by Matt Cardin
Sean Moreland
See also: Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Gothic Poetry; Part Three, Reference Entries: Brown, Charles Brockden; The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Psychological Horror; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Vampires; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Addison, Joseph. [1712] 2000. “Joseph Addison (1672–1719), The Spectator, No. 419 (1712).” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 104–107. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Bloom, Clive. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crawford, Joseph. 2013. Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Dennis, John. [1704] 2000. “John Dennis (1657–1734), The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704).” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 100–104. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
HORROR IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
As the nineteenth century began, it seemed, at least in Europe, to mark a new beginning following the upheaval of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s empire, which occupied Europe until 1815. America was relatively unconcerned with such developments, which seemed distant in spite of their repercussions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United States seemed relatively well settled after its own revolution, in spite of seething disputes between the North and South that would remain in uneasy balance for the first sixty years of the century, the continuing conquest and taming of the West providing a safety-valve of sorts.
France was not done with revolutions yet—it was to have two more in 1830 and 1848, and another, albeit brief and localized, in 1871—and other European nations, even when they kept the lid on ever-seething domestic social upheavals, were by no means done with international wars, the Crimean War providing a particularly bloody midcentury interlude, and the traumatic reverberations of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 extending beyond France, especially in their apparent implications as to the probable shape of wars to come. The imaginative significance of those two European wars and the American Civil War of 1861–1865 went far beyond the political questions they appeared to settle temporarily, by virtue of the innovative newspaper reportage that brought the horrors of war to the domestic hearth in an unprecedented fashion and complemented their dire reality with a new urgency that sowed fear for the future as well as horror.
The news in question revealed, all too clearly, that war was something that affected civilians as well as soldiers in devastating fashion, and that as weaponry became more powerful, civilians were being moved ever closer to the battle lines as increasingly easy cannon fodder. Writing about the horrors of war became much more intimate and immediate in the nineteenth century, not merely because the images of death and devastation became sharper but because they became much closer in time and space. For the first time, people began to produce fictional images of wars that were historically very recent, or even still in progress, sometimes even yet to come. Such fiction is not generally categorized as “horror fiction” because that genre tends to be defined primarily in terms of supernatural horror and the horror of psychological aberration, but no shift in the spectrum of horror, considered in its broadest sense, can occur without reverberations in other parts of the spectrum.
Supernatural horror fiction did not slide toward oblivion as the spectrum of real horrors began to take a much greater place in the popular imagination—after war, the most newsworthy topic by far was murder, the more gruesome the better, and murder involving passion and rape the best of all—but it did mutate, as it had to do, to adapt to the new imaginative ambience. To some extent it did so by absorption; as the news suffered from the effects of melodramatic inflation, having to pile on increasing amounts of agony to procure the same level of shock and awe, so horror fiction reached for new extremes of gruesomeness, passion, and violation, but it was hampered and shackled in so doing by standards of literary decency. Even the news was censored of actualities too nasty to be reported, but fiction, devoid of the justification of accurate reportage, was more severely constrained by prudishness.
Inevitably, therefore, the most prominent strategy of adaptation was not a matter of taking real horrors aboard, but a matter of seeking and discovering oblique approaches to stimulation that could achieve telling effects without too much crudity. Even in France, which did not suffer from English Victorianism or American prudishness, the Marquis de Sade’s reckless indulgence in the horrors of rape and cruelty remained banned throughout the century, and it required special circumstances for a catalogue of physical atrocities like the one featured in Louise Michel’s Les Microbes humains (1886; translated as The Human Microbes) to slip through the net. The supernatural was, in that regard, something of a literary refuge, offering abundant scope for the creation of horror by implication, but it did not take long for writers to begin to exploit the inevitable hesitation of any character confronted with apparently supernatural manifestations, as to whether they were to be construed as objective facts or as symptoms of madness—or, in the most sophisticated works of all, the hesitation over whether that supposed difference ultimately really matters.
Against the background of this overall pattern of evolution, the Gothic novel was already doomed by the time the nineteenth century began. One of the first reflections of the developments of the philosophical and literary movement of romanticism, it had already reached its peak in the 1790s and was entering a phase of decline by 1801. The precedents laid down by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis were still influential, but anyone intending to achieve something new in the genre was required at least to broaden it out somewhat, and in so doing begin its transformation.
Most of the nineteenth-century novels subsequently to be labeled Gothic and established retrospectively as landmark works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), are considerably more sophisticated, psychologically and conceptually, than the eighteenth-century Gothic classics and helped mark a transition toward narrative that aspired both to more profundity and delicacy. Radcliffe, Lewis, and their imitators had given the imaginative lexicon of Gothic horror a new location on the literary map, from which the writers of the nineteenth century were to take selected items of that lexicon in several new directions, often refining its horrific element, both in the detail of its imagery and the imagined subtlety of its psychological effect.
By 1825 the Gothic vogue in Britain was well and truly past, although it lingered in the lowest strata of the marketplace, continuing to fuel “penny dreadfuls” like Varney the Vampire (1845–1847) for some time thereafter. When imported into America in the work of Charles Brockden Brown, it had already undergone a psychological adaptation that fitted it for the kinds of endeavors that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were to carry forward with such artistry, and a similar sophistication occurred, even more flamboyantly, in Germany, largely due to the endeavors of E. T. A. Hoffmann. It was Hoffmann who produced the most crucial exemplars of supernatural horror fiction in the first two decades of the century, not merely in his own country but in France, where his works were enorm
ously popular. Hoffmann was the writer who first blurred the boundaries between manifestation and hallucination so completely that it became impossible to discern, and thus set the direction and the tempo for the development of modern horror fiction.
A Timeline of Horror in the Nineteenth Century
1815
The Battle of Waterloo ends Napoleon’s imperial ambitions for good.
1818
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein establishes one of the key archetypes of modern horror fiction.
1820
Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer brings down the curtain on Gothic horror.
1824
James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner begins the new era of psychological horror in English-language fiction.
1839
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” reaches new depths of psychological symbolism.
1842
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni helps to lay the foundations of the occult revival.
1853–1856
The Crimean War is the first to be extensively reported in newspapers as it happens.
1857
Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal establishes the key exemplar of the Decadent style of consciousness.
1861–1865
The American Civil War brings the horrors of war to the United States.
1870–1871
The Franco-Prussian War ends with the bombardment of Paris and the brief establishment of the Paris Commune.
1886
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde establishes another key archetype of horror fiction, and Louise Michel’s Les Microbes humains illustrates the extent to which no one else was allowed to go in the depiction of fictitious horrors.
1890–1891
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray adds a further petal to the flower of Decadent aesthetics.
1895
Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow imports the Decadent style to American horror fiction, following precedents set by Ambrose Bierce.
1897
Bram Stoker’s Dracula supplies the last of the great nineteenth-century archetypes.
If there is one dominant theme in the post-Gothic weird fiction of the nineteenth century, it is the theme of the dead returning to pester the living, not necessarily literally, but insistently. Some authors stuck to the traditional motives of waiting to reveal the truth of hidden crime and to harry the guilty, but ghostly visitations were often more enigmatic than that, and the fright they caused more heavily impregnated with puzzlement and mystery.
Death had changed its social status in the nineteenth century; funerals, funereal monuments, and mourning became more ostentatious, to the extent that their extravagance could not help but be seen by many as gross hypocrisy. Thus, efforts made to soothe consciences by making more fuss of the dead often inflamed anxiety, and the angry psychological sores that resulted can be seen in the supernatural fiction of the period, as well as the remarkable growth of Spiritualism.
In America, the Fox sisters, who began to open new channels of communication between the forgiving dead and the reassurance-seeking living in 1848, were put on public display by P. T. Barnum. Their career as mediums served as the origin point for the Spiritualist movement, and as the century progressed it became increasingly difficult for people to let the dead rest in peace, especially as they seemed to be clamoring for attention with insistent rappings, levitating tables, and clouds of ectoplasm, while they waited their turn to use the overstrained vocal cords of entranced mediums, who responded as best they could to audiences’ demands to have their guilty anxieties soothed away. Their clients wanted to be told that their loved ones were safe in heaven, and that they—the living—had been forgiven for all their petty trespasses and sins of neglect. Horror fiction, which told a very different story, was the other side of the coin of conscience.
Skeptics fought to demonstrate that the apparitions of Spiritualism were merely products of fevered imagination. If they hoped by that means to drive out anxiety, however, they had mistaken their enemy; sufferers who were convinced that the cause was internal rather than external simply became haunted by demons within rather than demons without. In the nineteenth century the phenomena of madness were brought decisively into the context of medical research and medical explanation, and the idea of “mental illness” achieved its final victory, in order that the fear of the diseased psyche could take on its modern aspect. In stories of derangement written after 1825, therefore, an advancing clinicality was inevitable. The transformation that clinicality wrought sharpened rather than blunted the horrific aspect of tales of disturbing encounters with enigmatic apparitions. The medical association of madness with tertiary syphilis, under the euphemistic label of “general paralysis of the insane,” remained largely submerged in fiction by prudishness, but it lurks beneath the surface of nineteenth-century horror fiction, detectable to the psychoanalytic eye.
Because of its preoccupations with extraordinary extrapolations of guilt and medically defined madness, the history of the horror story throughout the nineteenth century is largely an account of growing introversion, as the moaning specters and deformed monsters of the Gothic were gradually relocated within the psyche, graphically depicted in such archetypes as Robert Louis Stevenson’s monstrous Mr. Hyde, lurking within the personality of the respectable Dr. Jekyll. Where ghosts and monsters retained independent existence, their connection with the people they haunted grew gradually more intimate and at least covertly sexual—a pattern particularly obvious in classic vampire stories from John Polidori, Théophile Gautier, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu to the full flowering of Dracula (1897).
There is nothing surprising in that growing intimacy, given the social dramatization of death and the clinicalization of madness. However the horrid specters of nineteenth-century supernatural fiction manifest themselves, there is something in the mind of their victim that summons them; the eye of the beholder is already prepared to catch sight of them. The Gothic villain, especially in his Byronic mode, was already an ambivalent figure, seductive as well as cruel; after 1825 his literary descendants evolved in two opposed directions, sometimes becoming more human and sometimes surreal, but they retained the power of the predisposition of their victims to be perversely fascinated by their symbolic status and force. There is a third line of development, in which the Gothic villain moves toward heroic status, foreshadowed in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rosicrucian romances, which served as an inspiration to many of the lifestyle fantasies of the occult revival that played such a prominent role in British and European (particularly French) culture during the Victorian period.
Brian Stableford
See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Part Three, Reference Entries: Baudelaire, Charles; Bierce, Ambrose; Brown, Charles Brockden; Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Chambers, Robert W.; Dracula; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Gautier, Théophile; Gothic Hero/Villain; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; The King in Yellow; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Maturin, Charles Robert; Melmoth the Wanderer; Penny Dreadful; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Psychological Horror; Radcliffe, Ann; Shelley, Mary; Spiritualism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.
Further Reading
Frayling, Christopher. 1996. Nightmare: The Birth of Horror. London: BBC Books.
Hennessy, Brendan. 1979. “The Gothic Novel.” In British Writers, vol. 3, edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert, 324–346. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Prot
estant Tradition. London: Macmillan.
Scarborough, Dorothy. 1917. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York: Putnam.
Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum.
HORROR FROM 1900 TO 1950
Culturally, socially, and artistically, the first decade or so of the twentieth century in America and Britain actually belonged to the nineteenth. It was effectively an extension of the Victorian Age, and this holds equally true for the significant horror literature of the period. In 1900, Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) Dracula was three years old. Robert W. Chambers’s (1865–1933) groundbreaking The King in Yellow was five years old. As the new century was beginning, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories of the late 1800s, wrote a variety of weird and ghostly stories. Indeed, his Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, published in 1901, is rich with a Gothic atmosphere and seems to promise the supernatural before its rationalized resolution.
The turn of the century saw the emergence of a number of significant new horror authors in Britain. One of the most important new writers of the age was M. R. James (1862–1936), who had been reading his ghost stories aloud to friends and groups of schoolboys (he was a British scholar and academic, later Provost of Eton) since about 1893. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, appeared in 1904, and others followed, with all of them ultimately assembled as the still-standard Collected Ghost Stories (1931). James’s hallmark was a refined subtlety of technique, in which a series of clues and hints usually led to an explicit (and often distressingly physical) encounter with some menace from the past better left buried. His work represented the highest development of the classical English ghost story, and it has been enormously influential on a whole school of followers and on such moderns as Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman. A contemporary and similar figure was E. F. Benson (1867–1940), who is best known today for social comedies comparable to those of P. G. Wodehouse, but whose ghost stories, beginning with the collection The Room in the Tower (1912), form a significant and surprising appendage to his main career.