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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Guest Post: Why I Love the Gothic Story “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens – by Rayne Hall

Today, we have a guest post by author and Gothic lover Rayne Hall. First, I’ll introduce her, then she’ll talk about Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” and then she has a special offer regarding her new book you won’t want to miss!

Rayne Hall MA is the author of over 100 books, mostly Dark Fantasy and Gothic Horror, e.g. The Bride’s Curse: Bulgarian Gothic Ghost and Horror Stories. She is also the acclaimed editor of Gothic, Fantasy and Horror anthologies (e.g. Among the Headstones: Creepy Tales from the Graveyard, and author of the bestselling Writer’s Craft series for advanced-level writers, including the bestselling Writer’s Craft series e.g. Writing Gothic Fiction.

Born and raised in Germany, Rayne Hall has lived in China, Mongolia, Nepal and Britain. Now she resides in a village in Bulgaria, where men perform the annual demon dance, ghosts and sirens beckon, and abandoned decaying houses hold memories of a glorious past.

Her lucky black rescue cat Sulu often accompanies her when she explores spooky derelict buildings. He delights in walking across shattered roof tiles, scratching charred timbers and sniffing at long-abandoned hearths. He even senses the presence of ghosts… but that’s another story.

Rayne has worked as an investigative journalist, development aid worker, museum guide, apple picker, tarot reader, adult education teacher, belly dancer, magazine editor, publishing manager and more, and now writes full time.

Why I Love the Gothic Story “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens

By Rayne Hall

(copyright Rayne Hall 2023)

Charles Dickens (1812 –1870) was a fiction writer, editor and social critic. Today, he is best known for his novels, including Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, depicting life in Victorian England. Few people realise that Dickens also wrote fine ghost and horror stories.

‘The Signal-Man’ is one of the stories which drew me to the horror genre – the kind of story I like best, Gothic, psychological, atmospheric, scary by implication rather than by gore. Each time I read it, it has the same disturbing effect, leaving me to wonder: what if the narrator had not interfered, had not tried to help the signal-man by calming him? Would the signal-man have paid attention to the call, heeded the warning, and averted the accident? How guilty is the narrator of the signal-man’s death? Does he feel the guilt? Should he?

Throughout the story, the narrator felt and acted compassionate and caring on the one hand, patronising and detached on the other. We don’t learn how he feels at the end, if his ‘superior’ attitude gives way to feeling foolish. As readers, we know only how we would feel in his place.

This is not the only question the author leaves for the readers to decide. Dickens doesn’t even reveal what the signal-man had really seen – or thought he had seen – and where the visions and premonitions had come from.

Although the ending is strong and leaves a powerful impact, it doesn’t answer all questions, and instead encourages the readers to think and draw their own conclusions.

Charles Dickens wrote this story a few months after he survived a horrific railway disaster, the 1865 Staplehurst Rail Crash. The train crossed a viaduct where a section of the rails had been removed for engineering works and derailed, with parts of the train tumbling into the dry riverbed below.

When his carriage hung at a steep angle off the viaduct into the river, Dickens escaped with his life. For hours, he aided injured fellow passengers, some of whom died in his arms. The directors of the railway company presented him with a piece of plate as a token of their appreciation for his assistance.

Dickens never got over this trauma. For two weeks after the accident, he lost his ability to speak, and for the rest of his life, he was terrified of trains and used alternative modes of transport where possible. According to his son, he never fully recovered from the terror of that day.

I know from experience how scary it can be to revisit personal traumas to weave them into fiction. Dickens wrote this story just a few months after the event, with the horrifying events fresh on his mind. This must have required great courage.

A second railway disaster, which happened a few years earlier and was still in the public mind at the time, also fed Dickens’ creative imagination for this tale: the Clayton Tunnel Crash of 1861. A series of human and technical errors, combined with misunderstandings and unfortunate coincidences, caused two trains to crash into each other in a tunnel, killing 23 and injuring 176 passengers.

One of the crucial factors in that train crash was a misunderstanding between two signal-men. An investigation revealed the horrifying conditions under which these men worked: one of them had been working a continuous 24-hour shift! His job required intense, non-stop concentration, and we can imagine how tired his brain was at the time of the accident. Even in his tired state, he did his best to avert the accident, but did not realise that his counterpart at the other end of the tunnel had misunderstood him. When the inquest revealed how these men, on whom the safety of trains and passengers depended, had worked without proper break, a public outcry ensued, and different rules and systems were put in place.

As well as an author and editor, Charles Dickens was a social reformer. Often, he combined these roles, using his fiction to expose intolerable living and working conditions, flagging up social injustices. He saw literature as a springboard to moral and social reform.

No doubt, he was moved by the plight of two signal-men involved in the Clayton Tunnel Crash who had been too tired to avert the disaster. In writing his story, Dickens exposed another aspect of the inhumane working conditions of signal-men.

The story’s titular character lives and works in total isolation, in a remote signal box where he has practically no human contact. As a result, his mental health suffers. Through the narrator’s perspective, Dickens presents it as a life that can descend into madness. Yet this man is in charge of the safety of trains. Dickens used his story to arouse pity for men working under such conditions, and alert the public to the resulting dangers.

In this, he was remarkably successful. Dickens was what we today would call an ‘influencer’. His stories helped shape public opinion influenced the decisions of the authorities, and contributed to several legal reforms.

I admire how Dickens manages to use the plight of fictional characters to expose real social injustices, and to inspire moral, ethical and political action without ever sounding preachy. This, I think, is literature at its noblest: inspiring readers to change their attitudes and bring about improvements, without preaching or dogma.

In tone, this story is decidedly Gothic. I’ve identified the following typical elements of Gothic literature:

The location is isolated, remote, difficult to reach and creepy: ‘The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down.’

The building is dark, dilapidated, battered by the elements: ‘His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’

The means of communication with the outside world are limited. The signal-man can use the telegraph machine to contact his colleagues along the track, and when a train passes, he can exchange a hurried signal with the driver, that’s all – except when a wanderer happens to come to this spot and seek a conversation, like the narrator does, an extremely rare circumstance.

The story begins when an outsider enters the scene, disrupting the status quo. This happens with the first word, the narrator calling “Halloa!”

A growing sense of danger and impending doom pervades the story. We readers know that a disaster will unfold, and are as helpless as the characters to prevent it. ‘There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen.’

Darkness, light and shadows create mood and contribute to the plot – for example, the red warning light.

Part of the story unfolds at sunset, that special time of the day when day gives way to night and the sinking sun dyes the horizon. Dickens’ description of the twilight’s effect is sparse, but powerful. ‘… so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.’

Windy weather contributes to the atmosphere. ‘The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail.’

The tunnel represents the dangerous underground space so common in Gothic fiction. ‘…and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’

In typical Gothic fashion, the line between sanity and madness is blurred: The narrator believes that the inhumane isolation has affected the signal-man’s mental health. ‘When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us…’

A character has a dark past that he prefers not to reveal. The signal-man mentions having wasted education opportunities in his youth, but does not elaborate. We readers are left to surmise what happened. Since he seems to bear his new life like a penalty for past deeds, it seems likely that he committed something worse than mere classroom truancy.

Paranormal elements are present, e.g. the ghost that appears and disappears. ‘I ran right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone.’

There are communications from the supernatural realm, e.g. the warning voice, and the warning bell ringing that only the signal-man can hear: ‘The ghost’s ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don’t wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it.’

A death contributes to the unfolding story: the demise of the young lady in the train.

Guilt, one of the key elements of Gothic fiction, plays a role when we readers wonder if the narrator caused the signal-man’s death – even though the narrator himself doesn’t seem to feel this guilt.

Great Gothic fiction flag ups and deals with social issues. In this story, it’s the working condition of signal-men.

Of course, no single work of Gothic fiction contains all tropes of Gothic literature. ‘The Signal-Man’ features neither a disputed inheritance nor a forbidden love; those would simply not fit into this plot.

However, one crucial trope of Gothic fiction is conspicuous by its absence: passion.

Throughout the tale, the narrator remains strangely detached and analytical, even when he feels strongly about something. The signal-man, although conscientious, is not passionate about his job. Although he teaches himself in his spare time, he’s not passionate about learning either. While he is distressed and worried about the warnings, he is not passionate about finding out what they mean.

This absence of passion is strange in a work of Gothic fiction, and the sense of detached, analytical interest from the narrator’s point of view feels alien – but in my opinion, this makes this story all the more chilling.

To me, ‘The Signal-Man’ is Gothic fiction at its finest: creepy, thrilling, thought-provoking.

When I was editing the anthology The Haunted Train: Creepy Tales from the Railways and selected the stories, I was happy to include this masterpiece of Gothic fiction.

ABOUT THE BOOK THE HAUNTED TRAIN: CREEPY TALES FROM THE RAILWAYS

Come on board for a Gothic journey in a funicular railway in Victorian England, a freight train in the Carpathian mountains, a high tech sky train in Bangkok, an underground railway in Tokyo. Visit stations which lure with the promise of safe shelter but harbour unexpected dangers. Meet the people who work on the tracks – stationmasters, porters, signal-men – and those who travel – commuters, tourists, dead bodies, murderers and ghosts.

In this volume, editor Rayne Hall has collected twenty of the finest– and creepiest – railway tales. The book features the works of established writers, classic authors and fresh voices. Some stories are spooky, some downright scary, while others pose a puzzling mystery.

Are you prepared to come on board this train? Already, the steam engine is huffing in impatience. Listen to the chuff-chuff-chuff from the locomotive and tarattata-tarattata of the giant wheels. Press your face against the dust-streaked window, inhale the smells of coal smoke and old textiles, watch the landscape whoosh past as you leave the familiar behind and journey into the unknown.

But be careful: you can’t know the train’s real destination, nor your fellow travellers’ intentions. Once you’ve closed that door behind you and the wheels start rolling, you may not be able to get out.

The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2023. (After that date, the price will go up.) https://mybook.to/Train.

The paperback edition will be available soon.

A New Biography of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, the Mothers of Historical Fiction

In 2017, I wrote a blog post here on Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), in which I lamented that more is not known about Jane Porter or her relationship with Sir Walter Scott in connection to the development of the historical novel. That gap in literary history has now been filled by a monumental biography just published by Devoney Looser titled Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës. The lack of information about Jane Porter available is apparent just in the fact that I was clueless she had a sister, Anna Maria Porter, who was also a historical novelist, and though Jane’s junior by three years, was published first.

Looser’s dedication to the sisters’ memory is extraordinary given the compiling of this 500-plus-page biography that must have taken her years to research and write. Between them, the sisters published twenty-six books, the best known today being Jane’s The Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw, but Jane also wrote The Spirit of the Elbe, The Pastor’s Fire-Side, and Duke Christian of Luneberg, plus many more. Anna Maria’s titles included The Lake of Killarney, The Hungarian Brothers, and Don Sebastian, to name only a few. Beyond the novels, Looser had access to countless letters by the sisters that have only come to light in recent years. The letters show the depth of their affection for each other, as well as their humor, and give deep insight into the workings of their family and how they felt the need to write to support their family when their brothers were often falling into debt.

Looser’s book needs to be read to do full justice to the sisters. I will just briefly say it is invaluable for many reasons. One of the chief is how the critics of the day responded to the sisters, often suggesting they should put down their pens. We also get insight into the workings of the literary world in the first half of the nineteenth century as the sisters made deals to sell their books, including how many copies to be printed, what they were paid, and what they received for future editions. Looser often compares what they were paid to other writers, including Austen and Scott, to put the amounts in context. In addition, the sisters wrote for magazines, and they wrote plays that sadly were mostly failures, including due to being rewritten by others.

One of the book’s real marvels is the depiction of the social circles the Porter sisters existed within. They had many connections to members of the gentry and even nobility, counting dukes as their friends and a Russian princess as their sister-in-law. They continually tried to get favors in regards to their publishing through this network, but usually with little success. American publishers made a fortune off Jane’s novels yet paid her nothing. Jane also tried to acquire a pension from the government, going so far as to write Duke Christian of Luneburg about George IV’s ancestors to get his help. Instead of receiving a long-term annual payment, she was only given a few occasional and small monetary gifts that barely sustained the family.

Anna Maria Porter

The sisters’ social circles included other female authors. Brother Robert Ker Porter was an artist, which opened the art world to the sisters, plus they had many friends in theatrical circles. The result is the sisters experienced more freedom in society than one would expect, given the limited social circles of the females in Jane Austen’s novels.

And then there is the sisters’ relationship with Sir Walter Scott. I had read that Scott was friends with the Porters, but Looser makes the relationship clear that they were only acquaintances in their youth, and long before Scott took up his pen. Years later when the sisters were novelists and he was a poet, they renewed their acquaintance, but they were never really more than acquaintances. In 1814, Scott published Waverley without revealing his identity, but it was generally known he was the author. In the preface, he claimed he had begun the novel a decade before, which meant he could avoid any claim of being influenced by Jane’s The Scottish Chiefs. He also cited the names of other authors, including Maria Edgeworth, who inspired him, but the Porter sisters’ names were noticeably absent. The sisters were always cordial to him, but also resented that he never acknowledged that they had been writing historical fiction before him, and he never acknowledged it, acting as if his work were original. The sisters were clearly jealous of his popularity, though they never openly accused him of plagiarizing their works or ideas, but they did want him to acknowledge their role in the development of the historical novel. The ultimate insult came when Scott died and Jane was asked to donate to the fund to help save Abbottsford because Scott’s debts were so great. Jane had known debt all her life, yet she contributed so she would not be seen as being mean for not doing so.

Jane Porter

I do think The Scottish Chiefs a remarkable historical novel with many of the elements Scott used in his own works. (At times, it also equals or surpasses Scott in dullness, but overall, it is a masterpiece.) Of course, its style is different from Scott’s, but I don’t think anyone can deny it is a great achievement in the historical novel that predates Scott’s work. Yes, it may be more romance than historical, but it was a vast improvement on earlier historical romances like Sophia Lee’s The Recess. Whether Jane Porter or Sir Walter Scott “invented” the historical novel may be argued for generations to come, but as much as I like much of Sir Walter Scott’s work, I would give the laurels to Jane as the true originator. As for Anna Maria Porter, I have yet to read any of her work, but I am sure she deserves partial credit given how the sisters worked together in partnership, not helping to write each other’s novels, but deliberately taking turns writing novels to support the family.

While Looser’s book is a tremendous achievement and one of the best literary biographies I have read in years, it is not without a few shortcomings. Despite the copious endnotes that list her sources, there is no proper bibliography. I would have liked to see a list of all her sources, especially those by the other few Porter scholars like Thomas McLean, whom she quotes. I also feel that the descriptions of the Porter sisters’ novels could be more extensive. Looser briefly tells us what each novel is about, but she does not go into detailed plot summaries, much less real literary criticism. I can understand this minimalism with the lesser known novels, but I think Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs could have had entire chapters devoted just to analyzing the works. Looser must have wanted to focus more on the sisters and their lives than the details of their work. Notably, Looser does not give the novels much praise herself, which suggests while the sisters are fascinating, perhaps their work is less so. I hope not since I think both Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs extremely readable and interesting, with a few lapses here and there, but if they are the two that became most famous, it’s possible the others are sub-par. Only reading them will tell. Hopefully, volumes of criticism on the Porter sisters’ novels are yet to be written.

A dramatic moment in The Scottish Chiefs, painted by N. C. Wyeth

I sincerely wish Looser’s book paves the way for a renewed interest in the Porter sisters. With the exception of Jane’s two best-known works, no critical editions exist of the other novels. Most of them can be bought in poorly produced editions online at Amazon—the kind that are often reprints with small fonts and scarcely readable. Instead, scholarly editions of all their books need to be produced, as well as ebook editions that contain their complete works so readers of Looser’s fascinating biography can get to know the sisters better.

I thank Looser for her devotion to making the Porter sisters real people who live again two centuries after they created a genre that remains one of the most popular in literature today.

Addendum: After Devoney Looser read my blog, she wrote to tell me she will be posting a bibliography at her website https://www.sisternovelists.com/

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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.

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.

Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, a Review

“damn good coffee never comes for free.”

— Timothy Morton and Rune Graulund

My opening quote is from Chapter 12 of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund, and Johan Höglund and just released by University of Minnesota Press. It references the situation we currently are coming to accept as a fact. All human activity has an effect on this planet and our climate, and that effect is usually a detrimental if not devastating one. Even the production of our coffee has had significant impact on the environment, both the harvesting and the packaging of it.

This blog post will review Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth and highlight some of the essays that discuss Gothic works that use environmental-related themes. The term Anthropocene in the subtitle refers to the time on this planet when humans have had the greatest impact on the earth, and Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth discusses that impact in all its severity, showing how Gothic our world and our lives have become as a result not just of the Industrial or Technology Revolutions but from our very earliest efforts to cultivate the earth and our misguided belief that we are its masters.

It is impossible for me to do complete justice to this book in a review, but I will say that the sixteen essays included in it are all illuminating, thoughtful, and interesting. I cannot discuss them all, but I enjoyed every single one and I appreciated that they are mostly free of academic jargon, though I did have to look up a few words, but mostly due to my own ignorance about climate change and the other environmental topics this book concerns itself with. I was glad to become better educated about them. The book is divided into four sections titled Anthropocene, Plantationocene (focused on agriculture), Capitalocene (referencing capitalism), and Chthulucene (referencing Lovecraft’s famous creation). The titles reflect the book’s larger discussion about the appropriateness or ineptness of the term Anthropocene to describe adequately the period of human impact on the earth.

As a student primarily of eighteenth and nineteenth century Gothic literature, I was not familiar with many of the works discussed, several of them being TV shows, films, and books from the last few decades, but the essays made me want to view or read most of them. Some of the better known works discussed include the recent Jurassic Park films, Jaws, and the TV series Twin Peaks. More classic works discussed are the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. While climate change and man’s detrimental effects upon the earth are themes more frequently treated in late twentieth and early twenty-first century works, I appreciated looking back to these classic texts to show how these concerns were already treated in earlier works. Lisa M. Vetere’s essay “Horrors of the Horticultural” was probably the most interesting article to me because it discussed how the landscaping of the estate in Brown’s Wieland allows for the Gothic plot, primarily the biloquism/ventriloquism to take place that causes the horrors in the novel. I had never considered that aspect of the novel, but Vetere provides plenty of support from the text to convince me. At the same time, she discusses the consequences of landscaping at large, including the damage done by the tons of weedkiller people use every year to create unnatural, manicured lawns in their efforts to control nature.

Lovecraft is known for his works about prehistoric creatures who threaten mankind’s place on the planet, but Rune Graulund’s essay “Lovecraft vs. Vandermeer” shows how Lovecraft’s themes are being reworked in modern works like Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) without the inherent racism Lovecraft uses and to show the earth does not inherently belong to humans. This concept of human dominance and their questionable right to the earth is discussed in numerous other essays. Fred Botting in “Monstrocene” discusses how humans need to come to terms with a multispecies concept on this planet and that we are all dependent upon one another for survival. I was left wondering if other species are as dependent upon us as we are upon them. I suspect not. Gothic re-imaginings of life after human extinction were also explored in various essays, including works in which humans become something other than human, as if to be anything other than human should be a cause for horror. Perhaps the opposite is true.

Texts that also seem to promote human ascendancy and even white male superiority are explored, such as the film The Meg in which strong, handsome white men destroy the giant sharks that threaten humanity. In “De-extinction” Michael Fuchs gives us another take on threatening animals by discussing how in the Jurassic Park films creatures are made de-extinct, and he reveals that this is no longer science fiction but becoming possible. However, as the Jurassic Park films warn, we cannot always control the consequences of our actions. Furthermore, reintroducing a species that was extinct could lead to the extinction of another species, so any efforts to try to manipulate nature can backfire on us.

Some of the essays were simply illuminating for me in relation to climate change and eco-friendly issues. In “Beyond the Slaughterhouse,” Justin D. Edwards discusses zombies and vampires as metaphors for our own meat-eating practices and how the Gothic asks how and what we can eat to be less destructive. I was stunned to learn one-third of the planet is given over to feeding the animals we eat and one-third of cereal is used for animal grain, making one wonder why humans could not just eat the cereal rather than the animals. Edwards adds that we try to gloss over our violence toward animals by redefining them so that we don’t eat cows but beef and we don’t eat pigs but pork.

Another essay I found fascinating was Laura Kremmel’s “Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-burial” which talked about sanitary issues with graveyards in the nineteenth century and how the formaldehyde and other chemicals we use for embalming today are not healthy for the earth. She goes on to explore eco-friendly burials, including the role mushrooms can play in it and how actor Luke Perry was buried in a mushroom suit. Timothy Clark’s “Overpopulation” made me realize that overpopulation is often misconstrued as a problem, and while I was stunned to realize the world human population has more than doubled in my lifetime, I also appreciated Clark’s point that population growth, which is greater in the southern hemisphere, is not so much the problem as the pollution growth caused by the less densely populated northern hemisphere. Rebecca Duncan’s “Gothic in the Capitalocene” reveals that the world economy is really dependent upon the world’s ecology. The two cannot be separated from each other going forward.

As Fred Botting states in “Monstrocene,” humans are a major geological force on this planet, so we have to come to terms with the damage we are doing. All the essays in Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth make that point vividly clear, and I felt a good balance was achieved in them between highlighting the dangers of climate change and the current crisis the human race is facing as well as in the analysis of how these topics are treated by a variety of novels, films, and television series.

Frankly, though the book is 344 pages, I was left wanting more. Most of the authors focused on more recent works, but given my own area of expertise in the Gothic, I would have appreciated more of an overview of the literary history of texts that discuss these themes. That said, that I am able to name several classics that are relevant to the discussion shows how the book made me conscious of works one might not at first associate with environmental issues. Fred Botting discusses Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) which I have written about myself. It features a disease that wipes out the human race in the year 2100, as well as signs of nature, such as the sea, also acting against mankind. The Last Man was largely ignored by critics until the last few decades. Another work that deserves mention, though few people know it is also titled The Last Man, or Le Dernier Homme (1805) by French author Cousin de Grandeville. It is also set in the future and depicts a dying human race. Crop failure, sterility, and wild weather are all elements of this novel as the forces of nature try to stop humans from reproducing. I also think about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne’s adventure novels in which Captain Nemo explores the depths where creatures that men may not know lurk. Furthermore, Captain Nemo, in the 1961 film of The Mysterious Island, though not the book, experiments in food growth to try to help resolve the earth’s food shortage issues.

That there are not more essays on earlier works of literature is not a shortcoming of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth but rather a testament to how it has made me go back and start to rethink about texts I already know, and how I will pay more attention to environmental issues in books and films going forward. And such references are everywhere in literature and film from pollution to mining to fishing and a variety of other activities that are spread across human history and permeate fiction, Gothic or otherwise.

Finally, I appreciate how the authors of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth discuss how the realist novel is inept in trying to capture these concerns because climate change issues are not something easily depicted in a novel that focuses on the daily life of humans; rather to reflect the wide-ranging and long-term effects of environmental issues, the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and the Gothic are needed. No longer are critics ignoring these genres as if they were the ugly stepsisters of literature. Rather, they are being revealed to hold and be capable of conveying deep truths about the human condition and a future that may exist if we do nothing to try to prevent further climate change. At the same time, I take to heart Fred Botting’s remark that to see the future solely as horrible is to be unimaginative. Just because the future will be different from our present does not mean it is cause for horror.

In 2015, Disney released the film Tomorrowland, which got little positive attention from critics, though I feel it deserves greater recognition. It provided nostalgia about a time in mid-twentieth century America when the future was depicted in a positive manner as an age of wonders—think of Tomorrowland at Disneyland and The Jetsons. When did this viewpoint change? Well, even in the mid-twentieth century, we had no end of sci-fi and horror films about Godzilla, King Kong, and scientific experiments gone wrong all of which threatened humanity, so positive and negative views of the future have always coexisted, but in recent years, the trend has been almost completely negative. A better future is possible for us but we must heed the warnings of these Gothic works, and those from the scientific community.

Personally, Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth made me think much harder about my own personal impact on the earth, from mowing and watering my lawn to going through a drive-thru for coffee so one more plastic cup lid needs to be recycled. Even sitting in the drive-thru—fast food is rarely fast anymore given the worker shortage today—is polluting the earth as my car spits out fumes. And I get tired of fast food restaurants giving me plastic silverware I never use. I will start asking them ahead of time not to give me plastic. Opportunities to change exist everywhere if we look for and act upon them. No one really wants a Gothic future. Life is Gothic enough as it is. I hope readers will heed the Gothic’s message as highlighted in this book. It comes like Jacob Marley to ask us to reform before it is too late. I thank the authors of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth for highlighting the Gothic’s dire message.

Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth is available from the University of Minnesota Press:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/dark-scenes-from-damaged-earth

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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.

1928 Turkish Version of Dracula First to Equate Count with Vlad Tepes

The publication of the Icelandic Dracula and how it has turned out to be an abridged version of the Swedish Dracula has received a lot of attention by Dracula scholars in the last five or so years, but another translation, the Turkish Dracula, is also a fascinating freely adapted version of Stoker’s masterpiece. While critics debate whether the Swedish Dracula may be based on an earlier version of Dracula or whether Stoker had some hand in producing it, Dracula in Istanbul, the translation published by Neon Harbor in 2017, is definitely a free adaptation that Stoker could not have been involved in since it was published in 1928. The translator, Ali Riza Seyfioglu, actually named the novel Kasigli Voyvoda, which translates as The Impaling Voivode. However, the translation back into English has been titled Dracula in Istanbul because the 1953 Turkish film based on the novel was given that name, in Turkish Drakula Istanbul’da. The film can be found on YouTube for those curious to watch it, though it is itself very freely adapted from Seyfioglu’s translation.

Dracula in Istanbul is a fascinating book largely because it is the first to equate Dracula with Vlad Tepes. The main characters are Turkish and instantly think of Dracula as the great warrior who fought against Mehmed II. Instead of Jonathan Harker traveling from London to visit Count Dracula, we have a lawyer named Azmi traveling from Istanbul to assist Dracula with purchasing property in that city. The other characters similarly have Turkish names. Dr. Afif and Dr. Resuhi are Dr. Seward and Van Helsing. Mina is named Guzin and Lucy becomes Sadan. Arthur Holmwood/Lord Godalming becomes Turan and Quincey Morris is Ozdemir. They are all Turkish, and the three suitors for Sadan’s hand are men who fought in the Turkish War for Independence.

Because Vlad Tepes, referred to simply as Dracula in the novel, is known to have been the enemy of the Turkish people from nearly five centuries before, Guzin and Azmi immediately think of the Count Dracula whom Azmi is going to visit as a possible descendant of the warrior voivode Dracula who wreaked havoc on the Turks and impaled his enemies. Little do they know he is the same person, or so the text seems to imply, although it is never explained to us how he could still be alive centuries later or how he became a vampire.

The plot follows closely that of Stoker’s novel despite the changes in character names and setting. The events in Dracula’s castle are largely the same, but the changes begin to be more significant after that. Almost more interesting than the changes Seyfioglu makes is what he chooses to omit since the book translated is a paperback of only 158 pages and that includes seven pages devoted to photos from the film version.

The first notable omissions are when Dracula travels to Istanbul. There are no scenes aboard the Demeter, no captain nor ship log, no wolf running upon the shore, nor no old men on shore telling the female main characters of the past. Almost immediately after the scenes in the castle, Sadan becomes ill and everyone is concerned for her. The scenes with Sadan follow the text closely up to her death and through the scenes of the men having to hunt down and kill her. But all references to Renfield and an insane asylum are omitted.

Also omitted are all the scenes with Dracula in them in London, save for when Azmi first spots him and notes he has grown younger. There is no scene where money falls from a bag Dracula holds, and most notably, no scene where the men break in while Jonathan is unconscious and Mina drinks blood from Dracula’s chest. Consequently, Guzin never becomes close to changing into a vampire, so the men make no oath to kill her if need be, and there is no hunt for Dracula where her second sight abilities are used to pursue him. One wonders if the Islamic readers would have found such scenes too sexual so they were omitted, or perhaps the novel was simply considered too long by Seyfioglu, so he trimmed out more than half the text.

Dracula does not try to return to Transylvania, so no pursuit of him takes place. Instead, the men simply hunt down his coffins in various places in Istanbul and then sanctify them so he cannot return to them, thus narrowing down the possibilities of where he can be until they can slay him in his coffin. This change is close to the play and cinema versions first made from Stoker’s novel.

One interesting addition to the novel is that there is no use of Christian symbols, other than a cross a peasant woman tries to give to Azmi when he first goes to the castle and is in Romania. Garlic is still used to protect Sadan, but instead of crucifixes or sacred communion hosts, pieces of paper with verses from the Quran are inserted in the coffins so Dracula cannot rest there. Such papers are also used to seal up holes in the walls of Sadan’s tomb so she cannot enter except through the main entrance so the men can capture her.

The end result for Dracula is the same. Turan slices off Dracula’s head while Ozdemir stabs him, but Ozdemir is not wounded and does not die. Dracula disintegrates almost immediately, but Guzin does not witness a look of peace come across his face as in Dracula. Finally, there is no epilogue, and no young Quincey Harker to represent hope for the future.

These changes do not take away from the power of the novel. It is just as gripping as Stoker’s original, even if abridged. It even in at least one sense tries to improve upon Stoker’s novel by stating that the men who give Sadan blood fortunately and by coincidence all have the same blood type, a necessary correction since blood types were not fully understood in Stoker’s day and the blood transfusions would have killed Lucy if the blood types had not matched.

To what extent Stoker intended Count Dracula to be representative of Vlad Tepes is something that has been debated now for decades. Consequently, Dracula in Istanbul is interesting because the Turkish people instantly knew the association, one that would have been known by few if any of Stoker’s original British Victorian readers.

Also of interest is that the translator, who is passing the novel off as his own work with no reference to Stoker, uses the Gothic device of a found manuscript by stating in the preface that the papers that make up the novel were found in a pile as if they rained down from the sky. He found them wrapped in newspapers when getting off of a ferry and could not find their owner, but they clearly represent the journals of men and women that were arranged in a specific order. He states that the book almost reads like a novel, but he wonders if it can be true or not. I do not know if the found manuscript device is common in Turkish literature, but if not, it suggests Seyfioglu was knowledgeable of European Gothic literary traditions to use it. At the same time, he must have banked on the fact that his countrymen were not familiar with such traditions since he published the novel under his name with no credit to Stoker.

Dracula in Istanbul, with a foreword by Kim Newman and an afterword by Iain Robert Smith, is a fascinating addition to Dracula scholarship and helps us broaden our understanding of how literary characters from one culture are adapted by other cultures. In fact, Seyfioglu also translated Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Beasts of Tarzan to similar effect, and as Smith notes, Count Dracula has become a worldwide figure, even fighting Batman in a Filipino film and a resurrected Bruce Lee in a Hong Kong film. Each culture has seen fit to adapt him to their own needs. Anyone interested in Dracula and the development of the vampire in literature and film would do well to read Dracula in Istanbul.

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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.