What is Urban Gothic?
PhD, English Literature (Lancaster University)
Date Published: 16.07.2024,
Last Updated: 16.07.2024
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Definition
Poet James Thomson painted a macabre picture of London life in his poem “City of Dreadful Night,” writing that
That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,
Although not many exiles wander there,
With many a potent evil influence,
Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair. (1874, [2011])
James Thomson
That City's atmosphere is dark and dense,
Although not many exiles wander there,
With many a potent evil influence,
Each adding poison to the poisoned air;
Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair. (1874, [2011])
The image of Victorian London portrayed in Thomson’s poem epitomizes what has come to be known as urban Gothic (sometimes referred to as “fin de siècle Gothic”); urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, popular in the late nineteenth century, that deals with the horrors of the industrial world. Urban Gothic emerged as a response to anxieties over industrialization (and with it the loss of community), increased criminality and immorality in the city, and the alienation caused by capitalism and urbanization.
As Emily Alder explains,
Late-Victorian Gothic emphasizes the alienation engendered by the metropolis; the city's expanding population leads to a paradox of anonymity within the crowd. It also plays on the living conditions of the industrialized city — the unlit streets, factories, overcrowded dwellings, and proliferation of vice and crime — to produce spooky or sinister atmospheres and subversive social commentary. (“Urban Gothic,” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, 2015)
Edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith
Late-Victorian Gothic emphasizes the alienation engendered by the metropolis; the city's expanding population leads to a paradox of anonymity within the crowd. It also plays on the living conditions of the industrialized city — the unlit streets, factories, overcrowded dwellings, and proliferation of vice and crime — to produce spooky or sinister atmospheres and subversive social commentary. (“Urban Gothic,” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, 2015)
It is important to note that urban Gothic is “Gothic of a city rather than just in a city” (Robert Mighall, “Gothic Cities,” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, 2007). Holly-Gale Millette elaborates on this idea:
The city is not just a location onto which the action is imposed, the Gothic permeates the streets and the buildings, the stinking rubbish heaps and the sulphurous and poisonous rivers. Yet, inevitably, there is not one single unified idea of the urban Gothic. As in older Gothic fiction, different locales affect the tales of the urban and imbue them with a specific sense of place and space. [...] Cities differ from each other and within their own (permeable and unstable) boundaries they fragment and multiply—some becoming completely alien to others: conflicting and disparate. Cities are made up of contradictions and disjunctions, but the details of fragmentations are specific to particular locales. (“Introduction,” The New Urban Gothic, 2020)
Edited by Holly-Gale Millette and Ruth Heholt
The city is not just a location onto which the action is imposed, the Gothic permeates the streets and the buildings, the stinking rubbish heaps and the sulphurous and poisonous rivers. Yet, inevitably, there is not one single unified idea of the urban Gothic. As in older Gothic fiction, different locales affect the tales of the urban and imbue them with a specific sense of place and space. [...] Cities differ from each other and within their own (permeable and unstable) boundaries they fragment and multiply—some becoming completely alien to others: conflicting and disparate. Cities are made up of contradictions and disjunctions, but the details of fragmentations are specific to particular locales. (“Introduction,” The New Urban Gothic, 2020)
The city is, therefore, not simply the backdrop against which the horror occurs, nor is it merely aesthetic. Instead, the city, with its labyrinthine streets, hidden spaces, and constant influx of strangers, was seen as teeming with dangerous potential. Urban Gothic fiction aims to both fascinate and terrify its readers by exposing what lies in the dark underbelly of the metropolis.
In this guide, we will explore the origins of urban Gothic, before going on to cover some of the key characteristics of urban Gothic in the nineteenth century. To conclude, we will discuss the legacy of urban Gothic.
The origins of urban Gothic
Earlier Gothic texts, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), often took place in southern Europe or in rural, remote landscapes. For this reason, as Mighall highlights, urban Gothic can be seen as “a contradiction in terms”:
The Gothic depicted what the city (civilisation) banished or refused to acknowledge, except in the form of thrilling fictions. [...] The sublime, rugged landscapes of southern France, Italy or Spain, the deep forests or craggy peaks of Germany, were at the furthest remove from London or Bath; and were therefore the sanctioned preserve of terrors. (2007)
Edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy
The Gothic depicted what the city (civilisation) banished or refused to acknowledge, except in the form of thrilling fictions. [...] The sublime, rugged landscapes of southern France, Italy or Spain, the deep forests or craggy peaks of Germany, were at the furthest remove from London or Bath; and were therefore the sanctioned preserve of terrors. (2007)
However, with the onset of modernity, Gothic was relocated to the city:
In the nineteenth century, the Gothic mode originating with eighteenth-century writers such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe diversified; as urban populations increased with industrialization, Gothic tropes found new loci in city environments. Urban streets, buildings, and institutions replaced castles, mountains, and abbeys as sites of terror and the uncanny, which were brought home from distant times or exotic lands to these modern, domestic locations. (Alder, 2015)
Urban Gothic aimed to unsettle the metropolitan reader by making them question whether crime and horror were contained to the Continent. Rather than reading about horrors abroad from the safety of their homes, readers were now exposed to fiction in which criminal Others lurked in their own neighborhoods, masquerading as fellow citizens.
Key characteristics in urban Gothic
Gothic is a highly conventional genre, often relying upon repeated tropes and motifs. This section will explore some of the key characteristics of urban Gothic, from a preoccupation with industrialization to moral degeneration.
Industrialization
As Gothic moves from the rural and archaic to the modern city, the horror of industrial capitalism becomes apparent. Linda Dryden states that,
Advances in technology, such as the railway and the Underground, fuelled the changing social conditions of the nineteenth-century metropolis, changing the face of Wordsworth’s ‘smokeless’ city forever. Such developments altered the way people lived in the city and how its inhabitants used the city, and such developments contributed to the sensibility that informed the fiction of the modern Gothic. (The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles, 2003)
Linda Dryden
Advances in technology, such as the railway and the Underground, fuelled the changing social conditions of the nineteenth-century metropolis, changing the face of Wordsworth’s ‘smokeless’ city forever. Such developments altered the way people lived in the city and how its inhabitants used the city, and such developments contributed to the sensibility that informed the fiction of the modern Gothic. (The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles, 2003)
The perils of industrialization can be seen in the penny dreadful The String of Pearls (1846) (often referred to as “Sweeney Todd”) by James Malcolm Rymer. (Though authorship over The String of Pearls has been debated —at one time or another it has been attributed to Rymer, Thomas Peckett Prest, or both— it is now generally accepted that Rymer is the author of the text.) Penny dreadfuls were serialized stories sold cheaply and aimed primarily at the working classes popular in the mid-nineteenth century. The content was often melodramatic, focusing on crime and violence within the city. (For more on penny fiction, please see Rob Breton’s The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction [2021], Anna Gasperini’s Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy [2019], and Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine’s Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic [2023].)
The String of Pearls tells the tale of a London barber Sweeney Todd who murders his clients, dispatching their bodies down a hatch so that his co-conspirator Mrs Lovett can bake them into pies to sell in her bakery. The source of the pies is not the only secret Lovett hides from her customers: the pies are actually made by an imprisoned cook toiling away in the basement. Rymer’s text critiques modern mass production which he suggests alienates, isolates, and dehumanizes workers. In one scene, the cook pleads to be released, stating: “'I cannot be made into a mere machine for the manufacture of pies. I cannot, and will not endure it—it is past all bearing'” (Rymer, 1846, [2019]).
The connection between industrialization and the Gothic is also made evident in the numerous “real life” factory tales which employ the Gothic language to describe the horrors of working at industrial sites. Bridget M. Marshall coined the term “industrial Gothic” to describe how the Industrial Revolution is used as a site of horror in numerous nineteenth-century Gothic texts. To learn more, see Marshall’s work Industrial Gothic (2021) which explores factories, mills, and industrial cities.
The unknowable city
Dryden writes that,
Rapid expansion and overpopulation of the metropolis in the ensuing years [...] contributed to a growing awareness that the nineteenth-century city was not a controlled or controllable environment. In the latter part of the century the fears and social concerns of the nation became focused on its capital. (2003)
Social investigators attempted to navigate this new, dynamic city, particularly looking at the London East End slums (unfamiliar terrain for many middle-class readers). Some writers, such as James Greenwood, even partook in “slumming” an act of incognito journalism which involved the writer pretending to be one of the poorer classes to gain insider knowledge. For more on this, see Seth Koven’s book Slumming (2006).
Attempts were thus made to understand and categorize the city by peering voyeuristically into its darkest corners. The fear, and fascination, of the incomprehensible city sprawl was not lost on writers of fiction. As Judith R. Walkowitz explains,
The literary construct of the metropolis as a dark, powerful, and seductive labyrinth held a powerful sway over the social imagination of educated readers. [...] These late-Victorian writers built on an earlier tradition of Victorian urban exploration, adding some new perspectives of their own. Some rigidified the hierarchical divisions of London into a geographic separation, organized around the opposition of East and West. Others stressed the growing complexity and differentiation of the world of London, moving beyond the opposition of rich and poor, palace and hovels, to investigate the many class cultures in between. Still others among them repudiated a fixed, totalistic interpretive image altogether, and emphasized instead a fragmented, disunified, atomistic social universe that was not easily decipherable. (City of Dreadful Delight, 2013)
Judith R. Walkowitz
The literary construct of the metropolis as a dark, powerful, and seductive labyrinth held a powerful sway over the social imagination of educated readers. [...] These late-Victorian writers built on an earlier tradition of Victorian urban exploration, adding some new perspectives of their own. Some rigidified the hierarchical divisions of London into a geographic separation, organized around the opposition of East and West. Others stressed the growing complexity and differentiation of the world of London, moving beyond the opposition of rich and poor, palace and hovels, to investigate the many class cultures in between. Still others among them repudiated a fixed, totalistic interpretive image altogether, and emphasized instead a fragmented, disunified, atomistic social universe that was not easily decipherable. (City of Dreadful Delight, 2013)
Many Gothic writers were keen to dispel the idea that social investigators were intrepid explorers who could comprehensively map the city, thereby rendering it less intimidating. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) challenges the notion that one can gain mastery over the city. This is evident in the pride one of the main characters Mr Villiers takes in being able to navigate the city with ease:
Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment. (Machen, 1894, [2018])
Arthur Machen
Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment. (Machen, 1894, [2018])
When Villiers encounters his old friend, Charles Herbert, his ability to comprehend the mysteries of the city is brought into question. Herbert states,
“You, Villiers, you may think you know life, and London, and what goes on day and night in this dreadful city; for all I can say you may have heard the talk of the vilest, but I tell you you can have no conception of what I know, not in your most fantastic, hideous dreams can you have imaged forth the faintest shadow of what I have heard—and seen. Yes, seen. I have seen the incredible, such horrors that even I myself sometimes stop in the middle of the street and ask whether it is possible for a man to behold such things and live. In a year, Villiers, I was a ruined man, in body and soul—in body and soul.” (Machen, 1894, [2018])
Fog
The gothic city is frequently described as covered in fog or mist, a staple in the work of Charles Dickens who “adds fog to the Gothic meteorological repertoire” (Mighall, 2007). This is perhaps most evident in Bleak House:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. (Dickens, 1852, [2019])
Charles Dickens
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. (Dickens, 1852, [2019])
So why is fog such an enduring symbol in urban Gothic fiction? Mighall explains that
The fog obscures, but also reveals, the true character of the city. [...] Its mobility and obscurity are emblematic of the terrors of the tale, and of late-Victorian urban Gothic. Fog makes certainty difficult, and yet reveals the city’s sinister and menacing aspect [...] (2007)
Fog thus physically and symbolically shrouds the city, distorting reality and concealing hidden dangers. Areas covered in fog in such narratives teem with ominous potential, as seen in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In Stevenson’s novella, the lawyer Utterson embarks on a mission to discover more about Dr Jekyll’s mysterious associate Mr Hyde. Unbeknown to Utterson, however, is that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same, the alter-ego Hyde being created as a result of the Doctor’s experimentation. In one scene, Utterson visits Soho, a familiar haunt of Hyde, and becomes lost in the fog:
[...] the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. (1886, [2015])
Robert Louis Stevenson
[...] the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. (1886, [2015])
The fog here represents the obscured identity of Mr Hyde and Utterson’s inability to clearly perceive the events surrounding his friend Jekyll. The fog motif occurs throughout the narrative, with even Jekyll’s home being described as “foggy” (Stevenson, 1886, [2015]).
Rising crime, declining morality
High-profile crimes and scandals reinforced the idea that the fin de siècle was a time of declining morals. As Sara Wasson writes,
In late-nineteenth-century literature, urban Gothic is not only a metaphor for economic exploitation, evolutionary decline or a twilight empire: it is also a metaphor for the psychological darkness of its inhabitants. (“Gothic Cities and Suburbs, 1880—Present,” The Gothic World, 2013)
Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend
In late-nineteenth-century literature, urban Gothic is not only a metaphor for economic exploitation, evolutionary decline or a twilight empire: it is also a metaphor for the psychological darkness of its inhabitants. (“Gothic Cities and Suburbs, 1880—Present,” The Gothic World, 2013)
Concerns over urban crime resulted in an increased fascination with criminality, more specifically how to identify a criminal. Physicians Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso explained criminality through degeneration, suggesting that transgressive individuals, such as criminals, had specific biological makeup that differentiated them from “normal” and law-abiding citizens (see Lombroso’s L'uomo delinquente/Criminal Man [1876] and Nordau’s Degeneration [1892]). In Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle Stephan Karschay writes,
The writings of these degenerationists betray a fierce taxonomical impulse: degenerate individuals are singled out as clearly marked and thus easily recognisable (at least by the medical expert), making them amenable to measures of control and segregation. (2015)
Stephan Karschay
The writings of these degenerationists betray a fierce taxonomical impulse: degenerate individuals are singled out as clearly marked and thus easily recognisable (at least by the medical expert), making them amenable to measures of control and segregation. (2015)
We can see this reflected in the literature:
Marks of degeneration are detected in the monstrous Others of Victorian urban Gothic: the depravity corrupting Dorian's portrait in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and the repulsive dwarfishness of Hyde. Monsters emerge from the shadows of the city, symbolizing anxieties around moral and physical degeneration, invasion, and imperial decline circulating at the fin de siècle (see monstrosity). (Alder, 2015)
However, though these monstrous Others are often physically distinct from the rest of the populous, they are able in many cases to evade detection due to the bustling nature of the city and the anonymity it provides. This is true, for example, of the character Dracula, as Stephen Arata explains: “A large part of the terror [Dracula] inspires originates in his ability to stroll, unrecognized and unhindered, through the streets of London” (Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, 1996).
The fear that criminals lived among (and passed for) law-abiding citizens was amplified with the Whitechapel murders, occurring between 1888 and 1891. The murderer, dubbed by the press as Jack the Ripper, killed at least five women during this period and drew attention to a new threat that had emerged in the modern city. Citizens could no longer identify monsters by using Lombroso’s theory of degeneracy, as it was clear the Ripper was blending into the urban cityscape. As Simon A. Cole explains,
In modern, anonymous, socially mobile societies, distinctive dress, appearance, and accent were losing their power to convey social status at a glance. These emerging societies were brimming with people who were strangers, both to one another and to the state. The most heinous criminal could appear in the most innocent guise. (Suspect Identities, 2009)
Simon A. Cole
In modern, anonymous, socially mobile societies, distinctive dress, appearance, and accent were losing their power to convey social status at a glance. These emerging societies were brimming with people who were strangers, both to one another and to the state. The most heinous criminal could appear in the most innocent guise. (Suspect Identities, 2009)
Writers of the urban Gothic demonstrated that even with “clear markers” of degeneracy, urban criminals and monsters were able to move about the city undetected. One reason for this is the anonymity that city life affords; with increased urbanization, many were not familiar with their neighbors and it was not uncommon to see new inhabitants or tourists in the area. This, in part, contributes to the sense of alienation and the erosion of community within urban Gothic texts.
Upper-class criminality
Another reason that criminals in these texts are able to evade punishment is due to their class and status. In his famous penny dreadful, The Mysteries of London (1844–46), George W. M. Reynolds emphasizes how crime and moral degradation are not limited to the urban underclass as previously thought. As Reynolds writes in the prologue to the serial,
Crime is abundant in this city: the lazar-house, the prison, the brothel, and the dark alley, are rife with all kinds of enormity; in the same way as the palace, the mansion, the clubhouse, the parliament, and the parsonage, are each and all characterised by their different degrees and shades of vice. [...] Crimes borrow their comparative shade of enormity from the people who perpetrate them: thus is it that the wealthy may commit all social offences with impunity; while the poor are cast into dungeons and coerced with chains, for only following at a humble distance in the pathway of their lordly precedents. (The Mysteries of London, volume 1, 1844, [2014])
George W. M. Reynolds
Crime is abundant in this city: the lazar-house, the prison, the brothel, and the dark alley, are rife with all kinds of enormity; in the same way as the palace, the mansion, the clubhouse, the parliament, and the parsonage, are each and all characterised by their different degrees and shades of vice. [...] Crimes borrow their comparative shade of enormity from the people who perpetrate them: thus is it that the wealthy may commit all social offences with impunity; while the poor are cast into dungeons and coerced with chains, for only following at a humble distance in the pathway of their lordly precedents. (The Mysteries of London, volume 1, 1844, [2014])
The horrors of upper-world criminality are further illustrated in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In Wilde’s novella, wealthy socialite Dorian Gray captures the artistic imagination of painter Basil Hallwood who resolves to paint Dorian’s portrait and capture his beauty and youth. Upon seeing his portrait, Dorian becomes distressed upon the realization that he will age whilst the portrait will remain unchanged; he pledges his soul that the inverse were true and that the portrait will age as Dorian remains youthful forever. Dorian begins to live a corrupt and decadent life as his portrait bears the traces of his ageing and corruption.
Basil later confronts Dorian over his reputation and his pernicious influence on the wealthy gentleman in town who “lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity” and are filled with “a madness for pleasure” once they become associated with Dorian:
“[...] I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don’t know what to say. Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? [...] Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son, and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow.” (Wilde, 1890, [2014])
Oscar Wilde
“[...] I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don’t know what to say. Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? [...] Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son, and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow.” (Wilde, 1890, [2014])
Basil goes on to explain how Dorian has been seen in “dreadful houses” and in “the foulest dens in London” (Wilde, 1890, [2014]).
After hearing Basil recount his misdeeds, Dorian unveils his now-hideous portrait:
An exclamation of horror broke from the painter’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! (Wilde, 1890, [2014])
Dorian then murders Basil, the final death he is linked to before his own suicide, and blackmails his acquaintance Alan Campbell into disposing of Basil’s body.
Wilde’s novella, released only two years after the first Whitechapel murder, pointedly features an antagonist who does not bear the traces or burdens of his crimes. Far from the atavistic criminal, Dorian is beautiful and youthful and is part of London's high society and, perhaps as a criticism of dandies more broadly, has substituted morality for his aesthetic. As Rachel Bowlby puts it, Dorian Gray is “a receptacle and bearer of sensations, poser and posed, with no consistent identity, no moral self” (Shopping with Freud, 2006).
Beyond the nineteenth century
While the nineteenth century pioneered urban Gothic, this subgenre continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Wasson, for instance, explores urban Gothic during World War II in Urban Gothic of the Second World War
As it happens, Second World War London shared several of the sociohistorical features that made fin-de-siècle London so productive of Gothic. Both eras shared a preoccupation with the prospect of apocalyptic future war and a sense of the human subject as permanently embattled in interior struggle with irrational impulses. Furthermore, just as late nineteenth-century Britain was preoccupied with images of racial degeneration, that rhetoric returns in the war: when people fled to the tube platforms for shelter against raids, official writing began to apprehensively contemplate the risk of such underground shelterers degenerating into troglodyte beings. In Second World War texts, tropes and preoccupations of fin-de-siècle Gothic are inflected for a new moment. (2015)
Sara Wasson
As it happens, Second World War London shared several of the sociohistorical features that made fin-de-siècle London so productive of Gothic. Both eras shared a preoccupation with the prospect of apocalyptic future war and a sense of the human subject as permanently embattled in interior struggle with irrational impulses. Furthermore, just as late nineteenth-century Britain was preoccupied with images of racial degeneration, that rhetoric returns in the war: when people fled to the tube platforms for shelter against raids, official writing began to apprehensively contemplate the risk of such underground shelterers degenerating into troglodyte beings. In Second World War texts, tropes and preoccupations of fin-de-siècle Gothic are inflected for a new moment. (2015)
Wasson uncovers a range of fiction that demonstrates the importance of World War II fiction in analyzing the urban Gothic, discussing numerous authors, including Anna Kavan, Inez Holden, Anne Ridler, and Mervyn Peake.
Alder has also highlighted how texts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have contributed to our understanding of urban Gothic in a modern context:
The iconicity of London in urban Gothic persists into contemporary texts, in which the influence of late-Victorian Gothic can be seen, for example, in Alan Moore's From Hell (1999), which speculates on the mysteries surrounding the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders. (2015)
Edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith
The iconicity of London in urban Gothic persists into contemporary texts, in which the influence of late-Victorian Gothic can be seen, for example, in Alan Moore's From Hell (1999), which speculates on the mysteries surrounding the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders. (2015)
We can also see the city produce terror in the many iterations of the Batman franchise, with director Christopher Nolan bringing a darker, grittier version of the comic-book anti-hero to the mainstream with Batman Begins (2005). Another example of twenty-first-century urban Gothic includes Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, the most popular of which is The Shadow of the Wind (2001). (You can read more about this work in the Bright Summaries guide, 2016 and Xavier Aldana Reyes’ essay “A Gothic Barcelona?” in The New Urban Gothic, 2020)
While keeping many of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century urban Gothic, contemporary urban Gothic has developed to reflect new anxieties of city living. In particular, as the edited collection The New Urban Gothic highlights, the Gothic mode is used to explore concerns over our post-industrial environment in the age of the Anthropocene:
The awareness of such violence and contamination is higher in urban areas where renewed debates about freedom, speech practices, trigger warnings and safe spaces proliferate. Such toxicity reproduces attitudes of (and to) Gothic identity and history—identities and histories as discussed in the first part of this collection. The meanings, functions, and residue of such toxicity – how toxicity is produced, sustained, distributed and left as waste—has become a central narrative in our new urban Gothic narratives [...] .The Gothic tropes found in many of our new urban storyworlds are, or act as, bridges between aesthetics politics, popular ideology and psychosocial haunting. This book argues that such a hybrid reinterpretation of the Gothic has emerged and is here to stay. (Millette, “Introduction,” 2020)
Edited by Holly-Gale Millette and Ruth Heholt
The awareness of such violence and contamination is higher in urban areas where renewed debates about freedom, speech practices, trigger warnings and safe spaces proliferate. Such toxicity reproduces attitudes of (and to) Gothic identity and history—identities and histories as discussed in the first part of this collection. The meanings, functions, and residue of such toxicity – how toxicity is produced, sustained, distributed and left as waste—has become a central narrative in our new urban Gothic narratives [...] .The Gothic tropes found in many of our new urban storyworlds are, or act as, bridges between aesthetics politics, popular ideology and psychosocial haunting. This book argues that such a hybrid reinterpretation of the Gothic has emerged and is here to stay. (Millette, “Introduction,” 2020)
As writers like Machen, Stevenson, and Wilde portrayed a city in flux, incomprehensible in its vastness and complexity, this new iteration of post-industrial urban Gothic too reveals the urban landscape to be changeable and unfathomable in the wake of climate change and other modern fears.
The Gothic of the city continues to be a source of inspiration for numerous writers, allowing for explorations of urban alienations, repressed desires, and the presence of a barbaric past within the present. It invites us to confront the unsettling aspects of modern, urban life; it asks us, for example, to question how well we know the people who live and work beside us; it makes us reconsider the spaces we deem safe and those we avoid. Ultimately, urban Gothic tales force us to reassess whether we know the true character of the cities in which we live.
Further reading on Perlego
Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings (2017) edited by Kevin D. Murphy and Lisa Reilly
Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (2018) edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt
London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (2010) Edited by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard
what is urban Gothic in simple terms?
What are some key characteristics of urban Gothic?
What are some examples of urban Gothic texts?
Bibliography
Aldana Reyes, X. (2020) “A Gothic Barcelona?: Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Forgotten Books Series and Franco’s Legacy” in Millette, H-G. and Heholt, R. (eds.) The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:
Alder, E. (2015) “Urban Gothic,” in Hughes, W., Punter, D., and Smith, A. (eds.) The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/993336/the-encyclopedia-of-the-gothic
Arata, S. (1996) Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press.
Breton, R. (2021) The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction. Manchester University Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/2663429/the-penny-politics-of-victorian-popular-fiction
Bowlby, R. (2006) Shopping with Freud. Routledge. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1614162/shopping-with-freud
Cole, S. A. (2009) Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Harvard University Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1147076/suspect-identities
Dickens, C. (2019) Bleak House. Heritage Books. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/2907878/bleak-house
Dittmer, N. C. and Raine, S. (2013) Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror. University of Wales Press. Available at:
Dryden, L. (2003) The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3478917/the-modern-gothic-and-literary-doubles-stevenson-wilde-and-wells
Gasperini, A. (2019) Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:
Gray, D. D. (2010) London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City. Continuum. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/875045/londons-shadows-the-dark-side-of-the-victorian-city
Karschay, S. (2015) Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3487486/degeneration-normativity-and-the-gothic-at-the-fin-de-sicle
Koven, S. (2006) Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton University Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/735982/slumming-sexual-and-social-politics-in-victorian-london
Lloyd-Smith, A. (2004) American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. Continuum. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/818333/american-gothic-fiction-an-introduction
Lombroso, C. (2006) L'uomo delinquente/Criminal Man. Duke University Press Books. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1465805/criminal-man
Machen, A. (2018) The Great God Pan. Endymion Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1886365/the-great-god-pan
Marshall, B. M. (2021) Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature. University of Wales Press. Available at:
Mighall, R. (2007) “Gothic Cities” in Spooner, C. and McEvoy, E. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Routledge. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1606922/the-routledge-companion-to-gothic
Millette, H-G. and Heholt, R. (2020) The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:
Millette, H-G. (2020) “Introduction,” in Millette, H-G. and Heholt, R. (eds.) The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:
Nordau, M. S. (2016) Degeneration. Perlego.
https://www.perlego.com/book/1821690/degeneration
Reynolds, G. W. M. (2014) The Mysteries of London, volume 1. Perlego. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1848503/the-mysteries-of-london-v-14
Ruiz Zafón, C. (2001) The Shadow of the Wind. Penguin.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Book Analysis). (2016) Bright Summaries. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3578677/the-shadow-of-the-wind-by-carlos-ruiz-zafn-book-analysis-detailed-summary-analysis-and-reading-guide
[Rymer, J. M.] (2019) The String of Pearls, or the Barber of Fleet Street. Perlego. Available at:
Stevenson, R. L. (2015) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 3rd edn. Broadview Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/2030514/strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-third-edition-pdf
Thomson, J. (2011) City of Dreadful Night. The Floating Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1303133/city-of-dreadful-night
Walkowitz, J. R. (2013) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. University of Chicago Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1972157/city-of-dreadful-delight-narratives-of-sexual-danger-in-latevictorian-london
Wasson, S. (2013) “Gothic Cities and Suburbs, 1880—Present,” in Byron, G. and Townshend, D. (eds.) The Gothic World. Routledge. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/1611713/the-gothic-world
Wasson, S. (2015) Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3501920/urban-gothic-of-the-second-world-war-dark-london
Wilde, O. (1998)The Picture of Dorian Gray. Broadview Press. Available at:
https://www.perlego.com/book/2030356/the-picture-of-dorian-gray
Filmography
Batman Begins (2005). Directed by Christopher Nolan. Warner Bros.
PhD, English Literature (Lancaster University)
Sophie Raine has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her work focuses on penny dreadfuls and urban spaces. Her previous publications have been featured in VPFA (2019; 2022) and the Palgrave Handbook for Steam Age Gothic (2021) and her co-edited collection Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic was released in 2023 with University of Wales Press.