Social Reform in Gothic Writing

Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834

Ellen Malenas Ledoux

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137302687
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Social Reform in Gothic Writing provides a transatlantic view of the politically transformative power that Gothic texts effected during the Revolutionary era (1764-1834) through providing fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical writing in a wide variety of genres.

1

Emergent Forms

Horace Walpole, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century Reader

On October 5, 1764, Horace Walpole writes to his cousin Henry Conway to express his sense of resignation after two key political allies, the Dukes of Cumberland and Devonshire, were rumored to have died. When Walpole sends the letter, he believes that the dukes’ passing precludes him from forming a strong opposition to George III’s extension of the royal prerogative. The letter styles Walpole as the defeated Antony from John Dryden’s All for Love (1678):

For the rest, come what may, I am perfectly prepared! . . . what signifies what happens when one is seven-and-forty, as I am today? “They tell me ’tis my birthday” – but I will not go on with Antony, and say “and I’ll keep it / With double pomp of sadness.” . . . for take notice, I do not design to fall upon my dagger, in hopes that some Mr. Addison a thousand years hence may write a dull tragedy [Cato] about me. I will write my own story a little more cheerfully than he would; but I fear now I must not print it at my own press.¹

Literally, the allusion is misleading; the letter is dated 12 days after Walpole’s actual September 24 birthday. Figuratively, however, Antony’s speech expresses a fatalism about his imminent clash with Caesar that mirrors Walpole’s own feeling that he is outmanned in Parliament. In addition, Dryden’s version emphasizes the erotic cause of Antony’s fall. Walpole’s allusion obliquely acknowledges his recent forced “outing” in a pamphlet war with William Guthrie in which Guthrie accused Walpole of being in love with the letter’s recipient, Conway.² The similarities between the ancient and the modern statesmen end there, however. Walpole asserts that his avocation as a writer and printer empower him in ways unavailable to the military leader or politician. Heroes act, but writers and printers make history.

Placed in its biographical context, this allusive letter provides insight into how Walpole views the aesthetic and the political as interdependent – an idea central to understanding the impetus behind his development of a “new species of romance.” Although not a progressive reformer himself, Walpole facilitates subsequent authors’ thinking about the political uses of terror and the relationship between reading pleasure and imaginative change by offering theories of how art simultaneously depicts and influences human behavior. Throughout his non-fiction, Walpole employs literary models to explain historical events, signaling literature’s capacity to describe political behavior accurately. His tendency to view politicians as actors in a high-stakes tragedy underscores his belief that the personal passions of the powerful shape large-scale events, which is a theme he explores in two major works, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Mysterious Mother (1768). As Walpole acknowledges, this theme traces back at least to the tragedies of Sophocles and manifests within exemplary English sources such as King Lear. Yet, in his letters and political memoirs, he maintains that, however old this idea might be, it remains vital to understanding politics.³

Most important for this book’s overall argument, the letter demonstrates how Walpole sees the erstwhile narrow sphere of politics expanding in the era of growing literacy. Unlike the martyred Antony, Walpole can directly influence the turn of events as an MP, spin their reception by writing in a variety of genres, and circulate his interpretation of those events throughout the powerful circles in which he moves and to the general population. As this chapter’s first section argues, his two prefaces to The Castle of Otranto amplify the ideas about authorship and publishing contained in the letter. They offer an extended commentary on fiction’s role in politics, and they also provide an aesthetic model for how to create terror fiction with the maximum amount of rhetorical impact. Walpole’s first preface deploys an authorial ruse to demonstrate that political battles will be waged increasingly through popular writing. Although a select few still govern, their actions begin to require public justification, like it or not, as the populace becomes more and more politically enfranchised. Authors, then, become powerful political agents in this unprecedented era, vital to any governor’s ability to shape public opinion. Walpole’s intervention into public discourse at a variety of levels – through pamphlets, plays, novels, memoirs, and “open” letters – suggests his canny awareness of the author’s growing agency in the late eighteenth century. Unlike the other authors discussed in this book, however, Walpole is not particularly invested in consistently promoting any ideology with that agency. Rather, he lobbies for a growing awareness in authors about how popular forms can be deployed for political ends.

Although some critics stress Walpole’s role within English circles of aesthetes and literati, this chapter highlights how Otranto engages the larger reading public. (The same cannot be said for The Mysterious Mother, which, as I will discuss, Walpole was ambivalent about circulating, partly due to its incestuous themes.) Walpole printed 500 copies of Otranto’s first edition at his Strawberry Hill press, which indicates his desire to circulate the work broadly. (In contrast, he printed only 50 copies of Mother and distributed just a portion of those among friends.) In Walpole’s lifetime, Otranto went through nine authorized English editions (1764, 1765, 1769, 1782, 1786, 1791, 1793, 1794, 1796) and was translated into French (1767), German (1794), and Italian (1795).⁴ That Walpole involved himself directly in editing the editions up to the fourth (1782) by J. Dodsley suggests that he wanted to disseminate his narrative throughout the public sphere. These editions made their mark among the reading public, as evidenced by the homages paid to Walpole by even middle-class women living outside London literary circles, such as Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, whose Old English Baron (1778) and The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) respectively are modeled after Otranto.⁵ Otranto found its most diverse audience when Walpole collaborated with Robert Jephson on a theatrical adaptation, The Count of Narbonne, staged at Covent Garden in 1781. As Walpole’s letters to Jephson testify, he was eager to make the narrative succeed in this theatrical venue that catered to workers and aristocrats alike.

Walpole self-consciously positions Otranto as “a Gothic Story” on the title page of its second edition, signaling the experimental nature of his work. Similarly, his preface to the second edition expands upon ideas gestured toward in the first and demonstrates that terror fiction, more so than other forms of writing, is poised to be politically persuasive. When discussing the text’s sensational elements and highly wrought tone, Walpole suggests that his narrative stimulates the imagination and taps into our capacity for sensibility in ways similar to those that I describe in the book’s introduction. The second preface also outlines in detail how authors can maximize the rhetorical potential of terror fiction, establishing the aesthetics of what later eighteenth-century critics will dub “terrorist novel writing.”⁶ Through an extensive discussion of genre and tone, Walpole advocates invoking the linguistic sublime and mixing the most potent aspects of the narrative and dramatic genres to create what he calls “a still more moving story” (p. 8).

This chapter’s second section turns to Walpole’s thematic treatment of political terrorism in Otranto and Mother. In these works, Walpole draws on his vast experience as a legislator to comment on how politics operate. His plots underscore the effectiveness of terror tactics in influencing both rulers and those they rule. My interweaving discussions of Otranto alongside Walpole’s letters, pamphlets, and Memoirs of the Reign of King George II (1822) and Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third (1845) reflect Walpole’s contemporary observations about terrorism’s role in current events such as The Gordon Riots and the court martial of Admiral Byng. Similarly, The Mysterious Mother makes a strong case against the extension of the royal prerogative, which Walpole consistently opposed, and expresses contemporary anxiety about the Princess Dowager’s influence over George III.⁷

Despite these specific instances of political intervention, it is important to stress that these narratives primarily describe political procedure – how power is won, how alliances are created, how influence is gained. Walpole does not encourage his readers to engage in physical acts of terrorism; in fact, his letters reveal a particular disgust for the practice. Yet, as an observer of political process, he notes that terrorism works and, through his fiction’s emphasis on the psychological, analyzes how it works. His willingness to experiment with mode and genre is one later authors embrace with alacrity, employing Gothic modal attributes in low, middling, and high art forms. As the historical trajectory of this book makes clear, however, not until the Revolutionary era do other authors such as Eliza Fenwick and William Godwin deploy Gothic motifs to advocate for specific forms of social change and to acknowledge the reader’s agency in determining a text’s political impact. Unlike his 1790s counterparts, Walpole does not consider the political influence of Gothic writing as bi-directional. His work analyzes political processes for the general reader, but it does not urge the reader to enter the fray.

Literacy and the Literary Terrorist

The son of England’s first Prime Minister, an important political force in his own right, and an innovator of literary form, Walpole has divided historians, biographers, and literary critics searching for a consistent ideological basis upon which his Gothic writing is built.⁸ Biographical studies, beginning in the early nineteenth century, give widely varying interpretations of Walpole’s beliefs, characterizing him as an accidental Whig with the spirit of a courtier, a benevolent paternalist, a devotee of liberty, and most recently an “outsider” debarred from a heterosexist establishment.⁹ Literary critics have focused mainly on two themes within Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: nationalism and antiquarianism. Despite the usefulness of individual readings, the conversation starts with the assumption that Otranto has a specific agenda related to Walpole’s Whig politics.¹⁰ However, looking at his corpus holistically reveals that although Walpole self-identifies as a “quiet Republican,” his vacillating opinions on fundamental issues such as liberty, freedom of assembly, and religious tolerance demonstrate that he is politically motivated by factionalism and friendship more than adherence to any abstract principles.¹¹ Thus, when literary critics attempt to apply Whig ideology to his imaginative work, they have found it inconsistent and frivolous.¹² This chapter argues that Otranto and Mother are best described as political procedurals, works which dramatize how political events originate, rather than political fables urging for a particular policy.¹³

As with most Gothic writing, Walpole’s most famous work, The Castle of Otranto must be discussed within the context of its paratexts and publication history to understand fully its political impact. Otranto’s complicated early publication history arose from a host of circumstances, including Walpole’s intentional desire to mystify readers. The first 500 copies were printed at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill press on Christmas Eve 1764, but the first edition’s title page reads “Printed for Tho. Lownds in Fleet Street” and gives a 1765 publication date. This first edition’s preface also sets up a multi-layered framing device for the main narrative. Instead of claiming authorship or publishing anonymously, Walpole alleges that the text is an ancient manuscript by an Italian priest “Unophrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto” found and recently translated into English by a “William Marshal, Gent.” Before the story even begins, Walpole creates two characters – a crafty Reformation-era priest and an English antiquarian – that he, as a ghost author, will “play” as readers encounter the first edition. These multiple layers of artifice can partly be explained by the “fear” Walpole expresses about printing his “own story” at his press. As others have noted, the authorial ruse also taps into the vogue for antiquarian trickery and demonstrates both Walpole’s literary playfulness and his shyness about owning an experimental work.¹⁴ These interpretations dovetail nicely with Walpole’s own offered explanation for the disguise: “diffidence of his abilities, and the novelty of the attempt” (p. 9). With new-found confidence, Walpole claims the second edition, adding a preface specifying his goals for this “new species of romance” and a title page labeling the story as “Gothic.” Critics typically interpret this second preface’s self-conscious aesthetic positioning as the manifesto for what will later become the Gothic novel and pay little attention to the first.¹⁵ While the second preface is important for thinking about the fraught relationship between the romance and the novel, given Walpole’s earlier shenanigans, it makes sense to pay just as much attention to what he does as to what he says. The first preface cannot be explained away so easily. Any feelings of shyness could be resolved by publishing anonymously, a common eighteenth-century practice employed even by undisputedly “great” authors for a variety of reasons.¹⁶

Giving equal weight to the two prefaces reveals important information about how Walpole views the aesthetics of terror and the structures of genre interfacing with political discourse. The characters Unophrio Muralto and William Marshal allow Walpole to discuss terrorist literature as a cultural phenomenon capable of influencing a broad audience, which had already shown an enthusiasm for the fantastic in a wide variety of genres – from the sentimental “graveyard” poetry of his friend Thomas Gray to the popular chapbooks of the folk tradition – without Walpole having to endorse such tactics himself. In essence, this preface draws attention to authors’ power to sway an increasingly important political constituency: the reading public. Walpole’s second preface follows up on the hints of the first, detailing how exactly the aesthetic of literary terror works. He advises that successful literary terrorism skirts the limits of believability; a “Gothic story” constantly negotiates the thin line between dramatic persuasion and bathos. The art of political persuasion provides the impetus behind his formal innovation, which invokes terror as its primary rhetorical tool. Yet, this blunt instrument, Walpole cautions, must be wielded by a skilled hand. Understanding how the first preface contextualizes the second also elucidates how complex narrative structures become central to the developing aesthetics of Gothic writing. As discussed in later chapters, Matthew Lewis, Sarah Wilkinson, William Godwin and others deploy “red herring” title pages and prefaces, disjunctive frontispieces, and “Russian doll” inset stories to create epistemological uncertainty that has important ideological consequences.

In the first preface, under the cover of William Marshal, Walpole points out the political advantages of using terror-inspiring narratives to wage ideological battle. He posits that the “ancient” Otranto manuscript could be a priest’s attempt to counteract the Protestant Reformation:

Letters were then in their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavor to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was his view, he has certainly acted with singular address. Such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour. (p. 6)

During the Reformation, texts such as Luther’s theses forcibly argued against the superstitious “errors” of Catholicism. Yet Walpole-as-Marshal suggests “letters” are “arms” that can be appropriated and re-deployed, like other weapons, toward promoting any given ideology. In the case of the Otranto manuscript, an “artful priest” can summon his narrative eloquence to scare his flock back to Rome. “Marshal” suggests that the priest’s arousal of fear is more potent than the reformers’ appeal to reason. He asks the reader to reconsider what genre is most suited to swaying public opinion. The priest’s chosen genre, terror fiction, can “enslave . . . vulgar minds” more easily than those “books of controversy,” the texts most often employed in attempts at ideological conversion.

Although multiple mediating layers exist between Muralto, Marshal, and their creator, Walpole, there are several reasons why one might conclude that Marshal speaks, at least in part, for Walpole. First, Walpole ventriloquizes Marshal’s voice, somewhat cheekily, to laud his own persuasive talents. After all, Walpole is the creator of the manuscript, who acts with “singular address.” One could ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fantastic Forms of Change
• 1 Emergent Forms: Horace Walpole, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century Reader
• 2 A Castle of One’s Own: The Architecture of Emerging Feminism in Works by Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Eliza Fenwick, Joanna Baillie, and Sarah Wilkinson
• 3 Transmuting the Baser Metals: The Post-Revolutionary Audience, Political Economy, and Gothic Forms in Godwin’s St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century
• 4 “Schemes of Reformation”: Institutionalized Healthcare in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn
• 5 Reforming Genres: Negotiating the Politics of Slavery in the Works of Matthew Lewis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index