Dickens’s account of the manifestation of the ghost of Christmas past and Machen’s description of the decomposition (and odd recompositions) of his fin-de-siècle femme fatale Helen Vaughan bear telling similarities and revealing differences. The sense of identity as potentially protean, unstable and incoherent suggests that these two models of the subject (which, given their dates of publication – 1843 and 1894 – are close to bookending the Victorian Gothic) capture an essential aspect of the Gothic form of the period: undecidability. Indeed this most Derridean of terms has played a key role in recent criticism on nineteenth-century Gothic. Julian Wolfreys explored the...

In 1860 George Eliot, already among the most significant of realist writers, found herself turning aside from her work on what would become Romola (1862–3) to focus instead on a smaller novel, Silas Marner (1861). As David Carroll notes, Silas Marner ‘thrust itself’ (Carroll, 1996: viii) rather unannounced into Eliot’s consciousness. This would have been a familiar interjection for Eliot; a year earlier her Gothic short story ‘The Lifted Veil’ had intervened when she was at work on The Mill on the Floss. Silas Marner was not to be a further adventure in the Gothic: rather it was another...

As this reviewer makes explicit, the Victorian sensation novel – here epitomised by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s best-seller Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–2) – is heavily indebted to earlier plots, finding its inspiration in late eighteenth-century Gothic narratives. The well, the waters or the lonely quarry as crime sites are highly symbolic, underlining the importance of depths in Gothic novels and their enduring presence. The search for the secret in sensation novels was, indeed, much modelled on that in its Gothic predecessors. Bodies and texts recording the crimes of the past are buried, dug up and read. However, as this chapter contends, the...

Public executions in the nineteenth century were gruesome and dirty affairs – though also apparently great fun (for a good study, see Gatrell, 1994). The condemned were marched from prison to the gallows through streets thronged with jeering, cheering spectators who gorged on food sold by the wandering street sellers and entertained themselves by throwing a large variety of disgusting missiles at both the prisoners and those guarding them: dead cats were a favourite, but the entrails of slaughtered animals, dung and other excreta, dead fish and vegetable refuse were common projectiles as well. By the time the prisoners actually arrived...

Victorian Gothic drama can most fruitfully be examined by recognising that it was not a ‘pure’ genre, but rather a hybridised form that made use of a number of formulaic ‘Gothic devices’, such as the foreboding or premonitory dream, the uncanny double, the confusion between the real and the fantastic, the devilish villain with quasi-supernatural powers, and the use of cathedrals or exotic locales as settings. Contemporary theoretical writings on the drama of this period are relatively sparse and limited to the overviews written by Archer, Filon, Scott, and James. Critics today tend to claim that the drama of this...

Victorian Gothic needs no more emblematically macabre apogee than a scene in the western section of Highgate cemetery on the night of Tuesday 5 October 1869. By the light of a bonfire that also served to dispel noxious graveyard odours, Charles Augustus Howell, unprincipled Pre-Raphaelite ‘fixer’, watched as two hired gravediggers dug up the coffin of Mrs Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her loving husband, grief-stricken at both the desecration and the negation of his loving gesture in placing his unpublished poems beside her pale beautiful face, could not bring himself to attend. He had read of the deadly vapours and ‘the...

During the nineteenth century, the ghost story developed from an embedded narrative in a novel or miscellany into a distinct genre of short fiction which encompassed the brief, spooky anecdote and the technically elaborate and psychologically sophisticated tale. In writing ghost stories, Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert note that:

A high degree of purely technical skill is essential, both in plotting and in handling description. Hyperbole lays the literary ghost with deadly finality: it gathers strength through obliquity and operates most powerfully on us, in Elizabeth Bowen’s words, ‘through a series of happenings whose horror lies in their being...

The assumption that Gothic became ‘domesticated’ during the Victorian period is now widely accepted. To a certain extent this is true. Prior to Victoria coming to the throne in 1837, the Gothic text was invariably set in mainland Europe (as in the work of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley and Charles Maturin). However, from the 1840s onwards the Gothic comes home to roost, transmogrified as an aspect of the sensation novel and realist fiction. David Punter and Glennis Byron suggest Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady...

Since its inception in the mid eighteenth century and especially during its efflorescence in the late eighteenth century, the Gothic’s engagement with gender-related issues has been pronounced and multifarious. Both female and male writers have consciously and adeptly adopted the Gothic – a form that serves as a barometer of socio-cultural anxieties in its exploration of the dark side of individuals, cultures, and nations – to interrogate socially dictated and institutionally entrenched attitudes and laws relating to gender roles, identities and relations. Indeed, the Gothic, which experienced tremendous market success, was often itself gendered as feminine and consequently vilified as vulgar given...

In the nineteenth century, most Gothic narratives that can be read as having either overtly or covertly queer themes or characters are bound up in familial worries, medical diagnoses (including scientific experimentation) or legal discourses.¹ In many cases, queer Victorian Gothic can simultaneously explore, defend and, on occasion, interrogate these overarching authoritative institutions and systems of power as they were constantly being re-invented and re-inscribed with the goal of shaping the familial, medical and legal paradigms that still constrain us today. The Victorian family – specifically the Victorian middle-class family – was being rigidly defined in strict nuclear, heteronormative terms; thus, in...

Representations of death in the Victorian Gothic are closely aligned to models of subjectivity. How to read death, and the anxieties that it provokes, indicates just how far notions of the self are founded on discourses about death. By the end of the century there emerges a clear separation between ideas of a sustainable (quite possibly post-mortem) inner life and the corrupted and finite physical body. However, before examining this bifurication and its manifestation in Victorian Gothic texts it is necessary to outline how death and subjectivity became related, and this entails an exploration of its roots in the Romantic...

In Joseph Hocking’s novel The Weapons of Mystery (1890), Justin Blake finds himself in thrall to Herod Voltaire, ‘a fiend in human form’. An unscrupulous cosmopolite of mysterious origins, and the narrator’s sworn enemy and rival for the woman he loves, Voltaire has hypnotised him, and now Blake is no longer himself. He has blackouts and hallucinations. He is controlled by Voltaire’s ‘terrible eye’ and his potent ‘will-force’ when they are face to face (Hocking, 1890: 168, 95). What is more, the hypnotist can command Blake from a distance, forcing him to speak and act in accordance with Voltaire’s wishes,...

In an influential 1998 study of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Robert Mighall argues that, as well as persisting as a flourishing literary genre, Gothic had become a functional component of professional medical writing by the time of the Victorian fin de siècle. The rise of a clinical sexology, which relocated the physical and moral basis of human sexual activity away from religion and into the secular discourses of physiology and psychology, was to underwrite a new era in the cultural expression of monstrosity and deviance. Under this fearful regime of human introspection, the devil as a gross external tempter was...

‘Romance is the cry of the time’, novelist Hall Caine declared in 1890 (Caine, 1979: 480). Reacting against fictional realism and its epistemological twin, scientific materialism, many late Victorian writers turned to romanticism and, more specifically, to the themes and literary conventions of Gothic romances. The advocates of romance paradoxically cite as a key reason for its revival its disappearance from the modern world. H. Rider Haggard, for example, lamented the vanishing of ‘the ancient mystery of Africa’. Where, he wondered, ‘will the romance writers of future generations find a safe and secret place, unknown to the pestilent accuracy of...

In Margaret Oliphant’s ‘Old Lady Mary’ (1884) a doctor and a vicar argue about a child’s apparent vision of ghosts. Each is manoeuvring not to claim the phenomenon for his own sphere of expertise, but rather to disclaim the responsibility of pronouncement. This drama of epistemological uncertainty speaks to a wider crisis of knowledge experienced by the late Victorians and produced by the progressive displacement of a religious by a secular worldview throughout the nineteenth century. Suspended between supernatural and scientific explanations of the world, it is little surprising that the fin de siècle should have produced an explosion of...