The Mysteries of Lisbon: A Film of Portuguese Author Camilo Castelo Branco’s City Mysteries Novel

I have written extensively at this blog about the city mysteries genre, which began with Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. Sue’s novel inspired a plethora of imitations, including Paul Féval’s The Mysteries of London (discussed in my book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature), George W. M. Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and George Lippard’s The Quaker City. Authors around the world wrote novels in a similar vein and often with the same title pattern. However, until recently, Portugal’s contribution to the genre, The Mysteries of Lisbon, was almost unknown to the English-speaking world. That changed in 2010 when Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz filmed the Portuguese novel as Mistérios de Lisboa. The film is available with English subtitles at Amazon Prime.

A DVD cover of Mysteries of Lisbon

Mistérios de Lisboa is based on the 1854 novel Os Mistérios de Lisboa by Camilo Castelo Branco (1825-1890). Unfortunately, Branco’s novel has never been translated into English, although scholar Stephen Basdeo announced on his blog in 2022 that he is in the process of translating it. Since I have not read the novel, this blog post will only discuss the film.

Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon, like the city mysteries novels that came before it, is a convoluted tale filled with individual characters who tell their backstories, many of which are a bit on the sordid side. Unlike the novels of Sue, Reynolds, and Féval, however, the film, and probably the novel, do not provide a cross-section of characters from the upper and lower classes but focus solely on members of the Portuguese and French aristocracy and nobility. The plot is not difficult to follow, even with reliance on the subtitles, but it is complicated enough that I imagine the novel has more subplots than the film offers since the novel was published in three volumes and runs more than 600 pages, although the film itself runs approximately 270 minutes.

The plot centers around a young boy named João who attends a school operated by Father Dinis. Unlike the other boys at the school, João does not have a last name and knows nothing about his parentage. After another boy bullies and assaults him over his unknown parentage, João becomes ill and loses consciousness. He wakes in a sort of delirium to discover the mother he has never met has come to visit him. The visit is short, but it causes João to question Father Dinis about his mother. In time, he learns she is Ângela de Lima, the Countess Santa Bárbara. However, her husband, the Count, is not João’s father. João has grown up thinking Father Dinis may be his father, but the priest assures him otherwise and will only tell him his father was an honorable man and that he died two days after João’s birth. In time, we learn João’s father was Pedro da Silva. Father Dinis arranges secret visits between João and his mother, but these are threatened by Count Santa Bárbara’s displeasure over her having contact with the boy. She has been locked up and mistreated by her husband for years, plus he has been carrying on an affair with a woman named Eugénia. Eventually, she leaves him to be with her son.

The count now spreads rumors about Ângela, but when Father Dinis goes to confront him, he finds him dying. Father Dinis then arranges for Ângela to visit the count at the count’s request because he wishes for her forgiveness. He dies before she arrives, but he leaves her a letter and she forgives him. The count leaves Ângela his fortune, but she rejects it and enters a convent. For João, her decision to enter the convent is heartbreaking because he has only just begun to know his mother, and now he feels he is losing her.

In flashbacks, we then learn the backstory of João’s birth. Ângela’s father, the Marquis of Montezelos, had been against João’s parents’ proposed marriage. Instead, he arranged for her to marry the Count de Santa Bárbara. After Ângela gave birth to João, she was told the child died, but the count gave the child to a gypsy named Knife Eater with orders to have it killed. However, Father Dinis, who was not yet a priest, paid Knife Eater for the boy and then secretly raised him, even changing his identity to that of a priest. Meanwhile, Knife Eater used the money he received to become a rich man.

Returning to the story’s main timeline, Knife Eater has adopted the identity of a Brazilian named Alberto and entered Lisbon society. Rumors surround Alberto, from him being a rich slave trader or a pirate to being a spy for Dom Pedro (the first Emperor of Brazil who first fought for Brazil’s independence and then invaded Portugal and for a brief time was king). Women faint over Alberto, apparently because he is so masculine, powerful, and sexy. Men challenge him to duels and die by his hand.

Meanwhile, Father Dinis, who has been keeping João’s birth a secret, discovers the secret of his own birth. When the Count Santa Bárbara died, Friar Baltasar da Encarnação gave him last rites, at which time he and Father Dinis met for the first time. Instantly, the friar realizes Father Dinis is his son. The friar reveals to Father Dinis that he was once Álvaro de Albuquerque, who seduced and fell in love with the married Countess de Vizo. They ran away together to Italy where she died while giving birth to Father Dinis. Álvaro was grief-stricken over her death and his sin. Feeling unable to raise his child, he gave it to a friend to raise; when that friend died, the child was passed on to a French nobleman to raise. This nobleman in time would die at the guillotine during the French Revolution. The young Father Dinis grew up to fight in Napoleon’s army under the name Sebastião de Melo.

Back in the present, Alberto has married Eugénia, former mistress of Count Santa Bárbara. He finds himself being stalked by Elisa de Montfort, a widowed French duchess. She says she is bent upon revenge, and eventually tells Father Dinis her story. Alberto had negotiated with her to have sex with her and finally she had agreed. After their liaison, Elisa kept coming back each night for more sex, gradually falling in love with Alberto and wanting to return the money he paid her. For Alberto, it is all a game and about the chase, so when she begins stalking him, he wants nothing more to do with her. Now she has come to Lisbon to try again to return the money he paid her. Her efforts cause Eugénia discomfort, although she knows Alberto has a sordid past. Elisa, however, also wants revenge. She allowed her brother Artur to believe Alberto wronged her. Artur had attacked Alberto, who killed him in self-defense, but Elisa blames Alberto for her brother’s death.

Father Dinis now reveals to Elisa that he knew her mother. In the middle of Father Dinis’ story, Alberto bursts in. Elisa tries to shoot him, but earlier, Father Dinis had removed the bullet from her gun. Alberto then tries to strangle Elisa, but he stops when Father Dinis calls him Knife Eater and he apparently fears Father Dinis will reveal his origins if he commits the murder.

After Alberto leaves, Father Dinis finishes his story, telling Elisa of how he had once been in love with her mother, Blanche, but that Blanche had loved his best friend, Benoit. Benoit was an aristocrat while Father Dinis was a bastard child, so he knew he could not compete with Benoit for Blanche’s love. Then Father Dinis and Benoit save Colonel Lacroze from a firing squad during the Napoleonic Wars and befriend him, only to have him begin an affair with Blanche. Dinis is very jealous, but Benoit is more jealous. When Lacroze is called back to service, Benoit does not tell Blanche, so she does not come to say goodbye to him and then he intercepts Lacroze’s letters so that she thinks he has forgotten her. In the end, Benoit convinces her to marry him. Meanwhile, Dinis leaves, unable to endure Blanche and Benoit’s happiness. Later, Lacroze commits suicide from heartbreak that Blanche has abandoned him. When Blanche learns Benoit lied to her about Lacroze abandoning her, she is deeply hurt, and soon she claims she is speaking to Lacroze’s ghost. Blanche then dies in a fire, which Benoit may have set.

We now return to João, who has grown up, adopted his father’s name of Pedro da Silva, and become a poet. When he sees Elisa, he falls in love with her. Elisa tells him how she was wronged by Alberto and that her brother was murdered by him, so João goes to Alberto to challenge him to a duel. They fight with swords, but when neither is wounded, they plan to switch to pistols. First, however, Alberto reveals he has known João since he was a baby and tells him of how he nearly killed him but sold him to Father Dinis. Alberto also explains that Elisa’s brother’s death was an accident and the result of self-defense.

The film becomes confusing here. After Alberto leaves the site of the duel, João takes over as narrator, stating how he feels lost and talked down to, as if he is just João again rather than Dom Pedro da Silva as he now styles himself after his father. The film actually shows him shooting himself after Alberto leaves, but he is apparently only wounded and does not die. João now feeling his life makes no sense, runs away from his past, but he knows that is impossible. He travels randomly (like a true Gothic wanderer) and ultimately goes to Tangiers. He seems to be pursued by the representatives of Alberto, who wishes to return to him the sum of money Father Dinis had given him for his life, but João does not want the money.

João finds an inn in Tangiers and there becomes ill. As the film ends, we see him dictating his memoirs to an African servant, discussing how he has never really known who he is and he sometimes wonders if his whole life has been a dream since the moment he lost unconsciousness and first saw his mother in his delirium. The ending is very existential and also the kind of melancholic ending typical of Romanticism. It would not be going to far to liken João’s existential angst to that of Frankenstein’s Monster.

While the film seems focused on realism most of the time, it also tends to deconstruct the illusion of reality in subtle ways. Supernaturalism is suggested when Blanche claims to be speaking to Colonel Lacroze’s ghost. In other scenes, the camera shows characters not walking but appearing to glide through a room like one might expect in a modern-day vampire film. Numerous interesting camera angles and camera tricks are used. At one point we see a filled teacup upside down. The suggestion of illusion is emphasized by the miniature play theatre that João’s mother gives to him soon after they are reunited. Several of the various storylines have moments where the characters are depicted as paper figures in the play theatre, suggesting that someone is manipulating the story and characters, or perhaps they are all part of João’s imagination. Less understandable oddities include Eugénia hiding under the furniture for no perceivable reason unless she fears Elisa. Alberto and Eugénia also have a servant with some sort of mental disability that causes him to be in perpetual motion as if running in place. The viewer notes all these oddities, but they do not fully register or make sense until the end when João suggests everything in the film may just have been a dream. They then suggest they are the oddities one encounters in dreams that do not make sense in the real world.

The film makes no references to Eugène Sue or any other author of the city mysteries genre, but at one point, when Pedro (formerly João) is told by a friend how Elisa’s brother died in a duel for her, he can’t help remarking that it is like a plot out of a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe, which shows the filmmaker and probably Branco was aware of the Gothic tradition and Mrs. Radcliffe’s works.

Truly, there is little about the film that is similar to The Mysteries of Paris. Yes, some of the characters have multiple identities and there are numerous interconnected plots, but we also have a string of counts and marquises without any of the social justice themes of Sue and Reynolds’ novels with their depictions of the lower classes. All the characters in Mysteries of Lisbon are upper class or connected to them. If the novel was influenced by earlier city mysteries novels, I suspect the influence came from Féval’s The Mysteries of London, since in that novel the protagonist, the Marquis de Rio Santo, is an Irishman who earns a Portuguese title of nobility and seeks revenge against his English enemies. Another influence may be Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, in which Edmond Dantès becomes the fabulously wealthy count who seeks revenge on his enemies. Alberto’s story is similar to both characters in that he gains great wealth and has an air of mystery about him, including rumors about his past and being a seducer of women like Rio Santo. However, Alberto is not set on revenge toward anyone but rather has Elisa set on revenge against him.

If there is a link to Sue’s novel, Stephen Basdeo suggests it lies in Father Dinis, who like Sue’s Prince Rodolphe, is a dispenser of justice, or at least one who tries to save others. He stops Alberto and Elisa from murdering each other, saves João from being killed as a child, saves the life of Colonel Lacroze, though it backfires on him, and brings forgiveness between the Count and Countess Santa Bárbara. His multiple identities are like those of Rodolphe, Edmond Dantès, Rio Santo, and many other characters in city mysteries novels, and he can be equated to Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, itself influenced by the city mysteries genre, in the way he tries to right wrongs.

Camilo Castelo Branco

That said, much of the novel may be autobiographical. Branco, like João, was an illegitimate son. His father was a younger son of a provincial aristocrat family. His father was impoverished because of the strict laws of primogeniture in Portugal at the time that meant the family property and fortune would have gone to the eldest son. Branco ended up orphaned at a young age, and after being raised by three aunts, like João, at age thirteen, he was sent to a seminary where he was educated by priests. He studied theology and considered becoming a priest, even taking minor holy orders, but later decided to devote himself to literature. Therefore, he must have had insight into Father Dinis’ soul. He was also well-equated with the upper class’ licentiousness and crimes. He was arrested twice, the first time for digging up his first wife’s body, and the second time for committing adultery with Ana Placido, a Portuguese novelist, who later became his second wife. In 1885, he became a member of the aristocracy when he was made a viscount for his contributions to literature. This honor is not surprising since he was probably the most prolific Portuguese author of all time.

The Mysteries of Lisbon is the only novel in the city mysteries genre to have been filmed, unless one counts the various film versions of The Count of Monte Cristo. The film won many awards, and despite the subtitles and its extreme length, it is a worthy depiction of a city mysteries novel. I hope more films of the city mysteries genre will be made, and in English. Meanwhile, I look forward to reading the novel when it is translated into English.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

The Quaker City: America’s First City Mysteries Novel

On this blog and in my new book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897, I have written extensively about the City Mysteries novel genre, which began with French author Eugène Sue’s blockbuster The Mysteries of Paris (1842-1843). Sue’s novel inspired a chain of novels ranging from two novels of the same title, The Mysteries of London, one by French author Paul Féval, one by George W. M. Reynolds, and then numerous more imitations from authors around the world.

An illustration of George Lippard as a young man

In the United States, the city mysteries genre was first taken up by George Lippard (1822-1854), although he shied away from copying Sue’s title, naming his novel The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall. It was issued in monthly parts from August 1844 to May 1845. Its circulation began after Féval began serializing his novel, and so it is possible it was somewhat inspired by it, but it was completed before Reynolds began his novel. The Quaker City would be extremely popular and lead to many more city mystery novels in the United States, including Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848), written under the pseudonym Edward Zane Carroll Judson.

While similarities exist between Lippard’s novel and those of Sue and Féval, the reader, especially an American reader knowledgeable of American literature and particularly antebellum literature, is bound to be struck by what a very American novel it is in its themes. All the Gothic trappings of Sue, Féval, and Reynolds are here, but the novel’s setting in the United States makes the concerns over the criminal world and immorality all the more relevant because they threaten not only society and domestic happiness but the very ideals upon which the American Republic was based. Throughout the book, Lippard decries how Philadelphia, the Quaker City (Lippard appears to have coined the name), and setting of the novel, no longer reflects the ideals of the American Revolution. Lippard plays on scenes like Washington crossing the Delaware to have a criminal pursued on the river to have revenge taken upon him. In a terrible vision, another character foresees the destruction of Philadelphia, with Independence Hall standing in ruins and in the sky written in flaming letters the words: “WO UNTO SODOM.” The novel then serves as a warning to the American people of where the Republic is headed, mourning the lost ideals of the Founding Fathers and even having the President replaced with a king in the vision of the future. As a result, its exposure of crime and vice and its calls for reform make it the first muckraking novel in the United States.

A summary of The Quaker City’s plot would be difficult to follow, but like his city mystery predecessors, Lippard provides multiple storylines, each of which surrounds some crime or attempted crime ranging from abducting innocent women or bamboozling them into fake marriages to adultery to characters disguising themselves to con others and religious deceivers.

Throughout, Lippard pays homage to other great Gothic authors. He makes reference to Ainsworth as a master of plot and references both Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton. That much of the novel’s action takes place in the fictional Monk Hall may be a nod to Matthew “Monk” Lewis. It is surprising Lippard makes no references to Sue or Féval since at least the former, and probably both, inspired his work. He dedicates the book to Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first Gothic novelist who was from Philadelphia and set his novel Arthur Mervyn there. He also references James Fenimore Cooper, but notes that critics complain that more people in the United States read Ainsworth than Cooper, and he defends Ainsworth in the process. Surprisingly, he avoids mentioning his own American Gothic contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lippard was himself a good friend of Poe’s, and while the novel was published before Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and his other novels, Lippard must have known Hawthorne’s short stories since Poe reviewed them. Based on The Quaker City, it surprises me that Lippard is not a household name along with Poe and Hawthorne, for his novel is more thoroughly plotted and complicated than anything either of them wrote, and if he is not the equal in style and depth to Hawthorne, I feel he exceeds Poe in his greater vision of society and he keeps the reader in suspense without the boredom Poe too often creates.

Literary critic and historian Stephen Knight, in his chapter on the novel in The Mysteries of the Cities, notes that many critics have dismissed Lippard, but such critics have not really read him. The novel is actually wonderfully plotted and Lippard is a master of pacing, something in keeping with the writing of Ainsworth, as well as Sue, Féval, and Reynolds, and far exceeding the plotting and pacing of anything Dickens had achieved at this point in his career. That the novel was written by Lippard when he was only twenty-two to twenty-three years of age is remarkable, and really gives him genius designation with other brilliant young authors like Mary Shelley. By comparison, Dickens did not write The Pickwick Papers until he was twenty-five and it is a nearly plotless book. Furthermore, because Lippard wrote quickly, his work has been seen as inferior, but in my opinion, it just adds to his genius that he was able to keep so many plot strands straight and weave them together so effortlessly. Anthony Trollope also wrote quickly but only because he dedicated himself to daily writing. Nor should a novelist be decried for writing a novel in a year when it takes another author three years to do so since we cannot know how many hours of writing and contemplative thinking about the novel took place within either time frame.

A few plot points and characters from The Quaker City deserve mention. The novel begins a few days before Christmas when two men go to see a fortune-teller and are told that one of them will die by the other’s hand at the hour of sunset on Christmas Eve. The novel unfolds from there as these two seeming friends discover that neither is who the other thought and one greatly wrongs the other, leading to the dramatic murder scene on the Delaware River, said to be based on a true murder case in Philadelphia.

Another notable character is Devil-Bug. This depraved criminal is illiterate, unintelligent, and mostly the slave to superior criminals, yet he is perhaps the closest thing the novel has to a main character. As Stephen Knight notes, he is almost the reverse of Eugene Sue’s hero Rodolphe, who is a prince in disguise. Devil-Bug is not moral, but he is haunted by his past, continually seeing the ghosts of those he has killed. He also once was in love and had a daughter who was lost to him. By the end of the novel, we will learn not only what became of his daughter, but he will manage to save her and see her happy and prosperous, a marked contrast to how Rodolphe is unable to save his daughter, who ultimately dies of shame because of her past. Devil-Bug is also the character granted the vision of the future in the novel.

Original cover for The Quaker City

Perhaps the most interesting character for me, however, is Signor Ravoni. Did I not know that this novel was published before Alexandre Dumas’ Joseph Balsamo (1846-1848), I might have thought Ravoni was inspired by Dumas’ sorcerer character because Ravoni is also a sorcerer and has the same mesmeric abilities as Balsamo. However, as Stephen Knight notes, more likely Ravoni’s name is a play on Zanoni, the Rosicrucian hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842). Like Zanoni, Ravoni claims to have lived a long life—two centuries. He is a voice of atheism in the novel, wishing to rid the world of the old religions and replace it with a religion of man for man, which may sound like a sort of religion of reason akin to the Goddess of Reason during the French Revolution. However, he intends to use his new religion to gain power over other men, and to do so, he uses supernatural powers, attempting to resurrect the dead to win over followers who claim they will worship him if he can do so. He manages to bring about a faked resurrection, and he also mesmerizes a young woman, holding her in thrall similarly to how Svengali will hold power over Trilby half a century later in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby. The scenes where Ravoni is worshiped by his followers in a mass meeting also eerily reminds me of scenes in the Swedish version of Dracula, Powers of Darkness, where Draculitz tries to create a new world order. In the end, Ravoni is stabbed and dies, but not before he gets his followers to promise to carry on his new religion and he appoints a successor. (I discuss these novels by Dumas and Bulwer-Lytton and Powers of Darkness in Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides.)

The Ravoni plot does not get introduced into the novel until the fifth of the six books, and it is not as closely tied to the main plots as it might be, but it is interesting for its religious message that seems anti-Christian, anti-religion, and pro-man if not pro-reason, wishing to raise man from the groveling servitude that religion often places him in, and yet Ravoni is a type of hypocrite in wishing to be worshiped like a god. It is also telling that American culture has always been highly religious due to its Puritan roots, ironic given the novel is set in a city founded by Quakers. The role of religion in the novel needs far more attention by future critics.

While my interest in The Quaker City is primarily in its Gothic elements, it is worth noting that like Sue, Lippard was a voice of reform and one who spoke out for the poor and downtrodden. He mocks those ready to send off missionaries to Hindoostan when there are outcasts at home who know nothing of the Bible. He also shows the sad state of racism in the country, some of the characters finding it a lark to burn down negro churches or abolitionist headquarters and create race riots. He is not afraid to speak out against the many wrongs that afflicted American society in the 1840s, even if those wrongs also gave him fodder for creating his novels.

The Quaker City was a phenomenal success in its day. It was the best-selling novel in America until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. It sold 60,000 copies in the first year and at least another 10,000 in the following decade per Wikipedia. According to Stephen Knight, in London, Lloyd, the leading low-level publisher, republished it, much reduced and sensationalized, as Dora Livingstone (1845) (Dora is the adulteress character in the novel), and the German popular writer Franz Gerstacker translated it as Die Geheimnisse [“The Mysteries”] von Philadelphia (1845), taking credit as the author. In America, it spawned numerous more city mysteries novels.

As for George Lippard, he had published five previous books and would go on to publish at least twenty more before his untimely death in 1854 of tuberculosis. A list of his works is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lippard. Not listed, however, is The Mysteries of Florence, which is available at Amazon and was published under his name. I intend to explore that novel and other works by Lippard in the future, along with several other city mysteries novels.

Lippard, in my opinion, deserves a prominent place in early American literature alongside fellow novelists Charles Brockden Brown, Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne. Few scholars pay much attention to him today, but for more information on The Quaker City, I recommend Stephen Knight’s The Mysteries of the Cities which discusses not only Lippard’s novel but several other city mystery novels. Two books about Lippard’s life and writings I have not read but hope to explore are Roger Davidson’s George Lippard and R. Swinburne Clymer’s George Lippard: His Life and Works. References to Lippard can also be found in biographies of his friend Edgar Allan Poe.

While I have mostly focused on British and French Gothic works at this blog, American Gothic literature was alive and well in the nineteenth-century, though mostly overlooked today. Certainly, it deserves far more attention beyond the works of Poe and Hawthorne. I will try to remedy that in some of my future posts.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

The Introduction to Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897

“his trousers here, his towels there, and his French novels everywhere.”

— Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

The above quote from Wilkie Collins’ 1868 masterpiece[i] testifies that young gentlemen in England at the time were reading French novels, and yet the influence of French literature has been all but ignored by most scholars of British Gothic literature. This omission is surprising given that French novels were read in England by a wide audience in the nineteenth century as British literature of the period itself testifies. Besides the reference in Collins’ The Moonstone, in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864), we are told of the Earl de Courcy that “He always breakfasted alone, and after breakfast found in a French novel and a cigar what solace those innocent recreations were still able to afford him.”[ii] In the last chapter of Barchester Towers (1857), Trollope references three contemporary French authors as he attempts to complete his story, “What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Dumas can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history?”[iii] Mary E. Braddon, best remembered for Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), writes in her short story “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896) of a young companion paid to read to the title character, but because the companion’s French is not good, the French maid instead reads French works to Lady Ducayne: “When she is tired of my reading she orders Francine, her maid, to read a French novel to her, and I hear her chuckle and groan now and then, as if she were more interested in those books than in Dickens or Scott.”[iv] Furthermore, in Lady Audley’s Secret, the lawyer Robert Audley is emphatically associated with reading French novels to the point of neglecting his work, and in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848-50), a student’s quarters are described as, “While there was quite an infantine law library clad in skins of fresh new born calf, there was a tolerably large collection of classical books which he could not read, and of English and French works of poetry and fiction which he read a great deal too much.”[v]

Countless books have been written on nineteenth-century British Gothic literature, including my previous book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. Possibly, books have also been written on nineteenth-century French Gothic literature that are not accessible to an English-speaking audience since they were written in French, although the study of the Gothic does not yet seem to have become popular among academics in France.[vi] Even some significant nineteenth-century French Gothic novels have not been translated into English, and some of those that have been translated have suffered from being abridged. As a result, many students of the Gothic, myself included until recently, have been unfamiliar with the incredible influence that French and British Gothic novelists of this period had upon one another.

In scholarly works, if influence between French and British literature is mentioned, it is usually done so in passing and rarely detailed. To the best of my knowledge, no one to date has written a full study of how British and French Gothic texts influenced each other. The most thorough study I have found of English literature’s influence on French novels has been Eric Partridge’s The French Romantics’ Knowledge of English Literature, which was published in 1924, and as thorough as it is, it only briefly mentions a few Gothic novels and quotes extensively in French, which makes it inaccessible to many readers. M. G. Devonshire’s The English Novel in France (1929) similarly extensively discusses how English literature influenced French literature from 1830-70, but also makes little mention of Gothic fiction beyond Radcliffe and Lewis. Neither Partridge nor Devonshire mention Polidori or vampire fiction at all. Many other critics have discussed the specific influence of an individual work upon an author or work, but none have broadly discussed such influences upon the Gothic novel throughout the nineteenth century.

A misconception also appears to exist that British Victorians did not read French literature, thinking it too risqué. The above examples prove that is largely untrue. While some Victorians did hold that viewpoint, the extent of it has been heavily exaggerated. In his Preface to The Modern Literature of France (1839), George W. M. Reynolds, one of the most prolific British Victorian Gothic novelists, addressed this issue by stating that the journals of the day expressed as much dislike for anything French as they did during the Napoleonic Wars. He also disputed an article written three years earlier in the Quarterly Review that suggested the 1830 insurrection in France resulted from “the depraved taste of the nation with regard to literature, a proposition no less ridiculous than unfounded.”[vii] He goes on to argue that the divorce, licentiousness, and murders that take place in France cannot be attributed to its literature and that the British are just as guilty if not more so of such behaviors. Then he argues that the sense of freedom that resulted from the 1830 revolution is precisely what has led to an increase of high quality literature in France.[1] Consequently, his study reviews only French literature written after 1830. Most remarkably, with every author Reynolds discusses, he translates passages from works not yet known in England as examples of the French authors’ writing styles.

Despite Reynolds’ arguments and efforts, it is hard to know how many people listened to him. While some prejudice toward French literature doubtless remained, Juliette Atkinson has revealed in her 2013 article “The London Library and the Circulation of French Fiction in the 1840s” that circulation records from the London Library and other British libraries prove early British Victorians were reading French literature. Furthermore, Alexander Hugh Jordan, in an article discussing the influence of Carlyle upon Eugène Sue, remarks:

As Juliette Atkinson has recently noted, the assumption that the Victorians rejected contemporary French literature as “immoral” has proven stubbornly persistent, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (391-93). In fact, the productions of leading French novelists met with a wide-ranging and enthusiastic response in Britain, not least through the medium of English translations. For instance, between 1842 and 1847, no less than seven of George Sand’s novels made their way to Britain (Bensimon 200-01). Moreover, thanks to the endeavours of Berry Palmer Chevasco [in Mysterymania], we now possess a near-exhaustive study of the British reception of Eugène Sue, and particularly of his Mystères de Paris. As Chevasco points out, in 1844 and 1845 alone, thirteen separate editions of Sue’s novels appeared in Britain (80).[viii]

Consequently, a convincing argument can be made not only that the British read French literature, but that British authors were influenced by their French contemporaries and vice versa. In fact, the influence of British authors on French authors is better documented, at least among studies written in English. Literary historian Maurice Lévy has documented more than one hundred English Gothic novels translated into French by the 1820s.[ix] Regardless, much work remains to be done to understand the influences that extended in both directions among British and French Gothic novelists from the time of the French Revolution through the nineteenth century.

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature seeks to help fill the void of documenting the influence that both nations’ Gothic literature had upon one another. While no study can fully display the depth of influence individual works had upon each other, I hope this book will inspire a revision of Gothic studies with the understanding that there is no isolated British or French Gothic tradition, but rather a tradition that crosses national boundaries. I am also fully aware that the French and British novels I will discuss influenced other nations’ literatures and were influenced by them. For example, it is well known that German Gothic works had a significant influence upon British and French Gothic works, especially in the days of the Gothic’s infancy. However, to create a manageable survey, I will focus, with a few exceptions, on British and French texts.

The title of this book reflects the frequent attempts by male vampire characters, usually based upon John Polidori’s vampire Lord Ruthven, to force a woman to marry him so she can become his victim. William H. Ainsworth’s short story “The Spectre Bride” is also referenced in the title. It refers to a bride who, surprisingly, is not supernatural but forced to marry a supernatural being. The word “marriage” in this book’s subtitle is perfect to describe the relationship between French and British Gothic because it goes beyond the idea of simple influence to a partnership. I believe in many cases the French and British Gothic writers were conscious that they were writing within the same Gothic tradition and being influenced by one another’s work. Proof of that influence will be provided in every chapter of this book and, hopefully, readers will be convinced by the book’s conclusion of my argument for this incredible shared influence that crossed national and language barriers.

Before diving further into our subject, it is best to define a few terms. By French Gothic, I am referring specifically to novels, plays, and short stories written within the boundaries of France. Similarly, by British, I mean works produced within Great Britain. I have chosen not to use the term English because it is less encompassing and could refer solely to England, while British would include works produced in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England. I have also opted to use British rather than English so it is not confused with works written in English by people outside of Great Britain, such as in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. Only works produced within the national boundaries of Great Britain and France between 1789 and 1897 will be discussed in detail, with the exception of two American vampire works and the Swedish translation of Dracula.

Secondly, by using the term Gothic, I am referring to texts that include supernatural beings and occurrences, also known as the masculine Gothic, which includes works by Matthew Lewis, Alexandre Dumas, Bram Stoker, and others. I am also referring to texts where supernatural beings or events are believed to be occurring, even though they turn out to have rational explanations; this school is known as the feminine Gothic and is represented primarily by the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, although male authors like Pierre-Alexis Ponson du Terrail and Jules Verne also fit into this category.[2] By Gothic, I am also referring to works that are devoid of anything supernatural but still have a Gothic atmosphere, specifically crime-related novels, which arose out of the “mystery” aspect of earlier Gothic literature. Such works include the city mysteries novels of Eugène Sue, Paul Féval, and George W. M. Reynolds.

The bulk of the works discussed in this book belong to what I consider the Second Golden Age of the Gothic. As is well known, the Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, but its Golden Age really began in the 1790s when the terrors of the French Revolution resulted in a flood of Gothic novels that reflected people’s fears played out in a fictional form and set in the past because the present horrors were too terrifying to contemplate. This period ranges roughly from 1789-1820 and includes the works of Mrs. Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The Second Gothic Golden Age began about a dozen years later. The year 1818 is a key year for the Gothic because two Gothic parody novels, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, were published that year, announcing if not causing the Gothic’s death knell for the next decade. Parodies are always a sign that genres are popular but have also begun to decline in quality or influence.

The Gothic craze fell off in the 1820s with few notable works. Not until Victor Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 (translated into English in 1833 by Frederic Shoberl as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) and William Harrison Ainsworth published Rookwood in 1834 did the Gothic regain its popularity. This Second Gothic Golden Age would run through the 1850s, at which time crime fiction, the child of the Gothic, superseded it in popularity along with sensational Victorian novels. However, the Gothic would remain popular throughout the nineteenth century, and following the 1897 publication of Dracula, and the subsequent film versions of that novel that made horror a staple of modern cinema, the Gothic has become immortal in a way many of its characters who sought the elixir of life never could have foreseen.

This Second Gothic Golden Age is when the influences of French and British Gothic literature were strongest upon each other, and it is that mutual influence I wish to highlight in this book. The nineteenth century was a period when authors in France and Great Britain largely spoke each other’s language and read each other’s books, often in their original language, but also in translation. Today, I suspect people are less bilingual than they were then. As an American, I studied French in school, but I cannot speak it fluently or even read it without it being a somewhat painstaking task. I suspect many literary scholars (despite most PhD programs requiring one or two foreign languages) and most general readers would say the same. Consequently, we must rely upon translations and the decisions of publishers and translators about which works will be translated. I hope Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides will bring attention to the incredible influence that British and French authors of this period had upon each other. This literary marriage has long been overlooked largely because of translation barriers, so I wish my work to inspire further scholarship and interest.

I also hope this book will bring more attention to many significant writers of nineteenth-century Gothic literature who have largely been ignored until recent years. While Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas are, if not household names, known by most lovers of books, authors like George W. M. Reynolds, William Harrison Ainsworth, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval are unknown to most readers. These authors were in many ways just as remarkable as their better-known contemporaries. In fact, Reynolds and Ainsworth’s novels are said to have outsold those of Dickens, and as much as I love Dickens, both Reynolds and Ainsworth, in my opinion, surpassed Dickens in their plotting and pacing skills, if not in their character development or overall philosophical outlook. Similarly, the imaginations of the French authors of this period knew no bounds and their fantastic works deserve to be read today. Reading Sue’s The Wandering Jew or Féval’s Vampire City are incredible treats more readers should experience.

Nineteenth-century French and British Gothic is as capable today of teaching and entertaining us as it was for its original readers, for the twenty-first century is for us just as traumatic and terrorizing, if in different ways, as the nineteenth century was for our ancestors. By exploring such fears and the works they inspired, not only do we better understand Gothic literature, but we better understand the tastes, concerns, hopes, and dreams of our nineteenth-century ancestors, and in understanding them, we can understand more about ourselves because we are living their legacy.

Tyler R. Tichelaar

Marquette, Michigan

Halloween 2022

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[1] One of the giants of French Romanticism, Charles Nodier, would agree with him on this point. In his essay “Du fantastique en littérature” in the Revue de Paris in 1830, Nodier argued that: “the fantastique requires a virginal imagination and beliefs that secondary literatures lack, and which are only reproduced therein following revolutions whose passage renews everything.” (Quoted in Stableford, “Introduction,” Weird Fiction in France, p. 6.)

[2] The terms masculine and feminine Gothic were first coined by Kate Ellis in The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989).

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Introduction

[i] Collins, Wilkie p. 359.

[ii] Trollope, The Small House, p. 281.

[iii] Trollope, Barchester Towers, p. 424.

[iv] Braddon p. 324.

[v] Quoted in Atkinson p. 21-2.

[vi] Horner, “Introduction,” p. 1.

[vii] Reynolds, Modern Literature, Vol 1. p. iv.

[viii] Jordan.

[ix] Hale p. 31.

New Book Reveals Dracula’s French and British Gothic Ancestors

Dr. Tyler. R. Tichelaar’s new literary history, Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, reveals how nineteenth-century French and British Gothic novelists were continually inspired by each other to create some of the most memorable characters in literature, from Quasimodo to Dracula.

Marquette, MI, January 2, 2023—Gothic literature studies usually focus on one nation’s tradition. Dr. Tyler R. Tichelaar, however, argues that the Gothic crossed the English Channel regularly, providing blood transfusions of new life into the Gothic corpus as revealed in detail in his new book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897.

When Gothic novels are mentioned, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) quickly comes to mind, but Dracula was only one in a long tradition of vampire stories that stretches back to John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). Dracula scholars today focus on the handful of British vampire stories by John Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, and J. S. Le Fanu, as sources for Dracula, but in Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides, Tichelaar looks to the plethora of vampire texts from France by Charles Nodier, Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, Alexandre Dumas, Paul Féval, and several other authors as influential in the creation of Stoker’s masterpiece. In fact, the female vampires in Dracula make far more sense within the context of the French vampire tradition.

Beyond Dracula, French literature inspired numerous British Gothic works and was inspired by them. Tichelaar explores how early British Gothic novelists like Radcliffe, Lewis, and Scott influenced French Gothic works by Hugo, Dumas, and Sue, and those works inspired British works by William Harrison Ainsworth, George W. M. Reynolds, Charles Dickens, and many others. Besides vampires, Tichelaar examines such literary archetypes as immortals, werewolves, cursed transgressors, and redeemed Gothic wanderers. Separate chapters include thorough discussions of the city mysteries genre and depictions of secret societies and the French Revolution in Gothic novels.

Tichelaar argues that by exploring how the French and British Gothic traditions influenced each other, a new understanding arises of many literary classics from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Count of Monte Cristo to A Tale of Two Cities and Dracula. “To explore the French and British Gothic traditions together,” says Tichelaar, “is like performing an archeological dig that exposes the missing links in Gothic development. Reading Dracula and Carmilla in the context of early French Gothic literature allows us to understand better the continuity of the Gothic tradition. Today, Paul Féval is almost unknown and largely overlooked by scholars of British literature, yet his vampire and Irish novels probably influenced Bram Stoker. Even British novelists like Ainsworth and Reynolds, who have been ignored by literary critics, provide fascinating understandings of the Gothic’s cross-cultural influence. Dickens and Stoker regularly visited France, and French authors regularly read British works, so the two literatures deserve to be read together as one Gothic literary tradition.”

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature includes in-depth discussions of a wide range of British and French Gothic novelists from 1789-1897, including Mrs. Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, John Polidori, Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, William Harrison Ainsworth, George Croly, Edgar Quinet, Eugène Sue, Paul Féval, George W. M. Reynolds, Alexandre Dumas, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Marie Nizet, J. S. Le Fanu, Jules Verne, and Bram Stoker. The book’s cover art by Ukrainian artist Inna Vjuzhanina perfectly complements the title, suggesting not only the marriage of these two literary traditions but how the first literary vampires, including Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, continually tried to dupe unsuspecting women into marrying them so they could avoid eternal damnation. A comprehensive index, endnotes, and an extensive bibliography complete the study.

About the Author

Tyler R. Tichelaar has a PhD in Literature from Western Michigan University and Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in English from Northern Michigan University. He owns his own publishing company, Marquette Fiction, and Superior Book Productions, a professional editing, proofreading, and book layout company. The former president of the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association, Tichelaar has been a book reviewer for Reader Views, Marquette Monthly, and the UP Book Review, and regularly blogs about Gothic, Arthurian, and Michigan literature and history. Tichelaar is the award-winning author of thirteen novels and nine nonfiction books, including The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, When Teddy Came to Town: A Novel, and Kawbawgam: The Chief, The Legend, The Man.

Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, 1789-1897 (ISBN: 978-0-9962400-9-3 hardcover; 978-0-9962400-8-6 paperback; 979-8-9872692-0-6) is available through local and online bookstores.

For more information, visit www.GothicWanderer.com. Publicity contact: tyler@marquettefiction.com. Review copies available upon request.

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Alexandre Dumas’ Castle Eppstein: A Mix of Drama and Radcliffean Romance

Castle Eppstein is one of Dumas’ earliest novels, first published in 1843. Some confusion about its title exists since it was published in Brussels that year as Albine and then in France the next year as Chateau d’Eppstein. In English, it is known as Castle Eppstein or The Castle of Eppstein with the subtitle The Spectre Mother sometimes added. That said, it is not one of Dumas’ better-known works, so it is easy to see why its various titles have caused some confusion as noted by Alfred Allison who wrote the introduction to the Ruined Abbey Press edition that I read.

Allison notes that some critics have suggested Dumas simply translated a work from the German and it is not original to him. Dumas may have been indebted to the works of German author LaFontaine (1759-1839) for some of his inspiration, but the work is his own. Another source of inspiration, and the reason I was most interested in reading the novel, is Mrs. Radcliffe. Indeed, Castle Eppstein begins in a style that recalls The Mysteries of Udolpho, but it quickly moves into something entirely different and wholly Dumas’ own. Being an early novel, however, it lacks the skill and artistry of Dumas’ later masterpieces. It was also written at a time when Dumas was still very much a dramatist, and some of the dialogue reflects that, the characters feeling rather outspoken and a bit overly dramatic in their speeches. The novel also reveals that Dumas was not yet the master of plots and framing devices, as I will discuss below. Regardless, the work is interesting as an early use by Dumas of the Gothic.

Dumas certainly starts off well. He begins with a group of characters telling ghost stories at a party held by the Princess Galitzin, a real-life person Dumas knew. This telling of stories is a plot device he will later use in The One Thousand and One Ghosts (1849). In that work, several stories are told while in Castle Eppstein, Count Elim says he has witnessed a ghost for real, and his story then makes up the remainder of the book.

Count Elim tells how he was out hunting and got separated from the rest of his party. He took shelter at Castle Eppstein in Germany only to find it deserted save for two servants, a married couple. They tell him Count Everard lives there and that he has not left the castle for twenty-five years, but now he has gone to Vienna. The castle is in no state to host visitors because it is falling into ruin. The only room fit for habitation is the Red Room where Count Everard sleeps, but it is haunted. The servants offer to give up their bed to Count Elim, but he insists he’ll sleep in the haunted room. That night, he sees a female ghost enter the bedchamber. He feels terror, but she shakes her head, as if to say, “It is not him,” and departs. This scene very much recalls similar scenes in Radcliffe, such as when Ludovico sleeps in a haunted chamber in The Mysteries of Udolpho. In her novels, Radcliffe explains the supernatural as reality, so it is not surprising that Count Elim thinks a trick has been played on him and looks for a switch of some sort in the wall that would have let someone enter the room. Finding nothing, he begins to believe he has seen a ghost. He says nothing to the servants but departs in the morning for Frankfort, where he finds a professor and tells him what he has experienced. The professor tells Count Elim he has seen the ghost of Countess Albini. He then tells the Count a shocking tale about Castle Eppstein and its family that reveals the supernatural is a reality in this novel, thus leaving behind any hints of Mrs. Radcliffe.

The main story begins in 1789. Count Rodolph of Eppstein has two sons, Maximilian and Conrad. Maximilian is the eldest and Rodolph’s heir. He is also a widower with a son. Since his wife’s death, Maximilian has been busy debauching local women, but he thinks nothing wrong with creating bastards. Conrad, however, has married Naomi, the daughter of a servant, and thus is seen as having disgraced the family. In his heart, Rodolph knows Conrad is the honorable son, but he must abide by tradition and what society warrants so he banishes Conrad and Naomi, and they go to France. Meanwhile, Maximilian weds a wealthy woman, Albina. Albina has romantic visions of heroes and thinks Maximilian is such a man, but she soon learns otherwise. After Rodolph dies, Maximilian becomes the count and he and Albina reside at Castle Eppstein. In time, he becomes abusive to her and then leaves her at the castle while he goes off to Vienna.

By this point, the Napoleonic wars have begun and the French have invaded Germany. One day, the castle’s servants find a wounded French soldier named Jacques in the forest and bring him to the castle to recover. Jacques develops a friendship with Albina, and after he recovers, he remains at the castle for an extended period, the news of which eventually reaches Maximilian’s ears, making the count believe his wife has been unfaithful to him.

Maximilian returns to Eppstein, but by then, Jacques has left. Albina now tells Maximilian he is about to have a child. He immediately accuses her of adultery. She assures him she has been faithful, but they have an argument and he accidentally causes her to fall. She goes into labor and dies, but a son, Everard, is safely born.

Everard grows up without any real relationship with his father because Maximilian does not believe he is his son. However, Everard does have a relationship with his deceased mother. A legend says that the Countesses of Eppstein only half die if they die on Christmas night as Albina did. Consequently, she watches over Everard. Albina had also been friends with Wilhelmina, Naomi’s sister, and Wilhelmina agreed, since she was pregnant at the same time as Albina, to be his wet nurse and watch over Everard. Consequently, Everard grows up with Rosamond, Wilhelmina’s daughter.

Rosamond goes off to a convent for school while Everard lives at the castle, not becoming educated but living almost like a wild boy of the forest. When Rosamond returns, she educates Everard and they fall in love. During all this time, Maximilian remains absent. He sends Everard a letter saying he can live at the castle, but they are not to see each other. This changes, however, when Maximilian’s son by his first wife dies, making Everard his heir. Maximilian then returns home and finds that Everard is a son to be proud of.

Conflict ensues again when Maximilian wants Everard to marry a woman of the nobility and he wants to marry Rosamond. The result is a physical fight between the men that is only stopped when Conrad appears at the castle. Conrad now reveals to Maximilian that he was the Captain Jacques who had stayed at the castle long ago. Because he serves Napoleon, he had to keep his identity a secret. He had told Albina, however, that he was her husband’s brother; they developed a friendship but nothing more.

Maximilian now feels despair that he wrongfully accused Albina and caused her death. But then his pride gets the better of him and he refuses to apologize to her. He disappears into the castle, and when he does not reemerge, everyone else becomes concerned for him. The next day, they search for him in the castle and find him dead beside Albina’s tomb. Her skeletal hand has reached up and twisted the gold necklace around his neck, apparently strangling him.

This sad event puts a damper on Everard and Rosamond’s love. Dumas quickly wraps up the story by telling us Conrad died at Waterloo. Rosamond entered a convent at Vienna, and Everard remained at the castle. This ending is unsatisfying since it only completes what the professor at Frankfort apparently knew about the family. We never learn why Everard was gone to Vienna when Count Elim visited Castle Eppstein. Did he finally decide to go be with Rosamond, even though she entered a convent? Dumas appears to have lost the thread of his story, forgetting to wrap it up properly.

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). Castle Eppstein was one of his earlier novels and reflects his writing for the stage.

The novel starts out well with its opening Radcliffean haunted castle mystery, but it then turns overly melodramatic. The characters speak like actors on a stage and are mostly stick figures with little development. The sense of mystery gets lost in the long descriptions of Everard and Rosamond’s unconsummated love, turning it into a rather trite romance. Even when Everard convinces Rosamond to become engaged to him, she wants to wait two years because she knows eventually he will want to be with an aristocratic woman. Why Everard and Rosamond do not marry after Maximilian dies is not satisfactorily explained. His death is not a sufficient cause of grief since he’s barely been a part of their life. But the biggest plot hole is why Conrad felt the need to keep his identity secret for so long. Exactly how he serves Napoleon or why Albina could not tell Maximilian about Conrad is never satisfactorily explained. Had Albina just told Maximilian that Jacques was Conrad, the characters would have all been saved a lot of grief, but then there would have been no novel.

The end result is that Castle Eppstein falls somewhat flat. Fortunately, Dumas would use the Gothic to much greater effect in future works, notably The Count of Monte Cristo, the Marie Antoinette novels, and his play The Vampire.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, the upcoming Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature, King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other fiction and nonfiction titles. Visit Tyler at www.GothicWanderer.com, www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

The Feminist She-Fiend of Victorian Literature: George W. M. Reynolds’ The Parricide

George W. M. Reynolds’ The Parricide (1846) is a fascinating Victorian crime novel, and at its center is one of the most fascinating women in Victorian literature, Sophia Maxwell, who tries to thwart the title character and his accomplice in their schemes and revenge herself upon them. She is an early example of feminism in Victorian literature in how she advocates for women, making her far more interesting than even the dramatic plot twists that fill the novel’s pages.

The Parricide is actually a rewrite of Reynolds’ first novel The Youthful Impostor (1835). I discovered this after I ordered a copy of The Youthful Impostor and only received a reprint of Volume 1. In trying to find a copy of Volume 2 online (which I never did), I discovered with the help of a friend that Reynolds’ rewrote and retitled the novel. Although Reynolds refers to the main character, James Crawford, several times in The Parricide as an impostor, he probably felt the new title would be more attention-grabbing and consequently sell more books.

Always curious why someone would rewrite a book, I tried to follow along in both volumes as I read to see what changes Reynolds made. I discovered he primarily took extremely long chapters and divided them into two or three chapters. Not until Chapter 20 of The Parricide, which coincides with Chapters 12 and 13 in The Youthful Impostor, does the text seem to vary significantly. Unfortunately, the first volume ends soon after so I couldn’t see just how much divergence there is and to what extent Reynolds majorly rewrote, although Stephen Knight, in his wonderful book G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction, sheds some further light on the differences between The Youthful Impostor and The Parricide, which I will discuss below.

Interestingly, The Youthful Impostor was published in Philadelphia but not London. When it was translated into French, a French reviewer made several points that Reynolds listened to in revising the novel as The Parricide. The most obvious change besides the title is a new dramatic prologue that discusses how parricide (killing one’s father) is the worst crime imaginable and forever weighs on the murderer’s mind. While Reynolds does not reveal it until the end, it is obvious to the reader from the novel’s opening pages when the main characters are introduced that James Crawford is the parricide, though he himself doesn’t know it until the book is almost over. Spoiler alert: I will give away all the secrets below. Before discussing further the differences between the two versions of the novel and the character of Sophia, the “feminist fiend” who interests me most, a plot summary is in order.

The novel opens by introducing the reader to the Crawford family. Mrs. Crawford has three children, James, Catherine, and Emily. The late Mr. Crawford died under mysterious circumstances after he had gone to visit his cousin Sir George Mornay, a baronet. While Mr. Crawford was heir to the baronetcy, he and his cousin had experienced a falling out years before. Furthermore, Mrs. Crawford’s marriage to her husband, though legal, is not verified because someone tore out the page from the church register that recorded it, thus making James Crawford’s legitimacy questionable and giving Sir George reason to deny James is his heir.

James has a friend, Mr. Arnold, who poses as a caring friend to all the family, but he is actually a highwayman who has led James into a life of crime (unknown to James’ mother and sisters). Among those crimes is robbing coaches and even murder. Somehow James never realizes that he and Arnold were the highwaymen who killed his own father, something Arnold keeps a secret until the end of the novel.

Arnold has another great secret that the reader figures out before the novel ends—he is Sir George Mornay, whom none of the Crawfords have met save the late Mr. Crawford. Sir George is determined not to let James be his heir, resulting in the murder of James’ father and his stealing the Crawfords’ marriage record. In fact, Arnold is intent on destroying the whole family, leading James into a life of crime and pretending to be in love with Emily until he gets her pregnant and then abandons her while claiming he has talked to her mother about their marrying.

The novel is full of one twist after another and makes for exciting reading even if the plot is somewhat predictable. However, the biggest surprise is Sophia Maxwell. James Crawford manages to finagle his way into Sophia’s affections because her father thinks him a man of business and the favorite of a wealthy Mr. Fitzgerald, who is really just another of Arnold’s cronies posing as a rich man. Consequently, through these false connections, James manages to acquire large sums of money from Mr. Maxwell and begins to associate with his daughter. Between the money Maxwell gives James, thinking he’s investing it, and the possibility that James will marry his daughter, given that James is heir to a fortune, Mr. Maxwell considers himself very fortunate.

However, Sophia soon begins to fear James’ interest in her is waning, so she decides to do some snooping, resulting in her discovering he is a villain. Not wanting to hurt her father, Sophia blackmails James into giving her the money he took from her father. Meanwhile, Mr. Maxwell is also owed money by Sir George Mornay, so Sophia goes to see him and realizes that he is Arnold, James’ accomplice, although at this point, James still does not realize his friend Arnold is really his enemy Sir George.

Arnold now starts to plot against Sophia, calling her a “wanton slut” and “she-fiend” in Chapter 37. When she goes to visit Sir George and discovers he’s Arnold, Arnold tries to strangle her, but someone comes to her rescue.

Sophia now wishes to be rid of James, but she feels like her “life’s current” is now blended with his. She goes to find Dimmock, James and Arnold’s accomplice who has been masquerading as Fitzgerald. She learns James paid him off by giving him money to go to America, but she finds his son, also a criminal, in poverty. With a little work, she gets the younger Dimmock to share with her details of crimes he knows James and Arnold have committed. She offers to help him financially if he’ll turn from a life of crime, so he becomes her loyal follower, even going to James and Arnold to negotiate, pretending to let them bribe him and making them believe he will side with them, only to turn against them.

Matters come to a climax when James acts like he will make things right with Sophia and even go through with marrying her. He invites Sophia to meet his family, but he leads her to people pretending to be his relatives who drug her and then let James rape her in a scene obviously inspired by the rape of Clarissa in Richardson’s famous novel. James then celebrates her rape by getting drunk while Sophia wanders home in a stupor.

The rape becomes a turning point for Sophia. After being ill for several days, she decides not to die to prove her virtue like Clarissa, but to become vindictive. Her father tries to learn what is wrong, but she will only tell him she has done nothing wrong but been punished for looking into others’ affairs. He silently fears she is becoming mentally unstable because mental illness runs on her mother’s side of the family.

Sophia now makes arrangements to meet Arnold and James on a bridge with the idea that they will be arrested. Despite the danger, they go to the meeting, and when the fake police Sophia has hired try to arrest them, they jump over the bridge, but Dimmock retrieves them with a rope he has secretly hooked to them. Arnold, by this point, is repulsed by Sophia’s unlady-like actions. The narrator even seems to agree with Arnold, saying there is something about her “so ominous of mental perversion and female impropriety” that it has “removed the thing from the comic and brought it under the compass of the desperate and tragical” and that Sophia’s ‘diseased taste” from her crushed hopes now worked a “dread revolution in her nature” (Chapter 45). Up until the rape, there is almost a sense of good-natured rivalry in how Sophia and her adversaries try to best one another, but now the narrator clearly sees any such hint of humor or fun is removed by Sophia’s “mental perversion.”

James now tells Arnold that he should cheer up because Sophia is on the border of insanity, so she cannot be a serious threat to them. These two villains are truly appalling at this point because they are not the least horrified by how they have tortured Sophia to the point of near-madness.

Sophia next decides she wants to start a community for women who will not marry, and she will do this by extorting money from James and Arnold so their crimes will pay for it. She never becomes quite clear, however, on what this community will be, referring to it as a place for “abjuring women” and a type of convent or nunnery. She gets Dimmock to extort 500 pounds from her adversaries to start the community while she looks at possible locations in Pentonville for her women’s asylum. She says these women will be her “disciples in a new social religion.” She also begins to claim she has visions that provide her with knowledge from heaven and she has supernatural aid to assist her in creating this community of women. She is almost a precursor to Mary Baker Eddy in the sense that she is practically setting out to found her own religion guided by the supernatural.

Sophia enlists the aid of a man named Donald to help her find a location, but his response to her is very sexist. He tells her she is not clear on what she wants so it is difficult for him to help her, and he asks her ignorant questions such as whether it will be a home only for ugly women who can’t find husbands or for a broader group of women. Sophia replies that it will be a home for wronged women and those who have enough sense not to want to marry. Donald takes such responses as a further sign Sophia is a little crazy, and he hopes she’ll come to her senses and maybe marry him, a sign that he thinks women are only good for one thing—to please men.

Once Donald finds a location for Sophia’s “folly,” as the narrator calls it, he again asks if she wants him to look for women who are old and ugly or young and beautiful. She replies she wants the “pure in heart.” The narrator then refers to Sophia’s plan as a “most impracticable institution” and “crazy scheme” (Chapter 50).

Meanwhile, James and Arnold plot to murder Sophia and frame Dimmock for it. Before that can happen, however, Sophia tells a doctor she is being influenced by spirits from above who are giving her guidance to create her institution. The result is she and Dimmock are confined to a madhouse and we never learn more about them after Chapter 51. The narrator in a few paragraphs bids Sophia goodbye here and tells us the “obdurate door” has been shut upon us and other than for our imaginations, we will be denied access to her further wretchedness.

The novel now moves to its dramatic conclusion. Eventually all is revealed. James learns Arnold is really Sir George, and then Sir George reveals that James was responsible during the highway robbery of killing his own father. Arnold/Sir George and James duel, and James dies, but Hunter, who is in love with Emily, whom Arnold got pregnant, then fights Arnold/Sir George and kills him. However, as Hunter brings the news to Emily, he reveals he has also been shot and he dies. The End.

Not even the good are rewarded in The Parricide. James and Arnold get what they deserve, but Hunter does not deserve to die, and Sophia and Dimmock do not deserve to be locked up in an insane asylum. One wishes that Reynolds had provided an afterword sharing what became of them, but we can assume they are never released. Knight remarks that the text says they will die of starvation, but I have been unable to locate such a passage.

It is worth noting here a few differences between The Youthful Impostor and The Parricide now that I have given the full plot. Knight reveals that Reynolds, who is well known for borrowing/stealing other people’s plots or story ideas, was inspired by Dumas’ play Angèle, and borrowed the pregnancy plot and duel scenes from it. The jail scenes were likely inspired by scenes from Ainsworth’s novels. Minor changes include that Lord Mornay is renamed Sir George Mornay and that Arnold only implied James had stabbed his father in the first novel, but Reynolds has Arnold insist James committed the murder in this novel, a change in line with the new title. Of most interest is that in the original novel, Sophia does not take on a detective role or dress like a boy. She is not intent on revenge nor has reason for it. Instead, in The Youthful Impostor, she is a minor character. Knight writes of her “James also meets a satirically treated ‘Matrimonial Advocate’: the rich wife he is offered is Sophia Maxwell, whom he already knows and admires, but James’s mysterious death will end their possible happiness.” One has to wonder what led Reynolds to revisit Sophia and develop her into one of the most fascinating and mistreated women in literature when he revised the novel.

It amazes me that The Parricide is not one of the best known Victorian novels. Is it great writing? Yes, if one likes potboilers—few authors do a better job than Reynolds of keeping the reader intrigued with a fast-moving plot. Is it great literature? Perhaps not, but Sophia Maxwell deserves to be one of the best known women in Victorian literature. What is surprising is that Reynolds allows the reader to sympathize with her and cheer her on, yet then he makes her insane and even lets the narrator disparage her. Perhaps the sympathy I feel as a reader is a result of my twenty-first-century sensibilities while Reynolds’ readers would have seen her as solely a mental perversion like the narrator. Even though the argument that she is insane has a basis in her father’s fear she will become insane because insanity runs on her mother’s side of the family, it is questionable if Sophia really is insane. Her desire to help women is laudable. That she doesn’t die but fights back when she learns her lover is a louse and even after he rapes her makes her one of the strongest women in literature to this point. One might argue her belief that supernatural beings are aiding her makes her insane, but wouldn’t that make most of the founders of world religions equally insane?

Also notable is that Reynolds turns on its head the idea that virtue must result in death if you are raped. And yet, Reynolds then seems to turn against Sophia by letting the narrator call her scheme impracticable and not allowing her to be the ultimate form of vengeance upon the male perpetrators. Reynolds seems to be on her side by showing the stupidity of Donald who can’t understand her intentions to help women, thinking she can only help ugly women no man would want, but at the same time, the narrator appears to be agreeing with Donald. Reynolds, who is known to have been a champion of women and to have supported his own wife, Susannah Reynolds, in her own novel writing and even to have benefited from her editing, likely was trying to be as subversive as he felt his readers would allow without going too far.

Certainly more work needs to be done on Reynolds’ attitudes toward women. Most of his female characters in other works, notably The Mysteries of London and The Seamstress, receive sympathetic treatment, yet while Reynolds mourns Sophia being locked up in her asylum, he will not lift his pen to free her. But perhaps that was the strongest statement he could make—to leave her locked up, to provide an overwhelming dose of reality about how women were treated in his society.

Consequently, Sophia Maxwell is one of those Victorian characters who haunts the reader after the book is closed, a women ahead of her time whose own creator may have felt he needed to lock her up because she had gotten out of hand.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, The Children of Arthur historical fantasy series, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other titles. Visit Tyler at http://www.GothicWanderer.com, http://www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and http://www.MarquetteFiction.com.

Freaky Friday Meets Faust in Dumas’ Werewolf Novel

Alexandre Dumas’ Le Meneur de loups (The Wolf Leader), published in 1857, is one of the earliest werewolf novels. Prior to it, a werewolf story was included in the middle of English author Captain Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839) and English author George W. M. Reynolds provided a more thorough depiction of a character who turns into a werewolf in Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846-7). A few other pieces of werewolf literature, all by British authors, exist from this period, but Dumas’ novel may be the first werewolf story in French Gothic literature, and it does not appear to have been influenced by either Marryat or Wagner’s works.

The plot of The Wolf Leader is not complicated. What makes the novel interesting for me is how Dumas weaves in many Gothic elements that might be missed by someone who is not a serious student of the Gothic. I will summarize the plot here focusing on the Gothic elements worth noting.

The introduction begins with Dumas speaking in his own voice, telling how he heard this story from his father’s friend, Mocquet. Mocquet was superstitious and believed a local woman, Madame Durand, was a witch and was causing him to have nightmares. He held this low opinion of her because he said in her youth she was the mistress of Thibault, the wolf leader. By passing the story off as Mocquet’s, a real person he mentions in his Memoires, Dumas is using a literary device to make the story appear more authentic. Obviously, it is a supernatural tale that cannot possibly be true, but he can at least claim it is an authentic legend. Dumas says his father objected to Mocquet telling him supernatural tales, but when he was older and his father had died, Mocquet took him hunting and then told him the tale of Thibault.

Today, Dumas is best known for The Three Musketeers, but he was the author of many Gothic works, including The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), which plays with Gothic themes, as well as writing the play The Vampyre (1851) and using supernatural themes in his Marie Antoinette novels. The Wolf Leader, however, has received little attention by critics. According to Wikipedia, in 1951, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas reviewed the 1950 Prime Press edition and placed it among “Dumas’s drabbest hack-work.” However, Franz Rottensteiner described it as “considerably superior from a literary point of view.” I would have to agree with the latter. While the book has its faults, Dumas thought out the plot carefully and used many Gothic elements for his story. That it could be dismissed as hack-work, however, may result from its rather light tone. Despite the dramatic incidents in the book and the overall Gothic theme of redemption, the main character suffers no major feelings of agony and there is no intensely Gothic atmosphere, the result being that it reads almost like a spoof on Gothic literature, and if not directly mocking Gothic literature, it has a light and almost humorous tone at least in several of the scenes. In fact, despite the main character’s less than moral behavior, readers may find themselves cheering him on to his next adventure.

That Dumas is drawing upon Gothic literary traditions is obvious from the beginning of the tale when we are told Thibault is a shoemaker. Similarly, the Wandering Jew was a shoemaker, and his profession immediately, therefore, tells us that Thibault is a Gothic wanderer figure, one who is or will be cursed. Of course, shoemakers are not supernatural and we could argue it is just a coincidence that he and the Wandering Jew were shoemakers, but given that just a few years earlier Dumas wrote Isaac Lacquedem (1852-53), his incomplete novel about the Wandering Jew, it is unlikely Dumas did not intentionally make Thibault a shoemaker.

Although a shoemaker, Thibault has received some education and traveled, which has given him a high opinion of himself. He has gotten permission to set up trade in the forest on the estate belonging to the Duke of Orleans. He is also unwilling to let others think they are better than him, despite the social disparity that exists in 1780, the year the novel is set, less than a decade before the French Revolution. Thibault’s troubles (or adventures) begin when he encounters the Baron of Vez, who is out hunting. When the baron asks him if he’s seen a deer, Thibault gives him saucy answers that result in the baron’s gamekeeper beating him. Afterwards, Thibault wishes for revenge and becomes determined to hunt down the deer before the baron can. Thibault issues this wish out loud and is heard by the devil or one of his minions, though Thibault doesn’t realize it at first.

Later, Thibault enters his goat shed and is surprised to find the deer the baron sought mysteriously tied inside. Thibault decides he will take it to the convent and sell it to the nuns to get money to buy a wedding dress for Agnelette, his beloved. However, before he can do that, a black wolf enters his cottage on its hind legs and speaks to him. The wolf explains that it brought Thibault the deer at his request and it offers to help Thibault get revenge on his enemies, the baron and the gamekeeper. To seal the pact, Thibault and the wolf exchange rings. Soon after, Thibault is astounded to hear the gamekeeper has died and his wish has come true. However, the baron is also ill and Thibault is forced to let the baron’s men kill his goat to make a healing potion for the baron. And so it goes with everything Thibault wishes. He wishes ill on his enemies, and while what he wishes comes true, it also leads to something detrimental for himself.

Agnelette soon after confronts Thibault about how he got the gold ring he is wearing. Unable to tell her he received it from the wolf, he claims he got it for their wedding, but she knows he is lying since it is obviously too large for her. She then breaks off their engagement.

Meanwhile, wolves begin to follow Thibault everywhere and obey him. Part of the pact with the wolf was that the wolf would be granted a hair for his first wish, two hairs for the second, four for the third, and so on. For every hair the wolf takes, a red one takes its place until soon Thibault has a shock of red hair, which he tries to conceal by combing his hair in different ways. His hair is a sign he has been marked by the devil, rather like the mark of Cain, and eventually, Thibault can no longer hide it.

Thibault has several more adventures, mostly involving women he decides he would like to wed, which results in wishes to possess them and be rid of their current suitors. In one such encounter, Thibault wishes he could become the Baron Raoul, the lover of a countess. Consequently, he is able to make love to the countess when he and the baron switch places for twenty-four hours. This is one of the most interesting scenes in the novel and probably the first case in literature of people switching places in the style popularized by the Disney film Freaky Friday (1976). Another novel using this plot is Vice Versa (1882) by F. Anstey, a novel in which a father and son, through use of a magic stone, switch places. That novel is said to have been so funny that English novelist Anthony Trollope died while laughing over it. (A myth about his death, but one often repeated.) While both Vice Versa and Freaky Friday use the switched roles theme for comical means, Dumas uses it more seriously. Thibault, under guise of the baron, ends up being pursued by the Countess’ husband and wounded in a duel. Fortunately, the twenty-four hours of switching places ends just before the baron dies, so Thibault finds himself returned to his own body.

By this point, people have figured out that Thibault is in some way involved with sorcery. He wakes in his home in his own body only to find his cottage on fire and people shouting “Death to the sorcerer! Death to the were-wolf!” (Thibault has not become a werewolf yet, but that he leads a pack of wolves that terrify the villagers has earned him the name.) He escapes from his house but now feels like “Cain, a wanderer on the face of the earth.” Earlier in the novel, he also compared himself to Cain because he brought about the death of the gamekeeper. These references to Cain again relate to the Gothic tradition and particularly the mark of Cain that showed Cain was cursed among men.

Homeless, Thibault now begins to sleep in a wolves’ den with his wolf followers. People fear him as he begins having his wolves destroy property, leading to the bishop excommunicating him. Then one day, Thibault rescues Agnelette from a wolf. She is not grateful but expects he will kill her. He tries to convince her to leave her husband and be with him, but while she admits she still loves him, she refuses. He then tells her he wishes her husband were dead. Terrified because she knows his wishes come true, Agnelette runs to her husband who turns out to be fine, but after Agnelette tells him of Thibault’s behavior, he goes to report the behavior to the authorities and is accidentally shot on the way. Soon after, Agnelette becomes ill over his death.

By this point, a year has passed since the day Thibault made his pact with the wolf. He is now cursing all his ill luck and wishing he had never met the wolf. The wolf now appears and says Thibault can still enjoy everything he wants if he will only take the wolf’s form. No one will then be able to hurt him because his skin will be so strong. He will have to be a wolf by night but can be a man by day. The only catch is that he must be a vulnerable wolf for twenty-four hours once a year. Thibault agrees to the proposal because he is assured he will have unlimited power and wealth. Once the agreement is made, the wolf takes on the form of a man and Thibault becomes a wolf. (If the novel was influenced by Reynolds’ Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, this would be the only scene because in that novel Faust convinced Wagner to take his place as a werewolf.)

Immediately, Thibault finds himself in trouble because it happens to be the twenty-four hours when he must be a wolf. He is hunted by the Baron of Vez and his dogs. As he flees from them, he comes to a church where he finds Agnelette’s funeral in progress. At that moment, he blames himself for her death, feels great sorrow, and asks God to restore her to life even if it means his death.

The baron’s dogs now catch up to him and attack. When the baron arrives, he finds the dogs fighting over a bloody wolf skin, but there is no body to be found. The priest presiding over the funeral says he heard Thibault’s prayer of repentance and sacrifice and that saved him. The sacrifice, however, isn’t a true one since Agnelette died anyway. The novel closes by telling us that each year on the anniversary of Agnelette’s death, a monk comes to pray beside her grave. The implication is that Thibault became a monk.

The novel’s storyline has one plot hole in that it never shows us Madame Durand as Thibault’s mistress, although she is the person who supposedly caused Mocquet to have nightmares and tell the story in the first place.

The novel is interesting for blending the Faustian pact with other themes of the Wandering Jew and Cain. At one point, we are even told that Thibault’s thoughts were like those of Milton’s Satan after he fell. This statement reveals that Dumas probably knew Paradise Lost (1667), which was a major influence in the development of the Gothic novel in England as I have discussed in my book The Gothic Wanderer.

Is The Wolf Leader Dumas’ best work? Far from it, but it is a highly readable and enjoyable novel. It is somewhat predictable and far from as complicated and wide-ranging a plot as in Reynolds’ novel. But it is also interesting that while Wagner agrees to be a werewolf, he does not wish to kill people. Thibault has few qualms about hurting his enemies, although he becomes more careful about making wishes as the novel progresses.

Given that the novel was written in 1857 but set before the French Revolution, it might be interpreted as showing the uprising of the common man against the French aristocracy, especially since Thibault’s first assault is upon a baron. Thibault is also shown as climbing the social ladder as the novel progresses, especially in relation to the women he desires. He goes from loving Agnelette, a peasant girl, to imagining himself marrying a widowed miller’s wife, then a bailiff’s wife, and then a countess, even becoming a baron himself for a short time. In each case, however, the women ultimately reject him or make fun of him behind his back. His social climbing also is obvious from his increasing wealth through not having to work since the wolves provide him with meat that he often sells to support himself. His improved financial situation makes people suspicious of him and in time accuse him of sorcery. We might interpret the novel as showing he is punished for his transgressions against the social order and rising above his class. In the end, he regrets that he was untrue to Agnelette, the only woman he really loved and the only one of his class. Only when Thibault tries to save her and repents is he redeemed from his crimes. The story is thus both subversive in its attacks upon aristocracy and ultimately conservative by showing the dangers or sin of trying to move beyond one’s class. In the end, like Milton’s Satan, pride comes before the fall for Thibault.

However one wishes to interpret The Wolf Leader, it is a fascinating piece of Gothic literature that deserves more attention than it has received, especially in relation to its social implications and revenge theme, a theme that Dumas used to greater effect in The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas was a diverse and powerful writer, and while his work is somewhat uneven in quality, his lesser-known works deserve reevaluation.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, The Children of Arthur historical fantasy series, Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City, and many other titles. Visit Tyler at www.GothicWanderer.com, www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

The Forgotten Gothic: The Count of Monte Cristo

In titling this post “The Forgotten Gothic,” of course, I know no one has forgotten Alexandre Dumas’ phenomenal bestseller, The Count of Monte Cristo, first published in serial form in 1844, but what I think people have forgotten or never fully realized is just how much Dumas’ novel plays with Gothic elements in its depiction of the count and the chain of events he sets in motion in his thirst for revenge.

An early illustration of Dantès after his escape from the Chateau d’If

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo in 1992, I admit I found it deadly dull. I had expected a gripping adventure novel, but the translation I read—I am not sure who the translator was, but he heavily edited the novel to about half its actual length, he used stilted, formal English which loses the charm of Dumas’ original language, and he censored word choice and parts of the plot to make it more appealing to a British Victorian audience—made the novel lacking in vivacity. Many other early English translations abridged and censored Dumas’ original. For example, in several translations, the count’s enthusiasm for hashish was censored. However, when a member of the Trollope and His Contemporaries listserv I belong to mentioned that the Robin Buss translation revealed a new understanding of Edmond Dantès’ intense desire for revenge in the novel, I decided to revisit the book, having always been attracted by its Gothic atmosphere in film versions. Buss’ excellent translation really brought the story to life for me and made me realize not only what an incredible book it is, but what a significant link The Count of Monte Cristo is in the chain of Gothic literature.

The Count of Monte Cristo has never failed to be popular as evidenced by the numerous film, TV, and comic book adaptations of it as well as abridged versions for children. Most of these renderings of it, however, have done it a disservice. While perpetuating the novel’s popularity, they have led people who have not read the novel to think they know The Count of Monte Cristo. They do not. Even the 2002 film starring Jim Cavaziel as the count, which is probably the best film version, fails to do the novel true justice because it cuts so much to simplify the plot into a two-hour film. In truth, the novel runs to 464,234 words or about 1,000-1,300 pages depending on the edition. It is so long because it has several subplots all tied to the count’s desire for revenge. The 2002 film and most others seek a happy ending, usually by not letting the count’s love, Mércèdes, die, and they make numerous other changes, which leave the films as weak renditions of Dumas’ vision. The novel would be better served if adapted into a television miniseries so all its subplots could be treated fully as they deserve. Hopefully, someday that will happen. It has happened in France, but no English miniseries has been made in decades.

I invite readers to reread the novel for themselves in the Buss translation because I will not summarize the entire plot here. However, a very detailed summary of the novel’s plot can also be found at Wikipedia. Instead, here I will discuss the novel’s Gothic elements and some of its possible literary influences. I believe it is a remarkable novel in the Gothic tradition that serves as a transition piece between early and late nineteenth century Gothic novels as I will illustrate at the end of this essay.

Most readers know the basic story, even though it has been simplified in the cinematic versions they are familiar with. Edmond Dantès is wrongfully accused of plotting to help restore Napoleon. He has four primary foes who accuse him without his knowledge. These enemies are his shipmate Danglars; Fernand Mondego, who is in love with Dantès’ fiancée Mércèdes; Caderousse, an unscrupulous neighbor who dislikes Dantès; and Villefort, a magistrate who wants to protect his father, a Napoleon supporter, and more importantly his own career, which could be jeopardized by the paper Dantès has brought back from where Napoleon is in exile.

James Caviezel as The Count of Monte Cristo in the 2002 film.

Dantès remains in prison for fourteen years, which is where the Gothic elements begin. Dantès’ imprisonment recalls other Gothic novels filled with castles and prisons where characters are usually unjustly imprisoned. In prison, Dantès meets the Abbe Faria. Faria is particularly interesting because he meets Dantès while digging a tunnel that eventually leads to Dantès cell. Together, the men plan to escape. Faria is a Gothic character in the sense that, as Buss tells us in the novel’s excellent introduction, he is based on Portuguese cleric Jose Custodia de Faria, an eccentric figure in Paris in the early nineteenth century who was known for his experiments with hypnotism and magnetism. He was a student of Swedenborg and Mesmer and lectured on hypnotism. Hypnotism/magnetism are frequent themes in Gothic literature—the Wandering Jew, Svengali, and Dracula all have hypnotic eyes. Faria also draws geometric lines in his cell which cause his keepers to think him mad, but they reflect he has knowledge beyond most men and they do not understand he is planning his escape. He reflects in this knowledge the Gothic treatment of the Rosicrucian figure, who usually works for mankind’s wellbeing and has two great gifts, the secret of life extension and the philosopher’s stone that turns lead into gold. Faria reflects the gift of life extension in that he has had several strokes but has a “life-giving draught,” a sort of elixir of life, that restores him to health. As for the philosopher’s stone, he doesn’t know how to turn lead to gold, but regardless he has knowledge of a great treasure, one he reveals to Dantès that Cesar Borgia hid on the isle of Monte Cristo. He gives Dantès a paper written in “Gothic characters” that reveals the hiding place of his treasure. This paper is equivalent to the found manuscript in many Gothic novels that reveals secrets of the past. Besides working with Dantès to escape, he also educates Dantès, including teaching him several languages, which allows Dantès to disguise his identity as needed once he does escape.

Before they can escape, Faria dies. Dantès then escapes by hiding in the body bag given to Faria. He is flung into the sea but manages to survive, is rescued by pirates, and eventually gets to Monte Cristo where he finds the treasure, sets himself up under the disguise of a wealthy nobleman, and sets about his revenge. Dantès imprisonment lasts for fourteen years, which recalls the length of time the biblical Jacob labored so he could wed his beloved Rachel, but Dantès, upon returning to Marseilles, learns that Mércèdes has married his enemy Fernand, who now masquerades as a nobleman himself. More notably, Dantès’ escape is equivalent to a rising from the dead since he disguises himself as Faria’s corpse and then returns to life. He has basically been buried alive, not literally but through his imprisonment, and now he has resurrected. In rising from the dead, he is both a vampire figure and a Christ figure, but as the novel progresses, he gradually transforms from the former to the latter role.

Other Gothic elements surrounding Dantès’ character include how he learns to communicate with the sailors and pirates who rescue him. They make signs to one another to communicate much like the freemasons. The freemasons were often associated with conspiracy theories and were claimed to have done everything from building the Tower of Babel to causing the French Revolution. That Dantès works with them shows he is himself a manipulator of politics and economies. Indeed, the Rosicrucians’ possession of the philosopher’s stone was seen as a transgression against God, as evidenced in novels like William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), because it allowed them to manipulate national and world economies. Dantès has a similar power through his incredible wealth, although he only uses it to manipulate the downfall of his enemies. He is referenced by another character as being like Cagliostro and the Comte de Saint-Germain, saying he has the wit of one and the philosopher’s stone of the other. Cagliostro was an Italian adventurer with an interest in the occult, including alchemy. Saint-Germain was of unknown birth but became a nobleman and philosopher with an interest in alchemy who claimed to be 500 years old to deflect inquiries into his origins.

Dantès is equated with several other historical and mythic figures as well. Early in his return to civilization, he calls himself Sinbad the Sailor, drawing upon Arabian Nights metaphors. The Gothic frequently used the Arabian Nights technique of stories within stories, although Dumas does not use that framework, but the many subplots serve a similar purpose. The Sinbad metaphor applies to all the “wandering” Dantès does in his early years as he sets into motion the plans for his revenge—something that aligns him with other Gothic Wanderer figures who are usually transgressors, most notably the Wandering Jew. Dantès is also linked to the Arabian Nights by being called an Ali Baba because he finds the treasure in a secret cave.

Most in line with the Gothic tradition is how Dantès is likened to a Byronic vampire. When he arrives in Paris, he is described by other characters as being a type of Byronic hero, specifically Manfred, and like Byron, he is described as having the gift of spellbinding others—another reference to hypnotism. Later, he is described as having a hand as icy as a corpse, for which he is compared to Lord Ruthven, the hero of John Polidori’s The Vampire (1819), said to be based on Lord Byron. As noted earlier, Dantès has risen from the grave like a vampire. He is also described by other characters as “ageless”—suggesting he shares the Rosicrucian gift of life-extension or perhaps the long life of a vampire. One scene in the novel that may well have inspired Bram Stoker in writing Dracula (1897) occurs when the character Franz visits the Count of Monte Cristo and is served hashish. He falls asleep and dreams of making love to three female statues in the count’s residence of the courtesans Phryne, Cleopatra, and Messalina. This scene is erotic and brings to mind the incident of sexual dreams Jonathan Harker has in relation to the female vampires in Dracula’s castle.

The actual Chateau d’If where Dantès is imprisoned in the novel.

The novel’s resurrection theme continues when Dantès learns from Bertucci, a Corsican and his servant, about how he had once broken into a home of Villefort and discovered Villefort burying a treasure. Bertucci attacked Villefort to get the treasure, only to discover instead the box contained a child whose umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck; Bertucci believes Villefort thought the child dead and was burying it—trying to hide its existence since it is also illegitimate—but Bertucci realizes the child is alive and rescues it. The child has then literally risen from the grave. The child grows up to be named Benedetto. He is a malevolent being, and in time, Dantès hires him to help bring about his revenge against his enemies. Later, Dantès will reveal the secret of this child’s burial when he invites Villefort and his mistress, mother of the child, to the house, which he has purchased now for himself. He frightens them by saying the house is haunted by ghosts and then recounting the story of the child’s burial without revealing the players’ names.

As the novel continues, Dantès creates havoc in the lives of his enemies, while his true identity remains unknown to them. He enjoys promoting his mysteriousness, telling Villefort he’s one of the superior angelic beings and his kingdom is great because he’s cosmopolitan—no one can claim to know his birthplace and only God knows when he’ll die. Because he’s cosmopolitan, he has no national scruples. These references again make him akin to the Wandering Jew, cursed by God to wander the earth for who knows how long—but who often is depicted as working to reduce his curse by serving God’s purposes. Dantès’ cosmopolitan nature in the novel may well have inspired Lew Wallace’s depiction of The Wandering Jew in his novel The Prince of India (1893), in which the Jew, masquerading as an Indian prince, goes to Constantinople at the time of its fall in 1453. The Wandering Jew in the novel also has a great treasure that is hidden away. It is also likely that The Count of Monte Cristo, with its emphasis on revenge, inspired Wallace’s novel Ben Hur (1880), which also is about revenge and redemption. Further research needs to be done to see if Wallace was a reader of Dumas’ novel, but I think it very likely.

Faust is also part of Dantès’ characterization. Dantès claims, that like everyone else, he has been tempted by Satan; here he takes on the role of Christ, offered great wealth if he will worship Satan. This biblical scene is the original Faustian pact, a common theme in Gothic literature, though Christ refuses to make it, and so does Dantès. He claims he resisted this temptation by becoming an agent of Providence, punishing and rewarding according to God’s will. He is viewed as one of God’s angels by the Morel family in the novel, to whom he is a benefactor, Monsieur Morel having owned the ship Dantès had sailed upon and having been the only one who sought to help Dantès when he was unjustly accused.

In truth, Dantès in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo is a master of disguise. He claims as his close associates Lord Wilmore of England, who hates him after some nasty business happened between them in India, and a friend, the Abbe Busani. Actually, they are not his associates but people he also masquerades as. He does so especially when Villefort makes inquiries of both to find out the truth about the count. Of course, in both roles, Dantès feeds Villefort incredible stories. One is that the count bought a house to open up a lunatic asylum—perhaps another suggestion that seeped into Bram Stoker’s brain in writing Dracula. After all, Dracula is also a count and buys a house near a lunatic asylum where he manipulates the lunatic Renfield.

The Wandering Jew theme in the novel may have been suggested to Dumas partly because of his source material. The novel is based on the true-life story of Francois Picaud, who was a shoemaker or cobbler. Dumas found the story in Jacques Peuchet’s Police dévoilée: Mémoires historiques tirés des archives de Paris… (1838), a collection of anecdotes from the Paris police archives. While Picaud’s story shares many similarities to that of Dantès in the novel, Dumas made some changes such as shifting Dantès’ origins to Marseilles rather than Paris. However, what interests me here is the shoemaker origins. The Wandering Jew was himself a shoemaker who refused to let Christ rest outside his door on the way to Calvary; as a result he was cursed to wander the earth until Christ’s return. The shoemaker theme relates to the wandering—shoes being needed for long journeys. Here also we may have an influence of the novel upon Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) since Dr. Manette, when imprisoned in the Bastille, takes up shoemaking. Manette wanders about his rooms ceaselessly at night. Manette’s imprisonment in the Bastille also recalls Dantès’ long imprisonment, including that he was wrongly accused. Dickens would also use the resurrection theme in his novel, Manette being reclaimed to life, and there is a resurrection man, Jerry Cruncher, in the novel whose initials are the same as those of Jesus Christ. (For more on the Gothic elements of A Tale of Two Cities, see my book The Gothic Wanderer.)

One other Gothic theme in the novel is that of gambling. Madame Danglars is a great gambler who gambles away much of her husband’s fortune. Gambling is not limited to gaming, however; the count purposely uses the telegram to create false rumors that affect the buying and selling of stocks, which leads to Danglars’ financial ruin. Gambling was seen as a transgression against God in Gothic literature because people tried to rise above their social and financial status by gambling to gain great wealth. This transgression was linked to the philosopher’s stone that could manipulate world economies by manufacturing wealth.

Buss, in his introduction, says that Dumas could not have written this novel without first being influenced by Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842-4). That novel created urban crime fiction, and Paris is similarly the setting to the later parts of Dumas’ novel. Certainly, that Dumas took the frame of his story from Jacques Peuchet’s Police dévoilée: Mémoires historiques tirés des archives de Paris… suggests that he was trying to create an urban crime story to ride the coattails of Sue’s popular novel. Although only part of The Count of Monte Cristo is set in Paris, it is in the Paris scenes that the count enacts most of his revenge, creating many mysteries that those he would be revenged upon do not understand. At the same time, Dantès is benevolent much like Prince Rodolphe in Sue’s novel. Rodolphe disguises himself as a common worker to go out among the people, like Haroun al-Rashid—another tie to the Arabian Nights—to find people deserving of his benevolence. However, while in Sue’s novel, the prince aids convicts to help reform them, in Dumas’ novel, the count aids criminals only so they will help him achieve his revenge. These criminals in the end are also punished in various ways, despite their role in bringing about the count’s form of justice.

The Chateau de Monte Cristo, a home Alexandre Dumas built with money from the sales of his novels. Today, it is a museum.

Despite Dantès’ believing he is the hand of Providence, at the end of the novel, when he sees the full extent of the misery he has inflicted upon his enemies, he begins to question whether he has acted justly. After almost everyone in Villefort’s family has died, Villefort realizes he has been unjust toward his own wife, who has poisoned some of the family. He says she caught the disease of crime from him like it was the plague and he decides they will leave France together to wander the earth—another play on the Wandering Jew theme. However, Villefort arrives home to find it is too late—his wife has already killed herself. At this point, Dantès reveals who he is to Villefort, and having pity on him, tells him he has paid his debt and is satisfied. It’s too late, however; Villefort goes mad. Dantès then rushes from the house in horror, fearing he has gone too far.

Dantès is now filled with doubt and despair. He meets Mércèdes one last time—she long ago realized who he was and she begged him to spare her son when the two dueled—film versions often make the son Dantès’ son—but Dumas did not go that far. Dantès now parts from Mércèdes, knowing he has impoverished her and her son after her husband, Fernand, committed suicide, but he makes sure they are provided for.

Reexamining his life, Dantès next travels to the Chateau d’If, where he had been imprisoned, and there hears from the guard the history of the abbe and the escaped prisoner—the guard does not realize he is telling Dantès his own story. Dantès now asks God to take away his doubt that he has been acting as God’s agent in carrying out his revenge. When the guard gives Dantès the abbe’s manuscript of the history of the Italian monarchy as a gift, Dantès notices the book’s epitaph, “‘You will pull the dragon’s teeth and trample the lions underfoot,’ said the Lord,” and takes it as a sign that he has done the right thing in bringing about justice.

In the novel’s final chapter, Dantès completes his transformation from a resurrected vampire into a resurrected Christ figure. Throughout the novel, while he has wreaked revenge on his enemies, he has also spared the good, especially those of the second generation who were not responsible for their fathers’ sins. By not punishing sins to the third and fourth generation like the Old Testament God of the Hebrews, he also acts like a Christ figure who forgives sins. Among the second generation is Valentine, the daughter of Villefort. When Villefort’s wife was poisoning members of the family so that her son could become sole heir, Dantès manipulated events so that when Valentine’s life was in jeopardy, it would only appear she had also died. Dantès does not reveal his secret even to Valentine’s lover, Max Morel. Now in the novel’s final scene, he brings Max to the isle of Monte Cristo, where Max expects the count will help him carry out his suicide because he is so grief-stricken over Valentine’s death. Instead, Max finds Valentine there, alive and well, like Jairus’ daughter raised from the dead by Christ (a reference Dumas makes, thus equating the count with Christ). One also can’t help thinking of Romeo and Juliet in this scene where poison and suicide both figure in for the lovers, but instead of tragedy, life and happiness are restored.

In truth, while films and other adaptations of the novel have treated The Count of Monte Cristo as a great adventure novel, it is truly much more akin to Shakespearean and other Renaissance revenge tragedies. The novel may well have brought the revenge theme strongly back into literature in a way it had not known since the Renaissance. It is probably no accident that a slew of novels focused on revenge followed in the nineteenth century.

The first such novel that comes to mind is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Heathcliff, like The Count of Monte Cristo, is bent upon revenge. Heathcliff also has a great deal of mystery about both his origins and how he came by his wealth and what he did in the years he was absent from Wuthering Heights. I do not know if Emily Brontë read The Count of Monte Cristo, but I think it very likely since the novel’s publishing history in England, as detailed at Wikipedia, shows that several translations were available in England beginning in 1845, including serialization beginning in 1845 in W. Francis Ainsworth’s Ainsworth’s Magazine. Another abridged serialization appeared in The London Journal between 1846 and 1847, and the first single volume translation in English was an abridged version published by Geo Pierce in January 1846 as The Prisoner of If or The Revenge of Monte Christo. The novel also began appearing in April 1846 as part of the Parlour Novelist series of volumes, translated by Emma Hardy and in an anonymous translation by Chapman and Hall in 1846. One would have to learn more about the dating of the manuscript of Wuthering Heights to determine if an influence is possible in this short timeframe. (Some suggest she began the novel as early as 1837 but no later than October, 1845.) However, Brontë also read French—in fact, she lived in Belgium in 1842 to perfect her French so she could teach it. Given that the novel was published in France in 1844, that allows three years for Brontë to read it and be influenced by it in writing her own novel. I find I am not the first to suggest this possibility. Robert Stowell argued this point in “Brontë Borrowings: Charlotte Brontë and Ivanhoe, Emily Brontë and The Count of Monte Cristo,” Brontë Society Transactions, 21: 6 (1996), 249–251. However, while Stowell highlights similarities between the novels, there is no hard evidence to prove Brontë read Dumas. The text of Stowell’s article can be found at: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/count-monte-cristo.

As mentioned earlier, revenge is a key theme also in Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) along with the title character’s ultimate redemption when he becomes a Christian and learns forgiveness. Wallace scholars are well aware of Dumas’ influence on Ben Hur and The Count of Monte Cristo also influenced Wallace’s later novel The Prince of India (1893). According to Wikipedia:

“Ben-Hur was also inspired in part by Wallace’s love of romantic novels, including those written by Sir Walter Scott and Jane Porter, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) by Alexandre Dumas, père. The Dumas novel was based on the memoirs of an early 19th-century French shoemaker who was unjustly imprisoned and spent the rest of his life seeking revenge. Wallace could relate to the character’s isolation of imprisonment. He explained in his autobiography that, while he was writing Ben-Hur, ‘the Count of Monte Cristo in his dungeon of stone was not more lost to the world.’”

Also, as noted above, I suspect influence on Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In addition, The Count of Monte Cristo brings to mind the wealthy and mysterious financier Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1872) and even Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) because of his equally enormous wealth and mysterious background. While more research should be done to confirm these possible influences, to me, the novel’s incredible influence on both Gothic and realistic fiction that followed it cannot be overstated.

Alexandre Dumas

Too often, The Count of Monte Cristo has been dismissed as an adventure novel and even reduced to a children’s classic. In truth, it is a masterpiece of Gothic fiction, drawing upon numerous Gothic themes to tell not only a story of revenge but the transformation of one man’s soul as he struggles between his human inclinations for revenge, a belief in God, and trying to find a happy medium of justice where evil is punished but the good rewarded while leaving room for benevolence and redemption. It is time that the novel receive the critical attention it deserves, including taking its place in the Gothic canon on the same shelf as Polidori’s The Vampire and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and firmly planted between Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, The Children of Arthur novel series, and Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City. Visit Tyler at www.GothicWanderer.com, www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.