Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era

¹ As Michael Gamer in particular has argued, however, Wordsworth's new critical enterprise involved him divorcing himself from the Gothic genre which he had previously, albeit unsuccessfully, explored by writing Gothic dramas. Gamer explores the contradictions in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Wollstonecraft's criticism of the Gothic in "Gothic fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain." Here, he warns: "Such a reading, however, would demand we exercise selective memory and require we overlook that these same writers in these same years produced recognizably Gothic texts" (Gamer, 2002: 89).
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² Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in different significations by examples from the best writers, to which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar. 2 vols. (London: Knapton; T. and T. Longman, C. Hithch and L. Hawes; A. Millar, and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755), vol. II.
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³ As Fred Botting argues elsewhere in this collection, "Gothic machinery, in rationalising and mechanising supernatural occurrences and readerly superstition, establishes a cycle of repetition, boredom, stimulation and disappointment that threatens enlightenment ideals of the rational and discriminating individual."
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⁴ I am grateful to my colleague Dr Richard Steadman-Jones from the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield for assistance with this.
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⁵ The coupling of extravagance with France continued elsewhere in literary battles. For example, when reviewing Edmund Burke's 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Monthly Review criticised what it viewed as Burke's descent into French rhetorical embellishments: "he no sooner crosses the Channel, than he throws off the brown bob, and plain broad-cloth of British argument, to array himself in the powdered bag, and embroidered silk, of French declamation" (Monthly Review, 3, (1790) 321).
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⁶ Lara published two translated novels in 1796, the above and Louis de Boncoeur. A Domestick Tale (London: Ridgway, 1796). Although Arthur Aikin in the Monthly Review praised the latter for the "considerable merit" of its translation, the Critical concentrated on the extravagance of French sentiment in both translations, noting of the latter that "The language of genuine sensibility and affection is very distinct from this extravagance, which may produce affectation or provoke disgust, but will never touch the heart" (Critical Review, 18 December, 1796), p. 474.
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⁷ T.J.Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, (London, 1798).
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⁸ Cf. Chapter 3 of E.J. Clery's The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762-1800 for a detailed analysis of the "illegitimacy" issue in Walpole's two Prefaces (1995: 60-67). In "Ideal Presence and Gothic Romance" in Gothic Studies 1/1 Robert Miles also provides a detailed analysis of the implications of Walpole's two prefaces in relation to Kames's theory of "ideal presence" (1999: 21-23).
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⁹ Cf. also Paul Keen's The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s for a full analysis of the mounting concern of the demise of the republic of letters in Britain.
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¹⁰ On the imitative trend that gave rise to such satirical articles as the ones I am about to discuss, E.J. Clery correctly argues that "The hothouse productivity of the 1790s meant that the initial reading of a Gothic novel was not unlikely to be the equivalent of reading half a dozen others" (Clery, 1995: 142). Edward Jacobs also cites Mary Alcock's "A Receipt for Writing a Novel" in Roger Lonsdale's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (Jacobs, 2000: 199).
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¹¹ Cf also Sue Chaplin's "Romance and Sedition in the 1790s: Radcliffe's The Italian and the Terrorist Text" in Romanticism 7 (2) 2001: 177-90. Chaplin's article also addresses "Terrorist Novel Writing" in relation to the law and unregulated consumption.
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¹² The Ghost, edited by Felix Phantom. Edinburgh: Mudie, 1796. The Critical Review commented on the appearance of this periodical that, "Most of the papers are of a very flimsy texture, - the wit very thinly scattered, and the sentiments trite and common" Critical Review, 18, (December, 1796).
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¹³ Cf. also Fred Botting's argument on the "Gothicization" of Thomas Mathias's Pursuits in "Power in the Darkness: Heterotopias, Literature and Gothic Labyrinths" in Genre 26, 2-3, Summer/Fall, 1993, pp. 253-282.
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