Course:LIBR548F/2009WT1/Gothic Literature and Publishing In 19th Century England

Definition

Gothic literature is a genre of fiction that saw a proliferation in its writing and publishing in England between its beginnings in 1764 and the end of its most active period around 1840. What is considered the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (published in 1764), helped introduce Gothic literature’s defining characteristics which were in the beginning a “… feudal historical and architectural setting, the deposed noble heir and the ghostly, supernatural machinations.”[1] The genre also contained “…geographically and temporally displaced settings, the emphasis on terror or horror, the exploitation of the supernatural and most importantly, techniques of literary suspense.”[2] The term “Gothick”, used by Walpole in his Castle of Otranto was not coined by him, but was in common usage and part of the British lexicon much earlier.[3] Just as it was used to contrast the values of contemporary England, the Gothic was seen as and used as a term throughout history for something that was contrary to the classical/Roman ideal and to whatever the contemporary values were of the time.[3]

The Origin of “Gothic”

Usage of the term Goth and variations of it can be found throughout literary history from As You Like It, The Dunicad and The School Master to name just a few.[3] The first known mention of the Goths in literature came in AD 98, in Tacitu’s Germania.[3] In 1776, Edward Gibon (referred to as the “great historian of the enlightenment”) uses the term “Gothic” in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire where he attributes the overthrow of the Roman Empire to the Goths who originated from a region in Eastern Germany and whose language, is now extinct.[3] Archaeological evidence places the Goths around Baltic Sea and shows that they migrated down to the Black Sea before the 3rd century AD. Gibbon maintained that the Goths took the province of Dacia from the Romans and while the Goths would later represent an ancient and bygone time and set of values, during the time of the Roman Empire they were seen as a threat to Roman values much the same way segments of British society would see the Gothic literature genre some two thousand years later.[3] Until the Renaissance, the term Goth in Italy was associated with destruction and invasion and did not become a positive term until Vasari labeled all architecture before Brunelleschi as Gothic as opposed to the contemporary view that the architecture of bygone eras was “barbarian.”[3]

Societal Factors Leading to the Genre’s Popularity

Near the end of the 1700s, the Gothic tradition or ideal was used to contrast British society to that of revolutionary France by contrasting the Gothic traditions supposedly evidenced in France with the more ordered and structured contemporary British society.[1] “Gothic” was “referred to at the start of the century to connote the barbaric and the wild – as in things post-Roman and medieval – eventually the term “Gothic” became an antonym for “classical”.”[4] Not too far into the 1800s however, one sees at least a portion of contemporary British society beginning to regard the Gothic more favorably. Due to the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850), British society was seeing a quick and massive shift from “… feudal to commercial practices…” leading to anxiety and the fascination with the Gothic became a way of both exercising and escaping these anxieties.[1] “The taste for the sublime – in literature, art, and natural scenery – opposed the neoclassical virtues of order, reason, and beauty; it also valued the neoclassical vices – obscurity, terror, confusion, transgressed and open boundaries and excess of all kinds but especially of subjective feeling.”[4]

Gothic Publishing

The most active period of the genre’s publishing was between 1800 and 1835. Some believe that the genre ends around 1820 and argue that the genre began to lose reader interest around 1820 and contest that Gothic fiction “suffered from verbal exhaustion, seeing only momentarily the artistic brilliance that the genre had enjoyed before.”[2] These people may be responding to the increased popularity of the genre and those that sought to exploit this popularity for financial gain through Gothic bluebooks and Gothic tales which were imitations and abridged versions of original Gothic novels and quickly written stories of an arguably lesser quality. Whether one sees the genre as being confined to a specific period in history or as continuing on, one can consider 1764-1830 the heyday of the Gothic fiction genre.[2]

Gothic Novels

While there were Gothic novels published between 1764 and 1800, it would seem that out of the 342 listed in the appendixes in Gothic Publishing 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade that the bulk of them were published between 1800 and 1820.[2] Some of the more notable Gothic novels are The Castle of Otranto (1764), Frankenstein (1818), Wuthering Heights (1847), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Monk (1796), and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).

Gothic Bluebooks

Gothic bluebooks or chapbooks as they were also called were “cheaply printed” and “… were often, but not invariably, 36- or 72-page redactions or abridgements of full-length Gothic novels illustrated with crude woodcuts” and “sold for sixpence or a shilling, these books found a ‘new reading public’ that could not afford the high subscription rates at circulating libraries.”[2] There were 350 of these published between 1799 and 1835 with the majority of them being published between 1820-1830.[2]

Gothic Tales

Gothic tales were similar to Gothic bluebooks in that they were often seen as copies of Gothic novels but where the bluebooks have been referred to as a “subliterary industry”, the Gothic tales were published in some of the mainstream periodicals of the day and would have been either treated as serials or much shorter Gothic stories.[2] These too seem to enjoy an increase in publishing with the slowing down of the publishing of Gothic novels. Between 1800 and 1834, 300 Gothic tales were published in England with the bulk of them being published between 1820 and 1830.[2]

References

[1] Fred Botting, In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture in A Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter,(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000),3-7.

[2] Franz J. Potter, The History of Gothic Publishing 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),1-4,152-189.

[3] Robin Sowerby, The Goths in History and Pre-Gothic Gothic in A Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000),15-23.

[4] Matthew Brennan, The Gothic Psyche: Disintegration and Growth In Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Columbia: Camden House, 1997),1-5,37,77.