McGann points

out, as Byron "interiorises the form so drastically that it mutates into a drama of

personal history. "18 The poem begins with the account of Harold as a noble youth

who has exhausted himself with the earthly pleasures of "concubines," "carnal

17 Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Major Works 20. Page number will be gi~en ~or subsequent
references to Byron's preface, while canto, stanza and line numbers will be prOVIded III parentheses
for quotations from the poem.
18 McGann, Notes, Major Works 1026 (note 19).

170
companie," and "flaunting wassailers" (1.2.17-18), and has now become so world-

wearied that he decides to leave home and travel abroad for a change of scenery.

Harold's situation in some ways clearly parallels that of Byron, who made his way to

the Iberian peninsula and the Levant in 1810 and 1811; the hero's original name

"Childe Burun" (one of Byron's earliest ancestors) in the initial manuscript suggests

how Byron might once have intended to present his pilgrim and the author as

identical. 19

As Harold's travels proceed, the poem can further be seen as the projection of

Harold's (and also Byron's) psychological state. Jaded with his past voluptuous life,

the hero is even more disillusioned by the war-tom condition of southern and

southeastern Europe. Spain, for instance, was in turmoil when the populace rose

against the French invaders in 1808, while Greece under Turkish rule, as Byron's

work describes it, is a land of "lost Liberty" (2.75.714): "ne'er will freedom seek this

fated soil,/ But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil" (2.77.736-37).

Harold's dejected and mournful conscience is thus reflected through the ravaged

condition of the lands he traverses. His commentary on these scenes alternates with

ruminations on his past life and loves, consequently differing from most

contemporary travel writings which prioritised the traveller's ordered process of

observation, as well as the moral and intellectual improvement inspired by travel.

Harold's journey resembles what Chloe Chard terms the "purposeless movement

onwards" or "aimless wandering" that was likely to be rejected by critics "as

evidence of complete inadequacy in managing the experience of the foreign. "20 It

portrays Byron's hero as an idler. As the Anti-Jacobin Review asserted in 1812. the

work was "destitute of plot or even of plan and its hero [is] a personage not only
19
MacCarthy, Byron 13. .
20Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and ImaginatIve Geography
1600-1830 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999) 28-29.

171
wandering over the world, without any fixed object, but wholly unnecessary toward

any purpose of the poem."21 Harold, as the reviewer noted, "appears to be nothing

but the dull, inanimate, instrument for conveying his poetical creator's sentiments to

the public."n

Childe Harold, moreover, displays Harold's fascination with different customs

and manners, especially those of the Levant, described in the second canto. In the

poem, the colourful mixed ethnic groups of Albanians, Greeks and Turks are depicted

through descriptions of their distinctive, exotic costumes, sanctioned by Byron's

lengthy account of the inhabitants of Albania in his notes: the Albanians in general,

he noted, "have a fine cast of countenance ... [t]heir manner of walking is truly

theatrical; but this strut is probably the effect of the capote, or cloak, depending from

one shoulder" (89). For a European traveller such as Byron who did not cross into

Asia, Albania and Greece constituted, as Saree Makdisi has argued, a "frontier" zone

that represented the very different culture of "the East": as soon as Harold enters

Albania, for example, he feels "himself at length alone,/ And bade to Christian

tongues a long adieu" (2.43.379-80).23 Byron's encounter with the "Oriental" here

perhaps initiated his enduring fascination with the assumption or enactment of other

identities, and as his journals and letters reveal, this self-fashioning encompassed

different orders of otherness: in the Athens carnival in 1809, for instance, Byron

masqueraded as a Greek woman, while in 1814 he commissioned Thomas Phillips to

paint a portrait of himself in Albanian dress (Plate 1).24 With his long white kilt and

turban, of which one end was loosened and dangled on his shoulder to resemble

21 Anti-Jacobin Review (1812), Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary
Reviews of British Romantic Writers, Part B (New York: Garland, 1972) 10-11.
22 Ibid.
23 Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture. ~f Modernity
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 124. My quote of Chi Ide Harold is also from MakdlSl.
24 MacCarthy, Byron 114.

172
PLATE 1 Portrait of a Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian, by Thomas Phillips
(1814)

173
wavy locks of hair, Byron in Albanian costume looks particularly feminine.

Interestingly, Byron later gave the same clothes to his female friend, Mercer

Elphinstone, who wore them at a private masquerade at Burlington House in

London. 25

To Byron, the "Orient" was also a site of sexual transgression. According to

Louis Crompton, part of the appeal of the East for Byron and Hobhouse was "the

difference between its moral climate and England's," and the chance it provided

them to pursue "homoerotic adventures."26 Writing of his time in the court of the

Albanian chief, Ali Pacha, Byron related to his mother how the old Pacha admired

his "small ears, curling hair, & little white hands" and treated him "like a child" by

"sending ... almonds & sugared sherbet, fruit & sweetmeats 20 times a day. "::7 The

image of Ali Pacha as a pederast was further established in the manuscript of Childe

Harold, which mentions the goings-on in one of his chambers: "For boyish minions

of unhallowed love/ The shameless torch of wild desire is lit,! Caressed, preferred

even to women's self above."28 In the first canto, Byron also expressed his sympathy

for Beckford, as he mourned how the latter had been "smitten with unhallowed

thirst! Of nameless crime" and how his "sad day must close/ To scorn, and Solitude

unsought.,,29 In the published version, however, Byron omitted his lines on Ali

Pacha's "boyish minions," and modified the Beckford stanza by dropping his

reference to homosexuality and instead adding some detail concerning Beckford's

wealth and extravagance as the main source of his misfortune. Telling Dallas that he

was concerned if "any improper allusion" might have done Beckford further

25 Ibid. 217.
26 LoUIS
. Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: HomophobIa
. In
. 19th - Century Eng Iand (Berkelev·
.. U of
California P, 1985) 109.
27 Byron to Mrs. Byron, 12 Nov. 1809, Letters and Journals, vol. L 227-28.
28 qtd. in Crompton, Byron and Greek Love 139.
29 Ibid. 120.

174
damage,30 Byron altered the Beckford stanza by replacing the licentious account of

the author with a moral lesson concerning the perils of overconsumption. This

editing process, similarly evident in his omission of Ali Pacha's boy harem, proyides

an example of what Nigel Leask calls Byron's "moral filtering," signifying the

suppression of any Oriental cultural description incompatible with Western norms.

or its subordination to a certain didactic purpose. 31 Byron thus composed Childe

Harold with a keen awareness of his readers, who might not approve of his

delineation of Oriental excess and might even reject the work altogether.

Nevertheless, Byron stressed in the preface that Harold "never was intended

as an example, further than to show that early perversion of mind and morals leads to

satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones" (21). Despite the tedium of

his early life as a libertine, Harold is not repentant, but turns to regard his "fellow

bacchanals" (1.6.47) and "his native land" (1.4.35) with repugnance, and hence flees

from England in a state of "life-abhorring gloom" (1.83.826). As the reader is told,

the character of Harold was modelled upon the misanthropic spendthrift "Timon" of

Athens, and John Moore's profligate and villainous protagonist in his 1789 novel,

Zeluco (21). Moore's character, in particular, is akin to the popular literary figure of

the morally ambivalent Gothic villain-hero. Byron's borrowing of such figure is,

indeed, not surprising, for evidence has shown that he was a keen and enthusiastic

reader of works in the genre. In his preface to Marino Faliero (1820), he praised The

Castle of Otranto as "the first romance" and The Mysterious Mother as "a tragedy of

the highest order";32 as I have discussed in my first chapter, both of these works

focus on the lascivious, incestuous crimes of their protagonists. Likewise, Byron

30 Byron to Robert Charles Dallas, 26 Sept. 1811, Letters and Journals, vo~. 2, 107... .
31 Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of EmpIre (Cambndge. Cambndge
UP, 1992) 21-22.
32 Byron, Preface, Marino Faliero 305.

175
proclaimed that he was "a strenuous & public admirer" of Vathek and even asked his

friend Samuel Rogers to "beg" Beckford for "a copy in M.S.S of the remaining

tales," works which similarly explore the theme of moral and sexual transgression.-;3

Despite his satire of Lewis's Gothic novel and plays in English Bards, ByTon's

remark on the "wonder-working" of Lewis's fictions shows his acknowledgement,

though not admiration, of the commercial success of Lewis's Gothic. 34

In Childe Harold, Byron also made use of the picaresque tradition to

delineate the "adventures" of a rakish anti-hero. The poem might be seen as a mock

epic, for Harold does not really engage in adventure, but is instead an introspective.

cynical and idle "hero" who constantly reflects upon his past and makes comment on

the scenes he encounters. Most importantly, Harold is set up as a potential analogue

for Byron himself. His lament for the unattainable freedom of the Levantine nations,

particularly Greece, recalls Byron's philhellenism and his specifically aristocratic

brand of republican Whiggism. 35 Harold's travels also parallel those of Byron, as the

latter elaborated on his experiences in his notes. In his preface to the first two cantos,

however, Byron playfully rejected "the suspicion" of Harold being "some real

personage," asserting that his hero is merely a "child of imagination" (19). In this

pre-emptive denial of the identification between himself and his character, Byron

nonetheless drew attention to the link that the hero might have with him. This device

of playful refutation, as I will show, was to become a feature of Byron's self-

representation throughout his literary career, functioning to disown Byron's

responsibility for the characters he portrayed whilst allowing him continually to

remind the reader of his presence in those works. Later Byron repeatedly hinted at

the connection between Harold and himself, and even admitted, tongue-in-cheek, in

33 Byron to Samuel Rogers, 3 Mar. 1818, Letters and Journals, vol. 6, 17.
34 Byron, English Bards, Major Works 7, line 205. See, also, my third chapter, p. 159.
35 Malcolm Kelsall, Byron's Politics (Sussex: Harverster, 1987) 2, 10.

176
his preface to the fourth canto, that Harold was barely distinct from ""the author

speaking in his own person:" "it was in vain that I asserted, and imagined," he went

on, "that I had drawn a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the Yer)'

anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far

crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether-

and have done so" (146).

The reception of the poem focused on the character of the author as well as

his protagonist, and conservative critics were especially hostile towards Harold's

liberal attitude and manner. The Anti-l acobin Review (1812), for instance, objected

to "the political prejudices, to the unpatriotic defects, and to the irreligious

principles, of this bastard of the imagination."36 The evangelical British Review

(1812) also condemned Byron's immoral and antisocial hero, asserting that "[n]o

man has a right to be angry with the world because he has been outwitted by it in a

contest of iniquity; because prostitutes have jilted him; and the promises of

sensuality have proved false and treacherous. There is no dignity in the melancholy

or misanthropy of such a man.'m At the same time, Childe Harold was a literary

sensation. It went through over five editions within a year and established Byron as

an acclaimed author. The poem, as Lady Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to

her son in 1812, was "on every table," and Byron "[t]he subject of conversation, of

curiosity, of enthusiasm."38 Contemporary readers often identified the author with his

hero, whose mournful and mysterious character proved an irresistible attraction,

especially for his female audience. As Fiona MacCarthy shows, Byron received a

great number of amatory letters from women, some of whom imagined themselyes

the subject of "To Inez," and some of whom even offered him their own versions of

36 Anti-Jacobin Review (1812), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 11.

37 British Review (1812), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 400.
38 qtd. in MacCarthy, Byron 159.

177
 39
sentimental love poems. Byron, MacCarthy observes, "was intrigued and flattered"

by these letters and was delighted in "hoard[ing] this clandestine correspondence."~

It is not surprising, then, that Byron would later reinforce the connection between his

life and writing, most notably in his addition of the poem "To Ianthe" to the seyenth

edition of Childe Harold in 1814, addressed to Lady Charlotte Harley, the daughter

of Lady Oxford, with whom Byron was then having an illicit relationship.41 In the

fifth edition of the poem, Murray also supplied an engraving of Byron's miniature

portrait by George Sanders (Plate 2). It is the picture of the author and his page about

to embark on a sea voyage, or, possibly the grand tour of 1809. Byron's dress

resembles a naval uniform, but, as Robert Beevers points out, with the "loosely tied

scarf worn with an open neck shirt," there seems to be "a deliberate rejection on

Byron's part of the social restrictions implied by the standard linen high cravats of

gentlemen's fashion.,,42 Along with the gloomy, mountainous background, Byron's

melancholic countenance and eyes, which gaze out of frame into a distance, give a

reflection of the jaded, Romantic hero of his poem.

THE TURKISH TALES

In a letter of August 1813, Byron famously implored Thomas Moore to "[s]tick to

the East": "the oracle, StaeI, told me it was the only poetical policy. The North,

South, and West, have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing but

S**'s [Southey's] unsaleables,-and these he has contrived to spoil, by adopting

39 Ibid. 162-63.
40 Ibid. 163.
41 McGann, Notes, Major Works 1027 (note 21). ' . ., 005 13
42 Robert Beevers, The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed (Abmgdon. Ohvia . 2 ) .

178
PLATE 2 Byron, engraving after George Sanders ' portrait of 1809 by William
Finden (1830)

179
only their most outrageous fictions."43 Byron in the same year had himself \\Titten

and published his first Turkish tale, The Giaour. Though Byron still publicly held on

to his image as a noble author uninterested in monetary reward, his letter to \1oore

implies that he was at least aware of, if not motivated by, the demands of the market.

The "unsaleables" of Southey that Byron referred to were his metrical romances,

Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), both of which, as

Byron contemptuously observed, were not financially successful, especially the first

which had very poor sales figures in its 1813 third edition, with more than half of the

copies left unso1d. 44 The main reason for this, as Leask suggests, is probably that

Southey's Oriental poems were not "tailored to domestic tastes," and were therefore

"too spicy and indigestible for fastidious British appetites.,,45 While critics admired

the detailed information about Eastern mythology, legends, and beliefs in Southey's

extensive footnotes, many found his portrayal of barbarous and despotic Muslims or

Hindus incompatible with the refined tastes of modern readers. Despite Southey'S

declared aim of illustrating the "false" and "monstrous" nature of Hinduism in The

Curse of Kehama, the Eclectic (1811) censured him for confronting his readers with

"heathenism," and exciting "pleasure and disgust, with the knowledge ... that any

attempt to prolong them both is infallibly certain to end in the ascendancy of the

latter."46 In writing his Oriental poems, Byron was fully aware of the mistake that

Southey made, and therefore presented his works as more appealing to the market:

they were, as he self-mockingly remarked later in Beppo (1818), "samples of the

43 Byron to Thomas Moore, 28 Aug. 1813, Letters and Journals, vol. 3.101. . . ..
44Lynda Pratt, Appendix, "'Where ... success [is] certain'? So~they the hterary East Indlama~;_
Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael J. Frankhn (London: Routledge, 2006) 1__
53.
45 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 13-14.
46 qtd. in Pratt, "'Where ... success [is] certain'?" 146.

180
finest Orientalism," "mix'd with western sentimentalism."47 Such Orientalism, as I

will argue, subsumes Byron's use of ("male") Gothic elements along with his "self-

mystificatory" strategies to capture his audience's attention.

From The Giaour onwards, Byron adopted the popular Gothic themes of

domestic tyranny, illicit love and revenge, substituting the Near East for the

Mediterranean settings of Walpole or Lewis. Byron told Henry Drury in May 1810

that "[i]n England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, Sodomy

& smoking, we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and a pathic."48 At a time when

the prosecution of those involved in "unnatural" sexual relations was becoming

increasingly common, however, Byron's tales very suggestively elide the differences

not only between Britons and Turks, but between the sexual practices respectively

attributed to them in the quotation above. Just as Lewis did in The Monk, Byron

made use of the cross-dressing motif so that, as in The Giaour, relations between a

hero and a heroine could take on homoerotic overtones. In this poem, Hassan's cruel

punishment of his wife Leila is triggered by her adulterous relationship with her

Venetian lover. When Hassan finds out that Leila, "[i]n [the] likeness of a Georgian

page," "[h]ad wrong'd him with the faithless Giaour," he has her sewn in a bag and

thrown into the sea according to "the Mussulman manner.,,49 Leila's cross-dressing is

not just a concealment or deception here, for her elopement also enacts a homoerotic

encounter that is sanctioned by Turkish society. Leila's disguise, moreover, probably

has its source in Caroline Lamb's "secret" meeting with Byron in 1812, when she

dressed herself as a young page, "in scarlet hassar jacket and pantaloons," bearing a

47 George Gordon Byron, Beppo, Major Works 329.

48 qtd. in MacCarthy, Byron 115-16. .. .
49 Byron The Giaour Major Works 219, lines 456 and 458; the phrase "the Mussulman manner. IS
, , . ·'11 b . (th Ime
from Byron's Advertisement, 207. Subsequent references to The Glaour \\1 e given WI
numbers in parentheses) after quotations in the text.

181
letter to Byron;50 Caroline, as MacCarthy notes, employed several pages and even

named one of them Rushton, after Byron's favourite attendant. 51 The conspiracy of

transvestism, which might have first been intended to facilitate the lady's visit to

Byron, could therefore additionally entertain the lovers' homoerotic fantasy, a theme

which, as I will later discuss, became most conspicuous in Byron's final tale, Lara.

Along with sodomy, incest is another sexual taboo that Byron associated with

the Orient. In the opening scene of The Bride of Abydos, Selim, the hero, is

presented as an effeminate Turkish prince. His physique is described as thin and

delicate, as the old Giaffir sneers at Selim' s "less than woman's hands," and his

feeble arms which can neither "hurl the dart, and curb the steed" nor "copelWith

timid fawn or antelope.,,52 What is remarkable about Byron's tale is that he used the

Gothic theme of family secrets to banish the subversive potential of such a plot.

After Selim reveals the truth that he is the son of Abdallah, who had been murdered

by his usurping brother, Giaffir, his passionate relationship with his sister Zuleika

becomes as acceptable as his revolt against his uncle/stepfather. When Selim takes

off his exquisite robe and "high-crown'd turban" (2.9.l32) and instead puts on the

garb of a pirate chief, he can be seen to have transformed from an effeminate prince

into a courageous, manly hero. The affection between Selim and Zuleika, however,

is originally founded upon incest, since Byron initially meant to make them brother

and sister throughout the story, as he told Edward Daniel Clark that "none else could

there obtain that degree of intercourse leading to genuine affection."53 In his letter to

John Galt, Byron argued that the subject of incest was not actually unfamiliar to

50 Crompton, Byron and Greek Love 198.

51 MacCarthy, Byron 170-72. .
52 George Gordon Byron, The Bride of Abydos, Poetical Works 265; canto 1, stanza .L h.nes 99,.86.
. . ~
and stanza 5, hnes 136-37 respectIvely. Subsequent relerences to The B'dn e of Abvdos WIll be gwen
(with canto, stanza and line numbers in parentheses) after quotations in the text.
53 Byron to Edward Daniel Clark, 15 Dec. 1813, Letters and Journals, vol. 3.199.

182
British readers, for it had been adopted in "the finest works of the Greeks, one of

Schiller's and Alfieri's in modem times, besides several of our old (and best)

dramatists."54 His eulogy of Walpole's The Mysterious Mother in the preface of

Marino Faliero, as I mentioned earlier, was also a result of the play's powerful

treatment of incest, which made the piece, as he put it, "not a puling love-play."55

Whereas Walpole legitimised the incest theme by presenting the playas a closet

drama and assuming a self-depreciating gesture in his preface to its first published

edition, Byron chose to indulge the reader in Oriental sexual excess before returning

to a more orthodox state of affairs in the second canto, playfully affinning that he

was aware of the difference in the moral climate between "the East" and "the North "

and therefore decided to "alter" Selim's and Zuleika's "consanguinity" and "confine

them to cousinship. "56

The most "Gothic" of all Byron's Turkish tales is the last of them, Lara,

which is centred on the "long self-exiled chieftain," who may be recognised as the

pirate chief Conrad returning to his homeland (Spain) after his strange disappearance

at the end of the third tale, The Corsair. 57 From the beginning, Byron filled his

narrative with an air of mystery, depicting Lara as consorting with the supernatural:

Why gazed he so upon the ghastly head

Which hands profane had gather'd from the dead,
That still beside his open'd volume lay,
As if to startle all save him away? (l.9.143-46)

Through the "Gothic windows" of the hall where Lara is seen at midnight, there

appears a shadow with "bristling locks of sable, brow of gloom,! And the wide

54 Byron to John Galt, 11 Dec. 1813, Letters and Journals, vol. 3,196.
55 Byron, Preface, Marino Faliero 305.
56 Byron to Edward Daniel Clark 15 Dec. 1813, Letters and Journals, vol. 3, 199. c.-
57 ' . 1 1 l' e 4 Subsequent relerence~
George Gordon Byron, Lara, PoetIcal Works 303; canto ,stanza , 1 0 . . ' th .
to Lara will be given (with -canto, stanza and lme . parent h
. numbers 10 eses) after quotatIOns 10 e tex t.

183
waving of his shaken plume,/ '" like a spectre's attributes" (1.11.197-99). Here.

Byron turned to Walpole's motif of the waving plume, but for a different effect.

Whereas Walpole's original (the plume on Alfonso's helmet) is connected with an

ancestral claim of legitimacy, Byron's poem does not dwell on the symbol, and

indeed puzzles the reader over its hero's background and identity. Lara is associated

with "crimes," like Conrad, yet the reader is told that "there was softness too in his

regard" (1.17.303), and his gloomy and impenetrable mind captures other people

with "unwilling interest" (1.19.380).

One aspect of Lara's enigmatic character is his mysterious relationship with

Kaled. As Lara's page, "[o]fforeign aspect, and of tender age" (1.4.48), Kaled might

be read as the disguised Gulnare, a Turkish slave who falls in love with Conrad and

follows him back to his lair, in Byron's third tale. At the opening of the narrative, we

are told that Kaled would "fix his glance" and express his "mute attention" and

"care" to Lara (1.27.556). The affection between the two is most revealing during the

scene where Lara is dying: while Kaled holds the man "he loved" (2.21.512), Lara

murmurs, pressing Kaled's hand "upon his heart" (2.20.494), and pointing to the

East to refer to "some remember'd scene" (2.19.470). While Lara's ambiguous

gesture of pointing Eastward is suggestive of a certain shared experience between

him and Kaled in the past, the subsequent disclosure of Kaled's true identity as a

woman also reminds the reader of the role of disguise in The Giaour, only in Lara

the homoerotic undertone is more obvious, and Byron's revelation of Kaled's sex

serves even more overtly to legitimise such homoeroticism.

A prominent feature of Byron's Turkish tales is their seriality. The union

between Conrad and his wife, Medora, for instance, can be read as an echo of that of

Selim and Zuleika, in the same way that Lara and Kaled might be regarded as a

184
refiguring of the adulterous Conrad and Gulnare. The heroes of Byron's Turkish

tales are in fact very similar in their disposition and personality. As outlaws or pirate

chiefs, they are rebellious, positioning themselves not only against political but also

religious authority. Conrad, for instance, renounces his religion, proclaiming that

"my God .. . I left in youth. "58 The Giaour likewise refuses to conform to

ecclesiastical rules, abjuring Christianity as unable to relieve his grief or mend the

wrongs of the past. Given their mysterious background and the sexual transgression

that is hinted of them, these men seem to be akin to the socially and morally defiant

Gothic villain-hero. As Elfenbein remarks, Byron "jolted his audience by cutting off

masculinity from morality."59 To legitimise the content of their stories, other "male

Gothic" writers incorporated a Faustian framework such that transgression always

ends in punishment. Byron, on the other hand, was clearly fascinated with the idea of

transgression, but did not provide any clear or systematic resolution to his different

works; if his narratives commonly end with the death of their heroes, they do not

seem to offer any retribution for those characters' violation of moral and sexual

mores. In the case of The Giaour, Byron borrowed Beckford's imagery in order to

emphasise the tormented condition of the vengeful Giaour, as the Tartar fisherman

curses him to "wander round lost Eblis' throne:" "fire unquench'd, unquenchable-/

Around-within-thy heart shall dwell/ .. , The tortures of that inward hell!" (750-

54).

Through their transgressive sexual relationships, Byron's Oriental heroines,

as Franklin observes, defy their restrictive domestic, patriarchal society.60 Just as

Leila rebels against her master Hassan, so Zuleika rebels against her father by

58 George Gordon Byron, The Corsair, Poetical Works, 292; canto 2, s~nza 14.line~ 477-78. ed
59 Andrew Elfenbein, "Byron: Gender and Sexuality," The Cambndge Compamon to Byron. .
Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) 59.
60 Caroline Franklin, Byron's Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 33.

185
deciding to elope with her brother/lover. Touched by Conrad's generosity, Gulnare

not only passionately declares her love to him, but, after trying in vain to persuade

the harsh and oppressive Pacha to mitigate Conrad's punishment, even kills the

Pacha herself and sets Conrad free from the prison. The revenge which is perpetrated

(possibly by Kaled) upon Lara's enemy Sir Ezzelin, murdered and thrown into a

river, can also be viewed as a reworking or reversal of Hassan's drowning of Leila in

the first tale. To some critics, consequently, Byron's heroines are desiring, or

"oversexed," women. "His principal female characters," as the reviewer of the Anti-

Jacobin Review (1814) remarked, "make strong love to men, which is not \'ery

decorous, nor yet very natural. "61

Conservative critics were equally offended by Byron's heroes. William

Roberts's review of The Giaour in the British Review (1813), for instance,

condemned Byron's title character, comparing him to the "perverted" Harold, who

represents "a disappointed sulky sensualist with the dignity of that misanthropic

disgust which minds too exquisitely fastidious in their honourable feelings are liable

to contract in this mixed state of good and ill."62 Many other reviewers and readers,

however, exhibited a more mixed response than this. Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh

Review (1814), remarked on there being "something grand and imposing in the

unbroken stateliness, courage, and heroic bigotry" of Byron's heroes, even though

"[t]here is no intellectual dignity or accomplishment about any of his characters: and

no very enlightened or equitable principles of morality."63 The anonymous critic of

Byroniana: Bozzies and Piozzies (1825) also noted the "seductive brillancy" of Lara:

"[t]he power which this species of sentimental writing has over the susceptible mind

61 Anti-Jacobin Review (1814), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 46.

62 British Review (1813), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 413, 415.
63 Edinburgh Review (1814), Rutherford, ed., Byron 60, 62.

186
of ardent youth, is inconceivable."64 Indeed ' Byron's Turkl'sh tale s were a great

success: 6,000 copies of The Bride of Abydos were sold within the first month, and.

as Murray boasted, 10,000 copies of The Corsair were sold on the first day of its
65
publication. Like Harold, the rebellious heroes of Byron's tales possessed a

potentially erotic magnetism. As Elfenbein observes, Byron was especially popular

among women readers because his works not merely offered women the possibility

of an imaginary attachment to their faithful and courageous male protagonists, but

their depiction of adulterous, even incestuous, relationships with the heroines also

provided "an escape into the realm of transgressive sexuality. "66

In tandem with their seriality, an important factor that made the Turkish tales

appeal to contemporary readers was their connection with the author himself.

Published only a year after Childe Harold and Byron's return from his travels in the

Levant, the tales appeared to reinforce further the potential identification between the

author and his heroes. In his notes to The Giaour, Byron related that "[t]he story in

the text is one told of a young Venetian many years ago, and now nearly forgotten. I

heard it by accident recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who abound in

the Levant, and sing or recite their narratives" (246).67 Byron's presentation of his

source pinpoints his role as a first-hand compiler and transcriber of information.

Later in the same note, however, Byron apologised to the reader that his "memory

has retained so few fragments of the original" and that he thereby had to supply his

own "additions and interpolations" which "will be easily distinguished from the rest

by the want of Eastern imagery" (246). Rather than present his work as culturally

"authentic"
, then, Byron drew attention to the fact that he kept adding and changing

64 "Critique on Lara," Byronmania: Bozzies and Piozzies (1825), Ruther~ord, ed., Byron 71-72.
65 MacCarthy, Byron 215; and John Murray to Byron, 3 Feb. 1814, qtd. In Rutherford, ed .. Byron 69.
66 Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians 63. h fi
67 Page numbers from McGann, ed., MaJOr . W orks, WI'11 now be provided in parent ('ses or
references to Byron's notes of The Giaour.

187
lines in The Giaour, so that as he told Murray it grew from 684 lines in its original

manuscript fonn to "about 1200 lines" in its final draft before publication.h~ Despite

Byron's authentication of the story and his professed admiration of Beckford's

Vathek for its "correctness of costume" (247) or accuracy of Oriental description, his

declaration that he "retained so few fragments of the original" ironically points to the

fictitiousness and contingency of his material, confounding his readers and at the

same time inviting them to connect the poem to its author and his experiences in the

East.

Byron's travels in the Levant indeed frequently seem to provide the

groundwork for his writing. The "Mussulman" practice of drowning women, for

example, was remarked upon by Byron in his notes as "not very uncommon in

Turkey," since an instance of this-when "twelve handsomest women in Yannina"

were punished so "[a] few years ago"-was related to him by "[o]ne of the guards

who was present" at the scene (246). The drowning incident in The Giaour.

moreover, can also be read as autobiographical, in that it might be seen to allude to

rumours (perhaps initially started by Caroline Lamb) surrounding Byron's amorous

affairs abroad. To counter such reports, Byron told Moore about his intrigue with a

female slave, who later died of the same punishment as Leila. 69 Byron also had Lord

Sligo write and circulate "a different story," in which Byron had interrupted the

drowning procession, fighting with the Turkish soldiers, attaining the girl's release,

and sending her safely to Thebes-an account which contributed to the picture of

Byron as both romantic and heroic. 70

Byron's image as an "Oriental" hero was reiterated further by Thomas

Phillips' portrait of Byron in Albanian costume: the contrast between the c~otic

68 Byron to Thomas Moore, 1 Sept. 1813, Letters and Journals, vol. 3,105.
69 MacCarthy, Byron 132.
70 Ibid.; and Byron to Thomas Moore, 1 Sept. 1813, Letters and Journals, \01. 3,105.

188
dress and Byron's western countenance merges him with his Gl'ao ur. a \' enetlan
. In.

Turkey similarly "array'd in Arnaut garb" (223). This image was titled "Portrait of a

Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian" (Plate 2) and was, interestingly. displayed in

the 1814 Royal Academy exhibition next to another portrait by Phillips (Plate 3).

This second portrait ("Portrait of a Nobleman") depicts Byron in a rather fonnal

light, with casual open-neck white shirt and dark blue cloak, while his face and

posture uncannily resemble his fanciful Eastern image, "give or take Byron's

Albanian moustache," as MacCarthy observes. 7! This doubling of personae is

important for Byron's self-representation, since it provided him with the fluidity or

freedom to assume different identities, for example that of the noble and scholarly

poet and/ or the daring, romantic traveller (and the hero of his Turkish tales). In his

literary works, these personae also serve to enhance Byron's self-mystification,

distinguishing the author from his heroes while simultaneously hinting that both

could be the same.

In The Bride of Abydos, the doubleness of Byron's image becomes more

conspicuous. While in the text Selim is compared to Leander, in the notes Byron

enacts the Greek mythological scene, describing his swimming acoss the Hellespont,

though it proves, as Byron explained, that the straits described by Homer as

"boundless" and "broad" are only "half a mile" wide (896).72 Later, Byron mentioned

his Turkish "blade of singular contruction," on which he wished to have the "Koran

verse" engraved, as on Selim's scimitar (897). Byron's notes, in effect, juxtapose

author and character, and give a suggestion of how Byron might have made use of

his fiction to pass as an OrientaL The incest theme, as MacCarthy observes. also

seems to be closely connected with Byron's current relationship with his half-sister.

7!
MacCarthy, Byron 216. .' fi fi nees
72 Page numbers from Page, ed., Poetical Works, will now be proVIded m parentheses or re ere .
to Byron's notes of The Bride of Abydos, and The Corsair.

189
PLATE 3 Portrait of a Nobleman, by Thomas Phillips (1814)

190
Augusta Leigh, as he noted in his journal in November 1813 that the writing of The

Bride of Abydos was to keep him "alive," "for it was written to drive my thoughts

from the recollection of-'Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal' d, '" a quotation

from Pope in which Byron substituted the term "sacred" for "fata1."73

In his letter to Moore in January 1814, subsequently attached as the preface

to The Corsair, Byron denied outright any identification between himself and his

hero, but in doing so reinforced the association, as he playfully stated it that "if I

have deviated into the gloomy vanity of 'drawing from self,' the pictures are

probably like since they are unfavourable-and if not-those who know me are

undeceived-and those who do not-I have little interest in undeceiving" (277). In

the notes, Byron validated the status of Conrad as a villain-hero, providing examples

from the stories of La Fitte, the pirate commander who spared the life of a

Governor's soldier in Louisiana, and of Archbishop Blackboume, who used to be "a

buccaneer" in his youth (900). These accounts are nevertheless far-fetched, as they

are completely different in detail from Conrad's story. While Byron's nonchalance in

the preface reaffirms the affinity between himself and his hero, his casual annotation

functions perfunctorily to guard his poem aginst criticism rather than to seriously

offer the reader reliable authentication.

Unlike other writers in the period, as I have suggested, Byron's annotations

rely less on antiquarian research than his own experience. "The only advantage I

have," as he told Moore in December 1813, "is being on the spot; and that merely

amounts to saving me the trouble of turning over books, which I had better read

again."74 Byron's claim to accuracy largely depends on his direct contact with the

East, hence the various accounts of his travels in the notes, which, as a result. deviate

73 MacCarthy, Byron 212.

74 Byron to Thomas Moore, 8 Dec. 1813, Letters and Journals, vol. 3,194.

191
from scholarly footnoting conventions. 75 As Orientalist fictions, the Turkish tales

might be seen to exemplify what Leask sees as the containing function of notes,

distancing the reader from the potentially absorptive exoticism of the text by

subordinating it to a western "ethnological or historiographical discourse," in order

to assure the authenticity of descriptions and to guarantee the cultural superiority of

the reader.76 Byron's notes, however, do not have a pattern and are not products of

workmanship or erudition like Henley's copious notes to Vathek and Southey's

annotations to his Oriental romances. His note on the "Jerreed, or Djerrid, a blunted

Turkish Javelin" in The Giaour, for example, is accompanied by an ironic

observation: "It is a favourite exercise of the Mussulmans; but I know not if it can be

called a manly one, since the most expert in the art are the Black Eunuchs of

Constantinople" (242). His description of "the Capitan Pacha's whiskers" is comic:

"the portentious mustachios twisted, they stood erect of their own accord, and were

expected every moment to change their colour, but at last condescended to subside,

which, probably, saved more heads than they contained hairs" (244). Unlike

Southey's notes which so often present non-Christians as vicious and uncivilised,

Byron had the Giaour defy Christian precepts in the tale, and omitted the monk's

sermon in his note, mockingly stating that the preaching is "of a customary length"

and "delivered in the nasal tone of all orthodox preachers" (242).

Byron's Orientalism is thus distinct from that of other contemporary writers,

especially Southey. As a reviewer observed in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

(1824), "Mr. Southey is, and always was, too much of a monk, to understand a man

of the world like Byron; and Byron was too decidedly, or rather too exclusively, a

75 My argument here concurs with Stephen Cheeke who claims that Byron's notes "represent a form
of anti-antiquarianism, or counter-connoisseurship, rooted in a present reality of which he ... had
direct experience." Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (London: Palgrave. 2003) 30.
76 Leask, "'Wandering in Eblis'" 181.

192
man of the world, to understand a monk like Southey."77 Whereas Southey staked a

claim to the moral and intellectual high ground, according to this critic, Byron

catered to the popular taste. As Byron merged gossip and rumour about his personal

life with his fiction, this kind of "negative publicity," in the words of Elfenbein, also

encouraged a fantasy of love with a "glamorous aristocrat"-an exciting alternative

to the regularity and the "dullness of everyday life."78 Lady Frances Webster,

according to MacCarthy, was among the many female readers who could recite the

lines of The Giaour by heart, and who identified themselves with Zuleika, as she

wrote a passionate letter to Byron calling him "my Selim."79 The charm that had

fascinated Byron's early readers, however, seems to have diminished in his

subsequent works. After his separation from his wife, Byron became more overtly

antagonistic to English society, which, as I will show in the next section, turned out

to repudiate both the writer and his work as pernicious to the reading public.

LEADING THE "SATANIC SCHOOL": MANFRED AND OTHER WORKS

In the preface to his poetical apotheosis of the late George III, A Vision of

Judgement (1821), Southey attacked "those monstrous combinations of horrors and

mockery, lewdness and impiety, with which English poetry has, in our days, first

been polluted."80 "The poignancy of a death-bed repentance," he continued, "cannot

77 qtd. in Carol Bolton, Writing Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism (London:
Pickering, 2007) 147.
78 Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians 63-64.
79 MacCarthy, Byron 211-12. .
80 qtd. in Susan J. Wolfson, "The Vision of Judgment and the visions of 'author,'" The Cambndge
Companion to Byron 172.

193
cancel one copy of the thousands which are sent abroad. "81 Without mentioning the

names of the poets he is referring to, Southey made it clear that they were Byron and

Percy Shelley, who wrote their works abroad and had them published in England.

Southey, as Byron believed, spread rumours about his meeting with Shelley in

Switzerland in 1816, calling it a "League of Incest," which included Byron, Shelley,

Mary Shelley and her half-sister, Claire Claremont, who was then having an affair

with and pregnant by Byron. 82 Alluding to the two writers in A Vision of Judgement

as "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations," Southey drew the reader's

attention not only to their personal failings, but also to the repugnant sentiments of

their writings, labelling them as leaders of "the Satanic school" that introduced

works "characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety."s3 Southey'S

purpose was, of course, to denounce the liberal-minded authors as enemies of the

country's monarchical and religious institutions, the main objects of glorification of

his poem. His comments on Byron and Shelley in the preface to A Vision of

Judgement, moreover, show how significant a writer's poetical persona had become

in the early nineteenth century, when many Romantic writers had become

preoccupied with the figure of the poet and his moral and intellectual influence on

the reader. Wordsworth, for example, highlighted the poet's function of

"emanati[ng] ... reality and truth,,,84 while Coleridge described it with an emphasis

on the power of imagination. Shelley concurred with Coleridge in valuing the quality

of imagination, which he called "[t]he great instrument of moral good."85 Byron, by

contrast, did not pay such serious attention to his role as a poet. While denying the

81qtd. in Wolfson, "Vision of Judgment" 172.

82qtd. in MacCarthy, Byron 308.
83qtd. in Wolfson, "Vision of Judgment" 172.
84Wordsworth Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth and Coleridge 256.
85 Percy B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry; or, Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled 'The Four
Ages of Poetry' (composed 1821, published 1840), Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) 1190.

194
rigid identification between himself and his heroes, Byron appears to have delighted

in inserting circumstances from his life into his writing, provoking critics and

encouraging them further to stigmatise him, as Southey did, as engendering the

"Satanic school" which aimed to corrupt the English public.

Byron's marriage with Annabella Milbanke proved a failure after only one

year of living together. In January 1816, the couple separated, followed by legal

proceedings that included Annabella's allegations of Byron's sexual affairs with

other women and his drinking habit which had led to an outburst of temper and

violence against his wife. 86 With reports and scandals about his domestic affairs

increasingly tarnishing his reputation, Byron left England in April. Upon his

departure, Byron circulated a poem, "Fare Thee Well!," drawing a sympathetic,

sentimental image of himself as a husband who retains a warm affection for his wife

("Love may sink by slow decay,! But by sudden wrench, believe not,! Hearts can

thus be tom away") and a loving concern for his daughter ("When our child's first

accents first flow--/ Wilt thou teach her to say-' Father! ,/ Though his care she must

forgo?").87 As McGann has observed, the poem served as Byron's "sly move in the

game of the Separation," using "the rhetoric of repentant but loving husband" to

counter Annabella's harsh accusations and to attempt to gain the upper hand over his

wife and her supporters.88 The poem, however, did not much help Byron to regain

public favour. It was heavily ridiculed by the periodical press, most obviously in

George Cruikshank's caricature in April 1816 which illustrates Byron leaving the

shore of England with a host of mistresses, pretentiously reciting the elegiac "Fare

86 Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (London: Murray, 1971) 222.

87 George Gordon Byron, "Fare Thee Well!," Major Works 262, lines 22-24, and 34-36. .
88 McGann, Notes, Major Works 1037 (note 261); and "Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetonc of
Byronism," Studies in Romanticism 31.3 (1992): 305.

195
Thee Well!" while waving his hand to Lady Byron, who IS holding Ada, their

daughter, in her arms.

One month after Byron's period of exile began, Caroline Lamb published an

anonymous novel titled Glenarvon, a roman a clef that further stirred up gossip about

and negative opinion towards the poet. Lamb's description of Clarence de Ruthven ,

lord of Glenarvon, is easily read as an attack on Byron: "this young man," as Lamb

put it, "having passed his time in a foreign country, ... is now unfortunately arrived

here to pervert and mislead others, to disseminate his wicked doctrines amongst an

innocent but weak people, and to spread the flames of rebellion, already kindled in

other parts of the Island."89 "His stature is small," she elaborated further, "but his eye

is keen and his voice is sweet and tunable ... he is possessed of that persuasive

language, which never fails to gain upon its hearers" (l, 293). In the character of

Glenarvon, Byron appears Satanic-a diabolical villain who is involved in several

murders and seductions of women. Calantha, the heroine, at one point escapes from

her house in the attire of a page to meet Glenarvon, in an episode that mirrors

Lamb's own "secret" meeting with Byron as well as the disguise scenes in The

Giaour and Lara. After Calantha dies and Glenarvon's crimes are revealed,

Glenarvon is eventually "carried off' to Hell by a figure that first appears as a monk

but then turns out to be a fearful monster, covered in "deadly wounds" and "black

spouting streams of blood" (3, 218-19)-an intriguing invocation of the

Beckford/Lewis model of punishment against Byron. Lady Holland identified Byron

with Lamb's villainous protagonist and associated other characters with people in

Lamb's and Byron's circle. 90 Many readers, as Franklin notes, believed that Byron

89 Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, vol. 1 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1995) 292. Subseq~ent

references to Glenarvon (with volume and page numbers in parentheses) will be given after quotatIons
in the text.
90 Caroline Franklin, Introduction, Glenarvon, vol. I, xi.

196
had actually committed the crimes that were specified in the novel, and several

reviews and magazines made the most of the opportunity that the work provided to

criticise Byron's behaviour. 91

Byron read Glenarvon in 1817, and in one of his letters to Murray furiously

"damn[ed]" the novel.92 Lamb's depiction of Byron as a Satanic, Gothic villain

perhaps induced Byron to respond via his following work, Manfred (1817), and

specifically (as I will show) in the ending of his suppressed version of the play. In a

sense, Byron's play takes on Lamb's Gothic plot of transgression and (supernatural)

punishment. It might also have been influenced by Goethe's Faust, which Lewis had

translated and read to Byron in the summer of 1816 in Switzerland. If there is any

one work that provoked Southey to call Byron "Satanic," Manfred would be the

most obvious candidate, since it employs current "Gothic" and Faustian conventions

in order to flout and break them, and to present its title character as an absolute

rebel-the Byronic hero thus becoming increasingly outrageous and provocative.

From the outset, Byron can be seen to develop the metaphysical opening of Lara,

depicting Manfred conjuring up spirits in "a Gothic gallery" at "Midnight.,,93

Manfred resembles the overreaching Faust in that he is associated with forbidden

knowledge, but he also represents the reversal of such a model, since he seems to

have obtained and exhausted his knowledge and power, and is now standing at the

end of his quest, tormented and disillusioned that "[t]he Tree of Knowledge is not

that of Life" (1.1.12). What Manfred requests of the spirits, therefore, is an end to his

sorrow and suffering, in the form of "forgetfulness" (1.1.136) and "self-oblivion"

(1.1.145). The setting of the wild, desolate Alps calls up Byron's travels in

91 Ib'd .
1 . X-Xl.
92 qtd. in MacCarthy, Byron 302, , ,
93 George Gordon Byron, Manfred, Major Works 275; Act 1, scene 1, scene descnptton), Subsequent

references to Manfred will be given in parentheses after quotations in the text.

197
Switzerland in 1816: "it was the Staubach & the ]ungfrau," as he told Murray in

June 1820, "and something else-much more than Faustus" that prompted him to
94
compose Manfred. This "something else," as MacCarthy observes, was probably

Byron's dejection after the separation from his wife,95 a connection which becomes

clearer when Manfred is considered alongside Harold, in the third canto of Childe

Harold's Pilgrimage (1816), who voyages to Switzerland and is similarly desperate

for something to "wean me from the weary dream! Of selfish grief or gladness-so it

flung! Forgetfulness around me" (3.33-35).

To this basic Faustian structure, Byron introduced the "Gothic" theme of

family secrets that underpins Manfred's misery and that is partly related to his own

marital circumstances. Like his Turkish tales, Byron's play reveals only part of the

secret in question, while leaving the rest open to the reader's interpretation. In the

opening scene Manfred sees an apparition of a beautiful lady. As the work states,

"[ s]he was like me in lineaments" (2.2.105):

the pure warm stream

Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love. (2.1.24-27)

In a cross-reference to The Bride of Abydos, Manfred's lines here imply sibling

incest. But instead of representing youthful rebellion, Manfred's incestuous

relationship, as he confesses, results in tragedy, including the death of the lady

concerned: "Not with my hand, but heart-which broke her heart-/ It gazed on

mine, and withered. I have shed/ Blood, but not hers-and yet her blood was shed"

(2.2.118-20). The plot thickens when Byron introduces the phantom of Astarte in the

94 qtd. in MacCarthy, Byron 311.

95 Ibid.

198
second act, who, like the first lady, is virtually silent throughout. except in her

foretelling of Manfred's death at the end of Act 2. It is, indeed. tempting to read

Astarte and the first lady as the same person, since they seem to be the main source

of his sorrow. Astarte's appearance, in particular, has a strong impact on Manfred, as

it causes him to become delirious, raving to her about their illicit love that he

mentions earlier in the play:

... Thou lovedst me

Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not-that I do bear
This punishment for both-that thou wilt be
One of the blessed-and that I shall die ... (2.4.l21-27)

Toying with the reader's curiosity, Byron had Manuel, Manfred's servant,

leave his sentence incomplete in the final act: "The lady Astarte, his------" (3.3.47).

Without revealing Astarte's identity, the play presents her as central to Manfred's as

much as Byron's mystery. Along with the gossip that Caroline Lamb circulated

about Byron's affair with his half-sister,96 this hinting at sibling incest in Manfred

would no doubt have invited many contemporary readers to consider the playas

Byron's sorrowful reflection on his passionate relationship with Augusta, and the

damage that Caroline and Annabella's accusations of incest and adultery might have

done to her reputation. On the other hand, Astarte can also be interpreted as

Annabella and Manfred as Byron, who lamented over the failure of their marriage

and tried to justify their separation as the best solution to terminate such a painful

relationship. While Manfred asks Astarte to "forgive" or "condemn" him (2.4.105),

avowing that he will "bear/ his punishment" (2.4.125-26), Byron seems to perform

96 See Crompton, Byron and Greek Love 223.

199
the role of the guilt-stricken, self-exiled husband. Viewing the play alongside

Lamb's Glenarvon, it is interesting to see that Byron did not really deny her charge

about his extramarital affairs, but rather made use of the scandals (without admitting

them) to rectify his image, transforming the villainous womaniser of Lamb's tale

into the penitent, melancholic hero of Manfred. The autobiographical subtext was

credited by the public. The Day and New Times, for example, blatantly accused

Byron of incest, and later had to expurgate its review of the play.97 Byron's self-

dramatisation, as McGann has noted, also proved extremely compelling to many

readers.98 After reading Manfred, both Augusta and Annabella identified themselves

with Astarte: the first, as McGann puts it, was "filled with anxiety" whereas the latter

"registered a kind of satisfaction. "99

Despite Manfred's penitence, he vehemently opposes any idea of moral

reformation throughout the play. His feeling is not just governed by regret, but also

by frustration with the moral and social constraints that make his relationship with

Astarte impossible, and with the spiritual power that cannot liberate him from his

tortured life. Byron's hero is reminiscent of Walpole's Manfred in The Castle of

Otranto, who defiantly struggles against the controlling supernatural force of the

dead Alfonso as well as Jerome's religious precepts. But whereas Walpole's

Manfred is a largely comic figure, Byron's is a much more clearly heroic character.

Byron, in other words, can be seen to rewrite Walpole's Gothic novel by conferring a

certain sense of triumph upon the villain-hero. In the final act, Byron introduced the

character of the abbot of St. Maurice who attempts to persuade Manfred to become

reconciled with the church. Like the Giaour, Manfred rejects religious authority,

97 Reiman, ed., Note on the Gentleman's Magazine's expurgated version of the Day and New Times'
review of Manfred (1816) 1106.
98 McGann, "Hero with a Thousand Faces" 311.
99 Ibid.

200
asserting that he has not "sinn'd" against its "ordinances" and therefore does not

require any "mediator" between himself and heaven (3.l.55-56). When the spirits

reappear, Manfred also refuses to submit to their power, preferring, as he states, to

"die as I have lived-alone" (3.4.90). Instead of being punished and carried off by

the devil, Manfred's triumphant death frees Byron's hero and narratiYe from the

moral concern of the conventional Faustian framework. In fact, the original version

of the play is far more rebellious in its treatment of the abbot. In the manuscript, the

abbot of St. Maurice is presented as a gluttonous monk, who asks Manfred to donate

his properties to the monastery and is finally carried off the scene by a spirit upon

Manfred's order. The spirit's allusion to "a worldly Monk" and "a pregnant nun,"

moreover, recalls Lewis's punishment of the licentious Ambrosio in The Monk.100

Byron's borrowing from Lewis's Gothic offers a reversal of Lamb's conclusion to

Glenarvon, in which the hero is taken away by the spirit of a friar. The use of the

"male Gothic" Faustian narrative to expose religious cant and hypocrisy also helps to

define Byron's play against the contemporary evangelical insistence on the imparting

of religious principles in literary works.

While the reception of Byron's work continued to be mixed, it is fair to say

that contemporary critics pointed out the increasingly provocative nature of his

writing. Jeffrey, for instance, observed in the Edinburgh Review (1817) that Byron's

hero was "more proud, perhaps, and more awful than ever-but with the fiercer traits

of [his] misanthropy subdued, as it were, and quenched in the gloom of deeper

despondency."lol Calling Manfred "a work of genius and originality," Jeffrey also
. .,
drew attention to the work's disclosure of the "fatal issue of an incestuous paSSIOn,

100 McGann, Note on Byron's unpublished ending, Manfred, Complete Poetical Works, \01. -L -l67-
71.
101 Edinburgh Review (1817), Rutherford, ed., Byron 115.

201
which, he stated, "is not a thing to be at all brought before the imagination."ill~ The

Critical Review (1817) similarly remarked on the "near consanguinity" of the

relationship between Manfred and Astarte, describing Byron's work as a "monstrous

production[ ... ]," a "perversion," and a "lamentable occurrence in the literature of the

day."103 Byron, on the other hand, gave the impression of not taking his writing

seriously, telling Murray in February 1817 that he had written a drama "of a very

wild-metaphysical-and inexplicable kind," a "piece of phantasy" of which he

himself "ha[d] no great opinion."104 A month later in his letter to Moore, Byron

called Manfred a "mad drama," written "for the sake of introducing the Alpine

scenery in description."105 When Murray mentioned to him the negative reception

from reviewers, Byron claimed to show no interest in it: "I care not-he [Manfred] is

one of the best of my misbegotten-say what they Will."106 While many reviews

noted the influence of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Goethe's Faust, Byron asserted to

Murray that he had neither read nor seen the first, and only "heard Mr. Lewis

[translate] verbally some scenes" of the latter. l07 The outline of the Faust story is

nonetheless conspicuous in Manfred, and even though Byron sometimes denied this

literary influence, he could also admitted it in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner,

emphasising to Murray his different treatment of the hero, and his departure from the

example of his earlier works: "The devil may take both the Faustus's, German and

English-I have taken neither."108

At a time when there was increasing hostility towards stage effects and

spectacles, Byron's depreciation of Manfred, together with the fact that he wrote it as

102 Ibid. 117.

103 Critical Review (1817), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 669-70.
104 Byron to John Murray, 15 Feb. 1817, Letters and Journals, vol. 5, 170.
105 Byron to Thomas Moore, 25 Mar. 1817, Letters and Journals, vol. 5,188.
106 Byron to John Murray, 9 July 1817, Marchand, Letters and Journals, vol. 5, 249.
107 Byron to John Murray, 12 Oct. 1817, Letters and Journals, vol. 5,268.
108 Byron to John Murray, 23 Oct. 1817, Letters and Journals, vol. 5, no.

202
a closet drama, served to present him as a disinterested figure, removed from the

trade in literature. In a letter of March 1817, Byron confided to Murray that the play

"could never be attempted or thought of for the stage-I much doubt it for

publication even."109 "I composed it," he continued, "actually with a horror of the

stage-& with a view to render even the thought of it impracticable. knowing the

zeal of my friends, that I should try that for which I have an invincible repugnance-

viz-a representation."llo Despite such a show of aloofness, however, Byron's

engagement with the theatre is ambivalent, since he was in fact familiar with and

indirectly invoved in the theatrical business. In 1813, for example, Byron persuaded

Drury Lane to stage Coleridge's tragedy, Remorse, and also asked Moore to

comment favourably on the play in the Edinburgh Review. 111 Upon Byron's

suggestion, Murray published Coleridge'S Christabel, Kubla Khan, and Other Poems

(1816). After Byron became a member of Drury Lane's Sub-Committee of

Management in 1815, however, he rejected Coleridge's adaptation of Shakespeare's

A Winter's Tale, Zapolya, which, as he told Murray, "though poetical-did not

appear at all practicable," unlike Maturin's Gothic play, Bertram, which had an

extremely successful run at Drury Lane in 1816. 112

Notwithstanding critics' unfavourable reception of Manfred, Byron continued

to write plays, and he is indeed the most prolific dramatist among all the canonical

Romantics.1I3 Despite his ambiguous attitude towards the theatre, Byron's plays, as

Julie Carlson remarks, are the most stageable of all the Romantics, and Byron the

109 Byron to John Murray, 9 Mar. 1817, Letters and Journals, vol. 5,185.
110 Ibid.
III Franklin, Byron 73.
112 Byron to John Murray, 12 Oct. 1817, Letters and Journals, vol. 5,267. .
113 Between 1797 and 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote blank verse tragedIes, The Borderers
and Osorio, but both were turned down by theatre managers of Covent. Garden ~nd Drury Lan~
because of perceived staging difficulties. Over ten years later Coleridge reVIsed OSOD? and .offer:dhlt
anew as Remorse, whIch . became a success WIth . ,s he1p and WI'th C0 leridge's InsertIOn ut t e
Byron
spectacular incantation scene in the play.

203
only writer to survive in the Victorian theatre: among his other plays, Sardanapalus

(1821) and Wemer (1822) became favourites of mid- and late nineteenth-century

audiences, particularly for their lavish stage settings, costumes, and melodramatic
114
plotS. During his lifetime, however, Byron insisted on presenting his dramatic

works as closet plays, and even proposed an injunction against Drury Lane for

staging his Marino Faliero in 1821. Apart from his pose of aristocratic disdain

towards popular theatrical culture, another probable reason why Byron defined his

works as closet dramas is their offensive, immoral content. Byron's offer of his plays

as written texts opened up an opportunity for him to present ideas and elements that

he probably would not have been able to get away with in the contemporary

legitimate theatre, taking into account the examination of performance texts prior to

their staging. Manfred thus allowed him to insert an autobiographical subtext, or to

perform a private drama of a dejected, self-exiled husband, and his adaptation of the

Faustian framework, as I have shown, also enabled him to challenge conservative

moral and social restriction more generally.

It is worth noting here that Lamb's portrayal of Byron as a seductive, wicked

lord in Glenarvon was partly responsible for establishing his negative image as

"mad-bad-and dangerous to knoW."115 Her description of Glenarvon seems to

have influenced John Polidori in his depiction of the vampiric character, Lord

Ruthven, the name directly taken from Lamb's protagonist. Like Glenarvon.

Ruthven in Polidori's The Vampyre is a mesmeric but evil aristocrat: "his character

was dreadfully vicious, for .,. the possession of irresistible powers of seduction.

114 Julie A. Carlson, "The Theatre," Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2005) 646-47.
115 qtd. in MacCarthy, Byron 164.

204
rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society. "116 Ruthven attracts the

attention of Aubrey, who travels with him to Europe and learns about the myth of the

vampyre from the beautiful Greek Ianthe, a name that calls up Byron's dedication of

a poem to his young mistress, Lady Charlotte Harley, in the first canto of Childe

Harold. As the story unfolds, Ruthven develops into the renowned predator, and

before Aubrey can escape from his power, he becomes ill and delirious, unable to

save his sister from being "'glutted [by] the thirst of a VAMPYRE!" (23). Filled with

recognisable images and characters, Polidori's anonymous novel, when it was sent to

and published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1818, was at once identified and

subtitled by the magazine's sub-editor Alaric Watts as "'A TALE BY LORD

BYRON," feeding public curiosity about the author and boosting the sales of the

magazine. I 17

While Byron quickly denied his authorship of The Vampyre and Polidori

declared himself the writer of it in 1819, the connection that Polidori's tale had with

Byron is more substantial than its first readers might have realised. At that time

Polidori was Byron's personal physician and he travelled with Byron to Switzerland

in 1816. Polidori also joined the ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati,

comprising Byron, Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley and himself. Though

The Vampyre was not a direct product of this contest, in which Polidori wrote

Emestus Berchtold; or, The Modem Oedipus (1819), it was, as Polidori stated in a

note attached to the Introduction of Emestus Berchtold, partly grounded upon

Byron's unfinished "Augustus Darvell," a tale told from the perspective of a young

116 John Polidori, The Vampyre, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, eds. Robert ;"'~orrison
and Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997) 7. The subsequent reference to The Vamp\Te IS gIven
in parentheses after the quotation in the text.
117 Morrison and Baldick, Introduction, The Vampyre vii-viii.

205
man who witnesses the mysterious death of his travelling companion. 118 Polidori's

work became an inspiration for later vampire fiction, which centred on the figure of

the sinister, seductive, and bloodthirsty aristocrat, and in the early nineteenth century

it also participated in the reception of (and backlash against) Byron and Byronism.

On a personal level, Polidori might have imagined himself as Aubrey, in the power

of his lordly companion. But as Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick point out, the

tale could as well represent "middle-class resentment against the sexual allure of the

noble roue.,,119 As I will show towards the end of the chapter, the hypnotic and

contagious influence of the vampire-a feature that Polidori adopted from Lamb's

novel-chimes with the rhetoric of disease and infection that critics used in their

denunciations of Byron, and the dangerous appeal of his work, later in the century.

Despite the increasing antagonism of critics, Byron nonetheless thrived on

the literary image of a "Satanic," rebellious hero, while he became at the same time

more sympathetic towards independence movements in Europe. In 1820 Byron

joined the society of the Carbonari which aimed to liberate Italy from Papal-Austrian

rule, and he also developed an interest in the cause of the Greeks, making contact

with Prince Mavrocordato' s cousin in Pis a in 1821, becoming a member of the

London Greek Committee, and finally, sailing to Greece in 1823. The Faust story

continued to be prominent in his writing, but it was no longer as closely tied to the

Gothic theme of family secrets that implicated Byron's own personal life, and

became more closely related to his political and ideological commitment. The

disgrace brought about by his separation from Annabella, as Franklin obser\'es,

caused him to be even more cynical about an increasingly moralistic English society,

and in Cain, for example, Byron employed the Faustian structure of temptation and

118 Ib'd .
I . IX-X.
119 Ib'd ...
I . XlII.

206
punishment to challenge the very root of Christian belief' 120 Wl'th lSI
't b'bl'lcaI content.

the play is subtitled "A Mystery" in order to be, as Byron elucidated in the preface.

"in confonnity with the ancient title annexed to the dramas upon similar sub'~ec t~s.

which [are] styled 'Mysteries, or Moralities. '''121 Since the medieval Mystery Plays

were renowned for their admixture of vernacular language and Biblical subjects,

Byron playfully objected to his play's association with "those very profane

productions," claiming that Cain is "taken from actual Scripture" (881). While the

story mainly concerns Lucifer's temptation of Cain, what is most striking about

Byron's fallen angel is not his evilness, but his eloquent reasoning, which upholds

the idea of religious and intellectual freedom: "One good gift has the fatal apple

given-/ Your reason:-Iet it not be over-sway'd/ By tyrannous threats to force you

into faith" (2.2.459-61). Unlike the heroes of Byron's earlier works, Lucifer does not

merely represent transgression, but also carries out an inquiry into established moral

and social nonns. Byron's attachment to the Mystery Plays, in this sense, provided

him a licence, as Philip Martin argues, to "break all the rules whilst remaining

ostensibly innocent."122

Earlier, in 1819, Byron borrowed the seventeenth-century legend of Don Juan

(who, like Faust, is also dragged to Hell at the end of the story) to write an epic poem

of the same title. It was a comic satire of the increasingly restrictive English society,

"consciously initiated," as McGann suggests, "as an ironic alternative to Coleridge's

reactionary Biographia Literaria (1817)."123 There is an autobiographical dimension

in the poem again, especially evident in the figure of Donna Inez, Juan's

120 Franklin, Byron 124, M' W ks ;1\

121 George Gordon Byron, Cain: A Mystery, Major Works 881. Page number fro~ al,or or \\1,
,
be gIven scene an I'me numbers are proVIded m parentheses
'act,d
for references to the Preface, whIle
after quotations from the playtext. , ' ' ' l 'i
122 Philip W, Martin, Byron: A Poet before His Public (Cambndge: Cambndge UP, 198_) L 0,
123 McGann, Notes, Major Works 1043 (note 373),

207
authoritative and puritanical mother, who is reminiscent of both Byron' s mother and

his wife, whose unhappy married life led her, like Inez, to attempt to "pro\'e her

loving lord was mad,/ But as he had some lucid intermissions,! She next decided he

was on1y ba d." 124 Wh'l B ,. .

1 e yron s epIc compnses seventeen cantos and covers a wide

range of subjects and events, my brief consideration of the poem will focus mainly

on the recurring themes of gender play and cross-dressing.

After Juan's amorous affair with Haidee, he is sent off by her father to be

sold as a slave in Turkey. In Canto 5, Juan is bought by the black eunuch Baba, who

orders him to dress as a woman and enter the sultan's harem to serve as a female

slave. Earlier in his Turkish tales, Byron had used the motif of disguise, but

transvestism was limited to his Oriental heroines and it was mainly employed to

conceal clandestine relationships (with homoerotic overtones) between them and the

heroes. The cross-dressing motif in Don Juan, however, is employed in a still more

provocative way. Though Juan is distinguished by other harem members as a

Christian, his adoption of a female Muslim's appearance and manner offers Byron a

range of sexual possibilities, along with gender role reversal, that he could not

explore in an English context. As he is "femininely all array'd" (5.80.633) and is

taught by Baba to "swing a little less from side to side" (5.91.726) and to "look a

little modest" (5.91.728), Juan's disguise, according to Susan Wolfson, becomes "a

high-camp parody of the trappings of female subj ection. "125 His "blush and shake" as

a "new-bought virgin" (5.l56.l242) in front of the sultan later attests to how well he

has assumed a feminine sensibility.126 When Gulbayez, the sultana, asks him about

love, thus reminding Juan of Haidee, Juan "burst into tears" (5.117.936): his crying.

124 George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, Major Works 384; Canto 1, stanza 27, lines 210-12. Canto,
stanza and line numbers will ge given in parentheses for subsequent references. t.o the poem. .
125 Susan 1. Wolfson, "'Their She Condition': Cross-dressing and the PolItICS of Gender III Don
Juan," Byron, ed. Jane Stabler (London: Longman, 1998) 101.
126 Ibid. 101.

208
as Franklin observes, gives a comic twist to the sentimental depiction of women in

novels as "obtaining sway by the use of tears."127 A "man'''s tears, as Juan proves.

can likewise move and deceive women, as Gulbayez admits that "nothing ... had

e'er/ Infected her with sympathy" (5.l19.946-47) until she sees Juanna cry. Juanna's

popularity in the harem, moreover, makes other female slaves desire "her" to become

their bedfellow. Their fondling and kissing of Juanna, along with their offer to help

"her" undress before going to bed, not only carries obvious lesbian overtones, but, as

Wolfson remarks, also credits Juan, as a man, with more sexual potency. since he,

like the sultan, seems to be in possession of all the girls in the harem. 128

In Canto 16 Byron returned to the Gothic motifs of family secrets and

supernatural agency. In the ancient House of Amundeville in England, Juan

encounters in a "ghastly, desolate" (16.17.136) chamber a mysterious "monk,"

"arrayed/ In cowl and beads and dusky garb," (16.21.161-62) who "passed Juan by,!

[and] Glanced, without pausing, on him a bright eye" (16.21.167-68). Listening to

Adeline's story of the Black Friar who has haunted the place since the era of the

Nonnans, Juan becomes more terrified, but later finds out that the "ghost" is in fact

the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, who secretly maintains a passionate interest in him.

Byron's parody of the Radcliffean "explained supernatural" reveals a comic

transvestism that enables Fitz-Fulke to be sexually dominating in making her

advances towards the young hero. The Duchess's cross-dressing, as Wolfson puts it.

"affords an outlet for desire, and grants her a kind of 'male' power of action within

the existing social structure" that values women's self-restraint and modesty.129 The

libertinage of Byron's epic, as Franklin also asserts, "undennines the concept of

127 Caroline Franklin, '''Quiet Cruising o'er the Ocean Woman': Byron's Don Juan and the Woman
Question," Stabler, ed., Byron 87.
128 Wolfson, '''Their She Condition'" lOI.
129 Ibid. 104.

209
refonning society through endowing women with the role of guardian of morals, by

suggesting that the unalterable dynamics of human sexuality ha\'e appertained

throughout time and place, and that woman is by nature as much a creature-Dr

more-of sexual appetite as is man."l3o

Owing among other things to its sexual politics, Don Juan met with

widespread disapproval from critics. The Gentleman's Magazine (1819), for

instance, condemned it for its "shameless indecency," and the British Critic (1819)

similarly attacked the epic's "spirit of infidelity and libertinism."131 The British

Review (1819) went further than this in considering the implications of the poem's

subversiveness: "For praise, as far as regards the poetry, many passages might be

exhibited; for condemnation, as far as regards the morality, all: but none for either

purpose can be produced, without insult to the ear of decency, and vexation to the

heart that feels for domestic or national happiness."132 Byron's comic epic, however,

remained a favourite among readers, as a reviewer in the Monthly Magazine (1823)

conceded when he stated that "none of his lordship'S productions can afford him so

ample a field for self-congratulation as the Don Juan."133 "Revilers and partisans,"

continued the same reviewer, "have alike contributed to the popularity of this

singular work; and the result is, that scarcely any poem of the present day has been

more generally read, or its continuation more eagerly and impatiently awaited."134

The generalised aura of "rebellion" surrounding Byron and his work, it is

interesting to note, was also seized upon by some political radicals. In 1822, for

example, a reviewer referred to the pirated editions of Byron's Cain brought about

130 Franklin, '''Quiet Cruising o'er the Ocean Woman'" 80-81. .

131 qtd. in Colette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: SexualIty and
Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006) 26.
132 British Review (1819), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 476.
133 Monthly Magazine (1823), Reiman, ed., Romantic Reviewed 1705.
134 Ibid.

210
by "Atheists and Jacobins (the tenns are convertible)."135 The publishing history of

Don Juan is likewise complex and eventful, as his break with his long-time publisher

John Murray in 1822 caused him to tum to the radical John Hunt for the publication

of Cantos 6-16 of Don Juan. Byron's "combination of blasphemy, political sedition.

and hedonistic morality," as Colette Colligan explains, also made Don Juan "a great

favourite among underground publishers with radical allegiances and unconventional

morality.,,136 William Hone, for example, issued the spurious Don Juan, Canto the

Third in 1819, which portrays Juan as engaging in the circulation of an anti-

government tract in London.137 In 1823 James Griffin published another cheap,

underground work, The British Don Juan, an imitation of Byron's epic which is

centred on the sexual licentiousness of a man believed to be Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu's son.138 Four decades later, the publisher William Dugdale issued Don

Leon (1866), a poem that dwells on the hero's indulgence in homosexual pleasures

in the East. 139

The production and consumption of Byron's portraits after 1816 was also a

site of contest. Almost six months before Byron left England, a new portrait of him

appeared in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine in August 1815. It was an engraving

by Henry Meyer, after the original by George Harlow, depicting Byron with eyes

cast downward, pouting lips and a heightened bridge in his nose, and dressed in a

loose-necked shirt with a high collar but without any cravat (Plate 4).140 The picture,

as Beevers points out, was exaggerated so as to present Byron as disdainful of

135 qtd. in Ghislaine McDayter, "Conjuring Byron: Byronmania, Literary Commodifica~ion and the
Birth of Celebrity," Byronmania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and TwentIeth-Century
Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000) 50.
136 Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity 24.
137 Ibid. 27.
138 Ibid. 42.
139 Ibid. 44.
140 Beevers, The Byronic Image 66, 68.

211
PLA TE 4 Byron, engraving after the drawing by George Harlow by Henry Meyer
(1816)

212
society: his clothes, in particular, were drawn "in such a way as to imply impatience

with restraint. "141 According to Beevers, Harlow's work was "the first truly public

portrait of Byron, created with a mass market instead of a private patron in mind." 42

It was a notorious image, which sold especially well after Byron's separation from

his wife. The increasing demand for the engraving inspired "cruder and coarser"

pirated versions by anonymous engravers, who worked on the original plate "so

many times that the facial features have degenerated to a degree suggestive of utmost

depravity."143 After Byron's death, the Chartists appropriated Harlow's drawing of

Byron as their badge during the demonstration in Newcastle in 1838, turning Byron

into an icon of rebellion in England, a hero who was associated with political

subversion and radicalism. 144 Whereas Byron's support for revolutionary activities

was highly esteemed in Europe and among radicals and reformers in Britain, the

reception of Byron in an increasingly conservative British society was registered in a

very different way. As the conclusion of my thesis will show, Byron's posthumous

reputation, along with backlash against other "male Gothic" writers, reveals how

"male Gothic" theatricality and playfulness enjoyed much less license in the

nineteenth century. Byron, therefore, can be seen as both the high-point and the end-

point of the "male Gothic" tradition.

141 Ibid. 68.

142 Ibid. 70.
143 Ibid. 74, 76.
144 Ibid. 70.

213
 CONCLUSION

In many ways Byron's posthumous reputation serves as a reference point for the

demise of the "male Gothic." The nature of his reputation, first of all, was

considerably different in Europe and in Britain. On the continent, Byron was not

only famous for his role as a great supporter of Greek independence, but also for his

influence on European writers: Madame de Stael, for example, was an admirer and

translator of many of Byron's poems.] While acknowledging the influence that his

Faust had on Byron, Goethe praised Manfred, calling it "a wonderful phenomenon"

that impressed him through the poet's delineation of his passion and pain. 2 Goethe's

appreciation of Cain inspired a wider engagement with and appreciation of the

intellectual dimension of Byron's writing in Germany.3 Byron, moreover, inspired

Goethe to draw the character of Euphorion in Faust II after him, a character who, in

the story, appears as the son of Faust and Helena, aspiring to attain unreachable

heights (and who in the course of his quest meets an early death).4 In Russia,

Pushkin's works were heavily influenced by Byron's satirical mode and his stylistic

device of ottava rima. 5 Byron's personality and his mode of self-presentation also

had an impact on other Russian writers, especially Lermontov whose Hero of Our

Time (1839-41) presents a specifically Russian perspective on the figure of the

charismatic, proud, and cynical Byronic hero.

] Frank Erik Pointner and Achim Geisenhansliike, "The Reception of Byron in the German-Speaking
. of Byron III
Lands," The ReceptIOn . hard A . Cardwe 11 , vo 1. 2 (London·. Thoemmes.
. Europe, ed. RIC
2004) 246.
2 Goethe's review of Manfred (1820), Rutherford, ed., Byron 119. . d ....\~o
3 Pointner and Geisenhansliike, "Reception of Byron in the German-Speaking Lan s - .
4 Ibid. 255. . . t B n 1':; "-59
5 See Peter Cochran, "Byron's European Reception," The Cambndge Compamon 0 \Tl) -- - .

214
 In Britain, however, Byron's influence was registered in other ways. His

scandalous life remained a highly marketable commodity, as is testified by the

number of Byron biographies that were published throughout the nineteenth

6
century. His style of dress was imitated by Victorians such as Benjamin Disraeli,

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.? And despite critical disapprovaL

Byron's poetical works were still admired by many readers, especially from the

middle- and working classes: according to Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, for

example, a Colchester headmaster's compilation of "poetic gems" for students in

1833 included Byron alongside other poets such as Cowper, Barbauld and Scott,

while the female poet Jane Ransome Biddell went as far as naming her son

"Manfred" after Byron's protagonist. 8 While writers such as Charlotte and Emily

Bronte famously based particular characters upon the figure of the Byronic hero,

however, most Victorian authors, sought to keep a distance from the now notorious

poet. Thomas Carlyle, for example, lamented over Byron's death and probably based

the protagonist of Sartor Resartus (published in Fraser's MagazineJ833-34) on

Byron, but he also criticised Byron's larger-than-life self-characterisation in his

reviews of the poet's work. 9 In his poem "Empedocles on Etna" (1852), Matthew

Arnold seemed to model the cynical philosopher Empedocles on Manfred, but made

his hero, as ThaIS Morgan remarks, "a socially responsible one that corresponds to

mid-Victorian ideas about manliness."lo Byron was a popular subject for silver-fork

6 These works include, for example, Thomas Medwin's Journal of the Conversations ?f ~rd Byron
at Pisa (1824); Thomas Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notic~s ofhls Llfe (1830):
John Galt's The Life of Lord Byron (1830); Edward John Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Da.ys
of Shelley and Byron (1858); Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). See Elfenbem.
Byron and the Victorians 76-79.
? See MacCarthy, Byron 558-64.
8 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes 159-60. 1836) 'n
9 See Thomas Carlyle, Edinburgh Review (1828), and his extracts from Sartor Resartus ( 1

Rutherford, ed., Byron 290-94. . ' t Victorian

10 ThaIS E. Morgan, "The Poetry of Victorian Masculinities," The Cambndge Compamon 0
Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 217.

215
novels, which employed Regency society settings and sometimes incorporated

details from actual aristocratic lives and scandals. Nonetheless, as Elfenbein has

shown, the portrayal of Byron in works such as Benjamin Disraeli' s Venetia (1837)

and Catherine Gore's Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841) functioned to

suggest "the inadequacy of Regency values and the need for their ultimate

supersession by the supposedly better world of Victorian England." as these novels

tend to conclude with the downfall of the villainous, Byronic character and/or the

triumphant union of the morally upright hero and heroine. 11

In Britain, Byron's reputation was in part a victim of the evangelical revival.

As Davidoff and Hall have argued, by the mid-nineteenth century evangelicalism

became "the cultural norm for the middle class," promoting, above all, "the

commitment to an imperative moral code and the reworking of the ... domestic

world into a proper setting for its practice."12 Evangelical doctrines, as Boyd Hilton

claims, also permeated the aristocracy, many members of which, in reaction against

an earlier era of excess and conspicuous consumption, styled themselves as

examplars in order to survive in a more rigidly moralistic environment. 13 In these

new circumstances, Byron's aristocratic defiance and self-promotion increasingly

came to be seen as suspect. Coleridge predicted in 1825 that Sir Walter Scott would

"be read and remembered as a novelist and the founder of a new race of novels, and

Byron not remembered at all, except as a wicked lord who, from morbid and restless

vanity, pretended to be ten times more wicked than he was."14 Indeed, the contrast

between Scott and Byron was commonly drawn by contemporary critics. Hazlitt, in

The Spirit of the Age (1825), contributed a long section on the two writers, pralsmg

II Andrew Elfenbein, "Silver-Fork Byron and the Image of Regency England." Byronmania 78.
12 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes 25.
13 Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 178-79.
14 Coleridge's marginalia in Pepys' Memoirs (1825), Rutherford, ed., Byron 266.

216
Scott who "casts his descriptions In the mould of nature,
ever-varying, never
tiresome, always interesting and always instructive, instead of casting them

constantly in the mould of his own individual impressions."15 "In reading the Scotch

Novels," Hazlitt asserted, "we never think about the author ... [whereas] in reading

Lord Byron's works, he himself is never absent from our minds."16

Scott's engagement with the Gothic, as James Watt has observed, was in fact

more ambivalent than some contemporary commendations of his works attested.17

Scott was an enthusiastic reader of the Gothic, and in many of his reviews of the

genre in fact expressed a preference for the supernatural extravagance of male

writers such as Walpole, Lewis and Maturin over the more restrained and rational

mode of the Radc1iffean Gothic. 18 At the start of his career Scott collaborated with

Lewis in Tales of Wonder, and his first attempt at drama, The House of Aspen, was,

as he told George Ellis in 1801, a "Germani sed brat" in the style of Lewis, rejected

by John Kemble for containing "too much blood."19 His early poems such as The

Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) also incorporated Gothic

features such as supernatural agency, and grotesque episodes involving (for

example) live burial, making critics like Jeffrey, in his review of Marmion, view the

poem as an imitation of "a bad German novel" and the Radc1iffean school of

Gothic. 20

Scott, however, was much more successful in distancing himself from the

Gothic in prose fiction. As John Murray wrote of Waverley, in a letter to his wife: "it

15 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), Rutherford, ed., Byron 270.
16 Ibid. 271.
17 Watt, Contesting the Gothic 13 1.
18 See Watt, Contesting the Gothic 136-38. . I 2 (Ed' burgh' Constable. 1902) (13.
19 . hn G'b L kh rt Th L'fe of Srr Walter Scott, vo . m . .
qtd. m 10 1 son ~c a, e. 1 ." . Walter (1771-1832)," Oxford Dictionarv \It
My quote from Kemble IS from DaVId HeWItt, Scott, ~Ir M 2006, 29 Dec. 2007
National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004, Onlme ed., ay
<http://www.oxforddnb.comlview/ artie le/24 928>.
20 qtd. in Watt, Contesting the Gothic 134.

217
IS excellent. No dark passages; no secret chambers; no wind howling in long

galleries."21 Scott's novels distinguished themselves from the dominant mode of the

Gothic in their elaborate historical descriptions, an important element that, in the

eyes of critics, raised Scott's works above the ordinary run of fiction. Even in

Ivanhoe (1820), one of his more "Gothic" works, Scott chose a specific English

medieval locale, and set his novel within the historical context of Richard I's

England after the Norman conquest. While there are tonal ambiguities in certain

passages and episodes, as Watt has pointed out,22 Scott's Ivanhoe on the whole

abstained from the use of Gothic trappings. In contrast to the self-absorbed Gothic

villain or the Byronic hero, Scott's protagonists are not morally threatening.

Waverley, for example, is a passive figure involuntarily caught up in the turbulent

events around him, while Lovel, in The Antiquary, is peripheral to the plot of that

novel, as he disappears midway through the work until his identity is revealed and

his legitimacy established at the close. Scott's heroes, as Alexander Welsh observes,

represent qualities such as prudence, self-restraint and stoicism, and are therefore

congruous with what he describes as the period's emphasis on "national

conservatism and moral righteousness. "23

Scott's emphasis on the historical context of his works helped to establish

what Coleridge saw as "a new race of novels"24 which deviated from the sensational

modes of the Gothic and the Byronic. For John Scott, writing in 1820, the Waverley

Novels were "fresh and invigorating," and filled with "health and manliness."~s In

the London and Westminster Review (1838), Carlyle similarly distinguished Scott's

21 qtd. in Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1994) 28.
22 See Watt, Contesting the Gothic 144-46.
23 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963) 27.
24 Coleridge's marginalia in Pepys' Memoirs (1825), Rutherford, ed., Byron 266.
25 qtd. in Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority 244.

218
works for their "joyous picturesqueness and fellow-feeling, freedom of eye and

heart or to say it in a word, [their] general healthiness of mind."26 In her study of

Scott's self-fashioning as "the Author of Waverley," Ferris argues that the revie\\'s'

emphasis on the "healthiness" of Scott's texts helped to establish "a positive, male-

inflected fonn" of what was hitherto regarded, in pejorative terms, as the feminised

sphere of the novel. 27 This "manliness," as both Ferris and Fiona Robertson note, is

defined against the aristocratic, diseased masculinity of Byron. 28 To Hazlitt, what

was objectionable about Byron was his display of "morbid sentiments" through his

heroes, who are "sullen, moody, capricious, fierce, inexorable, gloating on beauty,

thirsting for revenge, hurrying from the extremes of pleasure to pain, but with

nothing pennanent, nothing healthy or natural."29 In 1838 Carlyle praised Scott's

historical romances for purifying the field of fiction which was "in the sickliest of

recorded ages, when British Literature lay all puking and sprawling in Werterism,

Byronism, and other Sentimentalism tearful or spasmodic."30 The New Monthly

Magazine (1820) likewise considered that Scott's novels had "counteracted the

working of that blasting spell by which the genius of Lord Byron once threatened

strangely to fascinate and debase the vast multitude of English readers."3!

As the language of contemporary reviews attested, the perceived danger of

Byron's writing was its potential to "fascinate and debase," to poison and

contaminate the public, with a contagious disease similar to that inflicted by the

vampire's seductive and infecting bite in the novels of Lamb and Polidori. Byron's

mode of "drawing from self," especially in his early work, seemed to retain a certain

26 Ibid. 248.
27 Ibid. 247.
28 See Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority 242-43, and Robertson, Legitimate Histories 27.
29 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), Rutherford, ed. Byron 272-73.
30 qtd. in Welsh, Hero of the Waverley Novels 27.
3! qtd. in Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority 242.

219
 chann, with Scott himself suggesting that Byron's readers "felt themselves attached

to him, not only by many noble qualities, but by the interest of a mysterious.

undefined, and almost painful curiosity."32 After Byron's death, however. his self-

dramatisation seems increasingly to have been regarded, in Carlyle'S words, as

"theatrical, false, [and] affected."33 Thomas Babington Macaulay observed in his

review of Moore's Letters and Journals of Lord Byron in 1831 that Byron "was

himself the beginning, the middle, and the end, of all his own poetry-the hero of

every tale-the chief object in every landscape."34 William Makepeace Thackeray

similarly remarked on the affinity between Byron and his heroes, emphasising the

"dangerous ground" upon which Byron wrote his poems, as he "got up rapture and

enthusiasm with an eye to the public."35

The critical rhetoric of "healthiness" can be seen as one yardstick by which

Byron and other "male Gothic" writers were eventually marginalised in the

nineteenth century. The denunciation, however, was voiced somewhat differently, as

attacks on Byron tended to focus on his seductive or "infectious" influence on the

public, while criticisms of writers such as Walpole and Beckford were more directed

at their "aristocratic" frivolity and unmanliness. In Specimens of the Table Talk of

the Late Samuel Coleridge (1835), for example, Coleridge condemned Walpole's

The Mysterious Mother as "disgusting" and "detestable," commenting that "[n]o one

with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have

written it. "36 While admiring Walpole's treatment of the supernatural in his

introduction to the 1811 edition of The Castle of Otranto, Scott, in the Quarterly

32 Quarterly Review (1816), Reiman, ed., Romantics Reviewed 2031.

33 Edinburgh Review (1828), Rutherford, ed., Byron 290.
34 Edinburgh Review (1831), Rutherford, ed., Byron 313. .
35 William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhlll to Grand Cairo (1846).
Rutherford, ed., Byron 343. . S b d Horace
36 Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Colendge, (1835). a or. e " =~
Walpole 148.

220
 Review (1818), saw the flimsiness of Walpole's style as exhibiting "the lightness of

the French badinage" rather than the "masculine and somewhat rough language" of

the English.37 Walpole's literary works, along with his frivolous, attention-seeking

self-presentation, were compared by D'Israeli to "plants of sickly delicacy," and

were regarded by Macaulay as "literary luxuries" or products of "an unhealthy and

disorganised mind."38 While many contemporary readers took Beckford's Vathek at

its face value as a moral tale, Henry Crabb Robinson, in his diary for March 1816,

pointed out Beckford's "unsuccessful attempt to unite the descriptions of horrid

situations and incidents with strokes of humour," and later in 1834 even called the

novel "one of the most odious book I ever laid eyes on."39 As early as 1791, Hester

Thrale expressed her contempt of Vathek as "a mad Book" written by "a mad

Author. "40 When Samuel Rogers heard Beckford read two of his episodes of Vathek

at Fonthill in 1817, he also remarked on their subjects as "objectionable,"

commenting that "the mind of the author was to a certain degree diseased. ,,41 Indeed,

in the early nineteenth century, the extravagance and provocativeness of "male

Gothic" writing no longer generated much excitement among the public. In her Life

and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (1839), Margaret Baron-Wilson observed how

Scott had purified the Gothic by proving that "the deepest and most thrilling interest

was to be invoked and sustained, without the aid of the wild or supernatural; while

the sympathies were awakened by historical associations, and kept alive by natural

37 Quarterly Review (1818), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 179. For Scott's introduction of the 1811
Otranto, see pages 88-99. .
38 Isaac D'Israeli, Calamities of Authors (1812), Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole 283; and Edmburgh
Review (1833), same source, 312. . .
39 Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Wnters (1938). McNutt.
Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 303.

40 Hester Lynch Thrale, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (l9~2), \1cNutt.
Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel 304. N tt E' hteenth-
41 Samuel Rogers, Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1887). Mc u ,!=.!.Clg====-
Century Gothic Novel 303.

221
 delineations of ordinary life."42 While reviving interest in the life and works of

Lewis, Baron-Wilson admitted that by the time she wrote this biography. the Gothic

productions of male writers like Lewis had already lost their hold on the reader: "the

monstrous and supernatural in fiction-having done their worst-were quietly

consigned to the graves from which they might be said to have originally sprung. "43

As I have elaborated in this thesis, the "male Gothic" is a historically and

culturally specific tradition, offering a space in which writers such as Walpole,

Beckford, Lewis and Byron experimented with ways to assume potentially

oppositional class and gender identities, and hence to resist emergent "middle-class"

ideologies and values. While this categorisation of the "male Gothic" might be seen

to present the writers in question as being very much alike, it is also important, as I

have argued, to discriminate between their different modes of self-representation and

engagements with the genre. Walpole's Gothic productions, as I have shown, were

part of his "aristocratic" self-fashioning, which served to distinguish his works from

those of his contemporaries but at the same time did not portray him as altogether

repudiating "public" standards of taste. While similarly assuming patriotic poses late

in his life, Beckford's transfonnation of Walpolean Gothic into Oriental romance

more conspicuously glorified the "old regime" of aristocratic excess, as he reworked

the nonns and conventions of the eighteenth-century Oriental tale so as to highlight

his protagonists' transgressions. Lewis, on the other hand, is the only "male Gothic"

author who was seen to be eager to establish himself as a professional writer.

Whereas The Monk was implicitly associated with the tradition of French

philosophical pornography and Lewis's alliance with aristocratic liberal Whigs, his

subsequent works were offered seemingly without any underlying agenda apart from

42 Baron-Wilson, Life and Correspondence, vol. 1, 175-76.

43 Ibid. 176.

222
annoying critics and catering to the popular taste for spectacle an d sensatlOna
. 1·Ism.

Byron, more than all these writers, employed the Gothic to create a particular self-

image of the liberal, rebellious and captivating Byronic hero, who fascinated the

public but later met with less approval in the increasingly reactionary society of

nineteenth-century Britain.

These writers' "resistance" to "middle-class" culture, as I have argued in the

thesis, is not absolute, for it also subsumes their various attempts to offer their works

as both legitimate and pleasurable. Central to the "male Gothic" writers' interest is

the fluidity and multiplicity of performance. Instead of representing a rigid,

uncompromising form of opposition, the "male Gothic" exemplifies an attempt to

negotiate the possible co-existence of different cultures-an experimentation with

ways of remaining within what Wahrman calls the "ancien regime" of identity,

during a period in which class and gender relations were significantly redefined. This

process of cultural redefinition, however, also ushered in a heightened sense of moral

and sexual probity, which in tum meant that nineteenth-century critics and readers,

especially, became more and more suspicious of the provocative writers and works I

have discussed. With this social and cultural context, I hope that my discussion of

the "male Gothic" will prove to be more fruitful than concentrating simply on the

literary tropes of the genre. The emphasis on class and gender aspects, moreover,

will help to offer perspectives on "men's Gothic" fiction that are not limited only to

the subjects of sexuality and queer theory. While certain motifs and features of the

"male Gothic" might be found in other Gothic fictions, they seem to be dissociated

from the writers' self-representation and concern with the "ancien regime" of

identity. And if we cannot say definitively that the "male Gothic" dies out after the
. b . t f; d from VICW
death of Byron, it seems fair to say at the very least that It egllls 0 a e .

223
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