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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi
Gothic Antiquity
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi
Gothic Antiquity
History, Romance, and the Architectural
Imagination, 1760–1840
DALE TOWNSHEND
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi
3
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 3/9/2019, SPi
Preface
¹ For the use of the phrase ‘first wave’ to designate British Gothic writing of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, see Rictor Norton, ed., Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840
(London: Leicester University Press, 2000).
² Clara F. McIntyre, ‘Were the “Gothic Novels” Gothic?’, PMLA vol. 36, no. 4 (Dec. 1921):
pp. 644–67 (p. 645).
³ McIntyre, ‘Were the “Gothic Novels” Gothic?’, p. 645.
⁴ Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York and London:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), p. 9.
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vi
(published late 1764; dated 1765) and William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and the
authors’ architectural work at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, and Fonthill Abbey,
Wiltshire, respectively, thus reinstating an early critical tendency that remains
prevalent if not inveterate to this day.⁵ Despite what it promised in its title, Eino
Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927) ultimately had very little to say about the
relationship between Gothic fiction and architecture beyond pointing out that
the haunted castle was a dominant motif in what he termed the ‘horror-
romanticism’ of Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Walter Scott, and others, one that
took its place alongside such other tropes as the criminal monk, the wandering
Jew, incest, ghosts, and demonic beings.⁶ In his pioneering account of Jane
Austen’s ‘Northanger Novels’ of the same year, Michael Sadleir made some
important observations regarding the political significance of architectural ruins
in post-French Revolutionary Gothic romances published in Britain, if only
eventually to dismiss these fictions’ architectural preoccupations—the abbeys,
castles, and ruins so frequently referenced in their titles—as being one of the
many ‘fatuities of the school’.⁷ J. M. S. Tompkins was similarly attuned to the
use—and highly conventionalized overuse—of architecture in her account of
Gothic romance in The Popular Novel in England (1932), claiming that, since
Gothic architecture had suffered from such ‘degradation’ and ‘over-production’ in
Gothic fiction, it was barely necessary to discuss the matter at all.⁸
In his essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward
a Historical Poetics’ of 1937, the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin developed his
notion of the ‘chronotope’—that complex conflation of space and time that lends
to a literary genre its singularity—through a brief but important analysis of the
architecture of Gothic romance. The Gothic castle, he argued, is ‘saturated
through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the
word, that is, the time of the historical past’;⁹ more trenchantly, it was this
particular chronotopic arrangement of time and space that was said to lend to
Gothic literature its generic specificity. Though Bakhtin’s theories have since been
fruitfully applied to the analysis of the early Gothic—most notably by Robert
Miles in Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (1993) and by Jacqueline
Howard in Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (1994)—the belated
translation of his work on the Gothic chronotope into English meant that its
⁵ Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (London: Constable and Co.,
1921), pp. 30, 97.
⁶ Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London: George
Routledge & Sons, 1927), p. vii.
⁷ Michael Sadleir, The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen, The English Association
Pamphlet no. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 17.
⁸ J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800, 2nd edn (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 268.
⁹ Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward
a Historical Poetics’, in Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans.
M. Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258 (p. 245).
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vii
impact upon the Anglo-American critical tradition was slow to take effect. Indeed,
though architectural matters were frequently mentioned in earlier criticism, it was
really only with the publication of Warren Hunting Smith’s Architecture in
English Fiction in 1934 that they received any sustained critical attention at all.
Though Hunting Smith was not solely concerned with Gothic fictional forms, his
study remains, to date, unsurpassed in its encyclopedic knowledge of the field, and
in its searching examination of the relationship between architecture and litera-
ture across a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts and writers.
This was followed soon thereafter by the publication of Montague Summers’s The
Gothic Quest in 1938, a study that, though by no means solely concerned with
architecture, continuously pondered the question in relation to the countless
forgotten romances, dramas, and chapbooks that it brought to light. In his
characteristically passionate tone, Summers paused amid a discussion of Walpole
and Clara Reeve in order to argue that ‘The connexion between the Gothic
Romance and Gothic Architecture is, so to speak, congenital and indigenous’,
that it ‘goes deep down to and is vitally of the very heart of the matter’.¹⁰
Summers’s primary objective in The Gothic Quest was to recuperate for serious
consideration a literary form that had fallen foul of the same cultural biases that, in
the first half of the eighteenth century, had dismissed Gothic architecture as crude,
uncouth, and barbaric. To this gesture, the reconsideration of architecture in
Gothic writing as something of far greater significance than what earlier critics
had tended to denounce as conventionalized ‘claptrap’ or superficial ‘parapher-
nalia’ became paramount. The Gothic castle, Summers here and elsewhere
insisted, was so central to the Gothic as legitimately to be conceived as a literary
‘character’ in its own right, invariably functioning, as such, as much more than a
vague historical referent or the marker of an atmospheric mise en scène.¹¹ As he
put it in a short piece on the relationship between architecture and literature
published in the Architectural Design and Construction journal in 1931, ‘It is the
castle which is the protagonist of Walpole’s romance; and throughout all Otran-
to’s progeny, whose name is legion indeed, the remote and ruined castle, the
ancient manor, the vast fortress, the lone and secret convent, the dark and
mysterious monastery, are ever and again the principal features of the tale.’¹² Of
all early critical opinions, it was this claim to the personified form and function of
architecture in the early Gothic that has proved to be one of the most enduring. As
E. J. Clery put it in her Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The
Castle of Otranto in 1996, ‘Few critics have failed to make the point that the gothic
¹⁰ Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London: The Fortune
Press, 1938), p. 189.
¹¹ See, for instance, Montague Summers’s argument in his ‘Introduction’ to Constable’s edition of
The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother (London: Constable, 1924), pp. xi–lvii.
¹² Montague Summers, ‘Architecture and the Gothic Novel’, Architectural Design and Construction
vol. 2, no. 2 (December 1931): pp. 78–81 (p. 80).
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viii
castle is the main protagonist of Otranto, and that the story of usurpation,
tyranny, and imprisonment could be seen as an extension of the mood evoked
by the setting.’¹³ More recently, Carol Margaret Davison in Gothic Literature
1764–1824 (2009) has drawn upon, and extended, such readings of architecture
as the Gothic’s primary ‘protagonist’, though leavening this approach with greater
sensitivity to the architectural style’s historical significations.¹⁴
In the Introduction that she wrote for Devendra P. Varma’s The Gothic Flame
in 1957, J. M. S. Tompkins signalled the critical sea change effected by what was
otherwise a highly derivative study by pointing out that ‘what has altered our
attitude to Gothic writings is, of course, the application of Freudian psychology to
literature and literary periods’.¹⁵ By this way of reasoning, the Gothic castle—‘that
formidable place, ruinous yet an effective prison, phantasmagorically shifting its
outline as ever new vaults extend their labyrinths, scene of solitary wanderings cut
off from light and human contact, of unformulated menace and the terror of the
living dead’—now presented itself to critics ‘as the symbol of neurosis’, a textual
‘symptom’ of anxiety concerning the forces of contemporary political and reli-
gious oppression.¹⁶ As Tompkins’s careful choice of words suggests, it was in the
wake of a critic such as Varma that psychoanalysis became Gothic criticism’s
dominant metalanguage, if not always in an orthodox Freudian sense, then at least
through the deft synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism that we encounter in
David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980). In Punter’s account, matters of
architectural interest—from Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, through the ruined
abbeys of Radcliffe, to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series (1946–59), and
beyond—are never far away. Yet, it was really only with the attention that
Anglo-American feminist scholars began to pay Gothic writing from the late
1970s onwards that architecture became an object of critical interest in its own
right. Crucial to this feminist turn was Ellen Moers’s work on the ‘female Gothic’
in Literary Women (1979), as well as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
feminist critique of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) in The Mad-
woman in the Attic (1979). Countering Bachelard’s exclusive focus upon sites of
‘topophilia’—the comforting and ‘felicitous’ home of childhood experience to
which the modern bourgeois subject repeatedly returns in dreams and nostalgic
flights of fancy—with their notion of ‘topophobia’, Gilbert and Gubar drew
¹³ E. J. Clery, ‘Introduction’, in Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. vii–xxxiii (p. xv).
¹⁴ Carol Margaret Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009),
pp. 70–3.
¹⁵ J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘Introduction’, in Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame, Being a History of the
Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (London:
Arthur Barker: 1957), pp. xi–xv (p. xiii).
¹⁶ Tompkins, ‘Introduction’, The Gothic Flame, p. xiii.
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ix
¹⁷ See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979),
pp. 87–8. For a more recent continuation of this feminist reading of Gothic architectural space, see
Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Gothic Architectonics: The Poetics and Politics of Gothic Space’, Papers on
Language and Literature vol. 46 (2010): pp. 136–63.
¹⁸ See C. G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, trans. H. G. and Cary F. Baynes (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1928), pp. 118–19.
¹⁹ See, respectively, Claire Kahane, ‘Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity’, The Centennial Review
vol. 24, no. 1 (winter 1980): pp. 43–64; Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the
Gothic Novel’, Arizona Quarterly no. 36 (1980): pp. 330–58; and Ian Watt, ‘Time and the Family in the
Gothic Novel: The Castle of Otranto’, Eighteenth-Century Life vol. 10, no. 3 (1986): pp. 159–71.
²⁰ Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 149–92.
²¹ Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), p. 44.
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Kate Ferguson Ellis’s The Contested Castle (1989); Alison Milbank’s Daughters of
the House (1992); Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995); and Diane
Long Hoeveler’s Gothic Feminism (1998).
These historical, psychoanalytic, and feminist studies of the Gothic constitute
only a small sample of the many critical works that have addressed the significance
of architecture to Gothic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. One thinks, too, of Robin Lydenberg’s often-overlooked account of
the parallels between the responses generated by Gothic architecture and those
exploited by early Gothic fiction, or of Linda Bayer-Berenbaum’s related attempts
in The Gothic Imagination (1982) at drawing out the connections between the
psychological states elicited by Gothic architecture and those to be found in
literary manifestations of the Gothic aesthetic.²² Other, better-known examples
include the brief architectural turn of Victor Sage’s Horror Fiction in the Protest-
ant Tradition (1988), a study that, in part, sought to read the dark houses of
Gothic literature as powerful allegories of larger theological concerns, or, to take a
more recent example, Fred Botting’s often-cited Foucauldian reading of ruins,
graveyards, labyrinths, and other ‘heterotopic’ spaces in the early Gothic literary
tradition.²³ When not reading Gothic architecture through such allegorical or
theoretical lenses, critics have expended considerable energy in identifying the
‘real’ houses that inform some of the well-known architectural piles in the
literature, not only in the often-cited parallels between Strawberry Hill and
Otranto or, more tangentially, between Fonthill Abbey and Vathek, but also in,
say, Rictor Norton’s claim that Haddon Hall, Derbyshire, might well have been the
source for Radcliffe’s Chateau-le-Blanc in The Mysteries of Udolpho.²⁴ Such critical
quests for the ‘real’ houses behind the novels are all shades of the same endeavour
that had so frustrated Nikolaus Pevsner in his work on the houses of Jane Austen’s
fiction in 1968: try as he might, the twentieth century’s greatest topographer and
architectural historian was ultimately unable to provide any definitive answers,
concluding that Austen ‘did not visualize any one thing for any one house or town’
when she penned her fictions.²⁵ Architecture, it turns out, is more the work of the
imagination than any mimetic representation of a real-life building. In an import-
ant essay of 1998, Stephen Clarke proposed a useful solution to the problem of the
relationship between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ Gothic buildings of the eighteenth
²² See Robin Lydenberg, ‘Gothic Architecture and Fiction: A Survey of Critical Responses’, The
Centennial Review vol. 22 (1978): pp. 95–109, and Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination:
Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (Cranbury, NJ, London, and Mississauga, Ont.: Associated
University Presses, 1982), pp. 47–71.
²³ Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1988),
pp. 1–25, and Fred Botting, ‘In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture’, in A New Companion to
the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 13–24.
²⁴ Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press,
1999), p. 209.
²⁵ Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘The Architectural Setting of Jane Austen’s Novels’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes vol. 31 (1968): pp. 404–22 (p. 409).
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xi
century by arguing that, though they might occasionally overlap, the ‘written
Gothic’ of authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen is fundamentally
different from the ‘built Gothic’ of the early Gothic Revival: while the former
traded in the intricacy, mystery, complexity, and obscurity of the sublime, the
latter were intended to be light, airy, cheerful, and picturesque.²⁶
In post-millennial Gothic criticism, there is barely a monograph on Romantic-
era Gothic writing that does not at least gesture towards the term’s architectural
meanings, or explore the ways in which Gothic architecture is implicated in
Gothic writing’s broader ideological work.²⁷ David Punter and Glennis Byron
include a short overview of Gothic architecture and the eighteenth-century Gothic
Revival in The Gothic (2004), while Victor Sage’s important essay on Gothic
Revivalist architecture, initially published in 1998, was reprinted in the second
edition of Marie Mulvey-Roberts’s The Handbook of the Gothic in 2009.²⁸ William
Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith’s The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2013)
includes short entries on Gothic architecture, the Gothic Revival, and ruins, and
Nick Groom’s The Gothic (2014) includes a brief but informative overview of
Gothic architecture, even as it ranges widely to explore the Gothic’s other political,
cultural, and literary manifestations across time.²⁹ In the more extended form of
the scholarly monograph, Kerry Dean Carso has addressed the relationship
between Gothic architecture and nineteenth-century literature in American
Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature (2014), while
David Annwn Jones commences his Gothic Effigy (2018), a wide-ranging study
of the Gothic aesthetic across several media and forms, with a brief discussion of
Gothic Revivalist architecture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England,
Wales, and America.³⁰ Most recently, Alison Milbank’s God and the Gothic
(2018) has provided a fascinating account of the ambivalent responses to monastic
ruins in eighteenth-century Gothic fiction and their theological relation to the
cultural work of the ‘Long Reformation’.³¹
²⁶ Stephen Clarke, ‘Abbeys Real and Imagined: Northanger Abbey, Fonthill, and Aspects of the
Gothic Revival’, Persuasions 20 (1998): pp. 93–105 (p. 99).
²⁷ See, for example, Angela Wright’s discussion of abbeys and castles in Britain, France and the
Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 88–146,
and Diane Long Hoeveler’s reading of the representation of ruined abbeys in The Gothic Ideology:
Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880 (Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 2014), pp. 197–246.
²⁸ See David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 32–6, and Victor
Sage, ‘Gothic Revival’, in The Handbook of the Gothic, 2nd edn, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 156–69.
²⁹ See William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, eds, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, 2 vols
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), vol. 1, pp. 38–40 and 40–4; vol. 2, pp. 579–81; and Nick Groom, The
Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 12–23.
³⁰ David Annwn Jones, Gothic Effigy: A Guide to Dark Visibilities (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2018).
³¹ See Alison Milbank, God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary
Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 13–61.
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xii
From the rise of a scholarly Gothic tradition onwards, then, critics have
repeatedly returned to the architectural question, accounting for its presence in
the literature variously through psychoanalytic, feminist, or new historicist the-
oretical lenses, or through the shorter, introductory explications outlined above.
However, there remains, to date, no sustained and closely historicized account of
Gothic writing in relation to the broader Gothic Revival in architecture with which
it was contemporary, and it is this gap in the study of Gothic literature between the
years 1760 and 1840 that Gothic Antiquity attempts to fill. In this respect, this
book aligns itself most closely with work on the architecture/literature relation
that has been published over the last four decades in the field of British romanticism,
a literary tradition that is closely aligned but not always entirely coterminous with the
early Gothic. These include Anne Janowitz’s England’s Ruins (1990); Sophie Tho-
mas’s Romanticism and Visuality (2008); Nicole Reynolds’s Building Romanticism
(2010); and Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism (2010). Though neither Reynolds
nor Duggett is primarily concerned with the precise forms of ‘Gothic’ literature that
I treat in this book, both studies have been particularly influential in my own
thinking on the subject. The same might be said of Lee Morrissey’s From the Temple
to the Castle (1999), a brilliant account of the literature/architecture relation in
selected authors who were either practising architects and architectural patrons
with considerable involvement in the design process—John Vanbrugh, Alexander
Pope, and Horace Walpole—or those whose writings demonstrate abiding architec-
tural preoccupations, such as John Milton and Thomas Gray. Other modern studies
of the architecture/literature relationship, including Ellen Eve Frank’s Literary
Architecture (1979) and David Anton Spurr’s Architecture in Modern Literature
(2012), do not treat eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Gothic in any depth.
If Gothic literary studies have failed adequately to provide a sustained and
historically rigorous account of how Gothic writing of the period 1760–1840 par-
ticipated in the broader architectural impulses of the Gothic Revival, studies of
Gothic architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been corres-
pondingly cursory in their treatment of the literary context. In his seminal A History
of the Gothic Revival (1872), the first scholarly study to define and constitute the
movement as such, Charles Locke Eastlake gave writers of Gothic romance short
shrift, maintaining that the trivial ‘Gothic’ productions of Horace Walpole and Ann
Radcliffe were as far removed from the splendid, revived ‘mediævalism’ of Walter
Scott as the ‘Gothick’ frippery of Batty Langley was from the ‘authentic’ Gothic
architecture of William Butterfield.³² Though arguing that, prior to its architectural
manifestations, the revivalism of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
primarily a literary phenomenon, Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival (1928)
cautioned against any meaningful interaction between the architectural and the
³² Charles L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1872), p. 113.
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literary by insisting that ‘it is impossible to show a smooth interaction, or even a close
parallel, between eighteenth-century Gothic novels and buildings’.³³ While the
‘Gothicness’ of popular romance, he continued, ‘consisted in gloom, wildness, and
fear’, revived domestic Gothic architecture ‘was too sensible to admit these qualities’,
striving instead for an atmosphere of ‘lightness and variety’.³⁴
In Gothic Antiquity, I subject Clark’s sense of the limited relationship between
Gothic literature and Gothic Revivalist architecture to ongoing scrutiny, some-
times disagreeing with it (as in the case of Walpole’s self-conscious drawing upon
what he understood to be the tradition of ‘Gothic story’ in his fashioning of
Strawberry Hill), and at other times confirming it (as in nineteenth-century
Gothic architects’ attempts at purging the revived Gothic style of its long-standing
relationship with Gothic fiction). Even in such cases, though, I maintain that
literature was central to the work of the Gothic Revival, albeit only through an
impulse of negative recoil. Other aspects of Clark’s The Gothic Revival are
similarly foundational to my argument. It was in the first chapter of the study
that Clark introduced an influential distinction between ‘Gothic Revival’ and
‘Gothic Survival’, meaning by the former that self-conscious return to, and
revitalization of, the architectural styles of the Middle Ages that we first encounter
in the eighteenth century, and by the latter the ‘tiny brackish stream’ of Gothic
architectural practice that persisted, attenuated yet largely unaltered, from the
medieval period onwards.³⁵ Gothic survivalism, he claimed, comprised three
closely interrelated elements: the work of Renaissance architects (Christopher
Wren, John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor) who occasionally built in a Gothic
idiom; the tendency of local builders and craftsmen to cling to older architectural
traditions, as in the Oxford colleges that were built in the Gothic style well into the
seventeenth century; and the more sentimental approach to the ruined remains of
original medieval piles adopted by antiquarian scholars, from shortly after the
dissolution of the monasteries during the mid-1530s onwards. While these
instances of the persistence or the survival of Gothic, Clark argued, were in
some senses quantifiably different from the eighteenth-century Gothic Revival,
they nonetheless called for a reflection on the accuracy and applicability of the
phrase itself. In his essay ‘Gothic Survival and Gothick Revival’ of 1948,
H. M. Colvin adopted a far more categorical stance in relation to Clark’s distinc-
tion, claiming that ‘Gothic survival and Gothick revival had nothing in common’,
and foregrounding the difference between these two impulses through the use of
the archaic spelling of the term ‘Gothick’.³⁶ Giles Worsley, by contrast, advanced,
in the fashion of Clark, a strong argument in favour of Gothic survivalism in ‘The
³³ Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1962), p. 33.
³⁴ Clark, The Gothic Revival, p. 33. ³⁵ Clark, The Gothic Revival, p. 1.
³⁶ H. M. Colvin, ‘Gothic Survival and Gothick Revival’, The Architectural Review vol. 103 (1948):
pp. 91–8 (p. 95).
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xiv
Origins of the Gothic Revival: A Reappraisal’ (1993), the essay in which he pointed
to a number of sixteenth-century Gothic architectural projects so as to cast doubt
on the very nature of an eighteenth-century ‘Gothic Revival’.³⁷ More recent
architectural historians have continued to ponder the question. I shall address
this and other related matters in the Conclusion to this book, but for now it is
important to stress that my interest in Gothic architecture in Gothic Antiquity
straddles both sides of the revivalist/survivalist divide. That is, I am as interested in
drawing attention in this study to the interplay between literature and architecture
in such revivalist or ‘modern Gothick’ structures as Strawberry Hill, Fonthill
Abbey, and the new Palace at Westminster as I am in addressing notable instances
of Gothic survival in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the ways in
which antiquaries and writers of Gothic fiction, poetry, and drama in the period
1760–1840 responded to the ruined castles, abbeys, and monasteries of what we
now term ‘medieval’ Britain.
Clark’s account of the Gothic architecture/literature relation set the terms of the
debate for several later scholars. Though he reiterated Clark’s claim concerning
the literary origins of the Gothic Revival in England, Paul Frankl’s treatment of
literature in his wide-ranging, pan-European study The Gothic (1960) was slight,
the argument merely rehearsing the commonplace assumption that Walpole ‘was
contributing to the popularization of Gothic [architecture] in the widest circles
through his novel, The Castle of Otranto’.³⁸ Georg Germann’s account of Gothic
literature in Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain (1972) is even more perfunctory,
achieving little more in this regard than reiterating the claim that Strawberry Hill
provided the ‘inspiration’ for The Castle of Otranto.³⁹ Much the same pertains to
Michael McCarthy’s otherwise pioneering focus upon the work of Thomas Gray,
Horace Walpole, and the domestic architecture of the Strawberry Hill architects in
The Origins of the Gothic Revival (1987): even though his subject matter begs
literary questions, this is never a concern that he explores in any depth.
It is true that, with the critical turn towards interdisciplinarity across the arts and
humanities in the late twentieth century, more recent accounts of the Gothic Revival
in architecture have been less reluctant to engage with literary questions. In Gothic
Revival (1994), Megan Aldrich was the first scholar to achieve more than a mere
gesturing towards the links between Walpole’s home and his fiction, citing across her
study examples of literary responses to Gothic architectural forms taken from Ann
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818),
and even Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Ultimately, though, Aldrich’s attention is
more architectural than it is literary, with these and other fictional examples often
³⁷ Giles Worsley, ‘The Origins of the Gothic Revival: A Reappraisal: The Alexander Prize Essay’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society vol. 3 (1993): pp. 105–50.
³⁸ Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Source and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 392.
³⁹ Georg Germann, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas, trans.
Gerald Onn (London: Lund Humphries with the Architectural Association, 1972), p. 55.
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⁴⁰ See Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), pp. 105–26.
⁴¹ See Michael Charlesworth, ed., The Gothic Revival 1720–1870, 3 vols (Mountfield: Helm
Information, 2002).
⁴² Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 13.
⁴³ See Peter N. Lindfield, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors,
1730–1840 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), pp. 131–43.
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Acknowledgements
This book has benefited immeasurably from the assistance of many individuals
and institutions over the decade and more that it has taken me to complete. My
greatest debt of gratitude is to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
for having awarded me an eighteen-month-long AHRC Leadership Fellowship
( June 2015–December 2016) for Writing Britain’s Ruins, 1700–1850: The Archi-
tectural Imagination, the larger research project from which this study derives.
Douglas Brodie, then Head of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University
of Stirling, provided further support, while Berthold Schoene and Sharon Handley,
respectively Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange and Pro-Vice-Chancellor
for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University,
oversaw the transition of the project to my new institutional home in September
2016, and generously granted me a further period of institutional research leave.
AHRC funding also made possible the appointment of Peter Lindfield as the
project’s Research Assistant, without whose brilliance, efficiency, architectural
expertise, and photographic skills this book would have been greatly impover-
ished. The members of the Writing Britain’s Ruins research network stimulated
and greatly enriched my thoughts on Gothic architecture, antiquarianism, and
literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and I am especially
grateful to have worked so closely with such distinguished scholars: Michael
Carter; Oliver Cox; Sally Foster; Nick Groom; Marion Harney; James Kelly;
Emma McEvoy; Hamish Mathison; David Punter; Fiona Robertson; Rosemary
Sweet; Nicola Watson; James Watt; and Angela Wright. Beyond this, Angela
Wright has been a good friend and source of Gothic inspiration over the years.
Jess Edwards, Head of the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan
University, and Antony Rowland, Head of the Centre for Creative Writing,
English Literature and Linguistics, have been the most supportive of managers,
while my friends and colleagues in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies—
Xavier Aldana Reyes; Linnie Blake; Helen Darby; Chloé Germaine Buckley; Sarah
Illot; Emma Liggins; and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn—have provided a convivial environ-
ment in which to work. Thanks, too, to the many colleagues who read portions of
the manuscript in draft form, and to those with whom I’ve discussed some of the
book’s ideas over the years, among them Kirstie Blair; Fred Botting; Stephen
Bygrave; John Drakakis; Matt Foley; Katie Halsey; Emma McEvoy; Stephen
Penn; Jon Stobart; Angus Vine; and Merle Williams. Stephen Clarke has been
the most astute and insightful of readers, and I am especially grateful to him for
having so generously shared with me his unsurpassed knowledge of Horace
Walpole and the early Gothic Revival. Tim Fulford kindly let me read his work
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Contents