The Mysteries of Udolpho

by Ann Radcliffe

  3. toilet: dressing room, with echoes in the satirical phrase ‘the throne of her homage’, which follows, of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712), I. 121–39.

  4. cotillons: Country-style dances for six or eight. They originated in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

  CHAPTER XIII

  1. [Thomson] Castle of Indolence: I.xxx.

  2. the latter: Valancourt.

  3. whole countries extend between the regions… exist!: Languedoc, for example, was French, but Roussillon belonged to Spain, as did Lombardy (Milan), while Venice was an independent state. How borders between countries were demarcated is now not easy to ascertain. Local inhabitants knew who was in control and to whom their taxes were due. Travellers who used Charles Estienne’s guide (La Guide des chemins de France, 1552) found stones engraved with coats of arms in place at boundaries between provinces. In the eighteenth century it was common practice for members of the British aristocracy and gentry, particularly young males with their tutors, to make the Grand Tour of Europe, reaching Venice and ultimately Rome via the Alps, and remaining on the Continent for a lengthy period, from months up to two or three years. In various comments, such as the one in Chapter III, about ‘a want of convenient inns’ in the Pyrenees, Radcliffe is obviously drawing on travellers’ experiences. For details about travelling at this time, see Antoni Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe, pp. 24–6, 111–12.

  VOLUME II

  CHAPTER I

  1. Goldsmith [The Traveller]: ll. 7–8.

  2. Mount Cenis: Massif and pass over the French Alps to Italy – an invasion route from earliest times.

  3. Hannibal’s passage over the Alps… St Bernard: Hannibal (247–183 BC) was the greatest general of the city of Carthage (now Tunis) on the north coast of Africa. Carthage was engaged in a series of wars with Rome from the middle of the third century to the middle of the second century BC. Early in the second of these Punic Wars, Hannibal, with 60,000 men and a few elephants, took the enemy Roman army by surprise using the daring strategy of crossing the Pyrenees, France and the Alps and entering Italy, perhaps via the Mount Cenis pass. Many Carthaginians were killed in the Alps by snow, cold and fierce mountain tribes – a scene depicted in J. M. W. Turner’s Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1810–12), which reputedly was prompted by Radcliffe’s painterly description. However, Turner’s whirling vortex-like snowstorm makes everything indistinct. The sublime infinitude of the ‘tremendous cliffs’ which so astonishes Emily, prompting her vision of the army, is perhaps better captured in John Martin’s very romantic oil The Bard (1817). Although Hannibal is not its professed subject, this painting depicts a huge army ‘winding among the defiles’ of a vast alpine terrain. For a discussion of the figuring of Hannibal in travel literature, including the comment of Thomas Gray which seems to have inspired Radcliffe, see Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography (Manchester and York: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 193–5. For Gray’s comment on Hannibal’s passage through the Alps as a fit subject for the painter Salvator Rosa (‘Hannibal passing the Alps; mountaineers rolling down rocks upon his army; elephants tumbling down the precipices’) see The Poems of Mr Gray, to Which are Prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings, ed. William Mason (London, printed by A. Ward, and sold by J. Dodsley and J. Todd, York: 1775), p. 305.

  4. conversazioni: Conversations; parties for the purpose of elegant and witty talk. In a letter to his mother from Florence on 19 March 1740, Thomas Gray wrote that the evenings of a Florentine Lent, after a day of ‘fish and meagre diet’, were composed of ‘what is called a Conversazione, a sort of assembly at the principal people’s houses, full of I cannot tell what’. See The Works of Thomas Gray, Vol. II, ed. John Mitford (London: Bell and Daldy, 1858), pp. 92–3.

  5. the Carnival at Venice: Carnevale Venuto, a period of revelry and merrymaking, began on Quinquagesima Sunday and ended on Shrove Tuesday (that is, in the week before Lent). Radcliffe’s descriptions are of eighteenth-century Venice, which spent its wealth on pageants, concerts and il Carnevale, which lasted for six months every year.

  CHAPTER II

  1. [Shakespeare] Midsummer Night’s Dream: II.i.140–41.

  2. the convulsed state of their country: See note 4 to Vol. I, Ch. II.

  3. the Brenta: An Italian river, north of Venice, which flows into the Adriatic sea.

  4. the palaces of Sansovino and Palladio: The Renaissance architects Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570) and Andrea Palladio (1508–80) designed several of the beautiful public buildings in Venice, but not ‘palaces’ (palazzos or palazzi) there. Radcliffe follows Mrs Hester Thrale Piozzi, who, in her Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1789), had mistakenly asserted that ‘Palladio’s palaces serve to adorn the Grand Canal’ (Vol. I, p. 160).

  5. silver tripods, depending from chains: A lamp with three metal rods or ‘legs’ projecting upward and outward and attached to three chains suspended from a central fixture on the ceiling. Early in the first chapter of Vol. III, Barnadine lights a tripod lamp which is standing on stairs in the east wing of Udolpho. However, one critic of Radcliffe, writing in the Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797, sneeringly commented that ‘she suspends tripods from the ceiling by chains, not knowing that a tripod is a utensil standing upon three feet’. His comments are reproduced in full in Clara Frances McIntyre’s Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 53.

  6. the goddess of spleen: A character in Canto IV of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

  7. the verses of Ariosto: Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) spent many years in the service of Duke Alfonso I of Este, whose family or house he exalted in his poem Orlando Furioso (1532), which is considered the greatest of the Italian romantic epics.

  8.‘those faint traces… past’: Unidentified.

  CHAPTER III

  1. [Shakespeare] Julius Cæsar: I. ii.202–9.

  2.‘Strike up… attention!’: Unidentified.

  3. Cynthia’s ray: Cynthia is a poetic name for the moon personified as a goddess. In classical mythology, the goddess of the moon, Artemis or Diana, is said to have been born on Mount Cynthus, hence this alternative name.

  4. canzonettes: Short, light, part songs for several voices; madrigals.

  5. Casino: A private assembly room or club. In the eighteenth century many of these were places of sexual licence and gambling, but Count Morano’s casino appears to be more respectable. Mrs Piozzi, in her Observations and Reflections, speaks of Quirini’s Casino in Venice, at which ‘all literary topics are pleasingly discussed’, and which she likens to Dr Johnson’s ‘literary club’ (Vol. I, pp. 179, 205).

  6. zendaletto: Diminutive of zendale (meaning a shawl or veil). According to the OED, ‘a long piece of cloth falling from the back of the hood of a gondola into the water; hence the gondola itself ’. Radcliffe takes the term from Mrs Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections. In the sixteenth century gondolas became a status symbol. To prevent rivalry, in 1562 laws were passed that all gondolas except those used for state occasions should be painted black; a family could show its colours on the mooring poles. By the late seventeenth century there were 10,000 gondolas in Venice.

  7. The scenes of the Illiad illapsed… to her fancy: Scenes about the war waged against Troy to recover Helen, wife of Menelaus; ‘illapsed’ – sank or glided in, permeated.

  8. Ilion’s plains: The Trojan plain.

  9. fane: temple.

  10. cruise: Cruse, earthen vessel for liquids, drinking vessel. See Collins, ‘Eclogue the Second: Hassan; or the Camel-Driver’, l. 3: ‘One Cruise of Water on his Back he bore’, in Oriental Eclogues. Written originally for the Entertainment of the ladies of Tauris. And now translated (1757), originally published as Persian Eclogues in 1742. Radcliffe appears to have been influenced by Collins�
��s Oriental Eclogues in the writing of her ‘Stanzas’.

  11. Aurora: Roman goddess of the dawn.

  12. scite: Site.

  13. Scamander: A river (now the Menderes su) of the Trojan plain; also a Greek river god, son of Oceanus and Tethys.

  14. ‘That from… sight’: Thomson, Britannia (1729), ll. 16–17; ‘Even not yon sail, that from the sky-mixed wave’ (l. 16) in the original.

  15. ‘Softened into silence’: Unidentified.

  16. ‘The sailor… wave’: Thomson, The Seasons. ‘Winter’, ll. 137–8; ‘With him the sailor soothes’ (l. 137) in the original.

  CHAPTER IV

  1. Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Winter’]: l. 364.

  2. took the fresco: Took the (fresh, open) air.

  3. she felt it would be mean: ‘Mean’ here is used in the sense of ‘improper’ or ‘ignoble’.

  CHAPTER V

  1. Collins’ ‘Ode to Fear’: ll. 53–7; ‘lest thou meet’ (l. 56) in the original.

  2. latin sails: Lateen sails. A lateen sail is triangular and suspended by a long yard at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the mast. The term ‘Latin sail’ (voile latine) was an allusion to its use in the Mediterranean.

  3. Italian revenge: Radcliffe follows Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwright John Webster in linking Italy with strong passions, intrigue and murder. Unlike Walpole’s Manfred in The Castle of Otranto, who alternately lusts and repents, Montoni never displays remorse and is described as ‘a stranger to pity and fear’. The ‘delirium of Italian love’ is alluded to in Vol. IV, Ch. XVII.

  4. Campagna: Level plains, countryside; also used of the region around Rome, famous for its idyllic countryside.

  5. ‘green delights’: Collins, ‘Eclogue the Second’, l. 25.

  6. curtain: Curtain wall – a plain wall connecting two towers in a fortress.

  7. briony: An English plant name of genus Bryonia, especially the common wild species which has red or white flowers.

  8. beaver: The lower part of a face-guard of a helmet, when worn with a visor, but sometimes serving the purposes of both. Radcliffe’s phrase echoes Horatio’s description of the ghost in Hamlet (I.ii.230): ‘he wore his beaver up’.

  CHPATER VI

  1. [Shakespeare] Julius Cæsar: IV.iii.276–8.

  2. regatta: Annette is referring to a boat race held on the Grand Canal in Venice in which Ludovico participated.

  3. Orlandos… Black-a-moors… Charly-Charly-magne: Mrs Piozzi, in her Observations and Reflections, speaks of the literary knowledge of the gondoliers and their singing of the old romances. She is delighted to hear the gondolieri singing of ‘the flight of Erminia from Tasso’s Jerusalem’ (Vol. I, pp. 174–5). Ludovico is depicted as such a gondolier. In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Orlando assists the Frankish king Charlemagne to fight against the Moorish (‘Black-a-moor’) king Agramante.

  4. But a terror of this nature… the object, from which we appear to shrink: Radcliffe frequently makes the reader aware of the aesthetic basis of her art. Utilizing the theories of Edmund Burke and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, she uses mysteriousness and obscurity creatively to raise suspense and link it to sublime terror. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): ‘To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary’ (facsimile edn New York: Garland Publishing, 1971, p. 99). Also Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ in Miscellaneous Pieces (1773): ‘A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch’ (3rd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1792, p. 125).

  5. Horror occupied her mind: In ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, published posthumously in New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (No. 16 (1826), pp. 145–52), Radcliffe contrasted terror and horror as follows:

  Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil?

  Unlike Matthew Lewis, author of the sensational gothic novel The Mon k (1796), which he wrote in response to Udolpho, Radcliffe generally avoids explicit, graphic descriptions of horror.

  6. Condottieri: Mercenary troops, or captains of such; Montoni is a condottiere. Because of their commercial and cultural interests, urban Italians at this time were reluctant to engage in military pursuits and employed mercenary troops to do their fighting. These troops either were composed of brigand-like adventurers or were the subjects of the smaller states with their prince, who let himself out on hire with his army, at times to the highest bidder. The condottieri seem to have prolonged wars while involving themselves in as little real action and danger as possible. See H. M. Vernon (K. Dorothea Ewart), Italy from 1494 to 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), p. 15. Radcliffe comments on the origins of ‘condottieri’ (from ‘condotta’, Italian for ‘contract’) in Vol. III, Ch. III.

  7. ideal terrors: ‘Terrors confined to thought or imagination; imaginary, opposite to real or actual. Hence sometimes not real or actual; based on idea or fancy. Gibbon, Decline and Fall (1776) I.x.272: “They despised the ideal terrors of a foreign superstition”’ (OED).

  8. with a repulsive gesture: Tending to repel or push away by physical gesture or coldness of manner, as in Vol. III, Ch. VII, of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: ‘she… repulsively quitting my assisting hand’.

  9. to regulate her conduct by the nicest laws: To follow only those codes which are refined or cultured; see also ‘so nice a subject’ in Ch. VII.

  CHAPTER VII

  1. Milton [Comus]: ll. 208–9; ‘And aery tongues’ in the original; ‘Of ’ picked up from the previous line.

  2. sequin: An Italian gold coin (originally Venetian) worth about nine shillings (OED).

  CHAPTER VIII

  1. Shakespeare [Antony and Cleopatra]: III.xiii.20–21; ‘upon him’ in the original.

  2. petits soupers: Intimate or informal suppers.

  3. herself a scientific performer: The Countess Lacleur plays an instrument or sings with methodical skill.

  4. had often deep play at her house: Allowed ruinous gambling. The term ‘deep play’ is repeated in Vol. III, Ch. XIII. Gambling was an integral part of eighteenth-century life and of great importance in France. There gambling occurred ‘in respectable houses on the footing of an assembly, where the banker paid the lady of the house for the privilege of fleecing her guests’. See Jeremy Black, The British and The Grand Tour (London, Sydney, Dover, New Hampshire: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 117; also pp. 116, 118–19.

  CHAPTER IX

  1. [Shakespeare] King John: IV.ii.71–3.

  2. ‘steal the lark’s wing, and mount the swiftest gale’: James Cawthorn, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, l.60. His Poems, first published in 1771, are virtually unknown today. Rictor Norton (Mistress of Udolpho, p. 197), in discussing Radcliffe’s conscious use of scenery corresponding to psychological mood, alludes to her use of one of Cawthorn’s poems in her The Romance of the Forest.

  CHAPTER X

  1. Sayers [Moina: A Tragedy]: II, ll. 224–7; ‘Shall no tear wet the grave / where Moina lies?’ in the original. A practising physician, Frank Sayers (1763–1817) was a member of a Norwich literary circle. Perhaps under the influence of Ossian (see note 3 to Vol. III, Ch. V), he was attracted to unrimed verse. Moina: A Tragedy is in unrimed Pindaric stanzas.

  2. reigning Doge: ‘Doge’ was the title of rulers of Venice from 697 to 1797.

  3. that sort of Venice glass… poisoned liquor: An allusion to the reputation of Venetian drinking glasses of the Middle Ages, taken up by Byron in The Two Foscari (1821) when h
e has the Doge say, ‘ ’Tis said that our Venetian crystal has / Such pure antipathy to poison, as / To burst, if aught of venom touches it’ (V.i).

  CHAPTER XI

  1. Sayers [Moina: A Tragedy]: II, l. 140.

  CHAPTER XII

  1. Shakespeare [Measure for Measure]: V.i.115–18.

  VOLUME III

  CHAPTER I

  1. [Shakespeare] Macbeth: III. i.128–30.

  2. she fell senseless at the foot of the couch: The second occasion when Emily has been overcome by horror in contrast to terror (see note 5 to Vol. II, Ch. VI). The striking similarity of this explicit description to the former teasing one of Emily’s unveiling of the portrait which ‘was no picture’ is a deliberate device to fuel readers’ speculation that what Emily had previously seen was a skeleton, perhaps of the missing Lady Laurentini. In Jane Austen’s partly parodic Northanger Abbey (Vol. I, Ch. VI), this is what Catherine Morland believes Emily has seen.

  3. ‘For since my father died… forsakes me’: Emily, in her distracted state, echoes Ophelia, whose madness is ‘the poison of deep grief ’ at the loss of both father and lover in Hamlet, IV.v.