The Haunted Castle

A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism

Eino Railo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429614347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Published in 1927: The purpose of the present work is consequently to serve as a guide to English horror-romanticism and by presenting the chief materials used by it and grouping them according to the various themes employed, to show how the main romantic movement that began at the turn of the century and is represented in all shorter expositions of the subject as a suddenly bursting wave, as a kid of spontaneous revolution, is in all essentials the outcome of an organic development with widely spread roots that penetrate deep into the past.

NOTES

(1) A portrait of Walpole accompanies the 1907 edition (Chatto & Windus) which I have used. He was refined to the point of effeminacy. “He always entered a room in a style of affected delicacy, chapeau bras between his hands, knees bent and feet on tiptoe. He usually dressed in lavender, with partridge silk stockings and gold buckles, and with lace ruffles and frill.” R. Garnett and E. Gosse : English Literature, III, p. 367 (1903). A fine edition de luxe (containing also The Mysterious Mother), with a preface by Montague Summers, was issued by Constable in 1924 (vide article by E. Gosse in The Sunday Times, Nov. 2). The above description of Walpole hails originally from Letitia Matilda Hawkins’s Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, and Memoirs, where pp. 87-`117 and 307–312 are devoted to Walpole. The father of this author, Sir John Hawkins, was a friend and neighbour of Walpole and wrote the biography of Doctor Johnson which was so severely handled by Boswell. She gives the further information regarding Walpole’s personal appearance : “His figure was … not merely tall, but more properly long, and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness.” Quoted from De Quincey’s article Anecdotage.

(2) The cause of the quarrel was Walpole’s inability to refrain from boasting of his position as the son of the omnipotent minister. In any case they were not well-matched travelling companions; Walpole danced and amused himself, while Gray studied Art and Music. Later they were reconciled and Walpole acknowledged himself to have been at fault. E. Gosse : Gray, pp. 43–44.

(3) “Gothic, a term of reproach, synonymous with barbarous, lawless and tawdry.” W. L. Phelps : The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, p. 15 (1893).

(4) Scott makes good-natured fun of this description in The Antiquary. Mr. Oldbuck’s find, a stone with what he takes to be an important ancient inscription, appears in much the same way as that of “Bil Stumps His Mark” in Pickwick Papers.

(5) A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, 1768. I have not had the opportunity of reading this work. Descriptions of Walpole’s villa are included in all works written about him, amongst which I would mention Austin Dobson : Eighteenth Century Vignettes (undated), “A Day at Strawberry Hill,” pp. 206–217, 2nd ed. A picture of Strawberry Hill is given by Garnett and Gosse. The most exhaustive source is Paul Yvon’s book La Vie d’un Dilettante, Book IV, pp. 487–646; “Walpole ‘gothicisant’”; p. 551 : “Strawberry Hill et le Château d’Otranto, le roman de Walpole, sont donc, selon la volonté de leur créateur, indissolublement liés”

(6) “Gray and Horace Walpole exceeded all their English contemporaries in the composition of charmingly picturesque familiar letters.” (Garnett and Gosse, op. cit., III, p. 363.) Information regarding Walpole : the work by Dobson mentioned in the preceding note; Sir Walter Scott : The Lives of the Novelists (1821), originally published as an introduction to Ballantyne’s edition of The Castle of Otranto (1811) and included with the latter in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library, Part V; my own copy is from the Everyman’s Library Series, London, pp. 188–203; Henry A. Beers: A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 229–243 and 249–255 (1906); Oliver Elton : A Survey of English Literature, 1780–1830, I, p. 203; Wilbur L. Cross : Development of the English Novel, pp. 101–103 (1911); Fr. Hovey Stoddard : The Evolution of the English Novel, p. 95 (1913); Helene Richter : Geschichte der Englischen Romantik, I, pp. 172–191 (1911); Austin Dobson : Eighteenth Century Studies, pp. 166–177; Dictionary of English Biography; Macaulay : Critical and Historical Essays, in which is a murderous criticism of Walpole as a politician and an author; Chambers’s Cyclopæedia of English Literature (1901); Henrik Schück : Allmän litteraturhistoria, V, pp. 372–376; P. v. Tieghem : Le mouvement romantique, 2nd ed., Paris (1923).

The most noteworthy and exhaustive sources of information regarding Walpole are Paul Yvon’s La Vie d’un Dilettante; Horace Walpole, 1717–1797; Essai de Biographie psychologique et littéraire (XV + 872 pages, large 8vo); and his Horace Walpole as a Poet (XV + 217) (1924), both of which I have utilized. The passage relating to Hurd has been compiled from the text-books mentioned and the preface written by Montague Summers. Schück declares Walpole to have been ignorant of medievalism.

(7) Biographies of Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe are included in Scott’s Lives of the Novelists; as a rule they are mentioned in the same text-books as Walpole; in Richter’s history much space has been devoted to them (pp. 191–197 and 219–239). The versions of their works used by me are included in Ballantyne’s Library (this does not include Gaston de Blondeville). Amongst the critical essays dealing with Mrs. Radcliffe, I wish specially to mention those contained in George Saintsbury’s works, The English Novel, pp. 161 and 172 (1913), and A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, 1780–1900 (1910), and in Sir Walter Raleigh’s The English Novel, pp. 227–234, 5th ed. (1907). Other sources are Mrs. Oliphant : The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, II, pp. 277–285 (1882); Allan Cunningham: Biographical and Critical History of the Last Fifty Tears, pp. 122–125 (1834); William Hazlitt : Lectures on the English Comic Writers, pp. 125–127 (Everyman’s Library); A. A. S. Wieten : Mrs Radcliffe. Her Relation towards Romanticism (1926).

(8) March 9th, 1765, to William Cole. Quoted also by Beers, p. 236.

(9) Walpole founded his printing-press, Ojfcina arbuteana, as he called it, at Strawberry Hill, in the summer of 1757; its first publication was Gray’s Odes. He had been so severely criticized for his earlier literary production that he had become timid. The Castle of Otranto was at first ascribed to Gray, which made Walpole remark that people must be fools indeed to think such a trifle worthy of a genius like Gray. Gosse: Gray, p. 169. Doctor Johnson admitted that “Horry Walpole … got together a great many curious little things, and told them in an elegant manner.” By this the Doctor did not however intend The Castle of Otranto, which it is hardly likely that he had read, as Boswell is silent on the matter. Walpole did not belong to the admirers of the “Great Bear,” or even to his circle of acquaintance, for the Doctor had made acquaintance difficult by his Parliamentary Reports in The Gentleman’s Magazine, in which he invariably made out a poor case for Sir Robert Walpole. Moreover, Walpole was a Whig, and thus in the Doctor’s eyes a “dog” and a “rascal.” The only question on which Walpole and Johnson were of the same opinion was in regard to Ossian. Phelps, op. cit., p. 110.

(10) Both Beers, p. 253, and Dibelius : Englische Romankunst, I, pp. 290–293, 2nd ed. (1922), and other investigators of terror-romanticism take into account the central position of the Haunted Castle, but they have not arrived at the synthesis of the material, at its decisive significance, to which my own studies have led. Yvon, op. cit., p. 490 : “Comment cet Anglais du milieu du XVIII^e siècle (Walpole), grand seigneur, homme en place et homme à la mode, s’était-il ainsi épris du charme du passé ? Pour le comprendre, il suffit de garder sans cesse, présente à l’esprit, l’image du petit château gothique de Strawberry Hill à travers toutes ses transformations, et de rappeler que ce château est moins une tentative de reconstitution archéologique, que l’expression d’un état d’âme.”

(11) The account given in the paragraph can be compared with pp. 18, 19, 21, 62 and 72 of The Castle of Otranto.

(12) The Old English Baron, pp. 618, 622 and 651. It might be brought forward against my argument that in The Castle of Otranto there is a ghost and a gigantic vision; an enormous mailed hand and foot. Dorothy Scarborough is building on these when she says in The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, pp. 17 and 19 (1917), “The Ghost is the real hero or heroine of the Gothic novel,” and, “The genealogical founder of the family of Gothic ghosts is the giant apparition in The Castle of Otranto.” This view is not, however, fully in accordance with the facts. The only true ghost in The Castle of Otranto is that of the hermit, in a bye-episode; the remaining supernatural matter must be understood as being of a visionary nature, and distinguishable from ghost-tradition; neither have been located in a part of the castle with the reputation of old of being haunted. This point was added later by Clara Reeve, who thus introduced a popular ghost-tradition into the new species of literature and discovered in a new sense the empty haunted suite.

(13) The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, pp. 721, 725. The Mysteries of Udolpho, pp. 233, 325.

(14) The Sicilian Romance, pp. 36 and 43. The Mysteries of Udolpho, p. 325.

(15) The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, p. 759; The Sicilian Romance, pp. 45, 60. The passage dealing with the thistle is in The Romance of the Forest, p. 82. The thistle is common in Ossian, e.g., pp. 3, 4, 44, 53 and 57; the phrase ...