1797. Its wonderfully scathing humor aside, it is typical of the many Bomantic-period commentaries that argued that the popularity of this new style of novel was a frightening symptom of literature's commercialization and of culture's degradation. The 'recipe' with which the anonymous author concludes the squib,
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and which makes the point that best-selling fiction is likely to be, in a precise sense, 'formula fiction,' is a frequent feature of satires on novelists (Coleridge, who in our next extract refers to novels as 'manufactures,' i.e., as things produced mechanically rather than as works that authors compose, elsewhere wrote his own recipes for Radcliffe romances and for Walter Scott poems). Also notable is the author's tacit suggestion that the political climate has helped make 'terror the order of the day': that phrase appeared in the directive that was issued in September 1793 by Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety and that inaugurated the bloodiest chapter of the Revolution in France.
Terrorist Novel Writing
I never complain of fashion, when it is confined to externals?to the form of a cap, or the cut of a lapelle; to the colour of a wig, or the tune of a ballad; but when I perceive that there is such a thing as fashion even in composing books, it is, perhaps, full time that some attempt should be made to recall writers to the old boundaries of common sense.
I allude, Sir, principally to the great quantity of novels with which our circulating libraries are filled, and our parlour tables covered, in which it has been the fashion to make terror the order of the day, by confining the heroes and heroines in old gloomy castles, full of spectres, apparitions, ghosts, and dead men's bones. This is now so common, that a Novelist blushes to bring about a marriage by ordinary means, but conducts the happy pair through long and dangerous galleries, where the light burns blue, the thunder rattles, and the great window at the end presents the hideous visage of a murdered man, uttering piercing groans, and developing shocking mysteries. If a curtain is withdrawn, there is a bleeding body behind it; if a chest is opened, it contains a skeleton; if a noise is heard, somebody is receiving a deadly blow; and if a candle goes out, its place is sure to be supplied by a flash of lightning. Cold hands grasp us in the dark, statues are seen to move, and suits of armour walk off their pegs, while the wind whistles louder than one of Handel's choruses, and the still air is more melancholy than the dead march in Saul.
Such are the dresses and decorations of a modern novel, which, as Bayes1 says, is calculated to 'elevate and surprise'; but in doing so, carries the young reader's imagination into such a confusion of terrors, as must be hurtful. It is to great purpose, indeed, that we have forbidden our servants from telling the children stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, if we cannot put a novel into their hands which is not filled with monsters of the imagination, more frightful than are to be found in Glanvil,2 the famous hug-a-hoo of our fore fathers.
A novel, if at all useful, ought to be a representation of human life and manners, with a view to direct the conduct in the important duties of life, and to correct its follies. But what instruction is to be reaped from the distorted ideas of lunatics, I am at a loss to conceive. Are we come to such a pass, that the only commandment necessary to be repeated is, 'Thou shalt do no murder?' Are the duties of life so changed, that all the instructions necessary for a young person is to learn to walk at night upon the battlements of an old castle, to creep hands and feet along a narrow passage, and meet the devil at
1. The ludicrously self-satisfied dramatist in The 2. Joseph Glanvill, author of Saducismus Trtum- Rehearsal, a comedy by George Villiers, duke of phatus (1681), which defended the belief in witch-
Buckingham (1672). craft.
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the end of it? Is the corporeal frame of the female sex so masculine and hardy, that it must be softened down by the touch of dead bodies, clay-cold hands, and damp sweats? Can a young lady be taught nothing more necessary in life, than to sleep in a dungeon with venomous reptiles, walk through a ward with assassins, and carry bloody daggers in their pockets, instead of pin-cushions and needle-books?
Every absurdity has an end, and as I observe that almost all novels are of the terrific cast, I hope the insipid repetition of the same bugbears3 will at length work a cure. In the mean time, should any of your female readers be desirous of catching the season of terrors, she may compose two or three very pretty volumes from the following recipe:
Take?An old castle, half of it ruinous. A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chests and presses. An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut. Assassins and desperadoes, quant, stiff.* Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.
Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, to be taken at any of the
watering places,5 before going to bed. 1798 3. Annoyances, objects of needless fear. 4. I.e., quantum sujficit (standard Latin phrase used in medical prescriptions): 'as much as suffices.' 5. Seaside resorts. The suggestion is that readers choose novels of terror as vacation reading.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Many elements in Coleridge's poetry?the account of the skeleton ship in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for instance, or the atmosphere, setting, and fragmentary plot of witchery and seduction in Christabel?suggest how absorbing he found the novels of the 'terrorist school.' His letters from the 1790s sometimes reveal him sitting up all night, trembling, he says, 'like an aspen leaf' as he turns their pages. But elsewhere Coleridge's writings indicate how complex and ambivalent the Romantic poets' reaction to Gothic writing could be. As a first example we provide his scathing review, published in the Critical Review in February 1797, of The Monk. It should be noted that Coleridge's reaction to Matthew Lewis's novel is, for all its alarm, much more measured than those of most of his fellow critics.
Front Review of The Monk by Matthew Lewis
The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite. The same phenomenon, therefore, which we hail as a
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COLERIDGE: REVIEW OF THE MONK / 603
favourable omen in the belles lettres1 of Germany, impresses a degree of gloom in the compositions of our
