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Gothic Novel
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It is less difficult to recognize that the attack on Gothic novels in the contemporary press was informed by a conservative political ideology. As the Revolution in France degenerated into the wholesale slaughter of the Terror, which seemed to bury the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, much of the reactionary ruling class in England condemned such democratic ideals as leading inevitably to the complete collapse of society. Gothic novels were politically censured as "the terrorist system of writing", and their authors denounced as Jacobins set on destroying England. Gothic novels were un-English – and un-manly. Even the less demonstrative women novelists were branded as belonging to "the Wollstonecraft school" of early feminsm.
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Since nearly all Gothic novels in this period involve a setting in the past, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the historical from the conventional Gothic romance. Most of the titles in this section either involve actual historical figures, as in I. Stanhope’s The Siege of Kenilworth, or make the historical setting intrinsic to the narrative, as in Charles Maturin’s The Albigenses, although the Cathars of this last seem more like eighteenth-century Deistic protestants than medieval heretics. In complete opposition to the historical record the Albigensians here defend themselves successfully but in so doing they reveal the whig tendency in much gothicised historical fiction. Even the seemingly conservative Clara Reeve wrote specifically in relation to history, “My father was an old whig: from him I learned all that I know.” For despite the glamour and chivalry of the Gothic past, the sensitive and rational protagonists of these stories move out of the castle and forward into the future, outfacing the fictional tyrants and overbearing monarchs of the past. In this evocation of a lost world in order to move beyond it, these proto-historical writers prepare the way for Walter Scott’s Waverley of 1814 in which the hero’s romantic
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Gothic novels often deal with the past in some form. This can mean anything from that the plot takes place in previous centuries, that the setting (a castle, graveyard, church, ancient ruins, etc…) evokes a feeling of history or age, or even that all of the problems that the characters face originated in the past. For example, the mistakes of a father come back to harm his daughter years later or old family secrets return to cause family members a number of problems. The past does not just reappear for background information, but it is “secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story.” 7
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"The Gothic Literature Page is intended to provide students and scholars of the Gothic novel access to the growing number of Gothic resources available on the web." Site includes rare Gothic texts from ZITTAW PRESS; critical commentaries, author/work background, academic sources and searchbale Gothic bibliography
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George Moore, novelist, wrote Grasville Abbey, which was serialised as a Gothic romance in Lady’s Magazine from March 1793 to August 1797 in 47 instalments. Its Radcliffian terrors delineate the torments of the Maserini family over two generations as revealed by the hermit, Father Peter at Grasville Abbey. Here Percival Maserini takes refuge with the hapless Clementina, who, he rescued from a convent where she had been confined by her hateful father. The abbey is hardly restful since it is residence to a cacophony of screaming portraits, wandering spooks and spectres, which turn out to have been the invention of the anchorite Father Peter to scare those opposing the authority of Maserini’s odious cousin Count D’Ollifont.
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Gothic Novel