Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles

GOTHIC BRITAIN

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Gothic Britain

Dark Places in the Provinces

and Margins of the British Isles

Edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2018

© The Contributors, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-233-7

eISBN 978-1-78683-235-1

The rights of The Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: The Decorated Gothic Revival spirelet and churchyard of St Catwg’s Church, Pentyrch, Wales. By permission, Richard Downs / Alamy Stock Photo.

This book is dedicated to our friend Nigel Kingcome

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Notes on contributors

Introduction: The Uncanny Space of Regionality: Gothic Beyond the Metropolis

William Hughes

Part I: Re-imagined Gothic Landscapes: Folklore, Nostalgia and History

1  ‘Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North’: Regionalism, Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Northern Gothic’

Catherine Spooner

2  The Gothic Child and the West Yorkshire Moors: The Deconstruction of Space in Jeremy Dyson’s The Haunted Book

Chloé Germaine Buckley

3  ‘Spook Business’: Hall Caine and the Moment of Manx Gothic

Richard Storer

4  ‘All those ancient stories that had their dark souls located in woods’: Rural Gothic, Scottish Folklore and Postmodern Conundrums in James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack

Gioia Angeletti

Part II: Unnatural Gothic Spaces

5  Entering the Darkness: Robert Aickman and the Regions

Timothy Jones

6  University Gothic, c.1880–1910

Minna Vuohelainen

7  Vampiristic Museums and Library Gothic

Holly-Gale Millette

Part III: Border Crossings and the Threat of Invasion

8  Lifting the Veil: Ambivalence, Allegory and the Scottish Gothic in Walter Scott’s Union Fiction

Jamil Mustafa

9  Cosmopolis Fever: Regionalism and Disease Ecology in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Ben Richardson

10  The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Inversion of Imperial Gothic in The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile

Ruth Heholt

11  Gothic Immigration: Kentish Gothic and the Borders of Britishness

Sarah Ilott

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Sarah Lewis for her cheerful and good-natured support of this project.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gioia Angeletti is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Parma, Italy. She has published a wide range of essays and articles in international journals on nineteenth-century English and Scottish poets and playwrights, and contemporary Scottish literature. Her publications include: Eccentric Scotland: Three Victorian Poets. James Thomson (‘B. V.’), John Davidson and James Young Geddes (2004), Lord Byron and Discourses of Otherness: Scotland, Italy, and Femininity (2012), and the edited book Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760–1830 (2010). She is currently working on two book-length studies respectively on Romantic-period Scottish migration literature and contemporary Scottish women playwrights.

Chloé Germaine Buckley is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include: Twenty-First Century Children’s Gothic Fiction: From Wanderer to Nomadic Subject (Edinburgh University Press), Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (co-edited with Sarah Ilott), and various chapters and articles on aspects of the Gothic, including children’s fiction, the Gothic child, the Weird, gender and the Gothic, and representation of Witches in popular culture.

Ruth Heholt is Senior Lecturer in English at Falmouth University. She has published on ghosts, the Gothic, masculinity and crime fiction. She works on Victorian literature and culture as well as contemporary texts. She is founding editor of Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, a peer reviewed online journal (www.revenantjournal.com). She has published a critical edition of Catherine Crowe’s 1847 novel The Story of Lilly Dawson (2015) and is co-editor of Haunted Landscapes: Supernature and the Environment (2016). She is working on a monograph on Catherine Crowe and has a collection: The Victorian Male Body, edited with Joanne Ella Parsons forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

William Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University, and a Past President of the International Gothic Association. He is the author, editor or co-editor of seventeen books including: Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (2000), Dracula: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2009), The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (2013) and That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (2015); and the collections Empire and the Gothic (2003), Queering the Gothic (2009), Victorian Gothic (2012) and Ecogothic (2013), all co-edited with Andrew Smith. He is the editor of the journal Gothic Studies, and is currently writing a monograph on phrenology.

Sarah Ilott is a Research Lecturer at Teesside University, UK. Her main research and teaching interests are in postcolonial literature and genre fiction, particularly comedy and the Gothic. She has recently published her first monograph, entitled New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Palgrave, 2015). This study analyses four new genres of literature and film that have evolved to accommodate and negotiate the changing face of postcolonial Britain since 1990. She has also published journal articles on postcolonial literature, multicultural screen comedy, and the Gothic in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Postcolonial Text.

Timothy Jones is a lecturer at the University of Stirling, where he is co-director the Gothic Imagination postgraduate programme. He is the author of The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (University of Wales Press, 2015), which was awarded the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. He received his PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Holly-Gale Millette is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton, UK. She is a Cultural, Performance, and Social Historian. She has articles in several prominent international journals, has contributed essays and curation to several collaborative projects and is working on her monograph. Her research is concerned with spaces of transition and with the ‘deep mapping’ of chronotopes, palimpsests and ruptured space that regularly interbreed with gender, class and politics. Outside her monograph, Holly-Gale’s current writing is centred on Gothic and Neo-Victorian cultures.

Jamil Mustafa is Professor of English Studies at Lewis University. Prior and forthcoming publications include essays on the Gothic works of Thomas Hardy, Angela Carter, Oscar Wilde, and Ray Bradbury, together with studies of neo-Victorian film and television, adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde, and Supernatural. His short story, ‘Vicious Circle’, was published in The Horror Zine, where he was the featured author. He is currently writing a monograph on psychology, cartography and the Gothic novel in the late-Victorian period.

Ben Richardson is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Duke University. His work currently investigates the relationship between natural science and the history of political theory in Victorian and Modernist writing. Focusing on the Victorian novel, his dissertation – tentatively entitled ‘Moveable Type: Biological Politics, Victorian Liberalism, and the Science of Difference’ – specifically examines the way in which realist fiction became crucial to the advent of individual ‘variation’ as a conceptual category within both evolutionary biology and liberal politics. His published work has previously appeared in JML: Journal of Modern Literature.

Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, UK. She has published widely on Gothic literature, film and popular culture, including the monographs Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. She has also co-edited The Routledge Companion to Gothic (with Emma McEvoy), Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (with Fred Botting) and Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory and Genre on Television (with Jeffrey Weinstock). She was co-president of the International Gothic Association 2013–17.

Richard Storer is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is the author of the volume F. R. Leavis in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series. He also contributes to the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and has published a number of essays on Bram Stoker, Hall Caine and T. E. Brown, as well as on Victorian Shakespeare scholarship. He is currently working on an edition of the letters of

T. E. Brown to Hall Caine in the Manx National Heritage Archive; this project is supported by Culture Vannin.

Minna Vuohelainen is Lecturer in English at City, University of London. Her current research focuses on fin-de-siècle print culture, the Gothic, literary representations of London, spatial theory, and Thomas Hardy. Her publications include the monograph Richard Marsh (University of Wales Press, 2015), the co-edited essay collections Interpreting Primo Levi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave, 2015) and Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890– 1915: Rereading the Fin de Siècle (Manchester University Press, forthcoming), scholarly articles in Victorian Periodicals Review, English Studies, Journal of Literature and Science and Clues, and critical editions of Richard Marsh’s fiction.

Introduction

The Uncanny Space of Regionality: Gothic Beyond the Metropolis

William Hughes

The literary Gothic, from its origins in the eighteenth century, has enjoyed an intimacy with the geographically provincial and the culturally peripheral that academic criticism has to date hardly acknowledged. The enduring nature of this intimacy should come as no surprise. After all, the Gothic is uniquely and consistently concerned with liminal and transitional states and, by the logical necessity of definition, such states require a functional centre against which to balance their epistemological Otherness. The negotiations between centre and margin in Gothic, however, are seldom so convenient as to permit their being rationalised as simple binaries. If, as Robert Mighall contends in A Geography of Victorian Gothic (1999), the Gothic ought rightly to be defined not by the putative presence of the supernatural but rather through its characteristic embodiment of cultural concerns predicated upon ‘history and geography’, then the whole relationship of centre and margin must inevitably be complicated by the intimacy of these two fundamental disciplines and their implication in the politics of identity.¹

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the paradigmatic text through which the Gothic was effectively established, The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. Though replete with unequivocally supernatural apparitions as diverse as a walking portrait and a monkishly cowled skeleton, The Castle of Otranto is a narrative which imbricates history with geography not merely within its actual plot but also by way of the rhetorical mechanisms through which the reader is invited to contemplate it as an artefact whose implications are relevant to more than one historical period, and whose cultural status draws upon the perception of localised and distant geographies. In both its content, and the manner in which that content is framed for contemporary consumption, The Castle of Otranto implicitly invites its reader to comprehend, simultaneously, the near and the far in both temporal and spatial terms.

Walpole’s Preface to the First Edition of The Castle of Otranto establishes the narrative as a faux historical document, the very survival of which into the eighteenth century is explicitly a consequence of provincial culture. The volume’s purported translator, ‘William Marshall, Gent.’, represents far more than a simple guarantor of the work’s verifiable worthiness as an historical artefact.² As the representative of the gentlemanly, scholarly antiquarianism of the eighteenth-century present, Marshall is implicitly located in a mode of contemplating the historical past that necessarily creates an unequal relationship between the educated and implicitly male perceiver and the artefact englobed in his acquisitive and critical eye. The contemplative tenor in Walpole’s Preface recalls, in its attitude to objects contextualised by space and time, the encyclopaedic enthusiasms of those dilettante enthusiasts who assembled the cabinets of curiosity that graced so many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mansions in the British metropolis. Walpole was very much a participant in this reductive discourse of acquisition and cultural taxonomy. His personal collection of curiosities was housed at Twickenham, and the degree of his active participation in the culture of gentlemanly collection can be gauged by him being appointed a trustee of Sir Hans Sloane’s private museum at Chelsea following his fellow antiquarian’s death in 1753.³ Sloane, to be sure, influenced not merely the tenor of the private collection but of the public museum also.⁴ Walpole and his fellow trustees passed his collection, in accordance with the antiquarian’s will, to the ownership of the nation, where it became the core of the eventual British Museum.⁵

Such cabinets of curiosity were not the sole preserve of the wealthy metropolitan collector, however.⁶ Outside London their presence supplemented the educated rhetoric of periodicals such as The Gentleman’s Magazine in reassuring the provincial antiquarian of his place in an intellectual culture whose demeanour could be, at times, itself reductive and patronising when contemplating specifically regional curiosities from its own non-metropolitan perspective.⁷ The self-conscious antiquarianism which motivated the literal cabinets that displayed physical artefacts in a domestic space, which valorised likewise the contents of private libraries and manuscript repositories, and which underwrote the periodicals that interpreted the contents of both for the benefit of readers across the breadth of the country, were all central to an elite mechanism that gathered power to an intellectual centre. That centre necessarily acknowledged the puissance of the capital city’s intellectual elite, and the leadership of London periodicals and scholars in particular. It should be noted that Walpole was himself to philosophise – albeit pseudonymously – on the nature of a museum as the repository of that which is singular, anachronistic or merely odd in the significantly titled periodical, Museum, in 1746.⁸

As a dispersed body of intellectuals, however, the centre could be said to be effectively abstracted across the national geography. Such a concept of scholarly culture would explain, for example, the tenacity with which Edinburgh intellectualism – expressed in learned societies, informed public debate and periodical publication – persisted as a distinctive and viable alternative to its counterpart in London following the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. In England, learned societies such as The Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Dilettantes, founded in 1717 and 1734 respectively, functioned as cross-disciplinary bodies through which discovery and interpretation might be disseminated not merely through events in the capital city but through a dispersed body of corresponding members.⁹ Bearing this in mind, the power of the abstracted intellectual centre was vested in its ability to facilitate and replicate microcosms of the centre-periphery relationship across the nation, allowing the geographically provincial and the historically distant to function not in simple binary terms but in a fractured multiplicity – a fractal, as it were, that pushed the margins, their artefacts and cultures, further and further away each time it projected its investigative taxonomy to a distance further in space or time. That which the privileged and empowered gaze of antiquarianism is directed upon is always, in a sense, implicitly provincial and inferior. It is the mind of the collector, the traveller, the scholar that is the centre, in this sense. To centre perception and interpretation upon that empowered individual is to force that which is observed, be it physical object, spatial terrain or physiological being, to the peripheral.

This much is exemplified in the complex significations that Walpole’s First-Edition Preface imposes upon the putatively rediscovered document through which the story of The Castle of Otranto is relayed to the eighteenth-century reader – and, indeed, to any subsequent readership. The opening words of the Preface are highly significant, though so casually presented as facilitate their being overlooked as the reader passes on quickly to the more trenchant remarks regarding religious controversy that initiate the author’s ironic comments on the enslaving of ‘vulgar’ (or uniformed) minds by such fictions. The translator begins:

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savors [sic] of that barbarism. The style is the purest Italian. If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095, the year of the first crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards. There is no other circumstance in the work, that can lead us to guess at the period in which the scene is laid.¹⁰

As Crystal B. Lake rightly asserts, the provenance of the manuscript, and the interpretation of its origins, are implicated within a contemporary antiquarian culture towards which the Whiggish author appears to have expressed some ambivalence.¹¹ That culture is itself ambivalent, though, with regard to the status accorded to the document’s coexistence in contemporary and historical time and space. In the rhetorical advancing of the document as an artefact in the hands of a collector-interpreter, contemporary Britain elides into historical Italy and the eye of the antiquarian transforms both locations into objects of curiosity, emblems of places far away in space, time and culture. The very survival of this document in the library of an explicitly Roman Catholic family in the British provinces emphasises how, in such vaguely defined locations as ‘the north of England’, anachronistic beliefs may persist unchecked and superstition may manifest itself as history.¹² The novel’s Protestant sectarianism – which is notably less strident than many of the works that followed The Castle of Otranto within the genre – quietly aligns the distant corners of contemporary England with the historical south of Italy, distancing both from the more familiar Enlightenment-era politics that apparently emblematise the prevailing attitudes of the forward-looking English metropolis and its satellite intellects in the provinces. The interest which The Castle of Otranto might have for northern Roman Catholic minds, in other words, is not the same as that which such a curious survival from the past might hold for an antiquarian – whether that antiquarian be located in London or the provinces. To travel in space is thus also to travel in time, or at least in a culture implicated in temporality and comparative development. The Preface to The Castle of Otranto thus says as much about a culturally distant north of England as it does about a geographically and historically distant Italy: the north, to adapt a phrase by L. P. Hartley, is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

If this were not sufficient to establish the provincial credentials of Walpole’s novel, it might likewise be noted that, though the work was ‘printed at Naples’, it depicts a series of incidents which occurred not in the well-known capital of the west-coast Campania but rather within the obscure curtilage of a provincial port in distant Apulia, some four hundred kilometres away on the east coast. The avowed temporality of the document is equally disparate, its printing in 1529 occurring some hundreds of years after the incidents were first narrated and through a linguistic filter – that of Walpole’s ‘artful priest’ – that ensheathes the superstition of the Dark Ages within the casuistry of the Renaissance.¹³ The work itself is a curiosity. The manner in which the document was preserved is a curiosity. The intimate relationship of the contents of the document to the sectarian beliefs of those in whose possession it presumably remains, is a curiosity. The Castle of Otranto is presented as an artefact suitable for description and reproduction within a magazine catering for those of educated and antiquarian tastes. It is an object that embodies both the provincial, and attitudes towards the perceptibly provincial, in many ways.

The Gothic, this would suggest, was from its very origins as much concerned with the culturally temporal as with the literally geographical. In highlighting and addressing the uncanniness of the periphery, it makes commentary upon the power of the centre to comprehend and contain that which it perceives and constructs as Other. The provincial is thus that which is gazed upon by one who has the right to comment upon it, rationalise it, render it into familiar terminology and subject it to Enlightenment control. That gaze may be exercised by a fictional translator or editor, by an impersonal narrator, or through the conventions of first-person narration. Almost invariably, it would seem, the centre aspires to align the reader with its desire to, variously, witness or understand the unprecedented or the unfamiliar.

The Castle of Otranto thus sets a precedent not merely for the recurrent supernatural, historical and sectarian features of the Gothic but also for its own enduring attitude towards anything that tests, let alone challenges, the power of a familiar intellectual and cultural tendency. Given that the provincial is a quality that manifests itself through perception rather than location, it necessarily becomes associated in Gothic with travel in time or space. It manifests itself in the attitudes – patronising, disdainful, incautious – of travellers who venture not merely from the capital to the regions, but who journey also from the urban to the rural, from provincial towns to isolated villages, and from the mainland to isolated islands.

In this sense, The Castle of Otranto is something of a ‘safe’ text for the antiquarian-reader who perceives its recorded violence and supernaturalism across a textual cordon sanitaire that spans several centuries. Later Gothic writers, though, were inclined to enhance the unease of comprehension both by way of the rhetorical intimacy associated with first-person narration and through the development of the genre’s uncanny stylistics within near-contemporary (rather than historical) temporality, and in identifiably British (rather than Continental) milieux. The development of these somewhat domesticated Gothic narratives may well be a consequence of the politics of travel following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Gothic at the eighteenth-century fin de siècle, it could be argued, allowed those educated Britons who could not undertake the customary Continental Grand Tour to access vicariously the sublime landscapes and labyrinthine cities of Europe. Likewise, the political events of the period, the revolutionary nature of which prevented the Briton from travelling abroad for leisure, might be experienced in an occluded form by participating in fantasies of ostensibly historical atrocities of tyranny and mob violence. If, as Robert Kiely suggested in The Romantic Novel in England (1972), ‘the madness of the roman noir imitates and caters to the madness of an unstable society’, then part of that catering must surely be one that essentially compensates the reader for an enforced sojourn on prosaic British shores.¹⁴

The final defeat of Napoleon heralded the return of Continental travel for those Britons wealthy enough to avail themselves of the opportunity, even if the extravagant, institutional Grand Tour of the eighteenth century was to become, in the nineteenth century, a shadow of its former self. It is tempting to associate the opening up of a somewhat safer Europe to British eyes with the progressive eclipse, in Gothic, of Continental locales by domestic ones. Certainly, a number Gothic works set closer to home appeared within a decade of Waterloo, popularised possibly by Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), the plot of which is initiated in Dublin, in 1816, prior to its recounting of earlier events in England, Europe and the Indian Ocean.¹⁵ John Melmoth’s short journey from Dublin to Wicklow, which frames the various narratives that lead up to the eponymous Wanderer’s return, is one taken from an educated centre – he is an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin – to a superstitious and backward periphery. If those narratives are of questionable truth, the physicality of the Wanderer’s return – he drinks, he talks, he leaves behind an identifiable handkerchief – has an evidential function, and his mysterious annihilation has a perceptible effect upon the young Irishman, who is rendered ‘silent’ by ‘unutterable horror’.¹⁶ Certainly, there is more than a small amount of evidence to suggest that such journeys from the centre to the margins constitute a minor tradition within the Gothic. Published four years after Melmoth the Wanderer, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) similarly engages a doppelgänger temporality in its juxtaposition of a series of historical events associated with Edinburgh and rural Scotland against first-hand testimony of a contemporary encounter in the Scottish provinces.¹⁷ The novel’s imbrication of past and present, or reported