Quincey's note].
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Tke Gotkic and tke Development of a Mass Readerskip
Strictly speaking, the Gothic is not 'Gothic' at all, but a phenomenon that originates in the late eighteenth century, long after enlightened Europeans put the era of Gothic cathedrals, chivalry, and superstition behind them?a phenomenon that begins, in fact, as an embrace of a kind of counterfeit medievalism or as a 'medieval revival.' As a word they applied to a dark and distant past, Gothic gave Romantic-period writers and readers a way to describe accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles and ruined abbeys?experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, ghosts, and graveyards. In the long run Gothic became a label for the macabre, mysterious, supernatural, and terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature generally; the link that Romantic-period writers had forged between the Gothic and antiquated spaces was eventually loosened. Even so, one has only to look, in post-Romantic literature, at the fiction of the Brontes or Poe, or, in our own not-so-modern culture, at movies or video games, to realize that the pleasures of regression the late-eighteenth-century Gothic revival provided die hard. Readers continue to seek out opportunities to feel haunted by pasts that will not let themselves be exorcised.
The Gothic revival appeared in later-eighteenth-century English garden design and architecture before it got into literature. In 1747 Horace Walpole (1717?1797), younger son of the British prime minister, purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate on the river Thames near London, and three years later set about remodeling it in what he called a 'Gothick' style. Adding towers, turrets, battlements, arched doors, windows, and ornaments of every description, he created the kind of spurious medieval architecture that survives today mainly in churches and university buildings. Eventually tourists came from all over to see Strawberry Hill and went home to Gothicize their own houses.
When the Gothic made its appearance in literature, Walpole was again a trailblazer. In 1764 he published The Castle of Otranto, a self-styled 'Gothic story' featuring a haunted castle, an early, pre-Byronic version of the Byronic hero (suitably named Manfred), mysterious deaths, a moaning ancestral portrait, damsels in distress, violent passions, and strange obsessions. Walpole's gamble?that the future of the novel would involve the reclamation of the primitive emotions of fear and wonder provided by the romances of a pre-Enlightened age?convinced many writers who came after him. By the 1790s novels trading on horror, mystery, and faraway settings flooded the book market; meanwhile in theaters new special effects were devised to incarnate ghostly apparitions on stage. It is noteworthy that the best-selling author of the terror school (Ann Badcliffe), the author of its most enduring novel (Mary Shelley), and the author of its most effective send-up (Jane Austen) were all women. Indeed, many of Radcliffe's numerous imitators (and, on occasion, downright plagiarizers) published under the auspices of the Minerva Press, a business whose very name (that of the goddess of wisdom) acknowledged the centrality of female authors and readers to this new lucrative trend in the book market. William Lane, the marketing genius who owned the Press, also set up a cross-country network of circulating libraries that stocked his ladies' volumes and made them available for hire at modest prices.
This section offers extracts from some of the most celebrated works in the Gothic mode: Walpole's Otranto as the initiating prototype; William Beckford's Vathek
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(1786), which is 'oriental' rather than medieval but similarly blends cruelty, terror, and eroticism; two extremely popular works by Radcliffe, the 'Queen of Terror,' The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794); Matthew Lewis's concoction of devilry, sadism, and mob violence, The Monk (1796). We also include an essay of 1773 in which John and Anna Letitia Aikin provide justification after the fact for Walpole's rebellion against the critical orthodoxies. According to most early critics of novels, the only moral fiction was probable fiction; the Aikins, however, make the business of the novelist lie as much with the pleasures of the imagination as with moral edification and the representation of real life.
Their essay suggests why Gothic reading was appealing to so many Romantic poets?visionaries who in their own way dissented from critical rules that would, drearily, limit literature to the already known and recognizable. Signs of the poets' acquaintance with the terror school of novel writing show up in numerous well-known Romantic poems?from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Manfred. For instance, in Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, a poem that in many respects represents an idealized tale of young love, Porphyro's invasion of Madeline's bedroom has some perturbing connections with the predatory overtones of our extract from The Monk. And Keats's enigmatic fragment 'This living hand' can be read as a brilliantly abbreviated version of the kind of tale of terror that aimed to make its reader's blood run cold.
Yet it simplifies matters to characterize the Gothic only as an influence on Romanticism. As the concluding pieces in this section suggest, the poets had a love-hate relationship with Gothic writers and, even more so, with Gothic readers. Many contemporary commentators objected to the new school of novels on moral and technical grounds: they complained, for instance, about how plot-driven they were and how cheaply they solved their mysteries. But questions about social class and literary taste were also important. In an era of revolution, in which newly literate workers were reading about 'the rights of man' and crowds were starting to shape history, the very popularity of Gothic novels, the terror writers' capacity to move and manipulate whole crowds with their suspense and trickery, itself represented a source of anxiety. As the twentieth-century critic E. J. Clery explains, the 'unprecedented capacity of the market to absorb at great speed large amounts of a particular type of literary product, the 'terrorist' novel, shook old certainties.'
Many of the Romantic poets comment, accordingly, on what is scary and pernicious about the Gothic as well as what is scary and pernicious in the Gothic. And throughout their writings, the tales of terror are invoked in ways that enable the writer to construct a divide between 'high' and 'low' culture and to play off the passive absorption associated with the reading of the crowds against the tasteful, active reading that is (according to the writer) practiced by the elite few. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for instance, Wordsworth identifies as a cause of English culture's modern decline the 'frenetic novels' that have blunted their consumers' powers of discrimination and reduced them 'to a state of almost savage torpor' (a negative version of the regression that William Hazlitt, for instance, celebrates as he describes how Radcliffe 'makes her readers twice children' while she 'forces us to believe all that is strange and next to impossible'). Wordsworth follows a hint that he may have found three years earlier in Coleridge's review of The Monk (extracted near the end of this section) and suggests that such readers inevitably need higher and higher doses of the 'violent stimulants' that novelists?drug pushers of sorts?have supplied them. In this way the Preface pioneers an account of a mass readership addicted to what will kill it. In similar fashion 'Terrorist Novel Writing,' the short anti-Gothic satire we include near the end of this section, makes it seem, as does our extract containing Coleridge's very funny tirade against the patrons of circulating libraries, that Gothic novels were objects of utterly mindless consumption (absorbed, imbibed, but not read), and that terror was a commodity produced on an assembly line. The extracts with which we close this section register, in other words, a recoil from the Gothic. But Gothic themes frequently come back to haunt the critics of the mode. When they depict popular,
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