Spectres of 

Antiquity

Spectres of Antiquity
Classical Literature and the Gothic,
1740–​1830

James Uden

1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Uden, James, author.
Title: Spectres of antiquity : classical literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 / James Uden.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020010822 (print) | LCCN 2020010823 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190910273 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190910297 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English—History and criticism. |
English literature—18th century—History and criticism. |
English literature—19th century—History and criticism. |
English literature—Classical influences.
Classification: LCC PR408.G 68 U34 2020 (print) |
LCC PR408.G 68 (ebook) | DDC 823/.087290905—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010822
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010823

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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction  1
CHAPTER 1 Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-​Century
Criticism: Ghosts, Knights, and the Sublime  25
CHAPTER 2 Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics
of Collection  55
CHAPTER 3 Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  85

CHAPTER 4 Queer Urges and the Act of Translation: Matthew

Lewis  121
CHAPTER 5 Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic: The
Skepticism of Charles Brockden Brown  157
CHAPTER 6 Embodied Antiquity: Mary Shelley’s Relationships with
the Past  191
Afterword: Haunting or Reception?  227

Bibliography  235
Index  259
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could never have written this book without other people’s patience,
wisdom, and good advice. Obviously this is a very different book from
my first monograph, and I hope that, all the way through, it communicates
a sense of excitement in discovering something new. It was the encour-
agement and assistance of a large number of scholars—​both classicists
and specialists in the Gothic—​that gave me the confidence to roam more
widely. Jerrold E. Hogle has guided my research from the very beginning,
when he chaired the panel for my first presentation at the International
Gothic Association. The model of a generous senior scholar, Jerry con-
tinued to read and comment on my ideas over the years, and his detailed
comments on the book proposal and the entire manuscript have shaped
Spectres of Antiquity in vital ways. Jamil Mustafa and Christopher Weimer
have been wonderful companions for this journey, and I thank them for
their friendship and for sharing their expertise. At Boston University,
Joseph Rezek and John Paul Riquelme showed enthusiasm for my Gothic
ideas and were willing to answer all manner of questions. When Michael
Putnam learned of my interest in this area, he gave me his beautiful editions
of the Strawberry Hill Lucan and the travel narrative of Lewis Engelbach,
both of which I cite in this book. I will treasure them.
Parts of Spectres of Antiquity were tested in talks to various audiences
over the past few years. I  cannot name all the audience members who
asked important questions. But I  thank all who attended my talks at
Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Washington; at the an-
nual meetings of the Society of Classical Studies in Chicago and San
Diego; at International Gothic Association conferences at Simon Fraser
University, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Manchester Metropolitan
University, and Lewis University; at the MACTe junior faculty collo-
quium at Connecticut College; and at Boston University, in the faculty
research group for travel literature and at “On Selling One’s Soul: A World
Languages and Literatures Symposium on the Faust Tradition.” Brett
M. Rogers, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Jesse Weiner organized the very
helpful conference on Frankenstein and classical literature at Hamilton
College in 2016, a meeting that came at a key point in my research.
I would particularly like to thank the audience for my talk at the University
of Michigan in September 2017, especially Basil Dufallo, Ian Fielding,
David Halperin, Yopie Pins, and Elizabeth Wingrove, whose comments
were pivotal in determining the final argument of Chapter 6.
I have discussed Spectres with more people than I  can count (or re-
member). I  would especially like to acknowledge the following friends
who helped clarify points in the argument or urged me to see things in a
different light: Alastair Blanshard, H. Christian Blood, Anston Bosman,
Shane Butler, Christopher B. Polt, Sunil Sharma, Dale Townshend, Angela
Wright, and Hariclea Zengos. Hannah Moss, Elizabeth A.  Neiman, and
Dale Townshend generously sent me new or forthcoming research.
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith kindly offered her expertise in French literature,
as did Peter J.  Schwartz in German literature. Early in my time in the
Department of Classical Studies at Boston University, it was made clear to
me that I should imagine the field of classics in the broadest terms possible,
and that directive was tremendously liberating. In many conversations over
the years, Stephen Scully has urged me always to think radically—​to re-
turn to the root [radix] in order to learn something new. All my colleagues
in Classical Studies heard me discuss this project and offered valuable
suggestions and support. I give particular thanks to Loren J. Samons for
being my faculty mentor over the years. Thank you also to my brother and
parents—​half a world away, close at heart.
Numerous scholars read parts of this book in various stages of comple-
tion. I thank C. Allen Speight for reading Chapter 1; Marguerite Johnson
and Joseph Rezek for their comments on an earlier version of Chapter 2;
and Leonard von Morzé for his detailed remarks on Chapter  5 and for
sharing unpublished work. Ann Vasaly read the entire manuscript and
her sharp eye saved me from numerous errors. Stefan Vranka at Oxford
University Press offered helpful comments on the finished manuscript, as
did the readers for the Press. Gareth Williams read an early draft of the
first two chapters, and then also read the full draft of the final manuscript.

viii  |  Acknowledgments
With his characteristic wit and insight, he led me to rethink my argument
at many points. Gareth was also the one who encouraged me to pick up
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk back in graduate school, so in a sense he is to
blame for all of this.
I am grateful to the Peter Paul Career Development Professorship for a
semester of leave in which I began the project, and to Boston University
for a semester of sabbatical in which to finish it. Kristen McDonald from
the Lewis Walpole Library was unfailingly helpful when I  had queries
about its holdings, and Lucy Lead from the Wedgwood Museum helped me
obtain permission to reproduce an image from the museum’s collection.
Chapter 2 is an expanded version of a previous published article entitled
“Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection,”
Gothic Studies 20/​1–​2 (2018), 44–​58. I thank Edinburgh University Press
for their permission to reprint it. Translations throughout the book are my
own unless otherwise noted.
Finally, my warmest thanks. I dedicate Spectres of Antiquity to Crystan
Tan. This is in part because of all the love and patience he has shown me
when I was utterly preoccupied with it, when I was spending too much
time in Gothic castles and not enough with him. It is also because he said
that if I dedicated the book to him, he would actually read it. Well, Tantan,
time’s up. Here it is. Let’s turn the page together, always—​
—​Boston, September 2019

Acknowledgments  | ix

Introduction

The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes was a group of his servants
endeavouring to raise something that appeared to him a mountain
of sable plumes. He gazed without believing his sight. What are ye
doing? cried Manfred, wrathfully: Where is my son? A volley of
voices replied, Oh, my lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the
helmet! Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew
not what, he advanced hastily—​But what a sight for a father’s eyes!—​
He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an
enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque made
for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black
feathers.1

In the opening scene of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764),

the sickly and unpromising prince Conrad is crushed to death on his wed-
ding day by a giant helmet. His father, the tyrannical Manfred, sees his
son “dashed to pieces” and also covered in feathers—​a surreal fate. The
spectacle provokes horror from the crowd, even though, as Walpole adds
drolly, Conrad’s intended bride, Isabella, “had conceived little affection”
for her betrothed. As Walpole’s story progresses, the helmet continues to
demonstrate supernatural powers, miraculously floating into view at op-
portune moments and nodding its plumes furiously to mark displeasure at
Manfred’s hubris.2 Manfred has stolen the rule of Otranto in southeastern
Italy from its rightful heir, and these monstrous events signal the power
of the ancestral spirits to avenge this wrong. If the helmet symbolizes the

1
 The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18–​19.
2
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 25, 29.
influence of history over the present, it is a startlingly literal version of that
idea.3 An uncanny awareness of the ancients as giants had been a unifying
element of European consciousness since the Middle Ages. Du Bellay,
in the Renaissance, had addressed the Romans as powerful spirits, huge
and beyond death.4 The vision in Otranto, however, is grotesquely over-​
explicit. In this feverish burlesque, the past really is a crushing weight.
Walpole invokes an image of history’s terrifying power and then strips it
of any potential pathos.
The Castle of Otranto, subtitled A Gothic Story in its second edition
in 1765, was later recognized as the first text in the English tradition of
Gothic literature. As the opening scene of the foundational Gothic novel,
Conrad’s death by ancestral helmet stages a clash between ancient and
modern (Otranto was, he says, an attempt to blend the “ancient and
modern romance”).5 In this grotesque beginning, we see the outlines of
a contrast that was once central to British self-​definition, a contrast be-
tween the oversized powers of the classical world and the belated fragility
of the modern. As Frederick S. Frank has noted, Walpole’s giant helmet
is strongly reminiscent of a scene in Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Battel of the
Books” (1704), in which Swift imagined the ancient Roman poet Virgil,
arrayed in “shining Armor, completely fitted to his body,” preparing to
fight his modern translator, John Dryden. Just like the puny Conrad in The
Castle of Otranto, Dryden’s tiny head is dwarfed by a giant helmet:

lifting up the Vizard of his Helmet, a Face hardly appeared from

within . . . For, the Helmet was nine times too large from the Head, which
appeared Situate far in the Hinder Part, even like the Lady in a Lobster, or
like a Mouse under a Canopy of State, or like a shrivled Beau from within
the Pent-​house of a modern Perewig.6

Walpole amplifies the details—​his supernatural helmet is “an hundred

times” too large, and it crushes rather than hides the man underneath it—​
and his image is detached from the explicit literary and historical polemic

3
 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens
(Cambridge, 1992), 31; Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London, 1995), 18–​19.
4
 Brian Stock, “Antiqui and Moderni as ‘Giants’ and ‘Dwarfs’: A Reflection of Popular Culture?,”
Modern Philology 76/​4 (1979), 370–​4; Margaret M. McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late
Renaissance France (New Haven, 2000), 211–​9.
5
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 9.
6
 The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1965–​73), i. 157;
quoted in Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, ed. Frederick S.
Frank (Peterborough, Canada, 2003), 74.)

2  |  Introduction
found in Swift’s “Battel of the Books.” A deeply felt cultural inferiority
becomes, in The Castle of Otranto, a fictional horror in a distant, medieval
setting.
The helmet’s nodding feathers also recall a famous scene in a celebrated
classical translation of the earlier eighteenth century. In book six of Pope’s
translation of Homer’s Iliad (1715–​20), the warrior prince Hector begins
to speak tenderly to his infant son, Astyanax. The boy cries out in terror
when he sees the nodding plumes on his father’s helmet. “The Babe clung
crying to his Nurse’s Breast.” writes Pope, “Scar’d at the dazling Helm, and
nodding Crest.”7 Similarly, when Walpole describes the terrifying helmet
issuing a warning to Manfred in Otranto, he describes the frantic nodding
of the giant helmet: “the sable plumes on the enchanted helmet, which still
remained at the other end of the court, were tempestuously agitated, and
nodded thrice.”8 The passage in Homer also concerns a royal father and a
son—​and both Astyanax and Conrad are princes killed gruesomely before
their time—​but Walpole strips the classical scene of its context and its ten-
derness. In 1766, a year after the second edition of The Castle of Otranto,
Walpole purchased Pope’s own Greek texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
and he displayed them among his other bibliophilic treasures in the Glass
Closet of his Main Library at Strawberry Hill. To think of Homer encased
at the heart of Walpole’s Gothic villa is to remember the presence of the
classical even within an aesthetic that rebelled against it.9
Spectres of Antiquity traces the relationship of Gothic literature with
classical texts from its early stages in the mid-​eighteenth century to Mary
Shelley’s melancholic, dystopian Gothic novel The Last Man (1826). It
argues that this genre emerged in Enlightenment Britain as part of an at-
tempt to wrestle with classical antiquity’s persistent power. Writers in
the eighteenth century worked to create a distinctively English antiquity
grounded in the “Gothic” age of chivalry, whose qualities of wild imagi-
nation and fantasy were expressed in the newly canonized English classics
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. This literary movement coincided
with an age that increasingly questioned Roman analogies for English
public life, and in which the teaching of Latin and Greek was subject to

7
 Iliad 6.596–​7; Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack, 2 vols. (London, 1967), i.
356. Cf. Richard Glover’s imitation of these lines in his poem Leonidas: A Poem (London, 1737),
125: ‘From his nodding crest/​The sable plumes shook terror.”
8
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 59.
9
 Anonymous, A Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill Collected by Horace
Walpole (London, 1842), 59; Allen T. Hazen, A Catalogue of Horace Walpole’s Library, 3 vols.
(New Haven, 1969), ii. 325.

Introduction  | 3
new challenge. Yet as the classical world ceded its position of centrality
in eighteenth-​century Britain, so it became amenable to Gothic repre-
sentation. Greek and Roman antiquity had itself become a remnant, the
ghost of an earlier era that nonetheless exercised great power. Spectres
of Antiquity underlines the continuing presence of Greece and Rome in
Gothic novels, poetry, and drama—​in epigraphs or quotations, allusions
to texts, personalities and places—​and argues that a tension with the clas-
sical was a vital constituent of the Gothic, even where the traces of ancient
texts seem increasingly faint. In place of the open confrontation between
ancients and moderns that took place in earlier ages, these tales of terror
represent the classical world as sinister remnants, hollowed-​out versions
of a formerly prestigious discourse that modernity was struggling to leave
behind. The archetypal Gothic trope of history returning to stalk the pre-
sent has its origins, I argue, in a specific psychic condition of the eight-
eenth century: its attraction and horror toward an “eternal” classical past
that now seemed stubbornly undead.
It has become common among scholars to understand Gothic litera-
ture as the product of overlapping historical moments.10 Authors of Gothic
texts in the eighteenth century exploit a contemporary fascination with
old ruins, ancient castles, crumbling abbeys, faded tapestries, spooky
portraits, dusty manuscripts, cruel monks, innocent nuns:  symbols of a
feudal past or emblems of “old” Europe, still in thrall to its traditions.
At the same time, Gothic literature focuses intense attention on the indi-
vidual, dramatizing threats to property ownership, the familial unit, and
the self in a manner characteristic of capitalist modernity. The Gothic is
thus, as Jerrold E. Hogle puts it, “Janus-​faced,” projecting its characters
onto a staged, stereotyped vision of history, while also being particularly
expressive of contemporary anxieties and fears.11 This mingling of pre-
sent and past mirrors the overlapping concerns of the eighteenth century
in England, Europe, and the United States. The creation of nation-​states
and the revolutionary struggle toward the new was accompanied by a
heightened attention to the old, a fashion for antiquarianism, archaeology,

10
 Robert Miles, for example, presents the Gothic as expressing “unease” at the coexistence of
two systems of knowledge in the eighteenth century, the clash between what Foucault calls the
“Classical” episteme—​the tradition of philosophical thought between Descartes and Kant—​
and modernity: Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester, 1995), 14; see Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1994; orig.
1966),  46–​77.
11
 Jerrold E. Hogle, “Gothic and Second-​Generation Romanticism: Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John
Polidori, and Mary Shelley,” in Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (eds.), Romantic Gothic: An
Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh, 2016), 114.

4  |  Introduction
and myths of ethnic origin. It makes sense, then, that ghosts would ap-
pear so frequently in the literature of this period, since they too represent
an overlapping of present and past: the coexistence of different modes of
time. In a number of articles, Hogle has argued specifically that the Gothic
genre is preoccupied with what he calls the “ghost of the counterfeit,”
the spectral representation of historical symbols of aristocratic status in
Gothic novels, symbols that on closer inspection had always been empty
or fake.12 Prestigious signs of family history—​portraits, castles, ancestral
armor—​are represented as ghostly in Gothic texts, giant but empty, the
object of both reverence and revulsion. They represent an attachment to a
dead past, clinging and monstrous.
While accepting these ideas, this book argues that we need to place
them on a more expansive historical canvas—​one that matches the deeper
history of the word Gothic, a word that preserves, however faintly, the
memory of cultures that clashed a full millennium before the Renaissance.
“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living,” wrote Karl Marx in the beginning of The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). His example was Rome: the leaders
of revolutionary movements inevitably justify their actions by donning the
clothes and manners of ancient Rome, and when bourgeois society settles
back into its habitual quietude, it forgets that “ghosts from the days of
Rome had watched over its cradle.”13 While Marx describes the haunting
of modernity by classical Rome in imagery strongly reminiscent of Gothic
literature, my claim in this book is that the Gothic novel had already
dramatized that haunting, the weight of the dead generations of the an-
tique past. No less than busts or portraits of ancestors, Latin and Greek his-
tory and literature were powerful symbols of status in eighteenth-​century
Britain and the United States, and the Gothic anxiously explores the su-
perstitious veneration of modernity toward that past. The ghost, writes

12
 See, e.g., Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Ghost of the Counterfeit—​and the Closet—​in The Monk,”
Romanticism on the Net, no. 8 (Nov. 1997), http://​id.erudit.org/​iderudit/​005770ar; Hogle, “The
Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection,” in David Punter (ed.), A New
Companion to the Gothic (Hoboken, 2012), 496–​509.
13
 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1963), 15–​16. In the words of
Jacques Derrida, the French Revolution manifested itself as a ‘Roman haunting, in the anachrony
of antique costumes and phrases”: Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994;
orig. 1993), 139. Derrida’s exploration of Marx’s Gothic imagery helped initiate the “spectral
turn” in literary studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. As Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock observes,
because ghosts are “unstable interstitial figures that problematize dichotomous thinking, it
perhaps should come as no surprise that phantoms have become a privileged poststructuralist
academic trope”: “Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed.), Spectral
America: Phantoms of the National Imagination (Madison, 2004), 5.

Introduction  | 5
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, is “that which interrupts the presentness of
the present.” The constant return of classical culture within modern life
exemplifies just that sort of anachrony; it is a spectral power from the
distant past that interrupts, shapes, and possesses ideas and beliefs in the
present.14
This book rejects the model of any clear movement in the eighteenth
century from a culture of classical imitation to one of romantic imagi-
nation and freedom. Such narratives simplify a much more complicated
and overlapping progression of ideas, and it is only when we notice the
continuing presence of the classical within the Gothic that we can see the
immanent tension between them. Gothic and classical appear together in
the novels, poems, and plays I study in this book. They are political and
aesthetic categories that are constituted when they are used (or implied) in
opposition to one another. Another goal of Spectres of Antiquity is to dem-
onstrate the surprising pervasiveness of classical literature in the Gothic,
a theme that has been treated in three recent dissertations and an edited
volume of essays, but has not received a comprehensive monograph in
any language.15 Understandably, the bits and pieces of Greek and Latin in
these texts have attracted less attention among modern readers than their
sensational narratives of haunting by giant ghosts, or stories of oppression
by tyrannous villains. This study aims to show that these quiet, apparently
innocuous moments are important; and, indeed, they are more expressive
of haunting and oppression than has usually been assumed.
In accordance with Hogle’s conception of the “ghost of the counter-
feit,” the remnants of antiquity I observe in this book often seem uncannily
empty. They are frequently inauthentic, denuded of context, or stripped
of their expected meaning. They are, precisely, the ruins of a discourse.
In reading the classics in a Gothic mode, then, we are primarily reading
a mode of resistance to the classical, a mode that questions the authority

14
 Weinstock, “Introduction: the Spectral Turn,” 5. Sarah Annes Brown makes temporal disruption
the basis for a spectral theory of allusion. Texts generate a sense of the uncanny when we realize
that they are speaking with a voice that is not their own: A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion
and the Uncanny (Manchester, UK, 2012).
15
 H. Christian Blood, “Some Versions of Menippea,” Ph.D. thesis (University of California, Santa
Cruz, 2011); Ana González-​Rivas Fernández, “Los clásicos greco-​latinos y la novella gótica
angloamericana: encuentros complejos,” Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid;
Maria Teresa Marnieri, “Critical and Iconographic Reinterpretations of Three Early Gothic
Novels: Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Influences in William Beckford’s Vathek, Ann
Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk,” Ph.D. thesis (Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona, 2016); Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers
(eds.), Frankenstein and its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction
(London, 2018).

6  |  Introduction
of the past by representing its remnants in hollowed-​out or exaggeratedly
fragmented form. “Gothic classicism,” a notion that I  explore with ref-
erence to Walpole in this book, is an inherently paradoxical idea. Rather
than looking for the eager reception of entire plots or characters from
classical literature in Gothic works, we should be looking for shards and
remnants, faint memories, dislocated phrases and images. This transfor-
mation of classical literature could also be an intensely creative process.
The scattered allusions to ancient writers in eighteenth-​century Gothic lit-
erature implicitly interrogate the widespread association of the classical
world with reason and decorum, forging a broader historical continuity be-
tween representations of horror. If readers of the Gothic recalled instances
of violence and the supernatural in classical literature, then the revered
texts of Greece and Rome could appear less as a repository of improving
examples, and more as an early expression of society’s darkest impulses.

Gothic: Historical Shifts in Meaning

The story of the Gothic begins in classical antiquity. Sources from the first
century CE onward give the name Gothic to at least six different Germanic
groups, which coalesced through political pressures in the fifth century
into two “supergroups,” the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths.16 In 378, at the
battle of Adrianople (in modern Turkey), Gothic forces claimed a devas-
tating victory over the Roman army and killed Valens, then co-​emperor of
the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. His co-​emperor, Gratian, held on
to power in the East, but this Gothic victory demonstrated the Empire’s
vulnerability to attack. In the West, the last Roman emperor was deposed
in 476, leaving the Ostrogoths to rule the city of Rome and its surviving
provinces for the next sixty years. The Goths therefore played a crucial
role in the so-​called Fall of Rome, although the reality of Gothic-​Roman
interaction was more complicated than that phrase suggests. There has
long been scholarly debate about whether these separate groups ever had
any unified identity as “Gothic,” despite the retrospective mythmaking of
our only surviving history by a Gothic author, the Getica of Jordanes (sixth
century CE).17 The period of Ostrogothic rule in Rome was also an era
of continuity more than change: the court adopted Roman modes of ad-
ministration, communicated in Latin, and fostered a culture of intellectual

16
 I follow here the account of Peter Heather, The Goths (Oxford, 1996).
17
 On this debate, see Heather, The Goths, 169–​74, 299–​303.

Introduction  | 7
learning that produced (among other things) Boethius’ Consolation of
Philosophy, one of the most influential philosophic texts of the Middle
Ages.18 Nonetheless, by the time “Gothic” had ceased to be a meaningful
ethnic label in the early eighth century, the Goths had entered the blood-
stream of European cultural memory. The meaning and importance of their
name differed according to an era’s attitude toward classical antiquity. In
periods that revered the legacy of Rome, the Goths became synonymous
with destructive barbarism. Their posthumous reputation as savages was
similar to that of the Huns and the Vandals, two other ethnic groups that
conquered and occupied parts of the Roman Empire in the same era of
history. In periods that sought to liberate themselves from the influence of
classical antiquity, the Goths were romanticized. They became an emblem
of freedom from cultural and political restraint, a courageous people who
threw off the shackles of Empire to rebel against the decadence and tyr-
anny of Rome.
The association with barbarism led to the next stage in the word’s ev-
olution. In the Renaissance, humanists created the category of “Gothic
architecture” to describe a particular mode of medieval building. The term
survives to this day, even though what we call Gothic architecture in fact
arose in twelfth-​century France, half a millennium after the Goths and in a
different region entirely. In the second edition of his influential The Lives
of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568), Giorgio
Vasari decried the maniera tedesca (“German style”). Buildings in this
style, which he calls “monstrous and barbarous” (mostruosi e barbari),
are full of “pyramids and points” (piramidi e punte), tall and thin columns,
and grotesque, excessive ornamentation. Whether through hyperbole
or error, he claims that this style originated with the Goths’ invasion of
Rome. Having destroyed the Romans’ buildings and killed their architects,
the Goths went on to pollute all of Italy with their debased style. Now, he
says, that style is avoided by the best architects—​that is, architects who
have returned to the authority of classical principles.19 As scholars have
emphasized, it is by no means clear which style Vasari was describing with
the maniera tedesca, or whether this outburst of animus was ever meant
to define a style at all.20 But through the influence of Vasari and other

18
 John Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford, 1992); Jonathan J. Arnold, Theodoric and the
Roman Imperial Restoration (Cambridge, 2014).
19
 Le opera di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1906), i. 137–​8.
20
 Anne-​Marie Sankovitch, “The Myth of the ‘Myth of the Medieval’: Gothic Architecture
in Vasari’s rinascita and Panofsky’s Renaissance,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 40
(2001),  29–​50.

8  |  Introduction
humanists, the label Gothic spread as a way of referring to a specific medi-
eval style of architecture characterized by soaring towers, pointed arches,
vaulted ceilings, and gargoyles, a style originally known as opus modernum
(modern work) or opus Francigenum (French-​style work). Although the
earliest references in English to Gothic architecture show familiarity with
Vasari and share his charge of barbarousness, by the late seventeenth cen-
tury the word was increasingly used in a neutral sense to designate this
style from the Middle Ages.21 Indeed, by the early eighteenth century, the
word Gothic had become a broader term for the Middle Ages in general,
with reference to its art and literature as well as its architecture.22 It had
become a synonym for “medieval,” though “medieval” itself is a word that
does not exist until later (its first attested use is in 1817).23
By this stage, the word Gothic was developing a trajectory largely in-
dependent of the historical Goths. But a political debate in seventeenth-​
century England put these ancient people again at center stage.
Increasingly, writers claimed that the English were Goths—​or, at least,
were derived from Goths, and shared their instinctive love of political
freedoms. Scholars since Bede in the eighth century had suggested an as-
sociation between the Saxons and the Goths, but Richard Verstegen’s A
Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605) renewed interest in the idea,
stating baldly that “Englishmen are descended of German race, & were
heretofore generally called Saxons.” Making the connection even more
explicit, Sir William Temple stated in his Introduction to the History of
England (1695) that “the Saxons were one Branch of those Gothick na-
tions.”24 This claim of origin was accompanied by other myths about the
Goths: that they had a system of democracy, which they brought with them
from Northern Europe to England; that they had no king, but only a dux
bellorum (“military leader”), who shared rule equitably with his advisors
and the people; and that they were a people who had only ever experi-
enced liberty and had never worn the yoke of empire. Even the Norman
Conquest was dismissed as a minor interruption in the continuity of Saxon

21
 E. S. De Beer, “Gothic: Origin and Diffusion of the Term: The Idea of Style in Architecture,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), 152–​6; Matthew M. Reeve, “Gothic,”
Studies in Iconography 33 (2012), 237–​8.
22
 Alfred E. Longueil, “The Word ‘Gothic’ in Eighteenth-​Century Criticism,” Modern Language
Notes 38/​8 (1923), 456–​7.
23
 David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (London, 2015), 52; Dale Townshend,
Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–​1840 (Oxford,
2019),  330–​1.
24
 Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought
(Cambridge, MA, 1952), 115, 195.

Introduction  | 9
rule. This myth of Gothic origins in England was a powerful political
weapon for those who were suspicious of the powers of the Crown, since
it popularized the idea that a veneration for parliament, and a freedom
from overbearing royal power, lay at the heart of English national identity.
The myth of Gothic origins openly contradicted the alternate,
classicizing model of a “transfer of Empire” (translatio imperii), ac-
cording to which the glory of ancient Rome moved westward and was
reborn in Britain. Pope, for example, had planned an epic depicting the
voyage of Aeneas’ great-​grandson from Italy to England, where he would
have battled giants in Cornwall and established a prehistoric version of the
modern state.25 Equally, the myth of Gothic origins reinforced a popular
opposition between northern European hardiness and southern European
decadence, which carried with it a host of other negative associations: cul-
tural and commercial lethargy, hostility to democratic institutions, and
Catholicism.26 As Matthew M. Reeve observes, a visitor to Lord Cobham’s
Gothic “Temple of Liberty” at Stowe in the 1730s would have seen the
inscription “Je rends graces aux Dieux de nestre pas Romain” above
the entrance: “I thank the Gods that I am not Roman.”27 Throughout the
1730s, disaffected Whigs hostile to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first
Prime Minister, continued to use this myth of Gothic origins to protest
his excessive closeness to the Crown and alleged political corruption. The
Gothic became a badge of parliamentarian resistance to the effete model
of monarchical inheritance flowing down from Aeneas and Augustus. As
the eighteenth century progressed, interest in England’s Gothic past also
spread broadly to other areas of cultural life, and antiquarians and writers
eagerly engaged in a process of rediscovering—​or sometimes creating—​
medieval traditions of poetry and learning, participating in the construction
of a distinctively English antiquity. In The Patriot Opposition to Walpole,
Christine Gerrard argues that the political aspect of the movement had
weakened by the 1750s. By that point the Gothic was no longer neces-
sarily a partisan cry for the importance of parliamentary power; it was

25
 That is, the Brutus, which was based upon the legend recounted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
twelfth-​century Historia regum Britanniae: Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope’s “Opus
Magnum”: 1729–​1744 (Oxford, 1977), 155–​74. Two different outlines and some opening lines
survive, but Pope died before he could begin work on it in earnest.
26
 On anti-​Catholicism as a basic component of Gothic ideology, see Diane Long Hoeveler, The
Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-​Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–​1880
(Cardiff, 2014).
27
 Reeve, “Gothic,” 239. The line is quoted from Corneille’s Horatius (1640), line 481.

10  |  Introduction
a fashion that had diffused across party lines.28 One mark of this broad-
ening appeal is that one of the most visible exponents of the Gothic trend
in English architecture and aesthetics was Sir Robert Walpole’s own son.
When Horace Walpole gave his horror story The Castle of Otranto the
subtitle A Gothic Story in its second edition in 1765, the word announced
the novel’s setting in the Middle Ages, and it marked Otranto as an invented
contribution to the current literary fashion for the medieval romance, albeit
set in the romantically distant world of Italy rather than in the patriotically
“Gothic” realms of Britain or Northern Europe. The lasting influence and
popularity of this novel would lead to the next stage of the word’s ev-
olution. It was Otranto’s scenes of ghostly horror that gave the Gothic
its modern sense of “darkly supernatural.”29 This new meaning seems to
have become fixed by the early nineteenth century, although it would not
supersede the other meanings until the twentieth century. When Alfred
E. Longueil published his history of the word Gothic in 1923, he described
the supernatural sense as the “most important for us,” but he said that the
meaning of “barbarous” or “anti-​classical” still had some “vitality.”30 Now
the meaning of anti-​classical has practically no life at all, and it takes some
effort to read it back into the works of Walpole and his contemporaries.
Such an effort is crucial, though, because the term “Gothic” in the eight-
eenth century had more (or, at least, different) layers than it commonly
does now. A political and aesthetic opposition to the classical was a fun-
damental connotation of the word among mid-​century authors, and the
memory of the historical Goths and the destruction of, or liberation from,
classical culture was key to the meaning of the idea for eighteenth-​century
writers and readers. Walpole and the other figures in the mid-​century
Gothic revival forged the generic tropes that would be closely repeated
in the next half-​century by the writers who followed them—​the writers of
what we now call, in another layer of anachronism, Gothic fiction.31

28
 The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​1742
(Oxford, 1994).
29
 Longueil, “The Word ‘Gothic’ in Eighteenth-​Century Criticism,” 458–​9.
30
 Longueil, “The Word ‘Gothic’ in Eighteenth-​Century Criticism,” 458, 455.
31
 Clara Reeve published The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story in 1777 (renamed The Old
English Baron: A Gothic Story in 1778, repr. Oxford, 2003), a work that helped to establish
Walpole’s novel as the formative text of a tradition (see Chapter 2). But in most cases our category
of “Gothic fiction” is a retrospective classification, and in the eighteenth century these texts were
known by a variety of terms: “romance,” “modern romance,” “hobgoblin-​romance,” “terrorist
fiction”: E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–​1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 148.

Introduction  | 11
Classical: Historical Shifts in Meaning

The same years that saw the Goths assume a central role in English self-​
definition also saw a reassessment of the significance of Greek and Roman
antiquity. As Larry F. Norman demonstrates in The Shock of the Ancient,
the seventeenth-​century “Quarrel of the Ancient and Moderns” (Querelle
des anciens et des modernes) was far from the narrow dispute its name
suggests. French writers and thinkers were grappling with conceptions of
historical distance. Modern partisans reacted with disgust to the rude and
“primitive” elements of ancient texts and sought to correct them, as gener-
ations had done with partially complete ancient sculpture, whereas ancient
partisans found reason for “enthralling awe” precisely in those elements
of cultural difference.32 The debate arrived in England with the publica-
tion of Sir William Temple’s twin essays “Upon the Ancient and Modern
Learning” and “On Poets” (1690), a response to Bernard Le Bovier de
Fontenelle and an impassioned argument for the ancient side.33 It is easy
to belittle the position of ancient partisans, because today we mostly take
for granted the idea that knowledge increases from age to age, and we
assume (sometimes arrogantly) that societies know more than the ones
before them. For Temple, it is the modern case that is narrow and small
minded. He protests against the parochialism of modern partisans, who
praise their own ideas as the pinnacle of human achievement. In order to
demonstrate that all civilizations depend upon those that precede them,
he argues that the “seeds” of even the most revolutionary conceptions of
Plato and Aristotle can be traced to ancient wisdom in China and India.
His treatise and others in the debate also relate to the growing interest in
fossils and geology, since one point of contention was whether physical
as well as intellectual giants existed in earlier ages (Temple thinks that
they did).34 Admittedly, he has a grim view of contemporary achievement.
He states that modern languages, constructed from the disparate roots of
several conquered civilizations, can only be “imperfect copies” of Latin
and Greek; that modern science has made smaller strides than the epochal

32
 The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2011), 2–​3,
28–​33,  131.
33
 Sir William Temple’s Essays on Ancient & Modern Learning and on Poetry, ed. J. E. Spingarn
(Oxford, 1909); on the controversy stirred by this work, see Douglas Lane Patey, “Ancients and
Moderns,” in Hugh Barr Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1997), 46–​52.
34
 Temple, Essays on Ancient & Modern Learning, 13, 19. On the debate over fossils of human
giants in this period, see Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists were Historians, 1665–​1775 (Ithaca,
NY, 1997), 112–​19.

12  |  Introduction
discoveries of antiquity; and that modern literature is a mere ghost of what
it was in the classical world (“as if Poetry being dead, an Apparition of it
walked about”).35 Advancement, if it is even possible, can be made only by
humbly acknowledging the greater wisdom of the past. A dwarf standing
on giants’ shoulders does not necessarily see farther away. He might just
get dizzy.36
Jonathan Swift worked as William Temple’s secretary intermittently
throughout the 1690s. When he published his “Battel of the Books” in
1704, it was a belated, satirical response to the controversy. The poem
defended Temple, his friend and former employer (and showed some of
his detractors being gorily killed). Yet ultimately the legacy of the debate
was not the “victory” of one side over the other but a heightened awareness
of how distant antiquity was, whether as primitive ancestor or towering
model. As the eighteenth century progressed, writers fashioned a patri-
otic vision of England grounded both in an enlightened belief in cultural
progress and in the mythologization of the English past—​a past whose
aura was captured in the representation of Shakespeare and Spenser as
native bards, inspired prophets of national identity.37 But public figures in
Britain nonetheless continued to identify themselves with the Romans. As
Philip Ayres writes, despite England’s “growing assertiveness against the
glory of antiquity,” in the interests of political self-​justification the “clas-
sical political heritage served too conveniently to be ignored.”38 While
proponents of the myth of Gothic origins represented the Revolution of
1688 as a reassertion of the Saxon spirit of parliamentary power, others
saw it as a vital reanimation of the values of the Roman Republic. In fact,
Ayres estimates that British classicizing was never more dominant than
in the half-​century following 1688. It would return to prominence in the
1790s in Burke’s speeches attacking the French Revolution, speeches
that invoked models of classical virtue to argue for the defense of tradi-
tion.39 Roman self-​analogizing manifested itself in many ways: in literary
allusions to Latin and Greek; in the landscape and architectural designs
of temples, villas, and gardens; and in the habit of the English nobility to

35
 Temple, Essays on Ancient & Modern Learning, 34, 25, 61.
36
 Temple, Essays on Ancient & Modern Learning,  18–​19.
37
 Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-​Capitalism and the Cultural Past,
1700–​1770 (Cambridge, 1999).
38
 Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-​Century England (Cambridge, 1997), 2.
39
 Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome, 166–​7. On political analogies between Britain
and the Roman Republic in the Romantic era, see Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in
the British Imagination, 1789–​1832 (Oxford, 2010).

Introduction  | 13
memorialize themselves in Roman-​style busts, which, in Ayres’s analysis,
were no “masquerade” but a mark that the owner “maintains the values of
the classical past in the English present.”40 One basic tenet of this book’s
argument is that the shift between classical and Gothic is not a clean break
between periods, and in fact it is misleading to conceive of it as a temporal
movement at all. It is precisely the coexistence of Gothic and classical that
makes possible the political and aesthetic tension between them, and it is
this tension that is explored vividly in Gothic literature.
Ayres’s account of the persistent presence of classical culture is an im-
portant counterweight to the dominance of Jürgen Habermas’s model of
the bourgeois public sphere, a model that has had enormous influence in
eighteenth-​century studies. In Habermasian accounts, the rise of the com-
mercial book trade in place of literary patronage, the dissemination of in-
formation about literature in periodicals, and the growing accessibility of
circulating libraries created a new arena for public debate not tethered to
aristocratic interests. It produced an audience of new, middle-​class readers
who did not necessarily have access to Latin and Greek, and looked in-
stead to English poetry and history as the prestige form of cultural know-
ledge. When the model is expressed in its strongest form, it creates the
impression that the reading of classical texts in England came to a very ab-
rupt end. Since Latin was “the cosmopolitan script of the old aristocracy,”
writes Jonathan Brody Kramnick, it “could not” be the language of the
coffee houses and circulating libraries; “uniform Latinity breaks down,”
and “the vernacular began to supplant Latin as the vehicle for collective
imaginings.”41 Benedict Anderson’s oft-​cited Imagined Communities (first
edition 1983) also argues that the elevation of vernacular languages over
Latin was a precondition for the emergence of the modern nation-​state.
Once nations had their own “language-​of-​power” in print, it created a
sense of community apart from the old republic of letters.42 Yet here we
need to draw a distinction. It is true that a dwindling number of authors
in eighteenth-​ century England sought to communicate their ideas in
Latin. Even in Oxford and Cambridge the language of instruction shifted
to English in most subjects over the course of the century.43 But English

40
 Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome, 68.
41
 Kramnick, Making the English Canon, 21, 43, 113.
42
 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2nd edn., London,
2016),  37–​46.
43
 M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500–​1900 (Cambridge, 1959), 47, 66–​7. This
shift was less pronounced in Europe. Yasmin Haskell has explored the “Latin Enlightenment”
in the eighteenth century, the network of medical, botanical, philosophical and theological texts

14  |  Introduction
novelists and poets continued to quote passages from classical texts. There
were challenges to the value of teaching the classical languages, especially
in Dissenting academies, but many of the most prominent critics of the
system of classical education were themselves classically educated, and
quoted Latin often.44 As the eighteenth century wore on, a classical tag or
quotation might elicit nostalgia, aversion, or incomprehension, but its use
could never be without cultural meaning. Latin might not have had much
life in an expanded English reading public, but it did have an eventful
afterlife.
One mark of the dynamic relationship between the classical and its
opposites, the Gothic and the romance, is that its categories could be
blended or even flipped. Writing in 1711, Lord Shaftesbury could mark
it as a sign of bad taste if someone prefers “an Ariosto to a Virgil, and a
romance or novel to an Iliad.”45 By the end of the century, in The Progress
of Romance (1785) Clara Reeve could claim that Homer himself was the
“parent of romance,” that the “extravagant sallies of the imagination”
associated with ballads and romances are equally present in the Greek
and Latin epic, and that only desiccated prejudice prevents readers from
seeing affinities between classical literature and popular literary forms.46
Admirers of the Gothic assessed the work of the Roman poets by Gothic
standards, and although they typically judged in favor of later texts, they
drew attention to elements of horror in ancient works. In his Letters on
Chivalry and Romance (1762), for example, Richard Hurd argued that the
witches of Shakespeare were more frightening than the witches described
in Latin poetry, and the critic Joseph Warton similarly decided in 1782
that the “sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet” in The Castle
of Otranto generated more chills than descriptions of sorcery in Ovid or
Apuleius.47 But then again, there had always been horror in classical lit-
erature. From our perspective, many passages of Greek and Roman liter-
ature seem eminently Gothic in the modern sense. Consider, for example,

that continued to circulate in Latin: Prescribing Ovid: The Latin Works and Networks of the
Enlightened Dr Heerkens (London, 2013).
44
 On opposition to classical education in the eighteenth century, see Penelope Wilson, “Classical
Poetry and the Eighteenth-​Century Reader,” in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in
Eighteenth-​Century England (Leicester, 1982), 72–​4.
45
 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge,
1999), 194.
46
 The Progress of Romance (London, 1785), 19.
47
 Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London, 1762; repr: New York, 1971), 48–​9; Joseph Warton,
An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1756–​82; repr. New York, 1974),
i. 402.

Introduction  | 15
the violent excess of Greek tragedy; the bloodthirsty witches of Seneca
and Lucan; or the ghost stories of Pliny the Younger.48 Most contempo-
rary classicists would find the idea of classical literature as something
inherently ordered and rational to be frankly incomprehensible. Yet “the
classical,” no less than “the Gothic,” is a category filled with meaning ac-
cording to the needs of each period, and it assumes a different attitude and
appearance each time.49 In fact, the writers in this book do demonstrate a
fascination with the horrifying aspects of ancient texts, and they draw at-
tention to moments of grotesquerie and horror that were already present
even in revered models of refinement such as Cicero and Horace.
To emphasize classical allusion in a genre such as the Gothic might
seem like a conservative scholarly project, especially since these novels
frequently were accessible to authors and readers who were excluded
from classical education. Criticism of the form in the late 1790s not only
opposes the virtue of classical literature to the moral dissolution of the
Gothic; it also associates the former with maleness and the latter with
women, foreigners, and effeminate men. When the blustering John Thorpe
assures Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1817) that he is too busy
to read novels, he asserts a conventionally gendered view of novel con-
sumption and production in the Romantic period (although he admits that
even he would read a novel by Ann Radcliffe, and the romantic hero Henry
Tilney has read Radcliffe very well).50 By contrast, while there were cer-
tainly women who read Latin and Greek, it was a far rarer accomplishment,
since there was an emphasis on modern languages in women’s academies.
A woman who wanted to learn classical languages would have to do so
at home, provided that she had a brother, father, or husband willing and
able to teach her.51 The substitution of an English antiquity for a classical

48
 For ghost stories in antiquity, see D. Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from
Classical Antiquity (Austin, 1999); Antonio Stramaglia, Res inauditae, incredulae: Storie di
fantasmi nel mondo greco-​latino (Bari, Italy, 1999). Evina Sistakou has traced similarities between
the Gothic “aesthetics of darkness” and Hellenistic Greek poetry of the third–​second centuries
BCE: The Aesthetics of Darkness: A Study of Hellenistic Romanticism in Apollonius, Lycophron
and Nicander (Leuven, Belgium, 2012).
49
 James I. Porter, “What is “Classical” about Classical Antiquity?,” in James I. Porter (ed.)
Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton, 2006), 1–​68.
50
 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York, 2004), 31, 108–​9 (the novel was
drafted in the 1790s but published posthumously in December 1817). On the “feminization” of
the novel in the critical discourse of the Romantic period, see Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and
Gender (New York, 1993), 6–​10.
51
 Penelope Wilson, “Women Writers and the Classics,” in David Hopkins and Charles Martindale
(eds.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 3 (1660–​1790)
(Oxford, 2012), 495–​518.

16  |  Introduction
one thus empowered new authors. My aim has not been to drag the Gothic
back in the direction of (what was regarded as) elite male culture, but
rather to reanimate the conflict with classical prestige that shaped the cul-
tural category of the Gothic, and that affected the ways in which literature
was written and read. My aim is also simply to point out what is there.
In universities today, Latin is generally classified as a foreign language,
but few authors in this book were likely to have seen it that way. Instead,
knowledge of the “learned languages” was regarded as a facet of English
literacy, albeit one severely restricted by gender and class. From this dis-
tance, it is sometimes hard to see a line of Latin text within English prose
as anything other than blandly bookish. In the eighteenth century, though,
it could still be seductive, startling, provocative, or frightening.

Spectres of Antiquity
Spectres of Antiquity begins with three figures in the mid-​eighteenth cen-
tury whose writing on antiquity shaped later Gothic tropes. The book’s
title comes from the poet and Anglican clergyman Edward Young, who,
long after the controversy between Ancients and Moderns had died down,
argued in frustration that literature was still haunted by the great writers of
antiquity. After publishing a melancholy, much-​read didactic poem about
death entitled Night Thoughts (1742–​6), Young published the polemical
Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Excessive reverence for
classical literature has transformed antiquity into a “spectre,” he claimed,
which terrorizes modern poets and stunts their capacity for original work.
If English writers are ever to forge great literary compositions of their own,
they must overcome their fear of these ancient giants. Edmund Burke, an
admirer of Young’s poetry, also described the terror evoked by classical
writers in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757), but for Burke the aesthetic power of clas-
sical literature lay precisely in its ability to evoke pleasurable feelings of
awe and terror. The description of the Underworld in the Roman epic the
Aeneid plays a pivotal role in Burke’s conception of the sublime, which
for him is a retreat to a dark, inner space of communion with the dead, and
involves surrendering to the greater powers of writers from the past. The
fascination with horror in classical literature is expressed in a different
form in Bishop Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762),
the defining critical treatise of the Gothic revival in the mid-​century. Hurd
attacks the dichotomy between classical epic and “Gothic” (that is, me-
dieval) romance by pointing out their similarity:  both describe witches,

Introduction  | 17
monsters, and errant warriors, and the later romance is simply superior
in its ability to evoke feelings of horror. Unifying all three texts is a new
emphasis on classical literature as the subject of private reading and expe-
rience, rather than as an object of public emulation and civic analogy. By
promoting an aesthetics of gloom, all three writers had a formative influ-
ence on the later Gothic.
Yet it is not until Horace Walpole’s A Castle of Otranto that the Gothic
was attached to a supernatural genre all its own. Walpole is also a key
figure in the Gothic architectural revival of the eighteenth century, and
his novel’s faux-​medieval setting mirrors his extravagant renovation of a
seventeenth-​century cottage in Twickenham into an elaborate, imitation-​
Gothic castle, which he dubbed Strawberry Hill.52 But Walpole is a
frustrating figure to have founded a genre. Otranto is a deliberately des-
ultory and self-​parodic literary work. It offers slim shoulders on which
to rest a tradition. Walpole would never willingly belong to anything as
gauche as a movement, and he mocked the earnest antiquarian efforts of
his era to forge a distinctively English antiquity. As I argue in Chapter 2,
the historical significance of the Gothic as a force destructive of the clas-
sical world is playfully reactivated in Otranto and in Walpole’s outrageous
double-​incest tragedy, The Mysterious Mother. These texts detach myths,
characters, and even phrases from Latin and Greek literature and stitch
them back together with a deliberate sense of disorder. Revered examples
of antique virtue appear deprived of any meaning or importance. When
Walpole does idealize ancient literature, as in his occasional comments
on Greek drama, it is to celebrate its capacity to represent grotesque acts
of horror unfettered by contemporary restrictions of propriety or good
taste. The Greek and Roman objects that he bought and displayed around
Strawberry Hill throughout his life follow a similar pattern. Even within
the ancient world, he is drawn to the obscene, horrifying, hybrid, and
odd. If Renaissance aemulatio sought to outdo the classical authors, then
Walpole seeks to undo them: to reshape the classical into new grotesques.
It was some decades after Walpole that the craze for Gothic literature
reached its height in Britain. According to one calculation, 38% of all
the novels published in 1795 had some connection to the Gothic, and the
fashion for terror spread to poetry, theater, and the visual arts.53 The most

52
 On the connections and divergences between Gothic literary and architectural cultures in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see now Townshend, Gothic Antiquity.
53
 Robert Miles, “The 1790s: The Effulgence of the Gothic,” in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, 2002), 41–​2.

18  |  Introduction
influential and successful author of the decade was Ann Radcliffe. The five
novels she published in her lifetime retained the motifs of the castle and
tyrannous villain from Otranto, but after a medieval experiment in her first
novel, she updated their setting to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
She also exchanged Otranto’s hasty sketch of Italy with long, painterly
descriptions of European landscapes drawn from travel literature. Her
novels were revered as English classics in their own right; yet when we
move from Walpole to Radcliffe, the specific engagement with classical
literature largely disappears. She never quotes Latin directly in her Gothic
novels, drawing her epigraphs from Shakespeare and Milton, not Horace
or Lucan. As I argue in Chapter 3, it is impossible to judge her level of
learning from the biographies that survive, because they adhere scrupu-
lously to a domestic ideal and avoid giving her any accomplishments that
might seem unfeminine. Nevertheless, references to the classical world in
her Gothic novels play a significant role in articulating the ethical and aes-
thetic responsiveness of her characters. Repeatedly, she stages situations
in which her heroines are confronted with the remnants of some monu-
mental event or achievement from antiquity (the Trojan War, Hannibal’s
crossing of the Alps, Roman feats of engineering), but their attention is
drawn instead to small aspects of human experience, and they express
sympathy for the victims of others’ grand ambition. Her characters trace
echoes of oppression across history, which is, in Radcliffe’s vision, more
a rhythm of repeated motifs than a sequence of discrete events. There is
no dramatic clash between Gothic and classical; only redirection. In the
decade of the French Revolution, when counter-​revolutionary figures like
Burke had begun to point again to the legacy of Greece and Rome in order
to safeguard traditional values, Radcliffe’s novels turned away from clas-
sical conceptions of heroism, fashioning a modern epic mode structured
around the experience of the powerless.
As novels of terror proliferated, Radcliffe mostly escaped mounting
criticism of the form. Vitriol was directed, however, at the young writer
Matthew Lewis, who at twenty years old published The Monk: A Romance
(1796), a work praised by the Marquis de Sade for capturing the vi-
olent social inversion of the French Revolution.54 The title character is
the haughty monk Ambrosio, who is seduced by his demonic attendant
into committing escalating acts of evil. In England, the novel scandalized

 Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, 16 vols. (Paris, 1966–​7), xi. 14–​15; translation in The
54

120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York,
1966),  108–​9.

Introduction  | 19
and delighted the public. According to conservative satirists and critics,
Lewis contributed to, and even epitomized, the vulgarization of public
taste. Yet in a bid to be taken seriously by the social elite, the Oxford-​
educated Lewis also augmented his Gothic novel with a demonstration of
classical learning. The Monk begins with a translation of an entire poem
by Horace. Later, characters pause to recite and discuss an erotic ballad in
imitation of the Greek lyric poet Anacreon. Three years after The Monk,
Lewis reversed the process and incorporated a number of scenes from
his Gothic novel into a classicizing work, the translation of a verse satire
by the Roman author Juvenal (The Love of Gain, 1799). As I  argue in
Chapter  4, by blending elements of classical translation into his Gothic
works, Lewis was able to open up a new channel of communication within
his texts. The central narratives were brashly sensationalizing, depicting
acts of depraved evil; and yet the allusions to antiquity expressed a more
secret anxiety about the consequences of his urge to write. Many of the
Greek and Latin texts that Lewis admired, including the poems of Horace
and Anacreon in The Monk, were explicitly homoerotic. His own career
was dogged by insinuations that he was attracted to other men. I  argue
that, for Lewis, translation turns out to be the most dangerous Gothic trope
of all: like an avenging ghost from the past, the frank expressions of homo-
erotic desire in these classical sources threaten to rise to the surface of his
texts, poised to reveal too much about the author himself.
Lewis’s view of antiquity is familiar from Burke—​a private world of in-
tense experience into which men can escape—​but he inserts his imitations
of antiquity into the popular form of the Gothic romance, like secret
doorways in a crowded room. In Chapter 5 we shift to a form of Gothic
literature with a much more explicit public frame. Charles Brockden
Brown grew up in a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. He made a career
in New York and Philadelphia as a young writer and editor with a close
circle of other intellectuals, and then, having lived through a series of
yellow-​fever epidemics and narrowly survived the illness himself, he
published four Gothic novels in an eighteen-​month period from 1798 to
1799. Brown’s work, which encompasses short fiction and extensive peri-
odical writing as well as novels, is animated by competing desires. On the
one hand, he is eager to represent himself as a writer of wide interests and
voracious reading, closely engaged with literary and philosophical trends
across the Atlantic. Educated in Latin and Greek in the Quaker schools, he
writes about classical literature with authority, and he savagely critiques
errors in other people’s Latin. On the other hand, his work challenges a
vision of historical continuity between Europe and the United States, and

20  |  Introduction
he demonstrates skepticism about the value and significance of classical
learning in the new nation. This skepticism is dramatized most vividly
in Wieland (1798), in which a character’s obsessive reverence toward
Cicero—​he places a bust of his “darling” orator in a temple on his family
property—​is transformed over the course of the novel into a frightening
fanaticism that leads, finally, to murder. In Ormond (1799), the narrator
has a similar veneration for antiquity, but Brown encourages suspicions
about her record of events, and leads the reader to interrogate the clash be-
tween her vision of history as continuity and the villains’ revolutionary de-
sire for the new. Brown, who became the most widely read and celebrated
novelist of the early American Gothic, uses the form to provoke questions
about emerging notions of national identity. By linking classical images to
scenes of irrationality and madness, he expresses a wider anxiety about the
reverence for antiquity in the public life of the early United States.
My final chapter, Chapter  6, moves forward to British Romanticism,
and in particular to Mary Shelley, a writer whose work exemplifies twin
revivals in second-​generation Romanticism:  a new willingness to ex-
plore the imagery and ideology of the Gothic, and a rejuvenated interest
in the creative spark of antiquity.55 Many Romantic-​era texts demonstrate
a renewed enthusiasm to identify with the “spirit” of Greece (and, less
often, Rome), and their desire and awe contrasts with the alienation and
skepticism toward classical authority that is characteristic of the Gothic.
But as a writer who is both central to Romantic thought and steeped in
Gothic ideas, Shelley blends the two attitudes. In her fiction and drama,
objects or ideas are idealistically revived from the distant past, only to pro-
duce horror, grief, or disappointment. Shelley creates bodily encounters
between antiquity and modernity that frequently prove to be frustrating
or painful. In Frankenstein (1818), Victor’s creature fulfills an archaic
dream to give life to the dead, a dream that Victor has imbibed through
his reading of premodern science. In “Valerius: the Reanimated Roman”
(1819), a young British woman is brought face to face with a mysteri-
ously revived man from Republican Rome, and Shelley describes the lack

55
 On the anxiously contested (but ultimately porous) border between popular Gothicism and
elite literary Romanticism, see Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception,
and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000). On classical culture and British Romanticism, a
very large theme, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature
and its Background, 1760–​1830 (New York, 1982), 113–​37; Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of
Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford, 1988), 313–​33;
and the essays in Timothy Saunders, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie (eds.),
Romans and Romantics (Oxford, 2012); Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (eds.), The Oxford
History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 4 (1790–​1880) (Oxford, 2015).

Introduction  | 21
of sympathy the two characters feel in each other’s presence. In the final
scenes of Shelley’s dystopian novel The Last Man (1826), the protagonist
is alone in Rome, surrounded by the giant, imposing monuments of the an-
cient world. The novel ends by emphasizing the contrast between the enor-
mous power of those timeless edifices and the dwindling capacities of the
human race itself. In Shelley’s fictional reanimations, just as in Otranto’s
giant helmet, the past returns to demonstrate the weakness and fallibility
of the present.
Certainly other instances could be adduced of the Gothic as a revisionary
mode of viewing the classical in this period, especially if we consider the
fashion for the Gothic as a “pan-​European” phenomenon, as Agnieszka
Łowczanin has recently encouraged us to do.56 One could cite, for ex-
ample, the scenes of magic drawn from the second-​century CE novelist
Apuleius in Charles Nodier’s “Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit,” (1821),
or the complex interweaving of Greek tragedy and Romantic phantasma-
goria in the Second Part of Goethe’s Faust (1832).57 Even if we emphasize
English writers’ formative role in the genre, the Gothic was always on the
move. The English Gothic novel was “almost as popular in France as in
Britain,” writes Terry Hale, and these French translations would in turn
become the basis for new adaptations in Spain, Italy, and Eastern Europe
throughout the nineteenth century.58 Spectres of Antiquity conforms to the
general tendency in Gothic scholarship to focus attention on the Anglo-​
American origins of the form, but by deepening the history of its allusive-
ness to include classical literature, it nonetheless seeks to challenge the
misconception that Gothic motifs have their first, only, or most important
expression in English-​language texts. This book also challenges the crit-
ical narrative that the Gothic represented an explosion of freedom, wild-
ness, and imagination after the dry, rational, rule-​bound writing that came
before it. That narrative might be useful when one is promoting Gothic
texts in the classroom, even if it undermines the efforts of colleagues to

56
 Agnieszka Łowczanin, A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English
Gothic (Berlin, 2018), 20.
57
 On Nodier, see Matthew Gibson, The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature
and the French Revolution (Cardiff, 2013), 24–​5; on Faust, Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Faust: The
German Tragedy (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 198–​205. On Goethe and the Gothic, see also Jane K. Brown
and Marshall Brown, “Faust and the Gothic Novel,” in Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas
P. Saine (eds.), Interpreting Goethe’s Faust Today (Columbia, SC: 1994), 68–​80.
58
 “Roman Noir,” in Marie Mulvey-​Roberts (ed.), The Handbook of the Gothic (2nd edn.,
New York, 2009), 223; see also Terry Hale, “Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation
and the Construction of the Gothic,” in Avril Horner (ed.), European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange,
1760–​1960 (Manchester, UK, 2002), 34.

22  |  Introduction
promote Dryden or Pope (or Virgil) down the hall. But it does not stand up
to any kind of scrutiny, not least because eighteenth-​century authors were
so pervasively indebted to prior traditions of the supernatural. Literary
scholars from Homerists to Modernists tend to frame their own period as
a site of inventions and beginnings, and as a decisive break with previous
eras. If we resist the pull of this rhetoric, our revolutions begin to look
more like returns, recurring phenomena in wider cycles of literary history.
Any focus on canonical authors also risks misdescribing the extent of
the Gothic wave that inundated the reading public in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. There is an extraordinary profusion of
novels, poetry, and drama that I have not been able to cover in this book.
If we leave aside famous figures like Radcliffe and Shelley, it is striking
how often fleeting references to antiquity appear in unexpected places.
In the final chapter of Regina Maria Roche’s Clermont (1798), when all
the mysteries are unraveled, the chapter epigraph cites Aeneas’ prediction
that his comrades will remember their sorrows with pleasure.59 In Francis
Lathom’s gender-​bending shocker The Impenetrable Secret, Find It Out!
(1805), the antique statue of a Roman gladiator exercises a strange sway
over its central character, and the memory of that statue recurs at a turning
point in the plot.60 In Charlotte Dacre’s tale of Satanic seduction Zofloya;
or, The Moor (1806), one of the Marchese’s dying injunctions to his way-
ward daughter is attributed to “Cicero,” although it is so generic and an-
odyne that it reads as a parody of polite learning.61 The classical world
remains a symbol of an alternately romanticized and demonized European
past, and its privileged status is one reason that so many authors are eager
to challenge it. Eighteenth-​century Gothic literature communicates the
anxieties of its age. Yet Greece and Rome cast a long shadow, and in any
case, an inveterate reader of the Gothic knows that the ghosts of history are
quite likely to return. Any attempt to consign classical antiquity to the past
risks being surprised when it rises from the dead.

59
 Clermont, ed. Natalie Schroeder (Chicago, 2006), 351, quoting Dryden’s translation of Virgil,
Aeneid, 1.203 (“An hour will come, with pleasure to relate/​your sorrows past”).
60
 The Impenetrable Secret, Find It Out!, ed. James Cruise (Chicago, 2007), 13, 57.
61
 Zofloya, or The Moor, ed. Kim Ian Michasiw (Oxford, 1997), 18: “How glorious it is to live with
dignity and decorum!”

Introduction  | 23
 CHAPTER 1 Gothic and Classical
in Eighteenth-​Century Criticism
Ghosts, Knights, and the Sublime

In the Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope describes the modern

veneration of ancient spirits. Ancient Greece dictated useful principles for
its “sons” to observe, and Rome created an expansive empire of learning.
Thus the modern writer should constantly return to these fonts of know-
ledge: “Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring,/​And trace
the Muses upward to their Spring’ (lines 127–​8).1 Later eighteenth-​century
critics undoubtedly distorted the sense of the Essay by portraying Pope as
excessively beholden to classical rules. In fact, he derides critics who issue
mere prescriptions for poetry, rules “without Invention’s Aid,” and who
only ever see merit in ancient authors (114–​5, 394–​5). Nonetheless, the
young Pope’s vision of Greek and Roman poets does grant them extraor-
dinary power. The classical authors are kings, haughtily violating their
own aesthetic laws; or they are deities, bestowing sparks of inspiration on
a chosen few (161–​2, 195–​6). Pope approvingly describes acts of devotion
to these authors:

Still green with Bays each ancient Altar stands,

Above the reach of Sacrilegious Hands;
Secure from Flames, from Envy’s fiercer rage,
Destructive War, and all-​involving Age.
See, from each Clime the Learn’d their Incense bring;
Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring! (181–​6)

1
 Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London,
1961), 253.
Some thirty-​five years later another poet, Thomas Warton the Younger,
created a very different image of the lingering hold that antiquity has on
the present. The poem, “To a Gentleman upon his Travels thro’ Italy,”
(1746) was included in his brother Joseph Warton’s Odes on Various
Subjects, a collection that was self-​consciously styled as a break with the
literary past.2 In this poem, the ancient authors are also an imposing, un-
dying force. But the scene of modern veneration is now at night, and the
mood is melancholic and gloomy:

Perhaps you cull each valley’s bloom,

To strew o’er VIRGIL’s laurell’d tomb,
Whence oft at midnight echoing voices sound;
For at that hour of silence, there
The shades of ancient bards repair,
To join in choral song his hallow’d urn around. (7–​12)

Pope and Warton were both still teenagers when they wrote these verses.
They both contemplate with awe the power that classical antiquity
exercises on their contemporaries.3 But the differences between these two
statements of classical influence, published over a generation apart, are
striking. Pope describes an act of devotion; Warton, a haunting. Pope’s ele-
vated, sacred altars are fresh with green laurel. Warton’s tomb, sunk low in
a valley and darkened by night, is scattered with “culled” flowers, “strewn”
over the tomb. Pope imagines modern authors singing songs of praise,
keeping alive the memory of the ancient dead. Thomas Warton imagines
the shades themselves singing at “midnight,” powerful without mortal as-
sistance. By the mid-​eighteenth century, antiquity’s echoing presence has
become a ghostly, unwilled return.
Both Joseph and Thomas Warton, authors of influential commentaries
on Pope and Spenser respectively, would become key figures in a larger
cultural project of English literary self-​definition. The 1740s and 1750s
saw poets, critics, and publishers engaged in a national effort to produce
an English antiquity to match that of Greece and Rome. Shakespeare,
Spenser, and the relatively recent Milton were recast as “ancient” bards,

2
 Odes on Various Subjects (London, 1746; repr. Los Angeles, 1979), 22–​5. David Fairer has
proven that Thomas Warton the Younger was this poem’s author: “The Poems of Thomas Warton
the Elder?,” Review of English Studies, 26 (1975), 298–​9.
3
 Warton was nineteen. The Essay on Criticism was published when Pope was twenty-​two, but
was composed, according to William Warburton, before he was twenty: An Essay on Criticism, by
Alexander Pope, with Notes by Mr. Warburton (London, 1751), 87.

26  |  Spectres of Antiquity

the core of a canon of English classics worthy of the same study and re-
spect as the Iliad or the Aeneid. Writers debated the virtues and character
of “native” genius, as opposed to the classical or the French, thereby
contributing to a strongly patriotic mythologizing of English character
and tradition. The language of Spenser and Shakespeare was analyzed as a
museum piece, increasingly subject to the sort of philological commentary
formerly reserved for Greek and Latin texts. Jonathan Brody Kramnick
has linked this production of an English antiquity to the expansion of pub-
lishing and booksellers and consequent widening of the reading public in
the eighteenth century. As books and periodical publications were increas-
ingly accessible to a rising middle class, there was a growing desire for
a classic literature that could be read and appreciated by those who had
never learned Latin and Greek, traditionally the province of the educated
elite.4
This national effort rendered the cultural position of Greek and Roman
antiquity newly ambivalent. As the celebration of an English literary tra-
dition came to the forefront of literary critical concerns in the middle of
the eighteenth century, the lingering influence of classical antiquity was
depicted as something oppressive—​a spectre from an increasingly distant
world rather than a positive example or model for the present. One of the
key theorists of this idea, Edward Young, calls for these classical spirits to
be exorcised so that English writers can follow their own paths, unhaunted
by powerful ghosts from the past.5 But the era also sees the development
of new ways of reading antiquity that find value precisely in this ghostly
vision of antiquity. Edmund Burke responds to the increasing displace-
ment of classical authors from cultural centrality by creating new value
in private, intimate encounters with ancient texts. Virgil need not teach us
anything; according to Burke’s theory of the literary sublime, the beauty
and value of his text come precisely in the Aeneid’s capacity to terrify
us in solitary moments. Richard Hurd’s influential writing on the medi-
eval romance also creates a new and “Gothic” vision of classical antiquity.
Hurd represents the classics as a distant prototype for the fantastic world
of medieval romance, not its ordered and rational opposite. These three
writers all contribute to a spectralization of antiquity. Classical writers
no longer existed in an immanent present, offering “useful rules” to their
“sons” in later generations. Now that the classical writers were exiled to

4
 Making the English Canon,  15–​53.
5
 Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759), 77–​8, a passage discussed in more detail
later in this chapter.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 27

an increasingly distant past, their influence was conceptualized as spectral
trace, a sometimes-​unwanted force that haunted and oppressed the pre-
sent, rather than teaching or leading it.
This spectralization drew from other cultural currents in the mid-​
eighteenth century. So-​called graveyard poets, beginning with Thomas
Parnell’s “A Night-​Piece on Death” (1722), described moldering ruins,
hooting owls, and gloomy gravestones in an effort to spur Christian
readers to meditation on death. Eric Parisot has convincingly traced the
origins of this genre to changes in both Protestantism and publishing.6 The
seventeenth-​and early-​eighteenth-​century church put growing emphasis
on private worship (“closet piety”), and there was a decline in the printing
of funeral sermons, so the reading of poems assumed a newly important
role in acts of domestic devotion. The fashion spread, and a great quan-
tity of verse throughout the eighteenth century uses cemetery settings as
an aesthetic device to generate a pious terror of the afterlife in its audi-
ence. At the same time, “fancy” or imagination became the precondition of
true poetry among a group frequently seen as precursors to Romanticism.7
Poets increasingly presented themselves in their work as isolated and mel-
ancholic, and favored personal modes such as the ode and the lyric over
the satires, moral essays, and didactic poems written in coteries earlier in
the century. This posture was set in explicit opposition to the poetry of
Pope and other luminaries. Although darkness, imagination, and the sub-
lime were all evident as themes in early-​eighteenth-​century verse—​Pope’s
“Eloisa to Abelard” was the object of especial emulation—​the mid-​century
poetics of sensibility negatively identified Dryden, Pope, Addison, and
others with conscious art, stifling propriety, and “the cold critic’s studied
laws.”8 Although the critical term “neoclassicism” is not used in a literary

6
 Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-​Eighteenth-​Century Poetic Condition
(London, 2013).
7
 Edward Young, William Collins, and Thomas Gray were once grouped with the Wartons as
“Preromantic,” in opposition to the still-​classicizing aesthetic of Samuel Johnson’s circle, but
the label is now usually rejected as an anachronism. Marshall Brown reclaims it in his study
Preromanticism (Stanford, 1991), but he uses the term to describe writers (Goldsmith, Sterne) of
a very different aesthetic stamp from that of the Wartons. On the mid-​century turn toward an “age
of sensibility,” see John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-​Eighteenth-​Century England (Ithaca,
NY, 1982).
8
 Joseph Warton, “To Fancy,” line 146 (Odes on Various Subjects, 12). On the Wartons’
indebtedness to Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), even in passages rejecting Pope’s influence,
see Robert J. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge, 1995),
31–​5. For the blend of classical and (proto-​) Gothic in “Eloisa to Abelard,” see William Fitzgerald,
“Augustan Gothic: Alexander Pope Reads Ovid,” in Philip Hardie (ed.), Augustan Poetry and the
Irrational (Oxford, 2016), 187–​98.

28  |  Spectres of Antiquity

context until the nineteenth century, the opposition between imitation and
imagination did much to construct a retrospective vision of Pope and his
circle as arid formalists, clinging to the desiccated ideal of classical verse.
The apotheosis of fancy also had a nationalistic aspect. For mid-​century
poets and critics, Shakespeare’s “warbling wild,” Spenser’s enchanted
fairyland, and Milton’s brooding majesty epitomized a native genius that
did not owe its power to rules derived from the ancients, or, equally point-
edly, to French systemizations of those rules.
Critical discourse in the 1740s and 1750s therefore combined the pop-
ular imagery of the spectral with the celebration of fancy and individual
imagination. In the 1747 revision of “To Fancy,” Joseph Warton asks to be
led to a place

where Echo walks steep hills among,

Listening to the shepherd’s song:
Yet not these flowery fields of joy,
Can long my pensive mind employ . . .
Let us with silent footsteps go
To charnels and the house of Woe,
To Gothic churches, vaults, and tombs,
Where each sad night some virgin comes. (57–​60, 65–​8)

The sunny landscape of classical imitation is exchanged for the melan-

cholic gloom of personal poetic inspiration. In a periodical article first
published in 1753, Warton wrote that the “manner in which the ancients
ought to be imitated” is not in “using their expressions and epithets, which
is the common method, but by catching a portion of their spirit.”9 The
audacious originality of classical poets should be the object of imitation,
not their words. Theoretically, we have moved from an era in which the
classics offer public, cultural patterns for poets to follow, to an era in which
poets pursue their own imaginative fancy to new and solitary paths of indi-
vidual genius. But once the ancients have been reduced from full-​blooded
models to etiolated “spirit,” the persistent reference by English poets to
classical texts—​the lingering appearance of Greek and Roman writers
even within works calling for invention and imagination—​becomes harder
to explain and, for some, a problem. Despite announcing a departure
from Echo’s hills, Warton’s poetry is thoroughly classicized. His Odes on

 The Adventurer 89 (September 11, 1753), 164. On Warton’s authorship of this article, see John A.
9

Vance, Joseph and Thomas Warton (Boston, 1983), 58.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 29

Various Subjects even begins on its title page with a choral passage from
Euripides’ Alcestis (582–​7), lines describing a pastoral retreat in the Greek
countryside. Warton might still decide, when it suits him, to catch a por-
tion of ancient “spirit.” But it is not a far leap from this image to Young’s
notion of antiquity as a “spectre,” a cultural weight that imposes itself
against modernity’s will, preventing the individual writer from striking out
entirely on his own.

Oppression by Ancient Ghosts: Edward Young

Edward Young’s judgments on literary history are best known from his
Conjectures on Original Composition, which depicts the overwhelming
influence of classical writers as a literary, political, and theological threat.
Yet the theme is evident already in an earlier and more ambitious work.
Young was an older contemporary of Pope who had eked out modest fame
in the early decades of the eighteenth century, but success came in the
1740s, when, as an Anglican rector in his sixties, he wrote Night Thoughts,
an epic-​size didactic poem on the immortality of the soul, a work that
went through several editions in his lifetime. Its nine sections, or “nights,”
published between May 1742 and January 1746, comprise almost ten thou-
sand lines of blank verse. Night Thoughts is not easy to read, and not only
because of its length (it is the same size as the Aeneid or Paradise Lost).
Plotless and slow, it envelops the reader in a somnolent haze evocative of
solitary and nocturnal contemplation. Death-​scene reminiscences in the
poem—​its only snatches of narrative—​echo one another, in dream-​like
fashion. “Philander” dies, and then “Narcissa” follows, and then “Lucia”
(“woes cluster,” says Young, 3.63).10 The interlocutor, who has the ex-
otic name Lorenzo, is utterly opaque, seeming to shift personalities as
the poem demands. Even the speaker, imagining a grandiose flight to the
heavens in the final night, pauses at one point confusedly to wonder where
he is (“Where am I? Where is Earth?,” 9.1745), and brings the text to a
halt while he briefly falls asleep (9.2173–​80). The shadowy uncertainties
fit the poem’s message. Young urges us to see the world itself as insub-
stantial and ephemeral, and to fix attention instead on a future with God
when things will be solid, fixed, and certain. “All on earth is Shadow,” he
declares; “all beyond/​Is Substance” (1.119–​20). Eric Parisot rightly likens

 I quote the line numbers from Stephen Cornford’s edition of the text: Night Thoughts
10

(Cambridge, 1989).

30  |  Spectres of Antiquity

eighteenth-​century graveyard poems to the katabasis scenes of classical
epic (and Dante’s Inferno), in which heroes traveled to the Underworld
to learn secrets from the dead.11 For Young, though, Earth itself is an
Underworld—​under Heaven—​and we sublunary beings are shadows, in-
substantial. We have “Stygian vapour” in our blood (5.218).12
Yet there is poetic energy, if not narrative or argumentative energy, in
the clash of literary precedents within the text. Night Thoughts makes con-
tradictory claims about its literary genealogy. In the closing portion of the
first “Night,” Young describes his own reading.13 In his “silent hours,” he
says, he reads Maeonides (Homer) and Milton (1.449–​51), both of them
great poets and blind:  by necessity, they made poetry out of darkness.
He distinguishes himself from Pope and particularly the Essay on Man
(1733–​4), promising that his own more expansive gaze will move beyond
mortality (“Man too he sung; Immortal man I sing,” 1.452). At the same
time, he attacks the preoccupation with history as a moral flaw, mocking
the person who subsists on “cold-​serv’d repetitions,/​and in the tasteless
Present chaws the Past” (3.320; “chaws,” appropriately, is an archaism
for “chews”).14 “We ransack Tombs for Pastime,” he intones; “Like other
Worms, we banquet on the Dead” (9.77, 87). In particular, he laments
Christian over-​reverence toward the classical poetic tradition (“Sing Sirens
only? Do not angels sing?,” 5.63), and rebuts Lorenzo’s objection that the
“Antient Times were wise” and should invariably be trusted (7.559–​60).
“The Roman? Greek?,” he asks contemptuously. “They stalk, an empty
name!”15 It is only a prejudice in favor of Rome and Greece that gives
them such sway.
Young’s muses will be more immediate: he invokes darkness, night, and
death. He addresses them in Miltonic style at the poem’s opening, calling
for “Night, sable Goddess!” (1.18), and “Silence and Darkness! solemn
Sisters!” (1.28).16 But immediately there is a dilemma, because it was not
the pious characters throughout the epic tradition who sought aid from the

11
 Parisot, Graveyard Poetry, 82.
12
 For the recurrent motif of the earth as Underworld and living people as shades, cf. 4.109; 5.32;
7.851–​2; 7.954–​5; 8.73; 8.138–​9; 9.428–​32.
13
 I say “Young,” although the narrator is barely recognizable as anyone in particular, and
contemporaries tried in vain to connect the work’s characters with real people: Steve Clark,
“‘Radical Insincerity’ in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts,” Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies
20/​2 (1997), 173–​86.
14
 OED s.v. “chaw” (“Chaw was very common in 16–​17th cent.”) .
15
 9.108. The phrase “empty name” is itself a classical revenant, found in Pope’s Iliad (17.545) and
Dryden’s Aeneid (4.319) and deriving ultimately from Horace (inane nomen, Epistles 1.17.41).
16
 Milton depicts “Sable-​vested Night” in Hell (Paradise Lost 2.968).

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 31

forces of darkness. Despite the unimpeachably Christian argument that
Young makes, his allusions constantly remind the reader of the classical
associations between night and chaos, fury, and evil. Indeed, Young seems
to court such risky associations, relishing the tension between Christian
argument and pagan poetics. When he bids the moon to be his muse in the
third “Night,” he unmistakably alludes to the frequent idea in ancient po-
etry that a person practicing black magic can draw the moon down from
the sky (“Is that the soft Enchantment calls thee down,/​More powerful
than of old Circean charm?”).17 Later, launching into a passionate denun-
ciation of suicide, he cries out “Furies! rise . . .” (5.434), setting loose the
chthonic powers of classical myth. Climactically, in a final attempt to save
Lorenzo’s soul on the final night, he sings a forty-​six-​line magical charm
that is set off with Gothic lettering in the original printing. In this paradox-
ically pious seance, the speaker invokes the powers of night to raise the
unbelieving Lorenzo from living “death”:

Attend—​The sacred Mysteries begin—​

My solemn Night-​born Adjuration hear;
Hear, and I’ll raise thy Spirit from the Dust;
While the Stars gaze on this Enchantment new;
Enchantment, not Infernal, but Divine! (9.2091–​5)

Any similarity with canonical literary witches is no coincidence:

By Silence, DEATH’s peculiar Attribute;

By Darkness, GUILT’s inevitable Doom:
By Darkness, and by Silence, Sisters dread! (9.2096–​8)

The charm conjures up “Groans, and Graves,” reaching back through

Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the witches of Virgil, Horace, and Lucan. The
fires of night in the spell are even compared to those of undying Rome,
“like VESTA’s, ever burning” (9.2104). Here and throughout the Night
Thoughts, Young creates dangerous, dramatic spectacle from the contrast
between the impiety of his poem’s mythic architecture and his redirection
of that inheritance toward Christian truth.

17
 3.47–​8. Compare, for example, Virgil, Eclogues 8.69–​70: “spells can even draw the moon down
from heaven;/​with spells, Circe transformed the comrades of Ulysses” (carmina vel caelo possunt
deducere lunam,/​carminibus Circe socios mutavit Ulixi).

32  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 The poem’s literary past is a rebellious underground, teeming with
sinners whose influence the Christian speaker must contain. Yet for all his
extravagance and hyperbole, Young is constantly qualifying. Prometheus
was a model of impiety in classical literature because of his theft from
the gods; when Young enlists him for his Christian project, he asserts,
‘We’ll, innocently, steal celestial Fire,/​And kindle our Devotion at the
Stars;/​A  Theft, that shall not chain, but set thee free” (9.617–​9). Most
dangerous is the Roman poet Lucretius, a difficult and seductive figure
in Young’s period. The scientific imagination of Lucretius’ first-​century
BCE didactic poem De rerum natura (On the nature of the universe)—​its
vision of all life as atoms in void, ecstatic praise of the capaciousness
of human understanding, and attempt to encapsulate the truth of heavens
and earth—​captivated an Enlightenment audience dazzled by Newton’s
astronomy and thrilled by evocations of the sublime. But the Roman was
also a pagan of the most vexing kind. His invectives against the ills of
religion were for a Christian reader impious, and his Epicureanism was
impugned (falsely) as atheism. Arguments in the De rerum natura against
the fear of death were also commonly interpreted in the eighteenth century
as an implicit defense of the sin of suicide.18 Mere months before the ninth
Night was published in England, the Anti-​Lucretius of Cardinal Melchior
de Polignac appeared in France, a nine-​book refutation of the poet in Latin
hexameters, and a text that testifies even more strongly to the effort to im-
itate Lucretius’ poetry while neutralizing his philosophy.19
Consequently, Night Thoughts is pervasively but ambivalently Lucretian.
Like the De rerum natura, it is full of ecstatic praise of science and reason
(“To rise in Science, as in Bliss,/​Initiate in the Secrets of the Skies?,”
6.94–​5), although Young also warns readers of the dangers of human reli-
ance upon rational thought (“Can Man by Reason’s Beam be led astray?,”
7.189). Just as Lucretius sought to teach his addressee Memmius the “ma-
chine of the world” (machina mundi, 5.96), the balance of natural elements
in the universe, so Young instructs Lorenzo in what he calls the “Machine”
of the galaxy, though for him the word signifies no physical process but
the immortal order of divine Creation (9.1323). Aspects of Lucretius’ ma-
terialist physics are repeated in Night Thoughts, but “atoms” and “void”
are now not building blocks of substance but a rhetoric for conceptualizing

18
 On Lucretius and suicide in Young’s period, see Parisot, Graveyard Poetry, 131–​2. Suicide is
depicted with particular horror in Night Thoughts (5.434–​515; 8.1326–​37).
19
 Melchior de Polignac, Anti-​Lucretius, sive de Deo et Natura (Paris, 1747); on this work, see W.
R. Johnson, Lucretius and the Modern World (London, 2000), 89–​93.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 33

the insignificance of humanity. Compared to God, he says, we humans
are merely “Atoms of this Atom-​World” (4.421), no more than “Atoms
ill-​perceived” (6.187). As Lucretius promises to scatter the darkness of
superstition and reveal the truth of natural principles, so Young promises
a similar enlightenment that leads one back, however, to religion: “To see,
before each Glance of piercing Thought,/​All Cloud, all Shadow blown
remote; and leave/​No Mystery—​but that of Love Divine” (6.99–​101). In
the final night, Young imagines his mind soaring through space to examine
the nature of the heavens and the majesty of creation. The passage recalls
Lucretius’ praise of his philosophical hero Epicurus. In the popular rend-
ering of Thomas Creech, Lucretius writes,

His vigorous and active Mind was hurld

Beyond the flaming limits of this World
Into the mighty Space.20

In Night Thoughts, Young’s mind is translated to the heavens, in part,

through an act of translation (12.2414–​7):

My Song the Midnight Raven has outwing’d

And shot, ambitious of unbounded Scenes,
Beyond the flaming Limits of the World,
Her gloomy flight.

Even as the poet mouths the words of his classical predecessor, his
arguments protest Lucretius’ pagan vision of the universe. What position
does the Roman poet occupy in this world? He is not a model. Young
rejects his impiety, disclaims inspiration from the “empty names” of Rome
and Greece, and condemns excessive devotion to the past. He is more an
animating force, a returning presence—​or, as Young would later concep-
tualize it in his Conjectures, a spectre.
Conjectures on Original Composition was published in 1759, when
Young was seventy-​six years old. As the case of Lucretius makes clear
in Night Thoughts, there are profound theological problems with an over-​
reverence toward the pagan classics. Conjectures attempts to turn this indi-
vidual dilemma into a fully fledged cultural crisis. Conjectures is addressed

20
 T. Lucretius Carus, the Epicurean Philosopher: His Six Books De natura rerum, Thomas Creech
(ed.), (Oxford, 1683), 4, translating De rerum natura 1.72–​4: extra/​processit longe flammantia
moenia mundi/​atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.

34  |  Spectres of Antiquity

to the novelist Samuel Richardson, and although the discussion deals only
with poetry and drama, the choice of addressee associates the argument
with Richardson’s contemporaneous theorization of the English novel as
a distinctive break with the classicizing literary past. After the publication
of Clarissa (1748), Richardson was eager to present his literary success
as a heroic liberation from classical literary forms. As Alan D. McKillop
demonstrates, Richardson was no passive addressee of the treatise. He
commented extensively on Young’s draft, and sharpened the work’s moral
antipathy toward classical imitation.21 Yet while Young’s essay polemicizes
about the relationship between classical models and contemporary writers,
its comparison between ancient and modern has none of the rivalry of the
seventeenth-​century French Querelle, or the competition to outdo clas-
sical models familiar from the Renaissance culture of aemulatio. Young
openly assumes the inferiority of modern authors. They surrender before
any Swiftian “Battel of the Books” can even begin. The trouble, Young
argues, is the oversized and oppressive influence of classical texts, whose
examples “engross, prejudice and intimidate” contemporary authors.22 The
fame of ancient authors may be “sacred,” he says, but it should “nourish,
not annihilate our own.”23 While Greek and Roman authors should not be
ignored—​it would scarcely be possible to do so—​English writers should
not be so cowed by them that they feel able to explore only areas the
ancients had already mastered. Conjectures is a work very frankly about
power. Literary influence is figured as political and theological control.
Young wants modern authors to conquer new territory and shake the ty-
rannical hold of old ghosts over contemporary minds. His mission is not to
criticize or compete with classical authors, but to exorcise them.
The notion of classical authors as infernal spirits remained mostly im-
plicit throughout Night Thoughts. But it is explicit in the Conjectures:

Rome was a powerful Ally to many States; antient Authors are our powerful
Allies; but we must take heed, that they do not succour, till they enslave,
after the manner of Rome. Too formidable an Idea of their Superiority, like
a Spectre, would fright us out of our Wits; and dwarf our Understanding, by
making a Giant of theirs.24

21
 “Richardson, Young, and the Conjectures,” Modern Philology 22/​4 (1925), 391–​404. For
Richardson’s rejection of classical literary culture, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley,
1957), 247–​8; Patey, “Ancients and Moderns,” 64–​5.
22
 Young, Conjectures, 17.
23
 Young, Conjectures, 20.
24
 Young, Conjectures, 25.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 35

One of Young’s emphatic arguments is that the classical authors were,
after all, only human beings. Virgil and Horace also lived and breathed,
just as we do today. It is a reminder of our distance from the eighteenth-​
century literary world that this mortality was so great a consolation. Were
the ancient authors “more than men?,” he challenges. ”Or are we less? Are
not our minds cast in the same mould with those before the Flood?”25 The
capacity of ancient and modern authors is equivalent; it is just that the per-
formance of the modern is so “deplorably short,” stunted by the inflated
honors accorded to classical authors.26
In describing a present persecuted by a nightmarish past, Young returns
to Night Thoughts’ infernal imagery. In one memorable passage, he offers
Lucian, the second-​century CE author of satiric works in Greek, as an ex-
ample of true and original genius. Recalling Lucian’s own narrative of his
literary origins, Young says that he was originally apprenticed to sculpt
statues, but then rejected an occupation based on imitation. Instead, as
a writer, he was dubbed a Prometheus, and swore like that mythic hero
that he deserved “to be torne by twelve vultures” in the Underworld if
he ever failed to produce original work.27 Young maliciously imagines
Jonathan Swift “shuddering” at “thy brother Lucian’s Vulturs hovering
o’er thee,” the transmogrified spirit of the satiric original preying upon
his imitator in Hell. Since Young condemns Swift’s satires as unethical as
well as unoriginal, he has little sympathy—​“Shudder on!” The description
of Lucian is itself a loose imitation of passages from two of the ancient
writer’s works: The Dream, or Lucian’s Career (in which a dream leads
him to choose paideia, “literary culture,” over sculpting) and Dialogue of
the Gods 5 (in which Zeus warns Prometheus of redoubled punishment in
the Underworld). It is perhaps surprising that a later Greek author of par-
asitic genres like satire and parody is held up in Conjectures as a standard
of strong and original genius. But Lucian’s Cynic philosophical streak
appealed to Young. Elsewhere in the Conjectures, he endorses a Cynic
irreverence toward the classics as a model of assertive authorship: he says
we should treat “even Homer” as the Cynic philosopher Diogenes is said
to have treated Alexander the Great, telling him brusquely to get out of
his sun.28

25
 Young, Conjectures,  23–​4.
26
 Young, Conjectures, 46.
27
 Young, Conjectures,  61–​2.
28
 Young, Conjectures, 20. On Lucian in the eighteenth century, see Daniel Richter, “Lives and
Afterlives of Lucian of Samosata,” Arion 13/​1 (2005), 75–​100; and on the influence of ancient
Cynicism on Enlightenment thought, see Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the
Salon (Baltimore, 2010).

36  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 In place of imitation, Young offers as a positive example an unnamed
friend who, “with a Genius, as well moral, as original,” managed to “cast
our evil spirits” and produce original work. His success is the result not
of spontaneous creativity but deliberate psychological expulsion. He was,
Young says, like those “first christian Emperors” who “expelled demons”
amid the closure of pagan temples in Rome.29 It is a resonant image: the
fourth-​ century political overhaul that led to a Christianized Empire
becomes a paradigm for modern authors mastering their past. This parallel
with Constantine and his successors is typical of the work’s emphatic link
between authorial originality and political order. Young likens the activity
of individual authors to the governance and occupation of states. “Hope
we, from Plagiarism, any Dominion in Literature?” he asks, comparing
the work of imitators to the myth of Romulus’ asylum, the harboring of
fugitives and thieves to increase the early population of Rome.30 Imitators
are “invaders of the Press,” he says; works of original genius are the only
“property” that can “confer the noble title of an Author.”31
It is specifically British power that will be consolidated and expanded
by the conquests made by original genius. “All the winds cannot blow
the British flag farther,” he writes, “than an Original spirit can convey the
British fame.” He announces his own canon of true British originals who
claimed new ground in knowledge, not just in poetry or drama (Spenser
is noticeably absent):  Bacon, Newton, Shakespeare, and Milton, all of
whose names “go round the world.”32 Original authorship is explicitly
likened to colonial rule. An original composition adds “a new province”
to the “Republic of Letters,” he says, and although it might approach as
“an Indian Prince, adorned with feathers only, having little of weight,” its
very novelty will arouse excitement.33 Imitation is associated with the lan-
guor of Europe, chained to the glory of a fêted past, whereas originality
is tied to the New World, a place of profit and new opportunities for rule.
Despite the work’s importance for Romantic authors in Germany as well
as England, Conjectures on Original Composition puts little emphasis on
the individual’s spontaneous response to experience.34 Writing original

29
 Young, Conjectures,  77–​8.
30
 Young, Conjectures, 25.
31
 Young, Conjectures, 54.
32
 Young, Conjectures, 76.
33
 Young, Conjectures, 10, 12.
34
 The treatise, translated twice into German less than a year after publication in England, had
a profound effect on Herder in particular, who spoke of Young’s electrifying “spirit” being
transmitted through the work “from heart to heart”: Martin William Steinke, Edward Young’s
Conjectures on Original Composition in England and Germany (New York, 1917), 21.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 37

works is instead presented as a national project, a sign of civilized ad-
vancement in a modern age.
Young also casts an excessive respect for classical writers as a religious
aberration. For the Anglican clergyman—​or at least for the purposes of
his argument—​an obeisance to the European past looks suspiciously like
Catholicism. “As too great admirers of the Fathers of the Church have
sometimes set up their Authority against the true Sense of Scripture,” he
writes, “so too great admirers of the Classical Fathers have sometimes set
up their Authority, or Example, against Reason.”35 There is only one Book
worthy of our submission. The Conjectures tars the ancient past with con-
temporary Protestant stereotypes about “Popish” superstition. The scholar
“up to the knees in Antiquity” has all the “blind veneration of a bigot
saluting the papal toe,” he sneers, “comfortably hoping full absolution for
the sins of his own understanding, from the powerful charms of touching
his idol’s Infallibility.”36 He bids original writers not to prostrate themselves
before spirits given “voluntary pedestals.”37 His most aggressive attack is
reserved for Alexander Pope, whose friendship he had courted earlier in
his life. Now the poet had been dead for fifteen years, and his reputation
had undergone revision, sometimes unfairly, by his literary successors.
Increasingly, Pope was seen as an author of wit and infallible correct-
ness, but without true sublimity or original poetic imagination. He was
also a Catholic. Young’s insinuations are grotesquely unfair. “His taste,”
he says, “partook the error of his Religion; it denied not worship to Saints
and Angels; that is, to writers, who, canonized for ages, have received
their apotheosis from established and universal fame. True poetry”—​the
phrase has a Wartonian ring—​“like true Religion, abhors idolatry.”38 The
Conjectures is anything but a detached, objective critical treatise. Its tone
is exaggerated, even hysterical (Young anticipates the charge that it is a
“rant”).39 But the urgency of this polemic exposes the perceived intrac-
tability of the classical world for this vision of British modernity. In this
literary polemic, we already see in nascent form many of the later Gothic’s
narrative tropes: the contrast between Europe, beholden to old-​world pres-
tige, and England, rational, modern, and Protestant; oppression by an

35
 Young, Conjectures, 32.
36
 Young, Conjectures, 55. Cf. Night Thoughts 8.1004–​15 on the moral dangers of Catholic Rome
to Protestants who hunger for “Works of curious Art, and antient Fame.”
37
 Young, Conjectures, 56.
38
 Young, Conjectures, 67.
39
 Young, Conjectures, 74.

38  |  Spectres of Antiquity

overbearing political or theological power; and the attempt to escape the
terrifying, giant influence of the past.

Antiquity, Terror, and the Sublime: Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas

of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is a pivotal work for the eighteenth-​
century Gothic, because it is the first treatise to argue for terror as a foun-
dation for aesthetic response. By the time the twenty-​eight-​year-​old Burke
published his Enquiry, the Greek text On the Sublime (Peri hupsous) by
“Longinus” had long been an object of literary fashion. It was sufficiently
ubiquitous to be parodied by Pope and Swift.40 Burke’s approach, shaped
in part by his early devotion to contemporary poetic gloom, was new.41
The Enquiry argues that when an idea of pain or danger is excited in a
person who knows that he or she is not at risk of harm, it engenders a “de-
lightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.” Because this effect
depends upon a person’s supreme instinct toward self-​preservation, what-
ever produces these emotions is a source of the sublime, the “strongest
emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” Burke also argues that
the fear of pain (and the fear of death, the “king of terrors”) is generally
stronger than the love of pleasure, and so he rates the power of the sublime
over that of the beautiful, a quality founded in pleasure, which induces
“a sense of affection and tenderness” toward an object.42 Whereas Young
fashioned a proto-​Gothic image of classical authors as ghosts or demons
exercising a malign influence over the present, Burke does not present
his theory as an explicit attack on ancient authority, and recent scholarly
work has underlined the importance of the classical substratum to his
ideas. By emphasizing what is terrifying and mysterious in works like
the Aeneid, the Enquiry models an engagement with classical literature

40
 On the cult of Longinus in France and England following Boileau’s translation in 1674, see
Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-​Century England (2nd
edn., Ann Arbor, 1960), 10–​28. Swift’s “On Poetry: A Rapsody” [sic] (1733) warns that “A
forward Critick often dupes us/​With sham Quotations Peri Hupsous:/​And if we have not read
Longinus,/​Will magisterially out-​shine us”: The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3
vols. (2nd edn., Oxford, 1958), ii. 648.
41
 Burke and contemporary poetry: Monk, The Sublime, 87–​91. According to one nineteenth-​
century biographer, Young’s Night Thoughts was the constant companion of Burke in his youth,
and he could recite long stretches of it by heart: James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of
the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1826), i. 30–​1.
42
 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. Paul Guyer (Oxford, 2015), quotations at 109, 33–​4, 34, 44.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 39

that is immediate, sensory, and immersive, loosening those texts from the
accumulated burden of moral or political exemplarity. The classical read-
ership Burke presumes is homosocial: his Enquiry articulates an emotional
response to texts that male readers can share.43 But it is also grounded
in private contemplation, and presents an implicit challenge to the public
uses of Greek and Roman literature. For all the vastness of the sublime, in
Burke the category becomes, paradoxically, a means for enabling small,
intimate encounters between modern readers and ancient texts.
Burke in fact quotes rarely from Longinus (just once in the preface
and once in the body of the text), and in general he demonstrates deeper
reading of Roman than Greek texts. Lucretius is an important presence,
and more pervasive than the number of quotations may suggest. As
many scholars have observed, the synthesis of opposites basic to Burke’s
argument—​the “delightful horror” of the sublime—​recalls Lucretius’ de-
scription of the voluptas . . . atque horror (“delight and horror”) experi-
enced by the student of Epicurus who has been taught to see the world as it
really is.44 The “dreadful pleasure” that later writers pervasively associated
with the Gothic form descends, through Burke, from Lucretius. But there
is an almost complete reversal of associations:  while Lucretius stressed
the dreadful pleasure that arises from understanding the true nature of the
universe, Burke’s “delight and horror” instead describes the pleasure to be
drawn from what remains gloomy, irrational, and mysterious.
Yet the most frequently cited author in the Enquiry is Virgil. Virgil’s
bold images strike the reader with a power that nearly resists analysis, says
Burke. If we “attend coolly” to his individual phrases, then “the chimeras
of madmen cannot appear more wild and absurd.”45 Burke describes the in-
tense emotions provoked by Virgil’s description of the Underworld. Burke
recalls the half-​lit entrance to the Underworld, per incertam lunam sub luce
maligna (“by the uncertain moon, under grudging light,” Aeneid 6.270),
and his vivid present tenses conjure the reality of the place: “Now some
low, confused, uncertain sounds, leave us in the same fearful anxiety . . . a

43
 See Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (London, 1992), 38, who argues that the
sublime enabled eighteenth-​century readers to demonstrate that they were “representative” in their
aesthetic response to texts.
44
 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 3.28–​9 (= Burke, Enquiry, 57). For the phrase “dreadful pleasure”
as an evocation of the Burkean sublime, see, e.g., Ann Radcliffe, The Italian; or, the Confessional
of the Black Penitents, ed. Robert Miles (London, 2000), 106. On Burke and Lucretius, see Philip
Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009), 153; Henry
J. M. Day, Lucan and the Sublime: Power, Representation and Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge,
2013), 51; James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2016), 471.
45
 Burke, Enquiry, 135.

40  |  Spectres of Antiquity

light now appearing, and now leaving us, and so off and on, is more ter-
rible than total darkness.”46 The growls of metamorphosed animals on
Circe’s island at Aeneid 7.15–​8 inspire a “great and aweful sensation” and
are a potential source of the sublime, as is the “horror and gloom” of the
mephitic stench in Latinus’ sacred grove at Aeneid 7.81–​4 and the subter-
ranean vapors of Acheron at Aeneid 6.237–​41.47 To the objections of con-
temporary reviewers, Burke made Virgil’s familiar Latin newly mysterious
and—​to use his word—​“obscure.”48 The archetypal paradigm for Burke’s
sublime, then, is Virgil’s Underworld, a descent into what is terrifying and
unknowable, which brings about an uncanny mingling of the corporeal
present and the shadowy past.
One section of the Enquiry strikingly combines Lucretian imagery of
revelation with the sublime gloom of the Virgilian Underworld. Entitled
“Privation” (Part II, Section VI), the chapter consists only of a stretch of
the Aeneid (6.264–​9), with a loose translation by Pitt and a couplet of
Dryden, with this introduction:

All general privations are great, because they are all terrible; Vacuity,
Darkness, Solitude and Silence. With what a fire of imagination, yet with
what severity of judgment, has Virgil amassed all these circumstances where
he knows that all the images of a tremendous dignity ought to be united, at
the mouth of hell! where before he unlocks the secrets of the great deep, he
seems to be seized with a religious horror, and to retire astonished at the
boldness of his own design.49

There follows Virgil’s invocation to Chaos and Phlegethon in the empire

of the dead, and the slow procession of Aeneas and the Sibyl, who move
darkly (obscuri, 268) in the solitary night (sola sub nocte, 269) through the
Underworld’s hollow dwellings and empty kingdoms (domo . . . vacuas
et inania regna, 269). Burke’s commentary assumes a complex chain of
identifications. Virgil briefly occupies the place of his own character, aston-
ished, as if he were himself at the mouth of Hell; the image of him shrinking
in “religious horror” recalls the Sibyl’s warning in lines just previous to

46
 Burke, Enquiry, 69.
47
 Burke, Enquiry,  69–​70.
48
 Burke used the word in its Latinate sense of “dark” or “shadowed,” but reviewers misunderstood
him to mean “confused.” In The Monthly Review for May 1757, Oliver Goldsmith objected
to the idea that the exemplary clarity of Virgil’s Latin might be associated in any way with
obscurity: Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966), i. 31.
49
 Burke, Enquiry, 58.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 41

those Burke quotations.50 In turn, the ability of the passage to evoke the
sublime depends on our own identification with Aeneas, undergoing the
privations of emptiness, darkness, solitude, and silence. Rather than being
oppressed by ghosts, the reader of the Enquiry passes like a shade from
body to body and era to era, a traveler like Aeneas (or Dante) in an under-
world of texts. The identifications are enabled by Burke’s erasure of his-
torical and theological difference. In reading the sixth book of the Aeneid,
Burke trains attention on the book’s evocation of dank places, sinister
noises, and foul smells, rather than on its proud conclusion for Roman
readers, the climactic pageant of future political heroes. The identification
that Burke encourages depends not on any grand analogy between Britain
and Rome, but on shared experience and everyday sense perception.
There is also a more than etymological link between “privation” and
“privacy” in Burke’s depiction of sublime solitude. The Enquiry comes
at the intersection of two longer narratives in the intellectual culture of
the eighteenth century. First, there is a shift toward the individual in aes-
thetic theory. Throughout the period, critics focus less on recognizing
and reproducing certain qualities in the literary or artistic work itself
(identifying levels of style, for example), and instead on describing the
response of an individual reader or viewer to that work. To study the sub-
lime is to observe the force of art on emotions and personality (the sub-
jective focus is even more pronounced in Hume and, later, Kant). Second,
the categories of “public” and “private” are refashioned in the eighteenth
century with the expansion of print culture and a new interest in depicting
domestic and suburban spaces. In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt
famously argues that the novels of Samuel Richardson represented a new
attention to the value of private experience. In the revision of this thesis
by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, eighteenth-​century epistolary novels did
not merely represent the private experience of readers, but also actively
helped to construct the idea of a private sphere associated with women,
letter writing, and domesticity.51 Burke’s Enquiry is aimed quite explic-
itly at men, and scholars have explored the ways in which gender differ-
ence is constructed and reinforced within the text.52 But it too is engaged

50
 Aeneid 6.258–​9: “  ‘procul, o procul este, profani,’/​conclamat vates, ‘totoque absistite luco’ ”
(“ ‘Stay far, far away, irreligious ones,’ shouts the seer, ‘and keep away from all the grove’ ”).
51
 Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-​Century Republic of Letters (Stanford,
1996), 71–​113.
52
 Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political
Economy in Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), 36; David Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment in British
Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753–​1835 (Montreal, 2015), 40–​6. Paul Guyer (A
History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vols. [Oxford, 2014], i. 156) notes what he calls the “distanced

42  |  Spectres of Antiquity

in constructing a domestic space for men, which it fashions through
a shared, generalizable aesthetic response to the sublime and the beau-
tiful. Writing to Samuel Richardson in the preface to the Conjectures on
Original Composition, Edward Young depicts the pleasures of retreating
to a “letter’d recess” and finding comfort in books, the “immortal friends
in our closet.”53 Similarly, Burke’s sublime is a descent into the recesses of
male privacy. In those moments of intimate experience, at least according
to Burke, men read Latin.
The male bonding paradoxically occasioned by the solitary reading of
classical literature is clearest in a passage of Burke describing the beau-
tiful rather than the sublime, arguing that certain qualities help to deter-
mine the emotions people excite in us:

Those persons who creep into the hearts of most people, who are chosen as
the companions of their softer hours, and their reliefs from cares and anx-
iety, are never persons of shining qualities, nor strong virtues. It is rather
the soft green of the soul on which we rest our eyes, that are fatigued with
beholding more glaring objects. It is worth observing, how we feel our-
selves affected in reading the characters of Caesar, and Cato, as they are so
finely drawn and contrasted in Sallust. In one, the ignoscendo, largiundo
[forgiving, bestowing]; in the other, nil largiundo [bestowing nothing]. In
one, the miseris perfugium [refuge for the wretched]; in the other, malis
perniciem [scourge for the wicked]. In the latter we have much to admire,
much to reverence, and perhaps something to fear; we respect him, but we
respect him at a distance. The former makes us familiar with him; we love
him, and he leads us whither he pleases.54

The initial thing to note about this scene is how homoerotic it is. Burke
imagines his learned reader in his “softer hours”—​the word “soft” is per-
vasively associated with the feminine and the beautiful in the Enquiry—​
finding relief from his cares in solitary time spent in reading the Roman
historian Sallust. Yet his reading embroils him in an intense relationship,
and he passively surrenders his power. Caesar will lead him “whither he
pleases”; Caesar creeps into his heart; Caesar makes the man “familiar”
with him (the phrase has an unmistakable erotic force). There is a suggestive

sexuality” of Burke’s treatise: it supposes that a woman’s beauty will excite “love, or some passion
similar to it,” but not “desire or lust.”
53
 Young, Conjectures, 5.
54
 Burke, Enquiry, 89.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 43

reversal here, because Julius Caesar is in other ancient texts a figure of
sublime terror. In the Pharsalia of the Roman poet Lucan (1.151–​7), for
example, Caesar is likened to a flashing thunderbolt of violent power, an
image that has been convincingly associated with symbols of the grand
style in rhetoric.55 Burke’s softer image again suggests that the reader is
wishfully imagining his own passive vulnerability, praising the mercy and
generosity Caesar shows to those under his sway.56 Scholars have used
various details in Burke’s life to detect overtones of “sexual ambivalence”
in the Enquiry, and cautiously to suggest that his theory of aesthetic re-
sponse resembles what would be identified as masochism in the nineteenth
century.57 In the case of this passage, the time spent alone with Caesar is
both an imagined relationship with a powerful male literary character and
an intense affective mode that bonds Burke with a broader circle of male
readers. Burke’s ingratiating “we” invites other men of sensibility to com-
pare the emotions evoked by a mutually familiar text. The Enquiry uses
an eighteenth-​century schoolbook (Sallust)58 and its untranslated Latin to
create a closet coterie.
The passage is also striking for its domestic context. The image of a
man of worldly cares retiring to his refuge to read is clearly a domestic
scene. The aura is strengthened in the succeeding sentences when Burke
draws a familial analogy:  we tend to remain distant from our stern fa-
thers and close to our indulgent mothers, he says, but we generally have
a “great love for our grandfathers,” in whom stern authority has softened
to “feminine partiality.”59 According to the argument of The Rise of the
Novel, the epistolary mode of Richardson’s novels was the “reflection of
a much larger change in outlook” in eighteenth-​century literary culture, a
“transition from the objective, social, and public orientation of the clas-
sical world to the subjective, individualist and private orientation of the
life and literature of the last two hundred years.”60 No classical scholar

55
 Day, Lucan and the Sublime, 107–​16.
56
 Burke alludes to a passage describing the senate debate concerning the punishment of the
Catilinarian conspirators. Cato spoke in favor of immediate execution, Caesar against (Bellum
Catilinae 51–​2, quoted phrases at 54). To both the conspirators and to the reader suffering from
“care and anxiety,” then, Caesar is a “refuge” (perfugium).
57
 Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative
(New York, 1977), 76; Dominic Janes, Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual
Visibility in Britain (Oxford, 2015), 49–​52.
58
 Sallust is a first-​year author on the 1736 Latin reading list at Trinity College, Dublin, Burke’s
alma mater, along with the entirety of the Aeneid and Terence: Clarke, Classical Education in
Britain, 1500–​1900, 161.
59
 Burke, Enquiry, 89.
60
 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 176.

44  |  Spectres of Antiquity

is likely to accept this simplistic dichotomy (what about Sappho? Latin
love elegy?), but Watt’s argument does accurately reflect the stratification
of cultural forms in the mid-​eighteenth century. The classical world was
pervasively associated with public rather than private feeling and identity.
Characters like Cato and Caesar had become too much common property,
too freighted with political allegory, too overpopulated by themselves to
become the object of intimate, readerly devotion or affection in the manner
of Lovelace or Clarissa. Commenting on Joseph Addison’s popular Roman
drama Cato (1713), Joseph Warton wrote that “I have always thought, that
those pompous Roman sentiments are not so difficult to be produced, as is
vulgarly imagined; and which, indeed, dazzle only the vulgar.”61 Burke’s
sentimental vision of domestic affection for Caesar, therefore, is sur-
prising. By emphasizing the capacity for classical literature to produce
emotions of terror and tenderness in solitary readers, he articulates an af-
fective mode that we might ordinarily associate with the private subjec-
tivity of self-​consciously modern forms like the English novel.
Samuel Monk’s influential study of the sublime (first published
1935) has done much to perpetuate the notion that Burke’s Enquiry was
an assault on classical or “neoclassical” aesthetic standards. As soon as
“disorder is admitted into art,” Monk writes, “classic beauty, whose very
essence is order, harmony, and proportion, is no more.”62 It is significant
that Monk’s oft-​cited work includes Burke’s quotations of Milton and the
Book of Job but none of Burke’s quotations from Virgil. To assert this
opposition between “classic” order and modern imagination is both to
oversimplify the aesthetics of Pope and his circle, and to conflate a later
tradition of Aristotelian aesthetics with the writings of ancient authors
themselves. Burke imagines the sublime not as the soaring liberation of
the mind, but as a plunge into a literary world of shadows and darkness, a
descent deep into the heart of the past, the literary Underworld of old texts.
To understand the passions, one needs to know “what lies hidden, un-
speakable, in our secret bodily fibres,” he says—​a quotation from a Latin
poet of distinct unsublimity, the Stoic satirist Persius (quod latet arcana
non enarrabile fibra, Satire 5.29). Burke’s Enquiry articulated a positive
goal for evocations of terror, and for that reason became a guiding text
for the Gothic later in the century. Yet there is no sense yet in Burke’s
treatise of Gothic and classical being contrasted either as periods or as

61
 Warton, Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, i. 261.
62
 Monk, Sublime, 95.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 45

aesthetic ideals. That development came in the work of Burke’s contem-
porary, Richard Hurd.

Connecting Monstrous Traditions: Richard Hurd

Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) argues against

the modern praise of the classical tradition at the expense of the “Gothic”
romance, asserting that the romance expresses the literary imagination
with greater freedom and force. Later the Bishop of Worcester, Richard
Hurd was the author of critical and religious treatises, a correspondent
of the poets William Mason and Thomas Gray, and a polemical adver-
sary of Edward Gibbon.63 For Hurd, the Gothic is essentially the medieval,
as it is refracted in later art and literature. The titular romances of the
Letters on Chivalry and Romance are not the medieval texts themselves,
but later writers who preserve the world of knights, jousting, gallantry, and
magic:  Ariosto and Spenser preeminently, together with parts of Tasso,
Shakespeare, and Milton.64 Hurd demonstrates little knowledge or interest
in the actual literature of the Middle Ages. The charmed world of romance
is instead a misty era poised between the classical and the modern, onto
which he projects mid-​century aesthetic ideas about the primacy of imag-
ination over reason, unity, and propriety. Although the construction of a
vast “Gothic” antiquity stretching from King Arthur to Milton is flagrantly
ahistorical, Hurd’s argument also explains aspects of the romance form
through a strong appeal to historical particularity. The political and ec-
onomic conditions of any period inevitably shape the art produced in it,
he maintains, and the apparent improbabilities and excesses of knights’
adventures can be explained by their origins in the feudal age, an era of
constant conflict between kings, barons, and their vassals.65 This is his-
toricism, we might say, without much actual history. The different parts
of the argument in the treatise exist in somewhat awkward tension with
one another. The wild imaginative elements of the romance should not
be a source of mockery, he asserts, because they are rational reflections
of their historical circumstances; but in any case, wild imagination is the

63
 Gibbon and Hurd: David Womersley, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City”: The
Historian and his Reputation, 1776–​1815 (Oxford, 2002), 77–​82.
64
 The Works of Richard Hurd, 8 vols. (London, 1811; repr. New York, 1967), iv. 231–​350. I cite
from the revised version of the essay in the Works, except where there is substantial difference
from the 1762 original.
65
 Hurd, Works, iv. 262.

46  |  Spectres of Antiquity

source of the romance’s appeal, and we dim its glow when we “philo-
sophic moderns” insist only upon reason.66
The counterweight to the Gothic in Hurd’s argument is the classical. He
self-​consciously presents the Letters on Chivalry and Romance as a bold
assault on the sensibilities of those readers who revere Homer and Virgil,
but look arrogantly upon elements of magic and chivalry in Ariosto and
Spenser. If readers had been following long-​lasting ideological battles in
French criticism, they would hardly have been surprised or outraged by
the Letters’ argument, and yet Hurd nonetheless imagines the “classical
reader” clinging bitterly to Greco-​Roman models, “shocked” by the disu-
nity of The Faerie Queene and “scandalized” by absurdities in romances.67
Historians of the Gothic have frequently followed the tenor of Hurd’s
self-​aggrandizement, but the indebtedness of Hurd’s thinking to classical
scholarship and literature is more complex than generally assumed. First,
the historicism that is modeled in Letters on Chivalry and Romance stems
directly from an approach that was developed in criticism on classical
texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and indeed is clearly
evident in Hurd’s own earlier, under-​read critical writing on Latin litera-
ture. Second, Hurd’s comparisons between the Gothic and the classical in
the Letters on Chivalry and Romance do not seek to replace one with the
other. Hurd fashions a continuity between the two—​a bold move, which
transforms the classical as much as it revalues the Gothic, and a move that
will be perceptible in many later authors in this study. Hurd may challenge
the cultural prestige of ancient epic, but the shades of Homer and Virgil are
still very much lingering presences, manifested now as forerunners, not
opposites, of Gothic’s “fine fabling.”
Given that Hurd’s Letters have become synonymous with a purported
rejection of classical aesthetics, the intellectual origins of Hurd’s treatise
in his earlier critical work have become obscured. Two of his earliest
publications were commentaries on the Ars poetica (1749) and Epistula
ad Augustum (“Epistle to Augustus”) (1751) of the first-​century BCE
Roman poet Horace, both still extremely popular and well-​known literary
works in mid-​eighteenth-​century England.68 Designed for the gentleman

66
 Hurd, Works, iv. 239.
67
 Hurd, Works, iv. 296–​7, 318. On the dialogue’s parallels with the work of the French critic Jean
Chapelain, Victor M. Hamm writes that “much of the ‘new’ and ‘radical’ in Hurd’s work must
seem strangely tame and derivative when we realize that it had already been uttered more than a
hundred years before, and by the founder of French classicism itself”: “A Seventeenth-​Century
French Source for Hurd,” PMLA 52/​3 (1937), 828.
68
 The two treatises together make up the first volume of Hurd’s Works.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 47

rather than the scholar, Hurd’s commentaries on Horace contain a small
amount of textual criticism, primarily in response to the controversial
conjectures of Richard Bentley, together with a bulk of familiar myth-
ological and historical material. Their main innovation, though, is the
novel application to Latin literature of cutting-​edge, “primitivist” modes
of reading classical texts. In 1735, Thomas Blackwell, the Chair of Greek
at Marischal College in Aberdeen, published An Enquiry into the Life and
Writings of Homer. Blackwell sought to explain the Iliad and Odyssey not
as timeless and divinely inspired literary works, but as the recited songs
of a primitive bard recording the customs and religion of his era. Among
Blackwell’s students at Aberdeen was James Macpherson, whose forged
Ossian prose poems in the 1760s caused a sensation as simulated versions
of just this sort of primitive epic.69 It was one thing to present the blind
bard at the beginning of Greek literary history as primitive; although the
Iliad and Odyssey were considered masterpieces, they had long aroused
concerns about the “barbarous” aspects of their manners and religion.
But it was another thing to apply this approach to a text like the Ars
poetica, which had long been read precisely for its polish and cultural
sophistication, and which was thought to have established aesthetic rules
of universal application. The Ars poetica, Hurd claims, was never meant
to offer a “critical system for the general use of poets.”70 The poem is
about drama, and specifically the Roman drama of Horace’s own time—​a
restrictive criterion, to say the least, since none of the dramas written in
Horace’s lifetime actually survive. Critics misuse his text if they forget
the immense gulf of time between antiquity and today. Those who use his
strictures on unity to attack Electra’s “improper or incredible” desire for
vengeance, for example, must remember that the legal systems of Greece
and Rome permitted killing the perpetrator in cases of adultery, so her be-
havior is consistent with the “popular creed of those times.”71
Hurd’s commentaries on Horace are far from attacks on their author.
Hurd is motivated to save the classical poet from his modern admirers, who
do him little justice by transforming his ancient ideas into burdensome,

69
 Blackwell himself was inspired by Thomas Parnell’s “Essay on the Life, Writings, and Learning
of Homer” (1715) and by a host of continental critics: Donald M. Foerster, Homer in English
Criticism: The Historical Approach in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1947), 26–​40;
Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, 220–​3. On Blackwell and Macpherson, see Duane Coltharp,
“History and the Primitive: Homer, Blackwell, and the Scottish Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-​
Century Life 19/​1 (1995), 57–​69.
70
 Hurd, Works, i. 15.
71
 Hurd, Works, i. 130.

48  |  Spectres of Antiquity

restrictive precepts for English and French literature. Yet it is also pos-
sible to see in Hurd’s commentaries on Horace the glimmers of an idea for
which he would later become known, the search for some pre-​rational pe-
riod in which imagination and passion have free rein. Glossing a line from
the Ars poetica giving license to comic characters to speak in impassioned
moments with “inflated speech” (tumido ore, 94), Hurd describes impas-
sioned speech as a remnant of our natural state:

The short of the matter is, in one word, this. Civil Society first of all tames us
to humanity, as Cicero expresses it;72 and, in the course of its discipline, brings
us down to one dead level. Its effect is to make us all the same pliant, mimic,
obsequious things; not unlike, in a word, (if our pride could overlook the levity
of the comparison) what we see of trained Apes. But when the violent passions
arise (as in the case of those Apes when the apples were thrown before them)
this artificial discipline is all shaken off; and we return again to the free and
ferocious state of Nature. And what is the expression of that state? It is (as we
understand by experience) a free and fiery expression, all made up of bold
metaphors and daring figures of Speech.73

An aesthetic version of Hobbes’s state of nature is also found in

Blackwell’s Enquiry, which represents Homer’s poetry as the product
of a time when “Nature was obstructed in none of her Operations, and
no Rule or Prescription gave a check to rapture and enthusiasm.”74 Still,
Hurd’s passage is an arresting reversal of values: high-​flown speech and
audacious metaphors typify not a late and an artificial stage of literary
decadence, but an earlier and a purer state of nature. It is not Horace him-
self who epitomizes this “free and fiery expression,” though he does think
that the classical poet could acknowledge the appeal of such wild flights
of fancy. He cites lines from the “Epistle to Augustus” in which Horace
says that the true dramatist is one who “tortures my breast with imma-
terial words/​who provokes me, soothes me, fills me with empty terrors/​

72
 Hurd paraphrases De re publica 2.27, describing the introduction of the liberal arts into early
Rome by its second king, Numa.
73
 Hurd, Works, i. 104.
74
 An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), 104. Hurd’s ape image is not
drawn from Hobbes, though other writers had earlier invoked Hobbes’s state of nature to describe
apes: Susan Wiseman, “Monstrous Perfectability: Ape-​Human Transformations in Hobbes,
Bulwer, Tyson,” in Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (eds.), At the Borders of the
Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke, UK,
1999), 215–​38.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 49

like a sorcerer.”75 Hurd’s commentary subverts the earlier vision of the
Ars poetica as a timeless, civilized guide to artistic balance and decorum.
His Horace is a remote figure divorced from modern sensibilities, and his
poems preserve evidence of the rough magic of the ancient imagination.
The emphasis on heightened emotion in Hurd’s works on Horace
presages his later writing on the Gothic romance. The Letters on Chivalry
and Romance express Hurd’s desire for an enchanted past of pure fancy
and emotion, and although he finds it in medieval rather than the ancient
Greek or Roman literature, his argument depends on noting similarities
and continuities between the Gothic and the classical. Hurd argues that
readers of Greek and Latin should not be condescending toward English
tales of chivalry, because such tales are so similar to Greek and Roman
epic. The presence of “monsters, dragons and serpents,” for example, typ-
ically causes readers to turn up their noses at the medieval romance. But
surely there are monsters in Homer?

Now in all these respects Greek antiquity very much resembles the Gothic.
For what are Homer’s Laestrigons [sic] and Cyclops, but bands of lawless
savages, with, each of them, a Giant of enormous size at their head? And
what are the Grecian Bacchus and Hercules, but Knights-​errant, the exact
counter-​parts of Sir Launcelot and Amadis de Gaule?76

Gothic and classical poets both told tales about seductive sirens, as well.
Are the famous enchantresses of romance, he asks, not “matched by those
of Calypso and Circe, the enchantresses of the Greek poet?” Both Homer
and medieval poets love describing battles; there is “the same particularity
of description in the account of battles, wounds, deaths in the Greek poet,
as in the Gothic romancers.”77 Arguing that the “giants” of romance were
allegoric depictions of feudal lords, Hurd asks, “could the very castle of
a Gothic giant be better described than in the words of Homer?”78 Hurd
explains these similarities through the parallel between the feudal system
and the conflict between chiefdoms in Homer’s age: “the two poems of

75
 Hurd, Works, i. 101, citing Horace, Epistles 2.1.211–​3: meum qui pectus inaniter angit,/​inritat,
mulcet, falsis terroribus implet,/​ut magus . . . ; he refers again to the same passage at page 118
and  397–​8.
76
 Hurd, Works, iv. 266.
77
 Hurd, Works, iv. 262–​3.
78
 Hurd, Works, iv. 267. Hurd cites Pope’s Odyssey 17.318–​9 [= Homer, Odyssey 17.266–​8], in
fact describing Odysseus’ home in Ithaca: “High walls and battlements the courts inclose/​and the
strong gates defy a host of foes.”

50  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Homer express in the liveliest manner, and were intended to expose, the
capital mischiefs and inconveniences arising from the political state of old
Greece.”79
In one aesthetic category, Hurd does clearly bring the Gothic and clas-
sical into competition and gives Gothic the crown. The horror of the super-
natural is only truly conveyed, he says, in postclassical texts. He presents
Greek and Latin works as “childish” in comparison to the mature terrors
of a later age:

for the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of
the Gothic were above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the
pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic Enchanters shook and alarmed
all nature. We feel this difference very sensibly in reading the antient and
modern poets. You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the
Witches in Macbeth. And what are Virgil’s myrtles dropping blood, to
Tasso’s enchanted forest?80

Hurd then stages a synkrisis of ghastly scenes. He claims that the descrip-
tion of witchcraft in Virgil, Eclogue 8.97–​8 and the evil eye (fascinatio)
in Horace’s Epistle 1.14.37–​8 are far less chilling than the description of
Prospero’s powers in The Tempest (act 5, scene 1, 46–​54) and Satan’s emer-
gence in Paradise Regained (4.421–​4, 426–​30). We know from a surviving
letter that one of Hurd’s readers objected to this argument, maintaining that
classical literature could be just as terrifying as later literature in its images
of sorcery and witchcraft. The witch Erichtho in Lucan’s Pharsalia, this
interlocutor observed, was surely “equal or superior in dignity & horror
to anything which the Moderns can produce in Necromancy.”81 The re-
vised version of the Letters in the collected Works shows Hurd’s response,
with his quotations replaced with more systematic explanation. Even the
classical writers most adept at displaying “magic and necromantic hor-
rors” (he now names Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan) fail to generate the horror
of later writers, he says, because time has grafted so many other sources
of terror onto pagan mythology. Later authors could add the demons of
Middle Platonism (thus Apuleius outdoes Lucan), the superstitions native
to cold and gloomy Northern Europe, and the terrors of Christian belief,

79
 Hurd, Works, iv. 277.
80
 Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance,  48–​9.
81
 The Early Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd, 1739–​1762, ed. Sarah Brewer (Woodbridge, UK,
1995), 403–​6, letter dated 10 December 1762. The reader in question was the lawyer and scholar
(later Attorney-​General) Charles  Yorke.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 51

which “transferred on the magic system all its additional and supernu-
merary horrors.”82
In generating horror, then, the classical does bow to the Gothic, ac-
cording to Hurd. But note how Hurd’s lens transforms what it sees. No
longer offering luminescent lessons to the present, Greco-​Roman antiquity
becomes a dark preserve of fancy, equally full of monsters and magic, and
yet dimmer and less vividly affecting than the romances of Ariosto and
Spenser that succeeded it. Hurd’s treatise does not oppose the reason of
classical texts to the imagination of the Gothic; it views classical authors
as earlier and more primitive examples of Gothic ideas. Like Burke, Hurd
also assesses Greek and Roman texts by their appeal to private sentiment,
judging them according to the “sensible feeling” of terror they engender
in the intimate experience of individual readers. One of Joseph Warton’s
reflections on Milton expresses the spirit of Hurd’s approach: “Such is the
power of true poetry, that one is almost inclined to believe the superstitions
here alluded to, to be real; and the succeeding circumstances make one
start and look around.”83 The reader who starts at a poem is presumably
sitting alone, absorbed in the world of the text, poring over its pages,
perhaps—​we might imagine—​as the candle has burnt low. As a test of a
poem’s effectiveness, it is distinctly solitary.
At an early point in the Letters, Hurd invites his reader to imagine chiv-
alry as a mighty river. It may have sprung up “amidst rude rocks,” he says,
but the “noise and rapidity of its course, the extent of country it adorns,
and the towns and palaces it ennobles, may lead a traveler out of his way
and invite him to take a view of those dark caverns.”84 He finishes this met-
aphor with some lines from Aeneid 6 describing the course of the Po out
from the Underworld: “from where the abundant River Po rolls through
the woods to the upper world” (unde superne/​plurimus Eridani per sylvam
volvitur amnis).85 His next sentence, “I enter, without more words, on the
subject  .  .  .  ,” seems also to recall the portentous beginning in Virgil’s
Underworld narrative: itur in antiquam silvam . . . (Aeneid 6.179, “here
lies entry to the ancient woods”). The channels meet. The postclassical lit-
erary tradition pours out from the dark forest of Virgil’s literary hell. The
critical treatises of Burke and Hurd submit Greek and Roman literature to
contemporary aesthetic ideals of obscurity, gloom, and the supernatural,

82
 Hurd, Works, iv. 285.
83
 Warton, Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, i. 39.
84
 Hurd, Works, iv. 241.
85
 Aeneid 6.658–​9; this understanding of superne follows Servius’ commentary on these lines
(superne, id est ad superos).

52  |  Spectres of Antiquity

and in the process they transform revered writers into something both
strange and intimate. The ethical and aesthetic ideals elaborated by such
texts no longer seem universally valid: Horace and Virgil are pushed back
into a barbarous and increasingly alien past. The critical works also turn
those public poets into authors who conjure ghosts for the private reader,
and those more distant spectres can still generate chills.
The three writers of this chapter all translated the public script of
classical literature into private experience. The expansion of eighteenth-​
century print culture generated a desire for an English canon accessible
to those without education in classical languages, and so poets and critics
of the mid-​century worked to create a native “Gothic” antiquity, a newly
minted past. The assertion of rational modernity expressed itself in the
enchantment of an idealized English premodernity, whose traces were pre-
served in those native geniuses Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. What,
then, of Greece and Rome? For Young, the residual authority of the clas-
sical world is experienced by the modern individual as a malign ghost
haunting the present from the past; for Burke, as a newly intimate mode of
experience for elite men; and for Hurd, as the distant forebear of the world
that has supplanted it, the world of “fine fabling” and Gothic romance.

A Bridge of Bones

Cambridge, October 15, 1735: a letter is sent from one undergraduate stu-
dent to another, signed “Horatius Italicus.” It is a spoof of Joseph Addison’s
Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), a popular guidebook notable for
its constant quotations from Latin literature. Addison’s work taught those
on the Grand Tour to see through ancient eyes—​to bring their classical
education to life—​and thereby to ennoble whatever was disappointing or
dull in modern Italy. The author of this letter offers an Addisonian guide to
the much more banal journey from London to Cambridge, creating faux-​
Latin and Italian names for towns, and playfully misinterpreting lines
from Virgil and Horace to refer to landmarks on his journey. “About 11
o’clock,” he writes, “we arrived at a place the Italians call Tempialbulo”
[Whitechapel]. Virgil seems to have prophesied of this town, when he
says, Amisit verum vetus Albula nomen.”86 Elsewhere, the author of this
witty letter alters the Latin lines to exchange Roman places for English

86
 Aeneid 8.332: “Albula lost its true name.” Albula, a legendary archaic name for the River Tiber,
is derived from albus, white.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism  | 53

ones, while keeping the meter intact. Virgil, as you may remember, sang
of Aeneas’ voyage past East London:  vivo praetervehor ostia saxo/​
Straffordi, Megarosque sinus, Tapsumque iacentem.87 Epping Forest was
celebrated by Virgil, apparently, in Aeneid 9: Sylva Epini late dumis, atque
ilice nigra horrida.88 There is something more than Scriblerian satire in
the letter, because as well as mocking Addison’s constant recursion to the
classics, it also conjures up, for the first time in its author’s work, a par-
ticular imaginative vision of the everyday English landscape. The familiar
locations are transformed into an exotic world of ruins, prophecies, and
myth. The house of the Earl of Suffolk becomes “a great castle belonging
to the Counts of Suffolcia . . . a vast pile of a building”; the prize at the
races at Newmarket Heath is really an “ancient gold cup,” bestowed by a
“certain German prince”; and by wordplay, Bourn Bridge becomes Pont
Ossoria (“Bone Bridge”), the burial site of the appropriately named Saint
Bona (from Latin bonus, “good”). The ordinary is costumed as something
faraway and fanciful; or, rather, the letter discovers something enticingly
mysterious and gloomy hiding behind the facade of ordinariness. The letter
is one missive in a classical correspondence by two young authors who
also named each other Celadon and Orozmades, and eagerly exchanged
quips in Latin and Greek. Both grew up to be important figures in English
literary history. The addressee was the poet Thomas Gray. The letter’s au-
thor was Horace Walpole.89 The spoof is a piece of juvenile wit quite un-
like the author’s later writings, which include The Castle of Otranto, the
first of the canonical English Gothic novels. As we will see, though, that
work also constructs its mythic, enchanted setting partly out of the broken
bones of classical antiquity.

87
 From Aeneid 3.688–​9: “I am borne past river-​mouths of natural rock,/​of Stratford [originally ‘of
Pantagias’], the bays of Megara, and low-​lying Thapsus.”
88
 Aeneid 9.381–​2: “Epping Forest [originally silva fuit, ‘there was a forest’], bristling with
brambles and black holm-​oak all around.”
89
 The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, W.S. Lewis (ed.), 48 vols. (New Haven,
1937–​83) (henceforth, Correspondence), xiii. 85–​90.

54  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 CHAPTER 2 Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism,
and the Aesthetics of Collection

This chapter considers the place of classical literature and art in

Horace Walpole’s formative Gothic aesthetic, and not merely as the op-
posite against which it was defined. Amid the extraordinary assortment of
curiosities in Walpole’s suburban villa, Strawberry Hill, were a number
of disembodied heads and limbs. In the 1784 inventory of the Strawberry
Hill collection, Walpole records “a small votive foot,” which the cler-
gyman and antiquary Conyers Middleton once owned, and “a votive foot
and toe,” which Walpole seems to have acquired himself. These objects
were sculpted throughout the Greek and Roman world as offerings to
the gods, in anticipation of, or gratitude for, answered prayers for health.
The body parts are uncannily realistic, and modern visitors to the sanc-
tuary of Asclepius in Epidaurus, Greece, can still have the strange experi-
ence of seeing shelves full of dismembered arms, feet, legs, breasts, and
brains.1 More imposing were Walpole’s heads. As well as marble busts of
the emperors Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius, each twenty-​one-​and-​a-​half
inches in height, Walpole had in his gallery a colossal head of the first-​
century Roman emperor Vespasian in “the finest black marble,” which,
with its pedestal, was a staggering six feet high. Its facial expression was
“powerfully expressive of the character of this monarch,” and its giant
gaze must have fallen on all his visitors. Walpole placed it with his mas-
sive eagle from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, a sculpture that, set on
an ancient altar decorated with a Medusa’s head and satyrs, also stood

1
 A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole (2nd edn., Strawberry Hill, 1784; repr.
Farnborough, UK, 1964), 64. On such objects in their ancient context, see Jessica Hughes, Votive
Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (Cambridge, 2017).
six feet in height.2 In 1842, when Walpole’s estate went to auction, one
writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine described the uncanny verisimilitude
and unnerving appearance of these giant antiquities in Strawberry Hill.
“There, semblant of life itself, as he came victorious from the conquered
East, Vespasian rose before us; and beside him, with eyes of cruel power
and kindred flame, stood, as if prepared for flight, that majestic bird.”3
Readers and scholars have long traced elements in The Castle of Otranto
(1764) to the architecture and interior design of Strawberry Hill, the sub-
urban house in Twickenham that Walpole bought in 1749 and remodeled
into the Gothic castle of his own imagination. But the classical curiosities
in Walpole’s collection, and his attitude toward Greek and Roman
literature—​condescension interspersed with moments of idiosyncratic ad-
miration, with a willingness to assault what was revered and a tendency to
falsify when he wished—​have remained mostly invisible in studies of the
eighteenth-​century Gothic. Yet, as a starting point for this chapter, the vo-
tive feet and colossal head of a Roman emperor in Walpole’s house seem
to have left a strong impression on the world of Otranto. In that novel too
there is a statue of “one of the former princes,” Alfonso. It is also carved
out of black marble.4 Manfred, the usurper to the castle, and his household
are terrorized by Alfonso as a giant in the gallery, just as the giant head of
Vespasian rose up threateningly before visitors in the gallery of Strawberry
Hill. This giant, like Walpole’s votive feet (Figure 2.1), appears mostly as
detached body parts: first, it is his feet and legs (“I saw his foot and part of
his leg”; “the vision of the gigantic leg and foot”. . .), and then his hands
(“Oh! the hand! the giant! the hand!”).5 The influence of the past is both
parodically over-​inflated, and divided and dismembered. Walpole’s clas-
sical curiosities are no direct model for Otranto. Rather, their presence is
felt indirectly, as the outlines of a formerly exemplary, now increasingly
alien world.6

2
 Walpole, Description, 50. Its height and the description of its face come from the estate’s auction
catalogue: Anonymous, A Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill, 234. Walpole
bought the bust himself at an auction in Rome in 1740, from the collection of Cardinal Pietro
Ottoboni (Walpole, Correspondence, xiii. 232–​3). “Finest black marble” are Walpole’s words
(Correspondence, xv. 12). Its position with the eagle: Correspondence, xix. 420. Walpole certainly
believed that his bust was genuinely ancient, but the black stone probably indicates a Renaissance
origin: Irène Aghion, “Horace Walpole, Antiquarian of his Time,” in Michael Snodin and Cynthia
Ellen Roman (eds.), Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (New Haven, 2009), 174.
3
 Anonymous, “Strawberry Hill,” The Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1842), 572.
4
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 20.
5
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 35, 37, 102.
6
 The current location of Walpole’s giant Vespasian is unknown, although we know that it was
bought in the 1842 auction by another notorious writer and aesthete of the period, William

56  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Figure 2.1  Roman votive foot. Since it is made of marble, it may originally have
formed part of a larger statue. Hadrian’s Villa, second century CE. © The Trustees of
the British Museum.

Both within Strawberry Hill, and in The Castle of Otranto and his
Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother (1768), Walpole replaces an earlier
eighteenth-​century mode of classical imitation and emulation with one of
collection. Classical objects, phrases, and ideas are detached from their
original context, fragmented, and playfully set in startling and disorienting
juxtapositions. Walpole’s disassembly of familiar elements of classical
culture draws attention to the author’s own ability to manipulate signs of
aristocratic status and also communicates a sense of estrangement from
the classical world, an alienation that would become a central element
of incipient Gothic ideology.7 Moreover, as an antiques collector, and as

Beckford: Stephen Clarke, ‘ “All Ardour, All Intrepidity”: William Beckford at the Strawberry Hill
Sale,” 1650–​1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 18 (2011), 57–​108.
7
 For collection as a master trope in Walpole’s period, see Sean Silver, The Mind is a
Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Thought (Philadelphia, 2015). He argues that a
culture of acquiring and displaying objects evolved in tandem with an understanding of the mind

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 57

a collector of textual antiques, Walpole draws attention to aspects of an-
tiquity that were already excessive, morbid, grotesque. He articulates an
unclassical aesthetic by reference to classical texts, an authorial practice as
ironic and intricate as it is disorienting and deliberately disordered. While
scholars have analyzed the production of a falsified antiquity in Gothic
texts, I am interested here in the particularity of Walpole’s rearrangement
of the classical past, the specific allusions through which he constructs a
paradoxical “Gothic classicism,” which is defined not by the rejection of
the classical but by its irreverent rearrangement. Moreover, his idiosyn-
cratic use of ancient texts draws readers’ attention to the irrationality, hy-
bridity, and excess that already characterized certain aspects of Greek and
Roman literature. If each period inevitably produces its own vision of the
ancient world, Walpole licenses his horror stories by fashioning an antiq-
uity that seems perversely proto-​Gothic.8
Horace Walpole claimed little place for himself in the new literary na-
tionalism described in the first chapter of this book. The son of Britain’s
first Prime Minister, and requiring no financial support from either pub-
lishing or patronage, he had an aristocratic disdain toward many of the lit-
erary and intellectual trends swelling around him in his period.9 He loved
what was frivolous. Although few of his published works are free from his
antiquarian interests, and his correspondence betrays moments of real pas-
sion for historical texts and discoveries, he was not so gauche as to admit
research. He was no scholar; he was a gentleman with time and money,
albeit never quite enough of either. It is also difficult to take Walpole se-
riously as a contributor to contemporary debates about the classical and
Gothic traditions because it is difficult to take Walpole seriously about
anything. His insouciance was a constant reminder that he had no need
to hold earnest views. Walpole’s use of “Gothic” in the subtitle of the
second edition of The Castle of Otranto, though it would later be viewed

as a collection, an assemblage of experiences of the external world. For a broader perspective

on European cultures of collection, see the work of Paula Findlen, especially Possessing
Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994).
8
 Previous accounts of the Gothic and classical in Walpole have tended to focus on architectural
rather than literary Gothicism. Matthew M. Reeve, for example, proposes that the Gothic
architectural aesthetic of Strawberry Hill “offered a remarkably perceptive critique of classicism,
to which it became not so much an opposite but rather an evil twin in theory and practice”: “‘A
Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome’: Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, and the Narratives of
Gothic,” in Matthew M. Reeve (ed.), Tributes to Pierre du Prey: Architecture and the Classical
Tradition, from Pliny to Posterity (New York, 2014), 186.
9
 James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–​1832
(Cambridge, 1999), 20–​1.

58  |  Spectres of Antiquity

as formative, has little of the renovated sense it has in Richard Hurd’s
writings and in other eighteenth-​century criticism. Walpole’s novel is set
in Italy. Far from contributing to a patriotic revaluation of English literary
culture, the author imagines Otranto as a foreign object, even going so far
as to present it in the first edition as the translation of a hitherto-​lost Italian
manuscript. Indeed, Walpole was equally happy to use the word “Gothic”
to mean simply “barbarous.” In the early 1750s, he wrote an attack on the
recent profusion of print for the weekly satiric periodical The World, in
which he praised the virtues of the great fire of Alexandria.10 “If I might
escape being thought an absolute Goth,” he begins, “I should humbly be of
the opinion, that the destruction of that library was rather a blessing than a
detriment to the Commonwealth of Letters.”11
A yet further work, the Hieroglyphic Tales, was begun in 1766 between
The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother and published in a ludi-
crously exclusive edition of just six copies at Strawberry Hill in 1785. In
the prologue, he declares his Hieroglyphic Tales as “the most ancient work
in the world,” and postulates that it may have influenced the Iliad, rather
than the other way around.12 But then he promises something else:

I have a more precious work in contemplation; namely, a new Roman his-

tory, in which I mean to ridicule, detect and expose, all ancient virtue, and
patriotism, and shew from original papers which I am going to write, and
which I shall afterwards bury in the ruins of Carthage and then dig up, that it
appears by the letters of Hanno the Punic embassador at Rome, that Scipio
was in the pay of Hannibal, and that the dilatoriness of Fabius proceeded
from his being a pensioner of the same general.13

By a variation on the trope of the rediscovered manuscript, Walpole

proposes to uncover the truth of the Second Punic War, and “ridicule, de-
tect, and expose” all “ancient virtue” and “patriotism.” His openly fictional
document will expose the baselessness of Rome’s pride in its victory over
Carthage, a fundament of Roman identity and one with continued symbolic
power in Walpole’s Britain, as attempts by France and England to cast
each other as Carthage during the Seven Years War demonstrated.14 Since

10
 The piece was never published, but it later appeared a volume printed at Walpole’s own
press: Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose (Strawberry Hill, 1758), 169–​78.
11
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 169–​70.
12
 Hieroglyphic Tales (Strawberry Hill, 1785; repr. Los Angeles, 1982), vii–​viii.
13
 Walpole, Hieroglyphic Tales, ix.
14
 See Nicholas Rowe, “Romans and Carthaginians in the Eighteenth Century: Imperial Ideology
and National Identity in France and Britain during the Seven Years War,” Ph.D. thesis (Boston

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 59

the 1730s, as Philip Ayres notes, Walpole had been strongly dismissive
of “self-​congratulatory Roman analogising.”15 He remained suspicious of
claims to history and genealogy to ennoble the present, less perhaps be-
cause they were inaccurate than because they seemed an easy form of no-
bility to one who was already noble. When Walpole’s contemporaries have
“learnt to detest the favourite heroes of antiquity,” he declares grandly
in the Hieroglyphic Tales prologue, “they will become good subjects
of the most pious king that ever lived since David.”16 Walpole’s Gothic
constructions represent their own strange world, and we misunderstand
their design if we seek too explicit a public function for them. But allied
with the charged word “Gothic,” their irreverent fragmentation of ancient
art and texts can be coordinated with a broader revisionism in the mid-​
eighteenth century with regard to the aesthetic, political, and ethical status
of classical antiquity. Walpole’s collections suggest a strong attraction to
elements of hybridity and excess in classical culture, and that approach
necessarily scrambles the exemplary potential of the ancient world. His
Gothic texts reject the notion of the ancient past as a model, and rediscover
it as something exuberantly imaginative, violent, and strange.

Quotation and Collection: The Castle of Otranto and The

Mysterious Mother

Walpole’s manipulation of classical culture begins with the title page of

his first and only novel. When the first edition was published in 1764, its
full title was The Castle of Otranto, a Story. It was, from the start, a fake.
The novel was presented as a translation by “William Marshal, Gent.” of
a manuscript by “Onuphrio Muralto”: “high wall” in Italian (muro alto), a
pseudonym that fits both castle and author (Wall-​pole).17 In the second edi-
tion, the pretense of the found manuscript was dropped, and the novel was
renamed The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story, with an incongruous mix

College, 1997), 64–​97. Although Walpole presumably does not realize it, his subversion of
classical history echoes similar maneuvers in classical literature, such as Dio Chrysostom’s ludic
attempt to prove that Troy won the Trojan War (Oration 11) and Lucian’s avowedly false True
Histories.
15
 Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome, 14.
16
 Walpole, Hieroglyphic Tales, x. On Walpole’s broader skepticism toward the truth value of
historiography, see Townshend, Gothic Antiquity,  24–​30.
17
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 5–​8. Angela Wright instead sees the pseudonym Muralto as an
allusion to the Swiss-​born travel writer Béat Louis de Muralt: Britain, France, and the Gothic,
1764–​1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge, 2013), 24–​7.

60  |  Spectres of Antiquity

of Gothic and classical on the title page. Underneath the subtitle appeared
a quotation from the opening to Horace’s Ars poetica:

. . . vanae
fingentur species, tamen ut pes et caput uni
reddantur formae . . .—​HOR.
[. . .vain images will be invented, yet in such a way that
foot and head are restored to a single shape. . .]

The quotation ostensibly uses the imagery of attaching limbs to say that
a unified artwork can be made out of disparate parts. But a closer exam-
ination reveals that the Latin quotation has suffered some dismembering
of its own.18 In eighteenth-​century texts of Horace (and still in modern
editions today), at lines 7–​9 of the Ars poetica Walpole would have read
vanae/​fingentur species; ut nec pes, nec caput uni/​reddatur formae (“vain
images will be invented, in such a way that neither foot nor head can be
restored to a single shape”).19 Walpole adds and subtracts:  he detaches
ut nec . . . nec and attaches tamen ut . . . et, attaching his own metrical
“feet”20 to the body of Horace’s verse to create a new—​yet still metrically
correct—​shape. In doing so, Walpole reverses Horace’s meaning. These
lines come at the opening of the Ars poetica, where the Latin poet had
argued that there can be no unity in an artwork of mismatched parts. Such
an artist will produce only “vain images,” velut aegri somnia, “like a sick
man’s dreams” (7). Walpole will go on in the preface to the second edi-
tion of Otranto to explain his story—​which supposedly had its origins in
a “feverish” dream21—​as the product of just such artistic mismatching. He
has combined the “ancient and the modern” romance, he says, and it is
worth noting that Horace’s passage was glossed in precisely these terms.22
In the first-​century CE rhetorical treatise of Quintilian, still widely read
in the eighteenth century, it is said to constitute a stylistic fault “if anyone

18
 Walpole’s manipulation of the quotation is also discussed by Blood, Some Versions of Menippea,
158–​62; and Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens, “Introduction: Fantasies of Antiquity,”
in Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (eds.), Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy
(Oxford, 2017), 1–​7.
19
 I quote the text and punctuation from Richard Bentley’s edition: Q. Horatius Flaccus, ex
recensione & cum notis atque emendationibus Richardi Bentleii (Cambridge, 1711), 293.
20
 In classical Latin poetry, bodily “feet” frequently pun on the idea of metrical “feet”: “Few word-​
plays are more familiar in Latin poetry than the one between the bodily and metrical senses of the
word pes”: Stephen Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-​Conscious Muse
(Cambridge, 1987), 16.
21
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxx: 177. “Feverish”: Correspondence, i: 88.
22
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 9.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 61

combines the sublime with the lowly, the ancient with the modern, the
poetic with the colloquial—​for such is the monster Horace describes in
the first part of his book the Ars Poetica.”23 Walpole takes apart and then
reassembles the classic statement of artistic unity so that it appears to au-
thorize his own stylistic heterogeneity.
With this quotation, Walpole also directs attention to a section of the Ars
poetica that was already troublingly grotesque—​a potentially proto-​Gothic
moment in the classical text. The Ars poetica begins its call to artistic unity
and propriety by lingering in perverse detail over the body of a Scylla-​like
monster: “If a painter wished to connect a horse’s neck to a human head,
and to cover limbs collected from every place with multi-​colored feathers,
so that a woman, beautiful on top, ends up disgustingly as a black fish—​
if you could see it, my friends, would you stifle your laughter?”24 With
each line of this unnaturally elongated, grammatically twisted period,
his monster transforms its shape. The viewer’s expected response twists
and changes, too: from horror, to revulsion, to laughter. Modern scholars
have long been fascinated by the inconsistency in Horace lingering for
so long on monstrosity and hybridity when arguing for uniformity. So,
Alison Sharrock writes that the opening of the Ars poetica “indulges in the
very playfulness and oddity that it supposedly censures—​and even tells
you how to appreciate it.”25 By invoking the opening of the Ars poetica at
the opening of his own horror story, Walpole points to a lurid fascination
with monstrosity that was present already in the very bible of classicizing
formalism. Moreover, the reaction to the monster that Horace seems to
model—​revulsion, then laughter—​resembles that which Walpole expects
for his own work. The Castle of Otranto, the terrors of which famously
kept Thomas Gray up at night, should also, as Walpole says in a sonnet at-
tached to the second edition, raise a smile.26 In rewriting Horace’s lines and
twisting the poet’s aesthetic to match his own, Walpole makes the ancient

23
 8.3.60: si quis sublimia humilibus, vetera novis, poetica vulgaribus misceat. Id enim tale
est monstrum, quale Horatius in prima parte libri de arte poetica fingit. I quote from Edmund
Gibson’s edition: M. Fabii Quinctiliani De institutione oratoria libri duodecim (Oxford, 1693),
396. On Quintilian’s continuing influence, cf. Pope, Essay on Criticism, lines 669–​70: “In grave
Quintilian’s copious Work we find,/​The justest Rules, and clearest Method joined” (Pastoral
Poetry, and An Essay on Criticism, 315).
24
 Ars poetica 1–​5: humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam/​iungere si velit, et varias inducere
plumas/​undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum/​desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne;/​
spectatum admissi risum teneatis amici?
25
 Alison Sharrock, “Intratextuality: Texts, Parts, and (W)holes in Theory,” in Alison Sharrock and
Helen Morales (eds.), Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (Oxford, 2000), 18; also,
James J. O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and
Lucan (Cambridge, 2007), 22.
26
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 15. Gray: Walpole, Correspondence, xiv. 137.

62  |  Spectres of Antiquity

poet his double. Indeed, although he was christened Horatio, Walpole al-
ways presented himself as “Horace” in print. According to a posthumously
published anecdote, this choice was because the form “Horace” seemed
more English, though he acknowledged that people were also likely to re-
call the classical poet when they read his name.27
As the plot of Otranto unfolds, there are elements familiar from an-
cient myth and Greek tragedy (prophecies, incest, sudden plot reversals),
but Otranto is not modeled directly on any particular classical myth.
Yet one myth—​ and one that already involved dismemberment and
fragmentation—​seems omnipresent in Otranto, at least in its outlines. In
the myth of Hippolytus, Phaedra falls in love with her stepson, who rejects
her incestuous advances. The myth ends with Hippolytus being dashed
to pieces by a horrific prodigy: a bull emerges from the sea on account
of the prayer of his father, Theseus, who thinks that his son has raped his
stepmother, and who learns the truth only too late. Frightened by the bull,
Hippolytus is thrown from his chariot but entangled in the reins, and his
horses tear him apart. The most extensive surviving Roman version of
the myth, Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra, expatiates on the dismemberment
motif, climaxing infamously with Theseus picking through the limbs of
his son on stage and then trying to fit them back together again over the
course of some twenty lines of monologue.28 Walpole certainly knew the
story: he mentions Hippolytus in his letters, and reiterated throughout his
life his affection for the French retelling by Jean Racine.29 The story is
also briefly recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid (7.761–​82), a central plank of lit-
erary learning in the eighteenth century. Yet the myth itself is fragmented
and dismembered in Walpole’s retelling. The name Hippolytus recurs in
The Castle of Otranto, but it now belongs to the mother, Hippolita, who,
nonetheless, still embodies Hippolytus’ sexless virtue; Phaedra’s inces-
tuous passion is transferred to the father, who now lusts for his daughter-​
in-​law, not his son-​in-​law; the son is dashed to pieces by a sudden and

27
 John Pinkerton, Walpoliana, 2 vols. (London, 1799), i. 62: “I have ever since I was a youth,
written and subscribed Horace, an English name for an English gentleman. In all my books (and
perhaps you will think of the numerosus Horatius) I so spell my name.” Numerosus Horatius
(“rhythmical Horace”) is Ovid’s phrase (Tristia 4.10.49).
28
 Phaedra, 1256–​74; Glenn W. Most, “Disiecti Membra Poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment
in Neronian Poetry,” in Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity (London,
1992), 393–​5. See also Helen Slaney’s suggestive account of possible Senecan influence on
eighteenth-​century Gothic authors, including Walpole: “Gothic Seneca,” in Eric Dodson-​Robinson
(ed.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy: Scholarly, Theatrical, and Literary
Receptions (Leiden, 2016), 233–​54.
29
 Hippolytus: Walpole, Correspondence, xxviii. 154; Racine’s Phèdre: Correspondence, v. 389; vi.
44; xxix. 111 (“the finest tragedy in my opinion of the French theatre”); xli. 296.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 63

horrific prodigy, though here at the beginning of the story, not the end; and
the story ends with a father mourning the death of a child he has inadvert-
ently killed—​now his daughter, not his son. The Gothic world of Otranto
has not razed and replaced the classical world. It has just scrambled its
symmetries into ill-​fitting parts, and then reassembled them with a con-
scious sense of disorder.
A more extended classical fragment is found in The Mysterious Mother,
the drama written by Walpole between 1766 and 1768 and privately printed
at Strawberry Hill, but not widely available until 1791.30 The tragedy has
a deliberately outrageous double incest plot: the protagonist Edmund will
find out in the final act that he has both slept with his mother, the Countess,
and married the woman, Adeliza, who is both his daughter and his sister.
The play’s allusions to classical tragedy (the incest theme of Oedipus
Rex, the allusions to the Furies, the Delphic oracle, the poisoned cloak
of Glauce) have tended to draw critical attention away from the work’s
ambivalent relationship with classical imitation, and, indeed, its negative
vision of imitation in general, given the disastrous role of dissembling
and disguise in the play’s incest plot. It seems obvious to call the plot
“Oedipal,” and yet to eighteenth-​century readers the most shocking el-
ement of The Mysterious Mother was how unlike Oedipus Rex it was,
since, unlike Jocasta in Sophocles’ original play, the Countess consciously
and deliberately seduces her son. “Mysterious” and even oracular to eve-
ryone else, the mother’s horrible sin is only too well known to herself.
There survives a series of letters, in fact, in which the poet and playwright
William Mason tried to persuade Walpole to make the mother and son’s
sex unwitting, in accordance with the Sophoclean model.31 Mason tries, in
effect, to turn his friend toward a more conventional and direct mode of
classical imitation. Walpole pointedly eschewed that approach.
It is typical of his scrambling of sources that the one ostentatiously
and deliberately faithful passage of classical imitation in the play is not
from tragedy but from the Roman epic of Lucan, the Pharsalia (or Bellum
civile, 65 CE). Walpole explicitly signaled the imitation with a note, but

30
 I cite the play from the edition of Paul Baines and Edward Burns, Five Romantic Plays,
1768–​1821 (Oxford, 2000). The Mysterious Mother was never produced in Walpole’s lifetime. It
appeared first on stage, in abridged and musicalized form, in 1821: David Worrall, “Undiscovered
1821 Surrey Theatre Performances of Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768),” Gothic
Studies 16/​2 (2014), 1–​19.
31
 On this series of letters, see E. J. Clery, “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the
Impossibility of Female Desire,” in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic (Cambridge, 2001), 24–​8.

64  |  Spectres of Antiquity

its significance has gone unexamined in modern criticism.32 Lucan’s grim,
bloody epic depicts the war between Caesar and Pompey that destroyed
the Roman Republic. It was a classical text imitated selectively and with
caution in the eighteenth century. In Hugh Blair’s oft-​reprinted Lectures
on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, for example, Lucan is criticized for
delighting in “savage scenes,” and having “too many shocking objects to
be fit for epic poetry.”33 Modern criticism has tended to find in his work a
“cosmic skepticism and a darkly ambiguous universe,” to transfer a phrase
from Frederick S. Frank’s description of The Castle of Otranto.34 Yet he
was certainly the Latin poet whom Walpole liked best. In his letters, he
criticizes Virgil for being an “insipid imitation” of Homer, and praises
Lucan instead.35 In 1760, in the Strawberry Hill press, he printed a full
Latin edition of the epic with previously unpublished notes by the textual
critic Richard Bentley. True to Walpole’s studious avoidance of appearing
studious, he repeatedly mocked the idea that printing an edition of the
epic had transformed him into a publisher of “learned” authors.36 In the
Lewis Walpole Library in Connecticut (LWL 49 2616 II), there is also an
unpublished manuscript from October 1746 with a translation by Walpole
of a passage from the first book of Lucan. The epic begins with a long
panegyric to Nero, in which scholars have long suspected ironic strains.
Walpole himself seems to have intuited this irony, since in his version he
substitutes Nero’s name for that of his father’s enemy, William Pitt the
Elder.37
In the passage of Lucan translated by Walpole in The Mysterious Mother,
the cold but virtuous Stoic Cato marches in the African desert with his
men (Pharsalia 9.565–​84). They come across a temple, and one of Cato’s
followers urges him to consult its oracle about their chances of success in the

32
 “Imitated from Cato’s speech in Lucan, beginning, Quid quaeri, Labiene, iubes?” (Baines and
Burns, Five Romantic Plays, 318).
33
 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3 vols. (3rd edn., London, 1787), ii. 295.
34
 Frederick S. Frank, “Proto-​Gothicism: The Infernal Iconography of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,”
Orbis Litterarum 41/​3 (1986), 203. Cf. Charles Martindale’s description of Lucan in his Latin
Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics (Oxford, 2005), 222: “a preoccupation
with dismemberment, fragmentation, and body parts and with the aestheticization of violence
marks the whole poem.”
35
 Walpole, Correspondence, xvi. 22–​3; xxix. 255–​6.
36
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxix. 11; xxxviii. 111. On Walpole and Lucan, see also Paul Yvon,
Horace Walpole as a Poet (Paris, 1924: 25–​6, 30–​3).
37
 On the opening of the Pharsalia and its potential ironies, Paul Roche, Lucan: De bello civili
Book 1 (Oxford, 2009), 8–​10.While an interest in classical authors is typically associated
with Walpole’s early days, he is still quoting Lucan in his latest notebooks: Horace Walpole’s
Miscellany, 1786–​1795, ed. Lars E. Troide (New Haven: 1978), 58.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 65

war. But Cato is too good a Stoic for that. He assures his men that he relies
on his own spotless conscience for guidance. In the corresponding section
of Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (act 1, 381–​407), the conniving friar
Benedict urges the Countess to confess the guilt tormenting her mind to a
“holy man,” who works miracles in a “neighb’ring district” (lines 373–​80).
Translated into the tragedy’s Gothic theology, the foreign superstition of the
African temple becomes Roman Catholicism, and the Stoic rationality of
Cato becomes the Enlightenment values of the Countess. She imitates the
speech of Cato in Lucan, replacing his Stoic commonplaces with Christian
ones and asserting her own inner truth against the friar’s counsel. Toward
the end of the speech, in the Pharsalia (9.581–​3), Cato says,

Sortilegis egeant dubii, semperque futuris

casibus ancipites: me non oracula certum
sed mors certa facit.38
[The doubtful need soothsayers, and are always in two minds about
future disasters. Oracles do not make me certain—​but certain death
does.]

In Walpole, this becomes (The Mysterious Mother, Act 1, 400–​3):

Weak minds
Want their soul’s fortune told by oracles
And holy jugglers. Me, nor oracles,
Nor prophets, Death alone can certify.

Walpole ranges over more lines than the Latin, even though he omits an
entire clause (semperque futuris/​casibus ancipites). But in other ways his
rendering is surprisingly close: “me, nor oracles” replicates the sound and
word order of Lucan’s me non oracula, and the Latinate verb “certify”
exactly renders the Latin certum facit (to embolden), while also punning
on the verb’s English sense (to authenticate). The deliberateness of the
imitation is ironic, since at the very point at which Walpole’s character
declares the ability to speak for herself, she is forced to mimic, with cum-
bersome exactitude, the words of someone else. In an ostentatious moment
of fidelity to classical models—​complete with footnote, lest any reader

 Text and punctuation from the Strawberry Hill edition: Lucani Pharsalia: Cum notis Hugonis
38

Grotii et Richardi Bentleii (Strawberry Hill, 1760), 473.

66  |  Spectres of Antiquity

miss the point—​Walpole deliberately sabotages his Countess’s declaration
of independence. If the crashing ancestral helmet in the opening pages
of Otranto represents a parodically literal vision of history bearing down
on the present, The Mysterious Mother’s incest plot suggests a tragically
over-​intimate relationship between the present and the past. The Countess,
doomed by the script to mouth the words of the classical paragon, struggles
against imitation itself.
The Countess’s imitation of Lucan is also ironic in a more obvious
sense, since the transfer of these words from the virtuous Cato to the inces-
tuous mother is a flagrant, outrageous bad fit. Far from exemplifying Stoic
freedom from mental distress, the Countess is tormented throughout the
tragedy, to the point of near-​madness, by her guilt at having had sex with
her son. Occasional slurs by the friars that the Countess parades “pagan
virtues” expose other characters’ misunderstanding of her true mental
state.39 The Latin text seems less to have been imitated than shockingly
misused. The grotesque discrepancy between Catonian virtue and the sin
of the mother may suggest that Walpole is satirizing those people who, in
the wake of Addison’s Cato earlier in the century, cast themselves in the
role of a virtuous Cato. We “still trade upon the stock of the ancients,”
he wrote to his close friend Sir Horace Mann in 1770; “we seldom deal
in any other manufacture.”40 At the same time, by staging this struggle
against the force of the classical, Walpole emphasizes by comparison his
own power to dismember and rearrange parts of the ancient past. Just as
Walpole audaciously rewrote the lines from Horace’s Ars poetica at the
opening of Otranto, in The Mysterious Mother he gives the speech of the
Stoic hero Cato to the incestuous Countess, stitching together ancient and
modern in a deliberately inapposite way. As in his collection of classical
objects, Walpole detaches these Latin quotations from their contexts, and
by manipulating them, deprives them of the value and virtue with which
they had been invested. Walpole’s Gothic texts communicate a tension
with the classical not by simply ignoring or rejecting Greek and Roman
literature, but by fragmenting and reassembling it as disparate components
of his postclassical form. Sabotaging any possible exemplary relationship
between his own time and Greco-​Roman antiquity, Walpole transforms the
revered poems of Horace and Lucan from models for aesthetic or ethical
emulation into objects for textual collection.

39
 “Pagan virtues”: act 1, 316, 318; and cf. the Countess’s explicit attempt to distinguish herself
from a Stoic at act 4, 173–​4.
40
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxiii. 192.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 67

Theater, Spectacle, and the “Nobler Licence” of Antiquity

In 1753, Horace Walpole published a letter in The World, announcing that

“[t]‌he world, Mr. Fitz-​Adam, though never sated with show, is sick of fic-
tion.”41 This flamboyant, understudied periodical piece is an early explo-
ration of the aesthetic ideas that would be further explored in The Castle
of Otranto. The piece begins by discussing the theater, one of Walpole’s
great loves, and pretends to mock contemporary theatergoers so desperate
to see reality on stage that they can no longer recognize imitation. Under
the guise of a commentary on the progress toward nature and realism in
the theater, Walpole stages a defense of “fancy”—​that literary watchword
of the mid-​eighteenth century—​in far more ironic and playful terms than
Richard Hurd. The desire for staged realism Walpole explores in this peri-
odical piece would later come to life in The Castle of Otranto, a novel that
presents its melodramatic plot both as a revival of ancient invention and
as a work of verisimilitude, either translated from a historical document
(according to the first preface) or observing rules of probability (according
to the second). For an audience tired of fiction but enamored of show,
Otranto’s theatricalized narrative is wrapped in the veneer of the fake real.
In this piece and elsewhere, Walpole’s comments on spectacle accord a
significant symbolic place to ancient drama, which for him represents
an artistic freedom that his own era would restrict or suppress. Indeed,
the specific contrast Walpole draws in The Mysterious Mother between
classicizing rules and the open horror of the Attic stage foreshadows a vi-
sion of wild antiquity that we usually associate with later periods—​with
German Romanticism, and, in the nineteenth century, with Nietzsche’s de-
scription of the Dionysian element of Greek culture.
Walpole begins his 1753 periodical piece by announcing a comparison
between “the ancient and modern stage,” and the one decisive advantage
of the moderns over the Greeks and Romans, “I mean, the daily progress
we make towards nature.”42 It is soon clear that Walpole’s defense of the
moderns is intended as satire. He calls the actors and theater managers
John Rich and David Garrick “worthy philosophers” for their “exhibitions
of the animal or inanimate parts of creation,” since, when their plays
call for a fountain, they introduce “a cascade of real water” on stage. He
reminds readers of Colley Cibber’s extravagant 1724 tragedy Caesar in
Egypt, in which the audience was treated “with real—​not swans, indeed,

41
 Letter of February 8, 1753 (by “Julio”), reprinted in Walpole’s Fugitive Pieces,  70–​8.
42
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 71.

68  |  Spectres of Antiquity

for that would have been too bold an attempt in the dawn of truth, but very
personable geese.”43 Walpole’s hyperbolic praise deflates showmanship as
crude literalism. Moreover, the mad craving for realism leads, he claims,
to a kind of epistemological numbness, so that neither audience nor actors
can distinguish mimesis from reality. Walpole describes the Italian cas-
trato Senesino in Handel’s Alessandro (1726), who, in the heat of operatic
battle, plunged his sword into one of the “pasteboard stones of the wall
of the town.” Likewise, in another production (perhaps Handel’s revised
Rinaldo in 1731, based on Tasso), a confused Senesino fell while stepping
into the stage-​prop boat of the enchantress Armida.44 Nor is the audience
better at distinguishing between reality and imitation. It is “well known that
the pantomime of the Genii narrowly escaped being damned on my Lady
Maxim’s observing very judiciously ‘that the brick-​kiln was horridly exe-
cuted, and did not smell at all like one.’ ”45 Walpole is borrowing his stance
from Addison, who criticized operas for their emphasis on spectacle and
their aesthetic mismatch of fakery and the real. “A little Skill in Criticism
would inform us that Shadows and Realities ought not to be mix’d to-
gether in the same Piece,” Addison wrote. “Scenes, which are designed as
Representations of Nature, should be filled with Resemblances, and not
with the Things themselves.”46 But Walpole’s real target is not the operas.
Under the cover of a defense of modern against ancient theater, Walpole
satirizes the modern desire for realism, and, in an age of “truth,” a failure
of imagination, the pleasures of which Addison had famously described.
The Castle of Otranto, for all its subsequent significance as the
first, formative Gothic novel, rehearses many of the central concerns
of this earlier periodical essay. The opposition of nature to “fancy” is
now transplanted from the theater to the novel. As Walpole wrote in

43
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 71–​3. The production was a notorious and expensive flop: Helene
Koon, Colley Cibber: A Biography (Lexington, KY, 1986), 107–​9. Others remembered the play
precisely for its transparent fakery. Koon cites one contemporary who remembered laughing “at the
Pasteboard Swans which the Carpenters pulled along the Nile” (Colley Cibber, 108).
44
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 74.
45
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 72–​3. “The Genii” is presumably Henry Woodward’s The Genii,
An Arabian Nights Entertainment, first produced on December 26, 1752. Berta Joncus cites a
puff for this production, boasting that “the most romantic eastern account of sumptuous palaces
are but faint to this display of beauty, this glow of light, this profusion of glittering gems, which
adorn the whole, and much exceeds all expectation”: “Nectar If You Taste and Go, Poison If You
Stay”: Struggling with the Orient in Eighteenth-​Century British Musical Theater,” in Philip F.
Kennedy and Marina Warner (eds.), Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian
Nights (New York, 2013), 302.
46
 The Spectator, March 6, 1711 (Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F.
Bond, 5 vols. [Oxford, 1965], i. 23).

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 69

the preface to the second edition, in the modern romance, “nature is
always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.
Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have
been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life.”47 Walpole’s
“fancy” is still intimately connected to the theater. Rather than being
drawn directly from classical or French romance, the “ancient,” anti-​
realist aspects of the Castle of Otranto—​its exotic, medieval setting, its
larger-​than-​life villain, its supernatural plot elements, its extravagantly
oversized props—​are all familiar from the tragedies, pantomimes, and
operas of the eighteenth-​century stage.48 Marcie Frank, pointing to
Walpole’s defense of the comic elements in his novel by reference to
Shakespearean practice, argues that Walpole “offers Otranto as a prose
equivalent of tragicomedy.”49 This argument helps to explain the radical
generic lability of Otranto, the speed with which the narrative seems
to slip from tragedy to comedy. “Well, this is a charming adventure!”
exclaims Bianca on learning that the ghost’s voice belongs to the young
peasant, though she was “half-​weeping in agony” one page earlier.50
Commentators have also pointed to moments in Otranto when the au-
thor seems to migrate to the stage, eschewing indirect discourse for
direct dramatic dialogue. One might also mention the descriptions of
Manfred on an escalating scale of evil, a hallmark of Senecan tragedy
(“The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy”), or the
story’s stated moral, which could be interpreted as a précis of Greek and
Roman tragic plotting (“the sins of fathers are visited on their children
to the third and fourth generation”).51
In the second half of his 1753 periodical essay, Walpole explores
the contemporary pursuit of nature outside of the theater:  in women’s
fashion, in gardening, and, most elaborately, in desserts. While mock-
ingly celebrating modern advancements in verisimilitude, Walpole in
fact laments the modern eclipse of imagination and invention. Women,
he writes, daily “moult” and “shed” their ornamentation, while modern
gardeners, eager to replicate the blemishes of nature, now plant dead

47
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 9.
48
 On opera and the Gothic, see Anne Williams (“Monstrous Pleasures: Horace Walpole, Opera,
and the Conception of Gothic,” Gothic Studies 2/​1 [2000]: 104–​18). For a broader perspective on
Otranto and theater, see Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford, 2005), 42–​65.
49
 “Horace Walpole’s Family Romances,” Modern Philology 100/​3 (2003), 425.
50
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 43.
51
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 38, 7.

70  |  Spectres of Antiquity

trees amid live ones.52 The age for which Walpole is nostalgic seems
relatively recent—​especially compared to Hurd’s nostalgia for jousting
and knights—​and yet it is frequently described by reference to classical
images and ideas. An extraordinary passage catalogues in luminous de-
tail the genera of elaborate desserts that have now sunk into disregard.
There used to be “temples of barley-​sugar” and “pygmy Neptunes in cars
of cockle-​shells,” he claims, until “at length the whole system of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses succeeded to all the transformations which Chloe and
other great professors had introduced into the science of hieroglyphic
eating.”53 Walpole recalls the glory days of confectionary, when the Duke
of Wirtenberg served a dessert that was “the representation of Mount
Aetna,” which erupted real fireworks over the heads of guests.54 Walpole’s
essay repeatedly describes modern homunculi attempting to fill over-
sized ancient shoes: the castrato Senesino floundering as the conquering
Alexander, Cibber’s Caesar selling stage tricks. He describes with some
contempt the reverential classicist—​a “bigot to Euripides”—​who is al-
ways ready to assert that the nurses of Electra or Medea show more fi-
delity to nature than the nurse of Shakespeare’s Juliet. He distances
himself from the purist who abstracts aesthetic rules from ancient art.
Instead, classical literature and myth symbolize a fantastic exuberance,
an unfettered freedom of imagination. They are part of a world of fancy
whose passing this satiric essay mourns.
The freedom of ancient literature is presented in darker and more famil-
iarly Gothic terms in the prologue to The Mysterious Mother. The prologue
begins with a strong declaration that this English tragedy will not abide
by the rules of French classicism. His drama will be “horrid, not polite”
(line 2), he says, and he will be not be fettered by the aesthetic restrictions
that French critics drew from Aristotle and the exemplar of the Greek
tragedians: “free as your country, Britons, be your scene!” (9).55 Walpole
rejects these classicizing aesthetic principles only to return with renewed
force to the classical. Projecting the ambitions that will come to be associ-
ated with the Gothic genre back on to the ancient world, he associates the
unshrinking expression of horror with Greek tragedy:

52
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces,  74–​5.
53
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 76–​7. Chloe is “Monsieur Chloé,” who enjoyed fame as cook to the
Duke of Newcastle; cf. Walpole, Correspondence, xvii. 485, with the note in the Yale edition.
54
 Walpole, Fugitive Pieces, 78.
55
 This prologue was not published until 1798, although it is generally assumed to have been
written in 1768: see Baines and Burns, Five Romantic Plays, 313.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 71

 The tragic Greeks with nobler licence wrote;
Nor veiled the eye, but plucked away the mote.
Whatever passion prompted, was their game;
Not delicate, while chastisement was their aim.
Electra now a parent’s blood demands;
Now parricide distains the Theban’s hands,
And love incestuous knots his nuptial binds.
Such is our scene; from real life it rose;
Tremendous picture of domestic woes. (23–​31)

Walpole sees a moralizing function in the awful myths of the Greek

stage, but he also emphasizes the freedom (the “nobler licence”) of
Greek dramatists to represent horrifying acts in their plays. While earlier
English critiques of French dramatic rules were grounded on the differ-
ence of modern from ancient tragedy—​it was typically argued, for ex-
ample, that only the presence of a chorus in Greek tragedy necessitated
observance of the dramatic “unities”—​Walpole claims that his drama is
an even closer approximation of the Oedipus plays and the Oresteia nar-
rative in its free expression of horror.56 Significantly, too, after praising
ancient tragedy, Walpole makes clear that his play will reflect its license
but will not be a classical imitation. “Such is our scene,” he writes: the
play will be like the ancient. “From real life it arose”: it will be grounded,
as Otranto was, on specious historical precedent. The authors of more
conventional classicizing tragedies in Walpole’s period excused the sav-
agery of their narratives by claiming that they hewed closely to the fa-
miliar originals. Instead, The Mysterious Mother reanimates the freedom,
not the plot, of ancient texts. In 1789, in one of his final notebooks, the
elderly Walpole wrote verses that lauded the audaciousness of ancient
poets over their lifeless modern imitators, praising the “lawless Bards of
Greece,/​Who ravish’d Beauties worth possessing,/​Nor staid to ask the
Critic’s blessing.”57
Walpole, to be sure, is no Hellenist—​still less a philhellene—​and his
description of Attic theater is more a symbolic projection of his own
desires than the reflection of any particular interest or expertise in the
ancient Greeks. Unlike Thomas Gray, he shows little evidence of reading

56
 In the postscript to the play, he says that although its plot was too horrid to be staged today,
classical authors suffered no such restrictions: “The subject is more truly horrid than even that of
Oedipus: and yet I make no doubt but a Grecian poet would have made no scruple of exhibiting it
on the theatre”: Baines and Burns, Five Romantic Plays, 65.
57
 Walpole, Horace Walpole’s Miscellany, 93.

72  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Greek past his school days in Cambridge. Yet in his Gothic vision of Attic
tragedy as an outburst of urgent energy (the dramatists wrote “what-
ever passion prompted”) and the revelation of horrific crime (“a parent’s
blood  .  .  .  parricide  .  .  .  love incestuous”), Walpole foreshadows later
revaluations of Greek drama. In the Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche
famously saw in Aeschylus and Sophocles an expression of the wild,
primitive Dionysian impulse within the ordered, Apollonian world of
images. The “fearful fate of the wise Oedipus” and “that curse on the
house of the Atrides which drove Orestes to matricide” are glimpses of
Dionysus’ insight into human existence, that it is better for us never to
have been born at all.58 For Nietzsche, to commune with the Greeks is
to come face to face with the forces of nature, the elemental impulses of
which all art is only an imitation. Walpole, of course, is far less rever-
ential. His Gothic works imagine that there lies in history an irrational
horror, a superhuman force, waiting to assert itself in the present. His
aesthetic defense is to vaunt his modern capacity to decontextualize and
rearrange, producing a literary world of weightless ahistoricism and
counterfeit spectacle. Yet Walpole’s “fancy,” like the Dionysian impulse
of Nietzsche, also ascribes value to that element of artistic creation that
resists control and strains against representation. Both writers see in
classical works a sort of imaginative excess, which later eras have ei-
ther sentimentalized or suppressed. Both reject the idea that antiquity
provides a source of refining rules for the present. They are drawn in-
stead to what is frightening, what is disruptive, what is beyond everyday
human knowledge and experience—​the horrid truths that ancient writers
had the freedom to reveal.

“A Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome”: Classical

Objects at Strawberry Hill

It is worth returning, finally, to Strawberry Hill, because there are clear

parallels to Walpole’s intertextual practice in the idiosyncratic collection
of classical objects in his villa. Admittedly, it is difficult to generalize
about any aspect of Walpole’s collection, and to some extent generalizing
itself misses the point, since he was driven above all by the eccentric
individuality of particular objects (or their “uniquity,” to use his own

58
 The Birth of Tragedy, trans. and ed. Douglas Smith (Oxford, 2000), 28.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 73

word).59 The striking profusion of objects related to pagan Roman reli-
gion in Strawberry Hill has its origin in the preoccupations of another
man, Conyers Middleton, whose antiquities collection Walpole acquired
in 1744. Middleton, an Anglican clergyman, had in 1729 published a
short work in English denouncing Catholicism for its similarity to an-
cient Roman religious ritual. In 1745, he published a much longer work
in Latin that reflected his own fascination with just those pagan rituals, in
which he discoursed at length on Roman magic and funerary practice.60
In this later work, Middleton veers between the scholarly and the sensa-
tionalistic. He provides, for example, a well-​documented description of
the bulla, the Roman child’s protective amulet, and refutes the belief that
unguentaria [perfume jars] in tombs were used to collect the tears of fu-
neral mourners;61 but he also weaves a fantastical description of orgies
in worship of the phallic god Priapus, and augments his discussion of
Hermaphroditus with modern reports of hermaphroditism.62 The relics of
the clergyman Middleton’s repulsion and attraction to Roman religious
ritual remained in display around Strawberry Hill. From the Middleton
collection, the Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole (1784), lists,
for example, a gold figure of a boy with a bulla, bronze phalluses and
“sacrificing instruments,” a “broken patera” [a plate used in sacrifice], “a
Roman emperor in bronze, as an idol, with thunderbolt and caduceus,”
“a small Terminus,” and “a sacrificing priest.”63 Walpole also acquired
similar kinds of antiquities himself: “a Roman simpulum [a ladle used in
libations]” (34), a figure of “the deity of gardens” (that is, the phallic god
Priapus) (61), a “small bronze vase, with a sacrifice to Priapus.”64

59
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxxi. 313. On the paradoxical impulses in Walpole’s collectivizing
of the unique, see James D. Lilley, Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in
Atlantic Modernity (New York, 2014), 168–​98. W. S. Lewis states that Walpole’s “concentration
on classical antiquities” ended in 1743, but it is clear from the Description and Correspondence
that many of his most striking classical objects were acquired by gift or purchase after this
date: “Horace Walpole, Antiquary,” in Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (eds.), Essays Presented to
Sir Lewis Namier (London: 1956), 180. On Walpole as a classical collector, see Clive Wainwright,
The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750–​1850 (New Haven, 1989), 73–​6;
Aghion, “Horace Walpole, Antiquarian of his Time,” 173–​6.
60
 That is, Germana quaedam antiquitatis eruditae monumenta [Some genuine artifacts of learned
antiquity] (London, 1745). On Middleton, see the engaging account of Robert G. Ingram, “Conyers
Middleton’s Cicero: Enlightenment, Scholarship, and Polemic,” in W. H. F. Altman (ed.), Brill’s
Companion to the Reception of Cicero (Leiden, 2015), 95–​123.
61
 Middleton, Germana quaedam . . . monumenta, 29–​48,  95–​7.
62
 Middleton, Germana quaedam . . . monumenta, 71–​2, 229–​30.
63
 Walpole, A Description, 58, 61, 62, 69, 65, 71.
64
 Walpole, A Description, 34, 65, 69.

74  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 Yet Middleton’s focused antiquarian interest in Rome is very different
from Walpole’s tendency to fragment and juxtapose. Since the bulk of the
Strawberry Hill collection has now been sold, we can only imagine the
experience of being inside Walpole’s rooms, overwhelmed by ephemera.
What was it like to see a Roman urn, decorated with sacrificial motifs, in
a medieval-​style armory, together with “a collar set with spikes, for a wild
beast,” “five pieces of a coat of mail,” and “an Indian pouch made of beads
and hair”?65 Amid the chaotic overcrowding of objects, each item in itself
seems radically isolated, denuded of any context.66 At times, the juxtapo-
sition between classical objects and other curiosities is suggested by the
order of Walpole’s lists: in the Description, a “small bust of Vespasian in
cornelian” comes immediately after two caudle-​cups and three snuffboxes.
At other times, Walpole makes the juxtapositions explicit. In the semicir-
cular recess he called the Tribune, home to many of his most precious
objects, he tells us that there is “a valuable jewel of lord Burleigh’s head
on onyx, by Valerio Vicentino, cut on the reverse of an antique of [the
emperor] Caracalla.”67 In the same room, he describes “a small box of the
gold and white Japan.68 In it are two dates found in a jar at Herculaneum;
they are burnt to a coal, but the shapes and rivelled skins are entire.”69
With his shuffling together of ancient and modern in his crowded villa,
these precious antiques become deprived of context and part of an im-
mense miscellany. While many of his contemporaries were fascinated by
the capacity of ruins to animate a sense of an ancient whole, Walpole’s
isolating juxtapositions make ruins even of things that survived complete.
Walpole found himself, in fact, at the vanguard of eighteenth-​century
archaeological discovery. He was one of the first English travelers
to see the Roman ruin at Herculaneum, one of two towns near Naples
destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. He visited the
site in 1740, less than two years after excavations began, while traveling
through Europe on the Grand Tour with Thomas Gray. “One hates writing
descriptions that are to be found in every book of travels,” he wrote to his

65
 Walpole, A Description,  32–​3.
66
 Cf.Sean R. Silver (“Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography,”
Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 21/​4 [2009], 535–​64): “Strawberry Hill was filled with objects that
insisted on their own incommensurability, with things that have nothing in common except their
resistance to comparison” (541).
67
 Walpole, A Description, 62, 57.
68
 Samuel Johnson (A Dictionary of the English Language [London, 1755; repr. New York, 1979]
s.v. Japan: “[from Japan in Asia, where figured work was originally done.] Work varnished and
raised in fold and colours.”
69
 Walpole, A Description, 68.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 75

friend Richard West, “but we have seen something today that I am sure
you never read of, and perhaps never heard of. Have you ever heard of the
subterraneous town? a whole Roman town with all its edifices remaining
under ground?”70 Walpole wrote the letter before he had seen any of the
art that had been recovered from the site, all of which had been removed
to the palace of Charles of Bourbon, so it is no wonder that his letter lacks
the detailed description of the ancient wall paintings that we find in Gray’s
later account of the same visit.71 Even so, Gray’s methodical description
of the site contrasts with Walpole’s brief, more distracted impressions.
“They have found among other things some fine statues, some human
bones, some rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine,” he writes,
composing a terse list of unrelated objects that resembles the catalogues
he would produce of artifacts in his own home decades later. Even here,
in a lost city of antiquity newly uncovered to modern eyes, Walpole is
attracted to the curious, artificial, and unexpected (“You would imagine
that all the fabrics were crushed together; on the contrary . . . what is very
particular, the general ground of all the painting is red . . . What is remark-
able, there are no other marks or appearances of fire”). Both he and Gray
are impressed by the characteristic trompe l’oeil frescos at Herculaneum,
in which architectural details or outdoor landscapes were painted onto the
indoor walls of buildings, an interest in visual illusion suggestively similar
to Walpole’s own later cultivation of an aesthetic of deliberate inauthen-
ticity at Strawberry Hill.72 It is tempting to speculate about how the early
experience of this archeological underworld might have shaped Walpole’s
Gothic aesthetic later in his life. Some of the imagery of the letter—​the
fortuitous re-​emergence of objects from the distant past, the narrow un-
derground passageways, the slow movement through ruins, arches, and
columns—​recurs in his later writing. After the fame of Herculaneum had
spread, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Robert Maturin, and Mary Shelley would
all allude to it in their Gothic writing. Yet to posit any deep interest in this
site would misrepresent Walpole’s characteristically irreverent approach
to all aspects of classical antiquity. Closest to Otranto and to his other
productions is the way in which this epochal rediscovery is translated into
a series of “curiosities,” an array of miscellaneous objects that have mys-
teriously re-​emerged in the present.

70
 Walpole, Correspondence, xiii. 222–​4 (letter of June 14, 1740). The ruins of Pompeii would not
be uncovered until 1748.
71
 Gray and his Friends: Letters and Relics, ed. Duncan Crookes Tovey (Cambridge, 1890), 252–​7.
72
 Walpole, Correspondence, xiii. 223: the surviving wall of a temple “is build of brick plastered
over, and painted with architecture.”

76  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 A small number of the classical items listed in Walpole’s Description
receive more detailed attention, and these too reflected characteristic
preoccupations reflected also in his Gothic writing. First, he seems
fascinated by elements of the grotesque and monstrous, elements that re-
fute any modern stereotype about the symmetry, beauty, or order of clas-
sical art. In the library of Strawberry Hill there is a series of seven Roman
“ossuaria,”73 the first of which is described as:

A semicircular ossuarium, an uncommon form:  in the pediment,a tripod

supported by grifons: at each corner, a horned head of a man and a bird, a
festoon hangs from the horns of the men, on which are two more birds: the
inscription,
P. LENILIO
MARTIALI
POSVIT FORTVNATVS
PATRONO SVO B. M.

[Fortunatus placed this for his patron, Publius Lenilius Martialis,

well-​deserving].74

The object, which was purchased from the collection of the physician and
antiquities collector Richard Mead, no doubt interested Walpole partly
because of its “uncommon form.” But the griffins—​hybrid lion-​eagle
creatures—​ also demonstrate that monsters more popularly associated
with medieval romance and heraldry were already present in classical art.
Walpole describes at unusual length the other, Dionysiac motifs: a tripod,
birds, and satyrs.75 In the epigraph from Horace’s Ars poetica at the be-
ginning of Otranto, Walpole had directed his readers’ attention back to a
canonical passage of classical aesthetic theory in which there was already
a fascination with the grotesque, and that aimed to inspire both horror and
laughter. Here too—​in Walpole’s own library—​is a similar instance of a
classical object that seems, in a playful reversal of aesthetic chronology,
proto-​Gothic.

73
 Walpole uses “ossuarium” as a general term to refer to small Roman funerary urns of square
or semicircular shape. According to the 1842 auction catalogue, he also had in his garden a large
Roman marble sarcophagus, which was three feet, ten inches in length, stood on lion’s paws, and
was decorated with sphinxes (Anonymous, A Catalogue, 249).
74
 Walpole, A Description,  35–​36.
75
 Griffins occur already in Greek art, but are observed particularly in Roman funerary art of the
first and second centuries, often paired with Dionysiac symbols, as here. See Janet Huskinson,
Roman Children’s Sarcophagi (Oxford, 1996), 59–​60.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 77

 Second, Walpole is fascinated with ancient examples of charismatic vil-
lainy, an interest that obviously carries over to his Gothic writing. In 1767
his affection for the bust of Vespasian was eclipsed by his love for a more
notorious tyrant. “This little Caligula,” he writes, “is far superior to my
great Vespasian.”76 In his Description, Walpole describes the new beloved
object as a “small bust in bronze of a Caligula, with silver eyes,” which
“seems to represent that emperor at the beginning of his madness.” It was
found “at the very first discovery of Herculaneum,” and purchased and
sent to Walpole by his friend, Sir Horace Mann.77 In a letter to Mann, he
expresses his delight in the bust, declaring it the favorite object in his villa’s
collection. He gazes on it “from morning to night.” Its eyes “are absolutely
alive and have a wild melancholy in them, that one forebodes might ripen
into madness.” Sensuously, he imagines the bronze as flesh, and says that
“the muscles play as I turn it around.”78 George E. Haggerty has rightly
drawn attention to the homoeroticism of this letter, especially since the
bust was a token of his friendship with Mann.79 But, magnetized by this
mad figure, Walpole also seems himself perversely Caligulan. Possessed
by a singular intensity, stroking the muscles on the neck of this disem-
bodied head, he calls to mind Caligula’s famous quip that he wished all of
Rome had a single neck.80 Audiences had long thrilled to the glamorous
evil of Roman emperors in Roman-​themed dramas on the English stage,
and the afterlife of those theatrical villains can be traced in the villains
of the later Gothic novels. Near the close of William Godwin’s Caleb
Williams (1794), for example, the depth of cruelty of the villain Falkland
can be fathomed only as a living embodiment of the memory of the tyran-
nical Roman emperors. “What—​dark, mysterious, unfeeling, unrelenting
tyrant!—​is it come to this? When Nero and Caligula swayed the Roman
sceptre, it was a fearful thing to offend these bloody rulers . . . Falkland! art

76
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxii. 523.
77
 Walpole, A Description, 62. The bust was also sold after Walpole’s death to William Beckford,
and its current location is also unknown. Only seven bronze Caligulas are known to have survived
from antiquity: Eric R. Varner, From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in
Roman Portraiture (Atlanta, 2000), 102–​7.
78
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxii. 522–​3.
79
 “Queering Horace Walpole,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900 46/​3 (2006), 550–​1.
For the significance of Walpole’s Roman objects in the expression of a queer sensibility, see also
Caroline Vout, “Rom(e)-​antic Visions: Collecting, Display, and Homosexual Self-​Fashioning,” in
Jennifer Ingleheart (ed.), Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities
(Oxford, 2015), 244–​9.
80
 The quip is known from Suetonius’ Life of Caligula, 30.2. Walpole in 1759 pondered writing a
continuation of Suetonius’ Lives, which would cover the lives of the five rulers after Suetonius’
text ends (Correspondence xv. 50–​1).

78  |  Spectres of Antiquity

thou the offspring in whom the lineaments of these tyrants are faithfully
preserved?”81
In Walpole’s Description of his villa, he had described the mixture
of ancient and modern decorations as a “Gothic Vatican of Greece and
Rome,” quoting a line from Pope’s Dunciad. But who could trust Walpole’s
quotations? The line itself is, if not a mixture, then at least a rearrange-
ment. In the 1728 Dunciad (1.125–​6), Pope had described the empty and
merely ornamental learning of Tibbald’s bookshelf as without classical
content:

Here all his suffering brethren retire,

And ’scape the martyrdom of jakes and fire;
A Gothic Vatican! of Greece and Rome
Well purg’d, and worthy Withers, Quarles and Blome.82

Walpole, by contrast, writes,

The designs of the inside and outside are strictly ancient, but the decorations
are modern. And the mixture may be denominated, in some words of Pope,
A Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome.83

Walpole omits the enjambed participle and runs the lines together, so that
Pope’s opposition between the cultureless Goths and classical learning
appears to dissolve. Just as Horace was co-​opted to articulate a Gothic
aesthetic in The Castle Otranto, so Pope is audaciously refigured as an au-
thority for the wild, unclassical heterogeneity of Strawberry Hill. Walpole
is rearranging the past. But he has little interest in truly harmonizing the
opposition between the Gothic and the classical, since the shock of his aes-
thetic depends precisely on sustaining a sense of dichotomy between the
two. The Castle of Otranto creates its own antiquity, as scholars have long
recognized. Its imagined past is “Gothic” not in any simple rejection of the
classical, but in the freedom and irreverence with which Walpole collects,

81
 Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London, 1988), 324. Richard Morton describes audiences’
attraction to evil Roman emperors in Restoration drama; their wickedness was not “senselessly
savage,” but “literate and exotic, wild but stimulating”: “‘Roman Drops from British Eyes’: Latin
History on the Restoration Stage,” in John Dudley Browning (ed.), The Stage in the Eighteenth
Century (New York, 1981), 112.
82
 Alexander Pope, “The Dunciad”: The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. James Sutherland (3rd ed.,
London, 1963), 78.
83
 Walpole, A Description, iii.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 79

fragments, and rearranges elements of the ancient world. He installs at the
origin point of the English Gothic novel a willingness to challenge the au-
thority of the classical through acts of radical rearrangement.

From Walpole to Radcliffe: Gothic Continuities in the

1770s and 1780s

In one of the most critically and commercially successful plays of the

London theater season of 1772, a woman keeps her imprisoned father
alive by feeding him milk from her own breasts. Based on a passage in
an ancient Roman text and set in fourth-​century BCE Sicily, The Grecian
Daughter was written by the actor, lawyer, playwright, and classical trans-
lator Arthur Murphy.84 The early scenes are set in and around a gloomy
cave. The tyrant Dionysius the Younger has stolen the throne from the
rightful ruler, Evander, and shut the old man in the cave to die by star-
vation. His dutiful daughter, Euphrasia, pleads with the guards to allow
her to see him, and then keeps him alive through her remarkable act of
piety. Needless to say, Walpole’s piquant defense of theatrical liberties
had no effect on the actual conventions of the stage, and Euphrasia’s act
of adult breastfeeding had to occur offstage. The guards are moved by her
devotion and help them escape, and Euphrasia hides her father in another
cave, this one containing the tomb of her mother. Meanwhile, an army
surrounds Syracuse to unseat Dionysius from the throne. The tyrant is de-
termined to resist until Euphrasia declares that she will strike the fatal
blow, and in the final scene she stabs him herself. The Grecian Daughter
was not only one of the most profitable plays of 1772; it was a mainstay
of the British theater for decades. For forty-​five years it “appeared almost
without exception at either Drury Lane or Covent Garden, sometimes at
both.”85 Hester Lynch Piozzi declared it in 1778 “unquestionably the best
of all our modern Tragedies.”86 But its reputation fell sharply in the nine-
teenth century, and by the Victorian era it had sunk into obscurity. In 1830,
the actress Fanny Kemble was pressured into playing the role of Euphrasia

84
 The Plays of Arthur Murphy, ed. Richard B. Schwartz, 4 vols. (New York, 1979), i. 209–​306.
Murphy gives as his source the first-​century CE writer Valerius Maximus, who relates two
anecdotes of women breastfeeding their parents in prison (5.4.7, 5.4. ext. 1). The setting and the
characters’ names are Murphy’s own invention.
85
 Howard Hunter Dunbar, The Dramatic Career of Arthur Murphy (New York, 1946), 216.
86
 Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), ed. Katharine Canby
Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1942), i. 248.

80  |  Spectres of Antiquity

at Covent Garden, with her own father as the breastfed Evander. She hated
the play, calling it “trashy.”87
Nobody in the 1770s would have labeled The Grecian Daughter
Gothic. It is set in the ancient world, not in the age of chivalry. It lacks
any reference to ghosts or to belief in the supernatural. Murphy himself
demonstrated an interest in Greek drama and in Aristotelian rules of dra-
matic composition.88 Yet aspects of the play are undoubtedly similar to the
Gothic novels and plays that would dominate publishing two decades after
Murphy. Joseph W. Donohue describes the tragedy’s caves as a “subjec-
tive Gothic labyrinth,” mysterious wombs to which Euphrasia returns to
visit both her father and her dead mother.89 Evander, we are told, is held in
a “dungeon drear/​Cell within cell, a labyrinth of horror,” and Euphrasia
later hides him in “the sad sepulchre where, hears’d in death,/​The pale re-
mains of my dear mother lie.” The action is set in a “wild romantic Scene
amidst overhanging rocks”—​the kind of rugged, picturesque setting later
beloved of Gothic novelists—​and takes place in the “gloom of night.”90
As in many later Gothic works, its plot explores the psychological and
physical extremes to which women in particular are forced through the ty-
rannical exercise of political or religious authority. Despite the many male
characters who mill around in the play, the action is repeatedly reduced
to an individual conflict between a fulminating tyrant and a stubborn, vir-
tuous heroine.
Most of all, the play’s signature image of breastfeeding unmistak-
ably suggests an element of incestuous desire between parent and child,
a horror that would become familiar to Gothic writing from Walpole’s
The Mysterious Mother to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s
Mathilda. The praise of Euphrasia’s virtue barely conceals the sugges-
tiveness of lines describing the “pure delight,” “exquisite sensation,” and
“rapture” that her remarkable act arouses.91 Murphy flirts with perversity.
When his play was printed, the last sentence of the Latin quotation on the

87
 Records of a Girlhood (2nd edn., New York, 1884), 238; quoted by Catherine Burroughs, “‘The
Father Foster’d at his Daughter’s Breast’: Fanny Kemble and The Grecian Daughter,” Nineteenth-​
Century Contexts 28/​4 (2006), 342.
88
 When Murphy died in 1805, his commonplace book included an unpublished translation of
Euripides’ Iphigenia, and copious notes in preparation for a review of recent translations of
Aristotle’s Poetics: J. Homer Caskey, “Arthur Murphy’s Commonplace-​Book,” Studies in Philology
37/​4 (1940), 598–​609.
89
 Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, 1970), 68.
90
 Murphy, The Plays, i. 217, 259, 228. Cf. Robert Donald Spector, Arthur Murphy (Boston, 1979),
151, on the tragedy’s “threatening Gothic atmosphere.”
91
 Murphy, The Plays, i. 243.

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 81

title page read, “Someone could think this was done contrary to the nat-
ural order, except that the first law of nature is to love one’s parents.”92 To
emphasize the Gothic aspects of The Grecian Daughter is not to claim
the drama as a missing link in the history of the genre, although its ubiq-
uity on the stage would certainly have made it familiar to later dramatists
and novelists. It is instead to stress the thematic similarities to the Gothic
that are obscured if we allow our vision to be guided by the period’s own
literary self-​positioning. Writers made strategic distinctions between
high and low, elite and popular, Gothic and classical, but in each case the
meaning of these terms is highly changeable.
While the 1770s and 1780s are typically viewed as a sort of interregnum
between the foundational writings of Walpole and the genre’s ascendance
in the 1790s, one of Walpole’s successors in this intervening era made the
Gothic an explicit battleground for the politics of literary respectability.
In 1777 Clara Reeve published a work she described as “the literary off-
spring of The Castle of Otranto,” which was first entitled The Champion of
Virtue: A Gothic Story, and then republished and retitled The Old English
Baron:  A Gothic Story in 1778.93 Living in provincial Ipswich, Reeve
was cut off from the metropolitan literary scene, and she was nearly fifty
years old when she wrote The Old English Baron, her first novel. But she
knew Latin well; her major work to that date was an English translation of
the seventeenth-​century Latin novel Argenis (1621) by John Barclay. So
when she eventually established a voice for herself, she was particularly
sensitive both to the barriers erected for female authors and the artificial
distinctions drawn by critics between respectable and “low” genres. “A
man shall admire and almost adore the Epic poems of the Ancients,” she
writes, “and yet despise and execrate the ancient Romances, which are
only Epics in prose.”94 In a bid for respectability, her own Gothic novel
deliberately reduced the sensationalism and grotesquerie that so delighted
Walpole, producing a much more sober story that emphasized the virtue of
its central characters. Murphy (implicitly) and Reeve (explicitly) produced
works that melded, and confuted any critical distinction between, Gothic

92
 Putaret aliquis hoc contra rerum naturam factum, nisi diligere parentes prima naturae lex
esset (Valerius Maximus 5.4.7). Accounts of adult breastfeeding would have been less startling in
antiquity, when breastmilk was sold and administered for its medicinal properties: see Tara Mulder,
“Adult Breastfeeding in Ancient Rome,” Illinois Classical Studies 42/​1 (2017), 227–​43.
93
 The Old English Baron. On the “halting” progression of the Gothic in the 1770s–​80s, see Clery,
The Rise of Supernatural Fiction,  80–​91.
94
 Reeve, The Old English Baron, 2.

82  |  Spectres of Antiquity

and classical.95 Whether Reeve ever saw or read The Grecian Daughter is
not certainly known. But it is probable: when she came to publish a literary
critical dialogue in 1785 (The Progress of Romance), she named the de-
fiant female character Euphrasia.
Even closer to Murphy is another Gothic novel entitled A Sicilian
Romance, published anonymously in 1790. The novel describes an exer-
cise of domestic rather than political tyranny. It takes place in a decrepit
and possibly haunted castle in Sicily, where the virtuous sisters Julia and
Emilia are raised by their father, the fifth Marquis of Mazzini, and their
vain, pleasure-​seeking stepmother. The Marquis urges Julia to marry a
haughty duke, but she escapes and is pursued through a series of laby-
rinthine caverns until finally she discovers her own mother imprisoned
in a ruined section of the Mazzini castle. A Sicilian Romance blends the
concerns of eighteenth-​ century sentimental fiction (female education,
relationships between women, marriage) with the plot machinery and
castle setting of Otranto. It then superimposes that artifice on the geog-
raphy of Sicily, a picturesque landscape crisscrossed, as in The Grecian
Daughter, with an imagined network of caves and secret passageways.
Alison Milbank notes that the cave in which Julia finds her mother in A
Sicilian Romance is strikingly similar to the “ear of Dionysius” in Sicily,
which was also the inspiration for the cave in which Euphrasia finds her
father in The Grecian Daughter.96 But the classical connection is never
explicitly mentioned in A Sicilian Romance, and indeed the novel lacks
the specific references to antiquity that were legible in Walpole, Murphy,
and Reeve.
In 1796, the novel was republished in its third edition under the author’s
own name:  Ann Radcliffe. Through the immense popularity of the five
novels published in her lifetime (and a sixth published posthumously),
Radcliffe would become the quintessential Gothic novelist for innumer-
able readers and imitators, even though one of the key elements of the
Gothic we have identified so far—​its spirit of challenge or tension with

95
 On Reeve’s political background and her creation of a more conservative “loyalist Gothic,”
see Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 46–​50. On Reeve and classical literature, see James Uden,
“Reassessing the Gothic/​Classical Relationship,” in Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (eds.),
The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,
2020), 161–​79.
96
 Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford, 1993), 208. Cf. the letter
from Arthur Murphy to David Garrick, January 23, 1772 (The Private Correspondence of David
Garrick, 2 vols. [London, 1831], i. 505): “You will see that I have endeavoured to make a dramatic
use of the description given by Addison of Dionysius’ ear.” Joseph Addison described this cave in
The Spectator, July 24, 1712 (= Addison and Steele, The Spectator, iv. 44).

Horace Walpole, Gothic Classicism, and the Aesthetics of Collection  | 83

the classical—​becomes far less visible in her work. Each of her Gothic
novels puts female experience at its center, and when aspects of classical
antiquity appear, they are seen from the perspective of gendered educa-
tional norms. Her heroines are not alienatingly erudite; a preoccupation
with the particularities of history is coded in her texts as a male char-
acteristic. Instead, Radcliffe emphasizes her heroines’ capacity for aes-
thetic response. If Burke’s sublime translated familiar classical texts into
private (and emphatically male) experiences of pleasurable vulnerability,
then Radcliffe’s texts model a more open and accessible mode of reading
and viewing the texts and monuments of the past. This sensibility also
has a distinctly critical edge, since Radcliffe frequently trains attention
to the ways in which historical and theological structures have conspired
to tyrannize the individual. Specific allusions to ancient literature may be
mostly absent in Radcliffe’s novels; but traces of ancient violence linger,
and her novels encourage a mindset that is willing and able to see them.

84  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 CHAPTER 3 Ann Radcliffe’s
Classical Remembrances

In July 1804, Marie-​Henri Beyle, later known by his pseudonym Stendhal,

wrote a letter to his younger sister, Pauline. She was supervising the ed-
ucation of their cousin, and the future Stendhal had firm opinions about
what he should read:

Do everything in the world to make sure that Gaetan reads Orlando Furioso,
the Iliad, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Cleveland, the Pharsalia of Lucan,
translated by Marmontel; Don Quixote, model of good wit; the History of
Henry IV by Péréfixe—​it is at home; the Memoirs of a Man of Quality; but
above all, the Iliad, the Jerusalem [Gerusalemme Liberata], Orlando, and
the Confessional of the Black Penitents. His imagination needs to be shaken
up; he is good, but there is no force in his goodness. He must re-​temper his
spirit, otherwise he will only be a weakling, and, with his big nose, he will
be mocked. Tell him that he needs to have more wit than others, with this
big nose.1

Poor Gaetan. He cannot do much about his physical features, but at least
he can strengthen his character through a bracing course of reading.
Stendhal’s list includes two novels by Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries

1
 Correspondance, eds. V. Del Litto and Henri Martineau, 3 vols. (Paris, 1962–​8), i. 132: “Fais
tout au monde pour faire lire à Gaétan Roland le Furieux, l’Iliade, les Mystères d’Udolphe,
Cleveland, la Pharsale de Lucain, traduite par Marmontel; Don Quichotte, modèle de bonne
plaisanterie: l’Histoire de Henri IV par Péréfixe, elle est à la maison; les Mémoires d’un homme
de qualité; mais surtout l’Iliade, la Jérusalem, Roland e le Confessional des pénitents noirs.
Son imagination a besoin d’être secouée; il est bon, mais n’a pas de force dans sa bonté. Il faut
retremper son âme, autrement ce ne sera qu’un faible, et, avec son gros nez, on se moquera de lui.
Dis-​lui qu’il lui faut plus d’esprit qu’à un autre, avec ce gros nez.”
of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian; or, the Confessional of the Black
Penitents (1796–​7). She is the only female writer here, and the only au-
thor whose works have female protagonists at their center. Her heroines
seem oddly matched with the warriors, knights, and monarchs who dom-
inate the list, yet by the turn of the eighteenth century, Radcliffe’s works
were indeed read alongside epic poems as classic works of literature. The
“Great Enchantress,” as she was called, wielded a power in her time that is
scarcely conveyed by the polite, domestic moniker by which she was later
known, “Mrs. Radcliffe.” The grand emotions inspired by The Mysteries
of Udolpho and The Italian will help Gaetan to “re-​temper” [retremper]
his spirit, Stendhal says, heating and cooling it as if he were strengthening
steel. Nor would it have surprised contemporaries to see Radcliffe’s prose
listed among grand works of poetry. Even when she was alive—​she is the
only living author on Stendhal’s list—​she was frequently cast as the suc-
cessor to an enchanted tradition of English poets that included Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton.2 The novels’ detailed plots included European
odysseys, contemplation of nature and the divine, remote historical
periods, and unfamiliar and beautiful landscapes. According to her biog-
rapher, her novels “wore a certain air of antiquity, and seemed scarcely to
belong to the present age.”3
By listing works by Radcliffe alongside the Iliad and the Pharsalia,
Stendhal groups them with epic poems of classical antiquity. Yet although
her novels lack the startling irreverence of Walpole, in other ways they
mark a firmer break with the ancient world. There are no Latin or Greek
epigraphs or quotations; there is an aesthetic rather than antiquarian in-
terest in Roman ruins; and although her characters often walk the classic
ground of Italy, references to specific Roman locations and myths are
fleeting or absent. To ring a change on Roland Barthes’s description of the
“reality effect” in the nineteenth-​century realist novel, Radcliffe’s novels
exchange classicism for a “classical effect,” an aspect of rhetoric, which
approximates the scope and prestige of the classical while dimming its
literary and historical specificity.4 In speaking of “remembrances” rather
than influences or allusions, then, I  adopt a word that is both frequent
and useful in Radcliffe’s texts. “Remembrance” appears eight times in
Burney’s Evelina and three times in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but

2
 Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London, 1999), 133.
3
 Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville . . . to Which is Prefaced a Memoir of the Author, 2 vols.
(London, 1826) i. 3.
4
 “The Reality Effect” (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1986;
orig. 1984), 141–​8.

86  |  Spectres of Antiquity

forty-​two times in The Romance of the Forest and seventy-​three times in
The Mysteries of Udolpho. The frequent reference to memory helps to
create what Terry Castle has evocatively described as the “mummified
emotional world” of Radcliffe’s novels, in which characters perpetually
“dwell with spirits of the dead,” and even the living appear as ghosts
from the past.5 Yet “remembrance” is a more flexible term than the more
firmly personal “memory.” When a remembrance strikes her characters, it
appears as if from some external location, leaving the exact origin of ideas
and thoughts suggestively undefined. The individual is seen as a cluster of
cultural ideas rather than as a singular and continuing personal identity.
This ambiguity about remembrances is particularly useful when we are
discussing classical culture in Radcliffe’s novels, given the difficult ques-
tion of how much Greek and Roman literature she knew in the original lan-
guages or in translation.6 Radcliffe wanted to give her novels a classicizing
veneer without assuming much, if any, actual knowledge of classical texts.
So she leaves the reading and knowledge of her heroines vague while at
the same time emphasizing that they are surrounded by a culture in which
classical ideas are present and available to them by “remembrance.” Far
from representing any lack or failure, this vagueness becomes a powerful
openness in her text. Her novels describe a form of cultural refinement
based upon sensibility (how one responds to ideas and experiences) rather
than on erudition (what one already knows). She creates a narrative per-
spective easily inhabitable by readers who had little or no access to clas-
sical education, even while her descriptions of classic “remembrances”
create an aura that was exotic and foreign.
Her novels also replace an earlier anxiety about the weight of the an-
cient past with more modern concerns about property and the family, dis-
placed onto a premodern European landscape. Radcliffe’s most frequent
setting is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when (at least in her
account) Reformation-​era Europe was still dominated by the power of
Catholic institutions, and the promise of Protestant enlightenment was
blocked by a stagnant cultural attachment to the rituals and institutions of

5
 The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-​Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
(Oxford, 1995), 136, 123.
6
 For an argument that Radcliffe read translations of Greek and Roman works, see Marnieri,
“Critical and Iconographic Reinterpretations,” 138–​42. It is certainly the case that translation
helped make the classics more accessible for women in the eighteenth century, although in
Radcliffe’s case it is hard to determine whether apparently classicizing moments are drawn
from translations or from earlier writers (Milton, Thomson, Collins) who knew Latin and Greek
literature well.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 87

the old world. The abbeys, monasteries, and castles in Radcliffe’s Gothic
are already places of “ancient” history, and the classical landmarks that
defined European travel in the earlier eighteenth century are overlaid with
ruins that offer no genuine portal to earlier history, but rather pleasing or-
nament and opportunity for contemplation in the present.7 When specific
aspects of classical antiquity do surface in her works, Radcliffe consist-
ently describes a mode of response differentiated along gender lines. Her
villains are knowledgeable about the particularities of ancient personalities
and events; they are attracted to monuments of power as archetypes for
their own tyranny; they collect knowledge or objects, insensible to feelings
of beauty or the sublime. On the other hand, her heroines demonstrate a
sensitivity toward historical imbalances of power, instances of oppression,
and victimization.8 If the classical aspects of Radcliffe’s writing are typi-
cally vague or indistinct, they nonetheless contribute to a particular histor-
ical sensibility in her work, which emphasizes an attention to individual
suffering over the ethically inert accumulation of facts and ideas.
When the Gothic craze was at its peak in the 1790s, Ann Radcliffe was
the most financially successful author in England. After a tentative first
novel set in the Scottish Highlands, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
(1789), she landed upon her signature style—​the suspense plot with po-
etic interludes and picturesque and sublime landscapes—​in A Sicilian
Romance (1790), set in late-​sixteenth-​century Sicily, and The Romance of
the Forest (1791), set in mid-​seventeenth-​century France and Savoy. She
was paid £500 for the expansive, four-​volume The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), whose plot moves between France and Italy in the late sixteenth
century, and the extraordinary sum of £800 for The Italian (1796), set
in mid-​eighteenth-​century Naples and Rome. Radcliffe lived until 1823,
but never published another novel (a further novel, the medieval romance
Gaston de Blondeville, was published after her death). Even at the peak of
her literary celebrity, little was known about her. She was born in 1764, the
year of The Castle of Otranto’s first edition. Her father was a haberdasher,

7
 Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith
to the Brontës (University Park, 1998), 65: “Sometimes Radcliffe’s heroines are living in 1590,
sometimes 1640, sometimes 1740, but all of them are living in a historical world that we would
recognize as elaborately artificial and contrived.”
8
 For the sublime in Radcliffe’s texts as a site for exploring patriarchal relationships, see
Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 85–​106. Cf. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested
Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana, IL, 1989),
122: Radcliffe’s “heroines find male protection at best a mixed blessing, at worst an intolerable
limitation.”

88  |  Spectres of Antiquity

and there is no record of Ann’s formal schooling.9 Through her extended
family, though, she had connections to major figures in intellectual life of
her period. Her granduncle on her mother’s side was Dr. John Jebb, a writer,
scholar, and religious reformer, whose controversial essays advocated for
toleration of Unitarians.10 (Sir Richard Jebb, the famous Hellenist of the
late nineteenth century, descended from the same family.) For part of her
childhood, she was sent to live with her uncle, Thomas Bentley, a business
partner of Josiah Wedgwood. They formed Wedgwood & Bentley as a firm
to sell their porcelain and fine china. After Bentley’s death, the company
would become Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, and then just Wedgwood, as it
is still known today. Bentley was also a prominent Unitarian intellectual.
He founded and helped fund the prestigious Dissenting school Warrington
Academy, which counted among its teachers the scientist and polemicist
Joseph Priestley, the Hebraist John Taylor, and John Aikin, father of the
poet and essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld.11 As with the heroines of her
novels, it is easier to prove that she was surrounded by an atmosphere of
learning than to pinpoint specific details about her education.12
In assessing the presence or absence of classical antiquity in Radcliffe’s
writing, it would naturally be useful to ascertain whether she had any
knowledge of classical languages, as did the other authors I study in this
book. Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult to do. After her death, her
husband, the journalist and translator William Radcliffe, sought to confirm
Ann’s legacy as someone with an unschooled talent for writing. In his
account, Ann adhered strictly to decorum and had only as much learning
as was respectable for a woman of her period. In a long note presumably
written by William and attached to her first biographical notice, we read,

To contemplate the glories of creation, but more particularly the grander

features of their display, was one of their chief delights; to listen to fine
music was another. She had also a gratification in listening to any good

9
 Scholars now generally disregard the hypothesis that Radcliffe attended a school run by Sophia
and Harriet Lee, speculation that depends only on allusions to Sophia Lee’s historical novel
The Recess (1783/​5) and a remark in Sophia Lee’s obituary that Radcliffe admired The Recess
warmly: Miles, Ann Radcliffe, 22–​3; Norton, Mistress of Udolpho,  46–​8.
10
 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho,  14–​17.
11
 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho,  26–​30.
12
 Norton has also argued for the presence of Unitarian theology in Radcliffe’s novels, but this
point has been disproven by Robert J. Mayhew, “Gothic Trajectories: Latitudinarian Theology
and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe,” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 15/​3–​4 (2003), 586–​9; and Alison
Milbank, God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition
(Oxford, 2018), 70–​1, 86–​7.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 89

 verbal sounds: and would desire to hear passages repeated from the Latin
and Greek classics; requiring, at intervals, the most literal translations that
could be given, with all that was possible of their idiom, howmuchsoever
the version might be embarrassed by that aim at exactness.13

This passage is repeated with small variation in the memoir of Radcliffe

by Thomas Noon Talfourd, a memoir that William also seems to have
supervised.14 Talfourd adds that she was “instructed in all the wom-
anly accomplishments after the earlier fashion of the time, but was not
exercised in the classics, nor excited to pursue the studies necessary to
form the modern heroine of conversations.”15 The story of Radcliffe sit-
ting docilely while her husband deciphers the ancient languages for her
might, of course, be true. But we should be suspicious of the degree to
which it reproduces a particular domestic ideal. Posthumous accounts of
Radcliffe safeguard a conservative image of Ann as traditionally feminine.
She appears not as a radical writer or bluestocking, but as a woman with
a “scrupulous sense of propriety,” who was devoted above all to her do-
mestic duties.16 At a time when excessive erudition was viewed as un-
feminine, and Greek and Latin were stereotyped as masculine zones of
learning, this image of Ann depending on her husband for these skills fits
the conservative ideal all too well. As Penelope Wilson observes, our “ev-
idence of knowledge of classical languages among women writers is spo-
radic and often uncertain, partly because women are as likely to disclaim
first-​hand classical expertise as to display it.”17
These biographical notices also perpetuate the myth that Radcliffe’s
writings were not the result of study and research—​as they clearly were—​
but spontaneous productions, works of fancy and imagination composed at
speed and without much forethought. The dreamy image of Ann attracted
to the sound of Greek and Latin words adds to this picture of a romantic
spirit, unencumbered by bookish erudition. We might have learned some-
thing from her letters and diaries about some domestic study, but here too
we reach an impasse. Incredibly for such a successful and famous writer,
there are almost no extant letters, and the only extant journal entries are

13
 Anonymous, “Mrs Ann Radcliffe,” The Annual Biography and Obituary for the Year 1824
(London, 1824), 99.
14
 Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, i. 100; for William as “jealous guardian” of Ann’s
reputation, see Miles, Ann Radcliffe,  25–​8.
15
 Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, i. 6.
16
 Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, i. 121.
17
 Wilson, “Women Writers and the Classics,” 496.

90  |  Spectres of Antiquity

those quoted in Talfourd’s memoir to demonstrate her novelistic talent at
describing landscapes and places. Ann may indeed have never learned
Latin, but we should be wary of trusting accounts of her life that attribute
to her only “womanly accomplishments,” especially those shaped by her
husband, who seems keen to prove that his successful wife was still de-
pendent upon and devoted to him.

Gender, Antiquity, and the Picturesque: The Romance

of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho

A number of Radcliffe’s heroines read Latin. This accomplishment might

have represented a genuine aspiration for some of the female readers of
Radcliffe’s novels, and might have seemed to others as exotically out of
reach as the distant European locales. In the case of her heroines, their
knowledge is not the result of formal schooling but of domestic instruc-
tion by a family member, a detail that faithfully represents the standard
source of learning for educated women in the late eighteenth century.18
In A Sicilian Romance, the Marquis of Mazzini supervises the education
of his daughters, Emilia and Julia, and they are taught “the Latin tongue”
within the castle.19 In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the Monsieur St. Aubert’s
library is filled with “the best books in the ancient and modern languages,”
and he devotedly teaches his daughter “Latin and English, chiefly that she
might understand the sublimity of their best poets.”20 Radcliffe offers her
readers a romantic vision of a world in which learning is both ubiquitous
and (comparatively) easily accessible. Yet while the men in Radcliffe’s
novels are often connected to specific ancient authors or ideas, women’s
classical knowledge is inevitably vague. When Emily St. Aubert and her
father set off from France, for example, they carry with them “several
of the Latin and Italian poets.”21 Which ones? Traveling down the Arno
River, Emily is delighted by the “remembrances, which the classic waves

18
 Clara Reeve, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and later Mary Shelley all learned Latin in the home.
19
 Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, 6.
20
 The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford, 2008), 3, 6. Classical education is
similarly ubiquitous in other Gothic novels influenced by Radcliffe. The protagonists Laurette and
Enrico in Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine (1798), for example, are “instructed in the
classics,” and Enrico’s military career is foreshadowed through his love for the epic poets “Homer,
Lucan and Virgil”: The Orphan of the Rhine, ed. Ellen Moody (Richmond, VA, 2014), 70, 72. Jane
Austen mocks the cliché of the Gothic heroine being prodigiously learned in Northanger Abbey,
writing that her heroine, Catherine, “never could learn or understand any thing before she was
taught; and sometimes not even then.” (6).
21
 Radcliffe, Udolpho, 28.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 91

revived.”22 Which remembrances? The impersonal phrasing obscures both
who is remembering and what is being remembered. Early in Udolpho,
Emily’s father finds copies of “Homer, Horace, and Petrarch” among the
possessions of Valancourt. Knowledge of these authors helps him verify
the refinement of his daughter’s suitor, establishing a bond between the
two men. But when Valancourt himself is wooing Emily, Radcliffe merely
says that he recites “beautiful passages from such of the Latin and Italian
poets as he had heard her admire.”23 Which passages? Which poets? The
gaps reflect the distance between the text’s fantasy of female classical eru-
dition and the reality of its inaccessibility for many of Radcliffe’s readers.
Her heroines may know Latin, but she leaves her descriptions of that
knowledge deliberately vague.
If Radcliffe avoids dwelling on the unfamiliar aspects of her heroines’
erudition, she uses specific references to antiquity, conversely, to create
situations that are alien or threatening to her characters. In The Romance of
the Forest, she describes the palace of the Marquis, an imperious aristocrat
with erotic designs on the heroine, Adeline. His saloon, sleekly artificial
and cavernously empty, is decorated with a collection of classical figures,
all specifically named:

Busts of Horace, Ovid, Anacreon, Tibullus, and Petronius Arbiter, adorned

the recesses, and stands of flowers placed in Etruscan vases, breathed the
most delicious perfume. In the middle of the apartment stood a small table,
spread with a collation of fruits, ices and liquors. No person appeared. The
whole seemed the works of enchantment, and rather resembled the palace
of a fairy than any thing of human conformation.24

Radcliffe’s choice of ancient figures hints at the sexual threat that the
Marquis poses to Adeline. The chaotic catalogue—​a jumbled list mixing
Latin poets (Horace, Tibullus, Ovid), a Greek poet (Anacreon), and a Latin
novelist (Petronius)—​consists of writers whose works were considered
erotic or obscene in the eighteenth century.25 Norton observes that the
reference to “Etruscan vases” recalls the porcelain vases produced by

22
 Radcliffe, Udolpho, 460.
23
 Radcliffe, Udolpho, 35, 42.
24
 The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford, 1986), 156.
25
 See Chard’s note on the eighteenth-​century reputations of these authors (Radcliffe, Romance of
the Forest, 379–​80). This list may hint at a polysexuality in the Marquis, since Tibullus, Anacreon,
and Petronius all wrote explicitly homoerotic literature; see Chapter 4 for Matthew Lewis’s interest
in Anacreon.

92  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Figure 3.1  Wedgwood bust of Horace in black basalt, 1777. Photo © Wedgwood
Museum/​WWRD.

Wedgwood & Bentley, who initiated a fashion for so-​called Etruscan

ware in the 1770s, inspired by the mostly Greek archaeological remains
transported to England from digs around Naples.26 I would add that the
classical busts also reflect the influence of her uncle’s firm. A  contem-
porary catalogue from Wedgwood & Bentley offers a bust of Horace
for purchase, together with cameos and gems depicting Ovid, Tibullus,
and Anacreon, all designed to ornament “the walls of apartments, in the
richest manner.”27 Today, the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-​on-​Trent, UK,
preserves one of these same busts of Horace in black basalt, depicting the
poet as an attractive young man, gazing pensively at the viewer (Figure 3.1).
Since the erotic poems in Horace’s Odes famously capture the feeling of
the aging lover, aware of his declining desirability and calling for us to

 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho,  34–​5.

26

 Anonymous, A Catalogue of Cameos, Intaglios, Medals, Busts, Small Statues, and Bas-​
27

Reliefs . . . Made by Wedgwood and Bentley (4th edn., London, 1777), 33.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 93

seize the day while we still can, it is oddly difficult to imagine a young
and beautiful Horace. Inevitably, all such decorative pieces exist at some
disconnect from classical antiquity, since, with the exception of Anacreon,
no visual representation of any of these authors survives from the ancient
world. Their images are necessarily the product of modern invention.
The aura of artificiality and pretense fits the Marquis very well, a char-
acter in The Romance of the Forest whose “studied air of tenderness”
and habit of dissimulation distinguish him from the ingenuousness of the
heroine. Radcliffe does not show us the Marquis reading these classical
authors. There is no hint that they form part of any aesthetic sensibility.
For him, the classical world is a luxury object that can be commodified,
collected, and put on display to impress and intimidate his visitors. This
desire for specific objects symbolizes an aggressive drive for power and
control, which the Marquis will soon demonstrate toward Adeline herself.
Soon after Adeline escapes from the palace, she and her lover Theodore
bond over their “similarity of taste and opinion.” They talk about books,
predictably unnamed (“their discourse was enriched by elegant literature,
and endeared by mutual regard”).28 By contrast, the string of specific clas-
sical names in the description of the Marquis depicts him and his milieu
as threateningly alien.
Radcliffe’s use of classical allusions in The Mysteries of Udolpho also
reveals a contrast between different, gendered visions of antiquity. When
Emily is passing through the Alps with the villainous Montoni, Radcliffe
describes their different reactions to a specific remembrance from classical
history: the crossing of the mountains by the Carthaginian general Hannibal
in 218 BCE during the Second Punic War against Rome. “Montoni and
Cavigni renewed a dispute concerning Hannibal’s passage over the Alps,”
she writes, “Montoni contending that he entered Italy by way of Mount
Cenis, and Cavigni, that he passed over Mount St. Bernard.”29 The dispute
over antiquarian detail is immediately contrasted with Emily’s exercise of
empathy and imagination:

28
 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 190.
29
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 166. There is confusion even in the ancient sources about
which pass Hannibal and his army took through the Alps to reach the Po Valley in Northern Italy;
Dexter Hoyos (“Crossing the Durance with Hannibal and Livy: The Route to the Pass,” Klio 88/​2
[2006], 463) calls it a question “enduringly alluring to Alpinists and warfare-​enthusiasts.” Neither
of the options mentioned in Udolpho—​the Mount Cenis Pass, or the Little or Great St. Bernard
Pass, which Napoleon would use in 1800—​matches ancient narratives of the crossing. Hoyos
argues for the Montgenèvre Pass as the most probable route.

94  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 The subject brought to Emily’s imagination the disasters he had suffered
in this bold and perilous adventure. She saw his vast armies among the
defiles, and over the tremendous cliffs of the mountains which at night were
lighted up by his fires, or by the torches which he caused to be carried
when he pursued his indefatigable march. . . . She looked with horror upon
the mountaineers, perched on the higher cliffs, assailing the troops below
with broken fragments of the mountain; on soldiers and elephants tumbling
headlong down the lower precipices; and, as she listened to the rebounding
rocks, that followed their fall, the terrors of fancy yielded to those of reality,
and she shuddered to behold herself on the dizzy height, whence she had
pictured the descent of others.

Emily transforms the mountainous outlook into a series of verbal pictures.

She exercises what William Gilpin called the “picturesque eye,” seeking out
rugged and varied scenes in nature that seem most congenial to painting or
sketching by offering light and shade, variation, and visual interest.30 For
Gilpin, the pleasure we get from the picturesque is more instinctive than
analytical: the “general ideas of the scene makes an impression, before any
appeal is made to the judgment. We rather feel, than survey it.”31 Yet Emily
exercises both her imagination and her pity, conjuring from the landscape
a sense of the hardships endured by the soldiers and the elephants forced
to cross the Alps. Her own awareness of dizzying height of the moun-
tain pass leads to a moment of cross-​temporal identification with these
soldiers from the ancient world. Radcliffe recreates the sublime, in the
words of Anne K. Mellor, as an “experience that produces an intensified
emotional and moral participation in a human community.”32 In this scene
in the Alps, Emily’s “fancy” powerfully illustrates a connection between
imagination and sympathy when she is viewing the lives of others.
Montoni, by contrast, “cared little about views of any kind.”33 In Mary
Poovey’s influential reading of the politics of sensibility in Udolpho, the
unfeeling Montoni is such a threat to Emily because the values which she

30
 Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape
(London, 1794), 44.
31
 Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 50.
32
 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 105. Hannibal would later be transformed into a sublime
figure for his titanic ambition, becoming a model for Napoleon’s political self-​representation
when he was crossing the Alps into Italy (John W. Spaeth Jr., “Hannibal and Napoleon,” Classical
Journal 24/​4 [1929], 291–​3), and depicted in artworks such as J. M. W. Turner’s Snow Storm—​
Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812). Pointedly, Emily expresses pity for the perils faced by
Napoleon’s soldiers rather than extolling their leader.
33
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 171.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 95

treasures—​sensitivity, pity, aesthetic and ethical refinement—​are of little
concern to him and have no power to restrain his behavior.34 Monsieur St.
Aubert’s belief that “virtue and taste are nearly the same” seems danger-
ously naive when his daughter is confronted with someone who cares about
neither one. Montoni is drawn to war. The conversations that Montoni had
with Cavagni were “commonly on political or military topics,” writes
Radcliffe, “such as the convulsed state of their country rendered at this
time particularly interesting.” Only when talking of war was Montoni’s
spirit enlivened; his eyes flashed with a fire that “partook more of the
glare of malice than the brightness of valour.”35 Radcliffe polarizes the
responses to Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps as an expression of a broader
division between different views of history. Emily’s mode of viewing his-
tory prioritizes the experiences of ordinary people over hymns to the am-
bition of great men.36
Later in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily travels with Montoni on a
barge across the Laguna in Venice. As they approach the mouth of the river
Brenta, she looks out at the Adriatic Sea. The sun sinks into the water, her
imagination drifts, and she begins to contemplate the lands that lay beyond
the Adriatic:

She thought of Greece, and, a thousand classical remembrances stealing to

her mind, she experienced the pensive luxury which is felt on viewing the
scenes of ancient story, and on comparing their present state of silence and
solitude with that of their former grandeur and animation. The scenes of the
Iliad illapsed in glowing colours to her fancy—​scenes, once the haunt of
heroes—​now lonely, and in ruins; but which still shone, in the poet’s strain,
in all their youthful splendour.37

The passage has a familiar rhythm for Radcliffe. Characters contemplate

the beauty of a natural scene; they invoke the memory of previous literary
or artistic representations; then, the comparison between timeless nature
and human transience leads them to reflect upon the power of either time
or God. As with her other descriptions of female classical learning, the
description of Emily’s response to the scene is universalizing and general.

34
 “Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Criticism 21/​4 (1979), 322–​30.
35
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho,  171–​2.
36
 Relevant here is Milbank’s groundbreaking exploration of the theological underpinnings of
nature description in Radcliffe’s novels, her union of a “natural sublime to a sublime of virtue”
(God and the Gothic, 98).
37
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 206.

96  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Radcliffe says that Emily feels what “is felt” by people when they view
the “scenes of ancient story,” replacing a specific and culturally elite mode
of classical appreciation with the broader and more relatable experience
of seeing any antiquated ruin. Her vocabulary presents Emily’s know-
ledge of Homer less as an alienating show of learning than the product
of pure feeling: the memories “steal” into her mind as if against her will,
spontaneously recalled by the natural scenery. Although the passage os-
tensibly celebrates the living memory and “youthful splendor” of the
Iliad, Radcliffe’s vagueness (Emily experiences “a thousand classical
remembrances”) underlines the lack of anything in this passage actually
drawn from Homer. Later in Udolpho, Radcliffe quotes from Alexander
Pope’s translation of the Iliad as an epigraph to one of her chapters.38
Here the reference spurs only the most general meditation on the passing
of time.
After imagining Greece, Emily turns in her thoughts to Troy. She
composes an eighteen-​ stanza poem to “reanimate” that literary land-
scape. The verses return not to Homer but to a different postclassical
39

scene, depicting camels and caravans moving heedlessly through the de-
serted walls of the once-​great city. The poem describes a Turkish trader,
Hamet, who stops for the night inside the “proud columns of deserted
Troy” and is ambushed by a Tartar robber.40 Just as the robber is about
to strike a deadly blow with his sword, he is felled by an arrow shot by a
shepherd hiding behind Troy’s ancient “column’d gate.” The poem ends
with Hamet leaving the ruin to return home to his family, bells tinkling on
his camels:

All merry sound the camel bells, so gay,

And merry beats fond Hamet’s heart, for he,
E’er the dim evening steals upon the day,
His children, wife and happy home shall see.

There is a classical parallel for this vision of a character wandering

blithely through the ruins of once-​great Troy. In the ninth book of Lucan’s

38
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 495.
39
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho,  206–​8.
40
 The poem is typical of what Edward Said calls the “imaginative geography” of European
Orientalism, inhabited by stylized, theatrical character types: Orientalism (New York, 1978),
66, 71. The name Hamet appears in other eighteenth-​century Oriental tales, particularly John
Hawkesworth’s popular Almoran and Hamet (1761): Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in
England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1908), 89–​97.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 97

Pharsalia, Julius Caesar tours the ruins of Troy, a scene that made a deep
impression on Petrarch and other Renaissance readers.41 The place is
overgrown with brambles and barely recognizable. “Even the ruins have
perished,” laments Lucan (etiam periere ruinae, 9.969). Caesar, the im-
perious dictator, is “oblivious” (securus, 975) to the sanctity of the place,
and he has to be warned by his guide not to “trample” (calcare, 977) upon
Hector’s grave. Far from signaling piety, Caesar’s hasty vow to the ancient
spirits that he will build a new Troy through his conquests foreshadows the
ruthless militarism that will bring destruction upon Rome in civil war.42
Henry Day argues that Caesar’s irreverence toward the ruins expresses a
sinister, tyrannical sublime associated with “military conquest instead of
intellectual discovery.”43 Radcliffe’s characters also manifest little rever-
ence toward the ruins. Hamet cares only about keeping his merchandise
safe and then returning to his family. But whereas Caesar’s lack of concern
with the ruins of Troy suggests an arrogant disregard for the lessons of his-
tory, there is no trace of moral disapproval in Radcliffe’s poem. Instead,
Hamet has the marks of sensibility that typify Radcliffe’s heroes and
heroines: he prays amid the ruins, whiles away his time with music, and
cries “warm tears” of expectation because he is soon to see his family.44
Stranded in Italy and far from her beloved, Valancourt, Emily thinks of
another character’s longing for home, and wishfully imagines also being
saved by a benevolent stranger. In this case, the picturesque ruins give rise
to an identification across borders of gender and religion as well as time.
The novel’s second reference to Troy comes later in Udolpho, when the
novel’s other heroine, Blanche, discovers and investigates a tapestry in a
mysterious old castle.45 She sees the ragged fabric on the wall:

To Blanche, every object here was a matter of curiosity; and, taking the light
from her woman to examine the tapestry, she perceived, that it represented
scenes from the wars of Troy, though the almost colourless worsted now

41
 Lucan, Pharsalia 9.950–​86. It is hard to judge whether Radcliffe knew this passage, though
she does mention Lucan in her work of travel literature (see the next section, “Shadows of
Tacitus: Ancient and Modern Warfare in Radcliffe’s Travel Writing”). On the long tradition of
responses to this scene in European literature, see Brown, A Familiar Compound Ghost, 85–​7;
Andrew Hui, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (New York, 2016), 102–​17.
42
 Otto Zwierlein, “Lucan’s Caesar at Troy,” in Charles Tesoriero (ed.), Oxford Readings in
Classical Studies: Lucan (Oxford, 2010), 422–​30.
43
 Day, Lucan and the Sublime, 178.
44
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 207.
45
 For the tendency of the Gothic novel to imagine a world in which buildings, objects, and even
characters are “frozen or framed and inventoried” for others’ perusal, see Emily Jane Cohen,
“Museums of the Mind: The Gothic and the Art of Memory,” ELH 62/​4 (1995), 891.

98  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 mocked the glowing actions they once had painted. She laughed at the lu-
dicrous absurdity she observed, till, recollecting, that the hands, which had
wove it, were, like the poet, whose thoughts of fire they had attempted to
express, long since mouldered into dust, a train of melancholy ideas passed
over her mind, and she almost wept.46

Blanche recognizes scenes from the Trojan War. But rather than trace any
particular episodes or events, her mind swerves almost instantly to a med-
itation on the passing of time, and instead of dwelling upon the immortal
subject of the poetry, her attention is drawn to the materials of the tap-
estry and to the mortality she shares with “the poet” (presumably Homer,
although the phrasing could equally fit Virgil, who described the fall of
Troy in the second book of the Aeneid).47 Like the empty ruins of the an-
cient city, the faded tapestry is an all-​too-​apt metaphor for the effacing of
any specific details from the classical text. Radcliffe’s writing, here as so
often, is profoundly vague: imprecise in its allusions to history and (by the
adjective’s etymological connection to Latin vagus, “wandering”) eager to
follow winding paths of associated ideas. But again, the character’s mode
of viewing history has an ethical aspect. Just as Emily thought of the suf-
fering of Hannibal’s troops when she was imagining his epochal crossing
of the Alps, so Blanche turns the epic subject of “the wars of Troy” from
a celebration of ancient valor into an opportunity for sympathetic iden-
tification with others. For Stendhal and others, Radcliffe’s novels were
classic works, epic literature out of time. Close attention to their heroines’
response to classical material, though, brings to light their acts of ethical
revision. Radcliffe replaces the celebration of grand conquests and acts of
heroism with a cyclic series of repeated, personal meditations on the sub-
jective experience of individual lives—​a sublime, then, of the iterative and
the ordinary.

46
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 474.
47
 Cf. a contrasting passage in Radcliffe’s posthumously published Gaston de Blondeville (i. 139),
in which the narrator describes another tapestry depicting “the story of Troy-​town.” Here she does
fill in the scene by briefly describing the tapestry’s pictures: the burning of the city, the old age of
Priam, the grief of Hecuba.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 99

Shadows of Tacitus: Ancient and Modern Warfare
in Radcliffe’s Travel Writing

At the midpoint of the Gothic decade of the 1790s, Radcliffe published a

travel narrative describing her one and only trip abroad, A Journey Made in
the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany,
with a Return down the Rhine: To Which are Added Observations during a
Tour of the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland (1795).
For a writer who had become famous for her evocations of the landscapes
of France and Italy, it is notable that Radcliffe was able to visit neither
place. Revolutionary unrest in France made the region off limits for all
but the most intrepid English tourists in the 1790s, and something crush-
ingly ordinary—​errors in processing her travel documents—​prevented her
from visiting her dreamland of Italy. The best she could do was to gaze
at the Swiss Alps from a distance.48 Although A Journey is a varied work,
the overall mood is one of disenchantment. In a repeated narrative motif,
Radcliffe expects something attractive from a distance, only to find it
squalid or banal close up. There are isolated moments of Gothic gloom and
sublimity. Yet there are many more moments in which the exotic and mys-
terious turn out to be disappointingly routine, and Radcliffe is frustrated
by the cost, ugliness, and hostility of the people and places she encounters.
When Gilpin addressed the problem of an absence of picturesque features
in a landscape, he blamed it largely upon the traveler’s own lack of imag-
ination: “even scenes the most barren of beauty, will furnish amusement,”
he promised.49 But since Gilpin’s travel works concerned rural locations
in Britain, he never had to deal with glaring cultural difference or war, as
Radcliffe does in A Journey. Radcliffe is writing for an audience who ex-
pected to find the features they admired in her novels, and she wrestles in
moments of self-​consciousness with whether the travel writer should de-
scribe the ordinary and unattractive aspects of places she visits. An implicit
theme of the work is the impossibility of sustaining picturesque illusions
in a contemporary Europe riven by warfare. Disruptions in the peace and
security of the world around her are mirrored in Radcliffe’s modulation
between different voices in the work, moving sometimes within a single
paragraph from romantic illusion to blunt and shocking reality.50

48
 Ann Radcliffe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 . . . (London, 1795), 275–​7, 273.
49
 Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 54.
50
 On Radcliffe’s conscious violation of aesthetic frames in A Journey, see JoEllen DeLucia,
“Transnational Aesthetics in Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795),”

100  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 We also hear different voices in A Journey in a more literal sense, since
the book was written with what Radcliffe describes as the “assistance”
of her “nearest relative and friend”—​certainly her husband, William, al-
though he is never named. The exact degree of his participation is no-
toriously difficult to ascertain. In the introduction, Radcliffe modestly
acknowledges his help while also remaining evasive about how much of
the writing was his. She could have included his name on the title page,
she says, but he thought that it would misrepresent the amount he had
contributed, and she did not want to attract a distracting sort of novelty to
the work.51 Perhaps they thought that explicitly acknowledging William’s
authorship would be detrimental to his career as a journalist; or perhaps
Ann was wary that the sudden appearance of her husband’s name at the
height of her success might create the impression that he had assisted with
her novels, too. In this introduction Ann also specifies a restricted ambit
of William’s influence. “Where the oeconomical and political conditions
of countries are touched upon in the following work,” she writes, “the
remarks are less her own than elsewhere.”52 It is naturally tempting to at-
tribute the novelistic aspects of the narrative to Ann and the journalistic
ones to William, but her phrasing subtly underlines her own involvement
in the totality of the text. Even the sections on history and politics are not
entirely William’s: they are merely less her own. Radcliffe also does not
say, as she surely could have done according to the educational norms of
her era, that her husband contributed all the classical quotations in the
work. Notably, A Journey contains many more specific references to Latin
books and inscriptions than her novels, and these have been used to iden-
tify areas of William’s authorship.53 Rictor Norton uses an alleged error
in one of these references to argue for Ann’s poor grasp of the classical
learning in her own publication.54 To be clear:  here and throughout this

in Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (eds.) Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism, and the Gothic
(Cambridge, 2014), 135–​50.
51
 Radcliffe, A Journey, iv. Some degree of joint authorship is confirmed by the contract for
publication, which specifies a book written by “William Radcliffe and Ann his wife”: JoEllen
DeLucia, “Radcliffe, George Robinson and Eighteenth-​Century Print Culture: Beyond the
Circulating Library,” Women’s Writing 22/​3 (2015), 297. The order of names no doubt reflects the
formal mode of address to a married couple on a legal document.
52
 Radcliffe, A Journey, iv.
53
 In Rotterdam, for example, she looks for Latin books in a bookstore and comments on the faulty
Latin in verse inscriptions; more examples discussed later in the chapter.
54
 Norton, Mistress of Udolpho, 46, 265. According to Norton’s description of the passage in
question (Radcliffe, A Journey, 423), Ann quotes a line from the poet Lucretius, misattributes it to
the satirist Juvenal, and then adds William’s translation. But Norton himself is mistaken. Radcliffe
describes the praise of domestic leisure as a popular theme since “Juvenal’s time”; she then quotes
Lucretius’ account of the pleasure of watching a boat tossed on the sea from a position of safety

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 101

chapter my aim is not to assert definitively that Ann could read Latin,
but I do want to caution us against simply presuming that she was either
unable or uninterested in doing so. The references to classical literature
throughout A Journey are consistent with the broader themes of the work
and indeed with the concerns of her entire corpus. They prove, at the very
least, that she was interested in and aware of classical literature, and that
the elision of explicit classical references in her Gothic works was a delib-
erate generic choice.
Rather than narrowing her vision to the romanticized “antiquity” of her
fiction, in A Journey Radcliffe describes ancient monuments appearing
alongside representations of contemporary political events. Outside the
German town of Andernach, she discusses a rediscovered Roman military
road and transcribes the Latin inscription commemorating its restoration
by Karl Theodore, Elector of Cologne. She informs the reader that the
road has been reliably dated to 162, the reign of Marcus Aurelius and his
co-​emperor, Lucius Verus; it is just possible that she is silently correcting
an account of the same inscription in another contemporary travel narra-
tive, which prints 262.55 She takes note of Latin inscriptions relating to the
history of places she visits. “An hexameter inscription” commemorates
the construction of a cathedral; a Latin inscription memorializes the death
of a monk.56 From Joseph Warton she borrows a quirky anecdote about
the first Roman to eat a stork.57 She relates all sorts of Latin etymologies
for German places: Mainz, from the Roman name Magontiacum; Bonn,
supposedly from the Latin word for “good” (bonus); Drusithor, the town
gate at Bingen, from a mixed Latin and German etymology (Drusi + Tor,
“Drusus’ gate”), from the conquests of the Roman general Nero Claudius
Drusus; Bacharach, allegedly from the Latin Bacchi ara, the “altar of
Bacchus.”58 Rarely, if ever, do quotations from Latin literature aim to en-
hance the aesthetic appreciation of a particular landscape, as they would in
the elite mode of Grand Tour narrative popularized earlier in the century

(De rerum natura 2.1); and her last lines are simply a quotation from James Thomson’s “Winter”
(lines 426–​8, 430–​1). The order of the passage is admittedly jarring, since “Juvenal’s time” was
after that of Lucretius, but this is nonetheless a series of allusions to three different authors and not,
as Norton assumes, a garbled reference to one.
55
 Charles Este, A Journey in the Year 1793, through Flanders, Brabant and Germany, to
Switzerland (London, 1795), 223; for modern critiques of Este’s work, see Katherine Turner,
British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–​1800: Authorship, Gender, and National Identity
(Aldershot, UK, 2001), 204.
56
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 110, 307.
57
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 21; Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, ii. 305–​6.
58
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 224, 223, 290, 297.

102  |  Spectres of Antiquity

by Joseph Addison. Rather, Latin is used to record aspects of public life,
typically politics and war. The longest block of Latin in the work, and the
only one accompanied by an English translation, is a transcription of the
epitaph on the tomb of William of Orange in Delft in Holland, celebrating
his heroism as a leader who preferred his country’s welfare “to that of him-
self and his family.”59
If Radcliffe is attentive in A Journey to classical memories underlying
modern life in a manner unlike her Gothic romances, she also creates
moments in which ancient and modern coalesce, particularly when she is
describing warfare. Entering the town of Andernach on the Rhine, she says
that it was occupied at the time by soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire,
engaged in a campaign against the French First Republic during the War
of the First Coalition (1792–​7). “As we entered the gorge of the rocky
pass,” she writes, “it was curious to observe the appearances of modern
mixed with those of ancient warfare; the soldiers of Francis the Second
lying at the foot of the tower of Drusus; their artillery and baggage wagons
lining the shore along the whole extent of the walls.”60 As Angela Wright
observes, by giving the date of travel in her title and describing her des-
tination as the German “frontier,” Radcliffe acknowledges the turmoil in
Europe from the outset as the unavoidable backdrop to her trip.61 As she
moves through Holland and Germany, she describes her strong ambivalent
responses to the signs of war, describing her “horror” in hearing soldiers’
songs and realizing that they soon might die, or the impossibility of seeing
the army en masse “without many reflections on human nature and human
mystery.”62 Radcliffe avoids partisanship; she also shows sympathy for
wounded French soldiers, identified by the fasces on their buttons, who
were “chiefly boys” and “livid with sickness.”63
The long legacy of warfare in the landscape is expressed also through a
series of quotations of the Roman historian Tacitus, an author who enjoyed
particular prominence in eighteenth-​century England both for his acerbic
critiques of political corruption and for his picture of the rugged freedom
of the Germans in the Germania, a work that was useful in constructing

59
 Radcliffe, A Journey,  24–​5
60
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 322.
61
 “Inspiration, Toleration, and Relocation in Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of
1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795),” in Christoph Bode and
Jacqueline M. Labbe (eds.), Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place (London, 2010), 133.
62
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 257, 270.
63
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 135.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 103

England’s political myth of “Gothic” origins.64 Radcliffe makes incidental
reference to Tacitus in Udolpho, but quotes his Latin three times in A
Journey.65 The first quotation occurs when Radcliffe describes her visit
to the German town of Neuss, near Düsseldorf on the Rhine. Initial hopes
that the town might afford comfortable lodging and attractive vestiges of
“ancient and modern history” give way to descriptions of squalor and un-
happiness. “On each side of the gate, cannon balls of various sizes remain
in the walls,” she writes; “at the door of every house, an haggard group
of men and women stare upon you with looks of hungry rage, rather than
curiosity, and their gaunt figures excite, at first, more fear than pity.”66
Then Radcliffe does pity the inhabitants of Neuss. She relates the de-
struction of the city in 1586 during the Cologne War, when the Protestant
city fell to the Catholic army after twelve months’ siege. Although Neuss
had surrendered, troops razed it to the ground and slaughtered all but
a small number of women and children. This “dreadful calamity,” says
Radcliffe, provokes “surprise, indignation, and pity” to this day.67 In the
middle of the Neuss section is a single sentence that reaches further back
in time, including untranslated Latin quotations from Tacitus’ Histories
(c. 106–​110 CE):

This is the Novesium of Tacitus, the entrance of the thirteenth legion into
which he relates, at a time when the Rhine, incognita illi caelo siccitate
[through a drought unprecedented in that climate], became vix navium
patiens [scarcely able to carry boats], and which VOCULA was soon after
compelled to surrender by the treachery of other leaders and the corrup-
tion of his army, whom he addressed, just before his murder, in the fine
speech, beginning, “Numquam apud vos verba feci, aut pro vobis solicitior,
aut pro me securior” [“Never have I addressed you with more concern for
your sake, and less concern for my own sake”]; a passage so near to the
cunctisque timentem, securumque sui [fearful for all, unconcerned for him-
self], by which LUCAN describes CATO, that it must be supposed to have
been inspired by it.68

64
 Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 113–​16; and see the Introduction to this book on
England’s Gothic origins.
65
 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 572: an aristocratic Count whiles away the hours with “a
volume of Tacitus” while attempting to discover whether a castle’s room is haunted.
66
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 96–​7; on this passage, see also DeLucia, “Transnational Aesthetics,”
139–​40.
67
 Radcliffe, A Journey,  98–​9.
68
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 97–​8. The quotations are from Tacitus, Histories 4.26 and 4.58; Lucan,
Pharsalia 2.240–​1.

104  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Tacitus is here describing an incident in the revolt in 69–​70 CE of the
German tribe the Batavi, former allies of the Romans. When Rome
launched an attack to quell the rebellion, there was dissension among the
troops because of a lack of supplies and because of widespread hunger.69
Tacitus records a speech by the general Dillius Vocula attempting to re-
mind deserters of the glory of self-​sacrifice and to shame them into fighting
again on behalf of Rome. Radcliffe compares this speech of Vocula to
Lucan’s description of the Stoic hero Cato the Younger in the Pharsalia.
Just as Cato’s virtue will prove impotent in calming the violence of civil
war in Lucan’s poem, so Vocula’s speech fails to inspire his troops. As
Radcliffe says, he is almost instantly murdered by one of the deserters, a
grim end that recalls Tacitus’ depiction of civil war in the city of Rome
during those same years.70
In juxtaposing the descriptions of warfare in different eras in the town,
Radcliffe depicts a continuity of human suffering across time. Many details
in the passage of Tacitus fit the despairing description of modern Neuss.
The hunger of the ancient troops mirrors the townspeople staring with
“hungry rage” at the visitors; the low waters of the Rhine in Radcliffe’s
day matches the drought in antiquity;71 and the buffeting of the town by
war is presented as a constant part of its history, from antiquity to the pre-
sent day. Pain abides. On the other hand, the praise of Vocula’s heroism
and his “fine speech” spurring soldiers on to war sits very oddly with the
sympathy expressed elsewhere in the chapter for the suffering endured by
ordinary people as a result of such conflicts.72 Amid a description of a land-
scape bearing the scars of war in various eras, the passages from Tacitus
and Lucan extol the valor of generals who urged soldiers to keep fighting.
Elsewhere Radcliffe does not extol military leaders. She even says that
the soldiers were probably “forced” into participating in the destruction

69
 Cf. Tacitus, Histories 4.35: Nihil aeque exercitus nostros quam egestas copiarum
fatigabat . . . fremebant, non se ultra famem, insidias legatorum toleraturos (“Nothing wearied our
army as much as the lack of provisions  . . .  they grumbled that they would no longer put up with
their hunger or the plotting of the generals”).
70
 Vocula’s death: Tacitus, Histories 4.59. On this passage, see Rhiannon Ash, “Fighting
Talk: Dillius Vocula’s Last Stand (Tacitus, Histories 4.58),” in Dennis Pausch (ed.), Stimmen der
Geschichte: Funktionen von Reden in der antiken Historiographie (Berlin: 2010), 230: Vocula’s
rhetoric “fails with shocking results . . . Should we therefore respond to Vocula’s speech as Tacitus’
own nihilistic expression of aporia in the self-​destructive context of civil war? In part, the answer
is yes.”
71
 Cf. Radcliffe, A Journey, 99: the shores of the Rhine “were yet low and the water tame and
shallow. There were no vessels upon it.”
72
 On Radcliffe’s desire for sympathy with the people she encounters in A Journey, see Wright,
“Inspiration, Toleration, and Relocation.”

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 105

of Neuss in 1586, and were therefore less culpable than the generals who
willingly led the massacre. There seems, in short, to be two voices in the
chapter. It may be that we are overhearing a conversation in this part of the
text between William and Ann, and yet the ideological tension between
commemorating heroic figures and sympathizing with the casualties of
their wars is also an overarching theme of the work as a whole.
There are two other untranslated quotations from Tacitus in A Journey.
The first comes when Radcliffe and her husband are traveling down the
Rhine toward an area famous in antiquity for the Battle of Teutoburg Forest,
a disastrous military defeat for the Romans. In Tacitus’ Annals, the histo-
rian described the return of a Roman army to Germany six years later to
avenge the defeat. When they saw the site of the battle, they were met with
a gruesome sight. Tacitus’ description of it has recently been described
as “among the most vivid and macabre scenes in Latin literature.”73
The soldiers discovered, to their horror, that the forest was still strewn
with broken pieces of weapons, the limbs of horses, and the decapitated
heads of their comrades attached to tree trunks.74 When Radcliffe and her
husband approach this very site, she quotes a line from the account of
Tacitus (“not far from Teutoburg forest, where the remains of Varus and
his legions were said to lie unburied,” haud procul Teutoburgensi saltu,
in quo reliquiae Vari legionumque insepultae dicebantur, Annales 1.60),
and then also quotes some somber words of Dryden, also commemorating
an ancient military defeat (“unburied remain,/​inglorious on the plain”).75
These memories sit incongruously with the pleasure Radcliffe receives as
a modern traveler from seeing the “woody heights of Cleves,” which break
the “flat monotony of the Eastern shore.” But this incongruity is surely
deliberate. The effect is subtle, because it depends on the reader’s ability
to read and remember the context of the Latin quotation, but it is sim-
ilar to other deliberate disjunctions in A Journey, when Radcliffe startles
the reader by juxtaposing picturesque scenes of nature with “the shock
generated by war.”76
Finally, toward the end of the work, Radcliffe cites one of Tacitus’
aphorisms to describe the effect of war on a society’s morals. In Tacitus’
ethnographical work about Germany (the Germania), he had described

73
 Kelly E. Shannon-​Henderson, Religion and Memory in Tacitus’ Annals (Oxford, 2019), 83.
74
 Tacitus, Annales 1.61.
75
 Annales 1.60; John Dryden, “Alexander’s Feast,” lines 139–​40 (The Works of John Dryden, ed.
Edward Niles Hooler, H. T. Swedenburg, Vinton A. Dearing, et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley, 1956–​2000),
ii. 7).
76
 DeLucia, “Transnational Aesthetics,” 141.

106  |  Spectres of Antiquity

a people called the Cherusci, who were bordered by two more warlike
ethnic groups on either side. Given the belligerence of their neighbors, he
cynically describes the naiveté of their desire for peace: “where life is led
by force, ‘moderate’ and ‘honorable’ are titles for whoever is stronger.”77
Radcliffe cites the line in Latin while reflecting on the way in which the
experience of war distorts a culture’s moral sense, leading it to extol vio-
lence under the specious name of courage. “These are all testimonies, that
among the many evils, inflicted upon countries by war, that, which is not
commonly thought of, is not the least; the public encouragement of a dis-
position to violence, under the names of gallantry, or valour, which will not
cease exactly when it is publicly prohibited.”78 All three quotations from
Tacitus are specifically about war. The insertion of the classical passages
within Radcliffe’s narrative, far from representing some sort of genteel
literary decoration, helps to trace the legacies of warfare in the places she
visits. These shards of untranslated Latin in her English text reflect pieces
of history that cannot be assimilated into a harmonious picturesque.
After recounting her European adventure, Radcliffe adds to the end of
A Journey a much more leisurely series of visits to the Lake District in
England. Having described her disillusionment with the realities of her
wartime travel in Europe, finally she teaches her readers to find enchant-
ment at home. The climactic account of the “lonely grandeur” and “dark-
ness” of Furness Abbey in Cumbria, for example, relocates the enticing
mystery of her Gothic writings from distant locations in Europe back to
the homely space of England, offering a moody gloom safely removed
from the ongoing suffering of war on the continent.79 There is mention
of the Roman army in these sections. But divorced from a contemporary
context of warfare, the forts, roads, and funeral urns that litter the English
landscape do not, as in Holland and Germany, mark a history of vio-
lence that perseveres distressingly into the present; they are aestheticized
remnants of an era securely in the past. Roman expansionism now seems
more grand, less cruel.80 The celebration of the pleasures of home at the
conclusion of A Journey might suggest that Radcliffe is endorsing a psy-
chic seclusion from contemporary concerns. But that is not the case.
Although her Gothic heroines do not face the horrors of war, they are

77
 Tacitus, Germania 36.1: Ubi manu agitur, modestia et probitas nomina superioris sunt.
78
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 434.
79
 Radcliffe, A Journey, 485–​96; on this passage, see Townshend, Gothic Antiquity,  175–​7.
80
 Cf. Radcliffe, A Journey, 440, describing the road from Penrith to Keswick: “On the now lonely
plains of this vast amphitheatre the Romans had two camps, and their Eagle spread its wings over a
scene worthy of its own soarings.”

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 107

forced time and again into traumatic and violent situations, imprisoned by
similar iterations of tyrannical power. Just as Radcliffe draws connections
between suffering in different eras in her travel narrative, so she urges her
reader’s sympathy for her characters’ suffering, and traces connections
between the oppressive power of her villains and the oppressive power of
broader social structures. In Radcliffe’s writing, patriarchal power seems
to migrate from place to place and era to era with sinister sameness.

Writing over Ruins: The Italian

After her travel narrative, Ann Radcliffe published one more novel during
her lifetime. It is still a matter of conjecture why she refrained from pub-
lishing in the last half of her life (she died in 1823), and her early retire-
ment gave rise to wild speculation about madness, illness, and death—​all
quashed posthumously by William, who insisted merely on her preference
for domesticity over literary celebrity. The Italian (1796–​7) took her imag-
inatively to places that she was not able to visit on her journey of 1794.81
Of all Radcliffe’s novels, this is the one most conspicuously set on classic
ground: characters move between Rome, Apulia, and Naples, an area that
had become silted with layers of allusion to Latin authors and the later
writers who traced their paths. Once we have returned from travel narra-
tive to Gothic novel, though, these landscapes are conspicuously shorn of
the classical references that had become almost obligatory in eighteenth-​
century literature. We hear of Mount Vesuvius smoking gloomily, for ex-
ample, but without any allusion to the famous letter of Pliny the Younger
that described its eruption.82 Characters move through the dense oak forests
of Mount Garganus made famous by the Roman poet Horace, without any
reference to the text that immortalized those forests for other eighteenth-​
century writers.83 The novel describes the plight of Ellena di Rosalba and
her relationship with the noble Vincentio di Vivaldi. At the instigation of
Vivaldi’s mother, who is outraged at the inappropriate match between her

81
 The first edition gives 1797 as the publication date, but from periodical notices the novel seems
to have been published in late 1796: see Miles’s note at Radcliffe, The Italian; or, the Confessional
of the Black Penitents, ed. Robert Miles (London, 2000), xxxvii.
82
 Pliny, Epistles 6.16. On the letter’s canonical position in eighteenth-​century accounts of Naples,
see Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–​1830: Classic Ground (Basingstoke, UK,
2013),  88–​9.
83
 That is, Horace, Odes 2.9; cf. the allusions to this poem in the description of Garganus by Henry
Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies in the Years 1777, 1778, 1779 and 1780, 2 vols. (London,
1783/​5), i.183; and Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed.
David Womersley, 3 vols. (London, 1994), ii. 745.

108  |  Spectres of Antiquity

son and the poor Ellena, the wicked monk Schedoni has Ellena imprisoned
in a convent and Vivaldi arrested by the Inquisition. If The Italian mostly
eschews classical allusions in describing its famous settings, it nonetheless
accords a more active role to its characters in not only appreciating but
actively creating and defining the aesthetic world around them. Ellena her-
self is an artist, and Vivaldi reflexively describes the novel’s landscapes as
works of art. This aesthetic vision also has an ethical aspect. Throughout
the novel, the characters draw links—​admittedly very impressionistic
and ahistorical links—​between the memory of ancient Rome and what
Radcliffe sees as the oppression of religious and political institutions in
modern Europe.
When Vivaldi sees Ellena for the first time in Naples, he little suspects
that “some copies from the antique, which ornamented a cabinet of the
Vivaldi palace, were drawn by her hand.”84 When he visits her home, he
sees her work:

A drawing, half-​finished, of a dancing nymph remained on a stand, and he

immediately understood that her hand had traced the lines. It was a copy
from Herculaneum, and though a copy, was touched with the spirit of orig-
inal genius. The light steps appeared almost to move, and the whole figure
displayed the airy lightness of exquisite grace. Vivaldi perceived this to be
one of a set that ornamented the apartment, and observed with surprise, that
they were the particular subjects, which adorned his father’s cabinet, and
which he had understood to be the only copies permitted from the originals
in the Royal Museum.85

In the half-​century since Horace Walpole had visited Herculaneum on his

Grand Tour, the fame of the site had increased, and the fashion for dec-
orative art based on its wall paintings had spread throughout Europe and
Britain.86 As Radcliffe suggests in her reference to “permitted” copies,
the transmission of information and images of these paintings was strictly
controlled by the court of Charles of Bourbon. All finds were regarded

84
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 13. Hannah Moss’s ongoing research at the University of Sheffield
convincingly places Radcliffe’s depiction of Ellena within a broader context of Romantic-​era
imitations of classical art, a branch of artistic production more open to women’s involvement.
85
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 31.
86
 Nancy H. Ramage surveys the influence of objects and paintings from Pompeii and
Herculaneum on domestic art and decoration in the late eighteenth century: “Flying Maenads and
Cupids: Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Eighteenth-​Century Decorative Arts,” in Carol C. Mattusch
(ed.), Rediscovering the Ancient World on the Bay of Naples, 1710–​1890 (Washington, DC, 2013),
161–​76.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 109

as the property of the king, and were kept at the Museo Ercolanese, and
later at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. Early visitors were
not allowed to make their own drawings or sketches of the art. Ellena,
the only one of Radcliffe’s Gothic heroines who supports herself finan-
cially, must therefore have enjoyed special permission from the court.87
Later, wider knowledge of the finds began to circulate, albeit still under
restrictions set by the Court. From 1757 to 1792, the Royal Press of Naples
issued the lavishly produced eight-​volume series entitled “The Antiquities
of Herculaneum Exhibited” (Le antichità di Ercolano esposte), in which
descriptions of the finds were accompanied by lengthy footnotes and intri-
cate, detailed engravings. At first, these volumes were exceedingly difficult
to obtain;88 then pirated and translated copies circulated throughout the
later eighteenth century, forming the basis for the innumerable imitations
of Herculaneum art in cabinets and drawing rooms across England and
Europe. By Radcliffe’s time, there was widespread familiarity with images
from the site, but her novel’s dramatic date of 1758 recreates a period in
which mystery attached to this fiercely guarded art.
The image of the “dancing nymph” is also deliberately chosen. Images
of dancing women were the most famous and recognizable images from
the Herculaneum wall paintings in Radcliffe’s age. Another early visitor
to Herculaneum, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann,
singled out the paintings of “female dancers and centaurs” as the most
beautiful paintings at the site in his Sendschreiben von den herculanischen
Entdeckungen (“Letter on the Herculaneum Discoveries,” 1762).89
A  series of engraved plates in the first, unauthorized English transla-
tion of Le antichità reproduced images of dancing female figures from
the Herculaneum wall paintings.90 Josiah Wedgwood was among the
subscribers to this publication, although he and Thomas Bentley had al-
ready managed to get access to the original Italian; in 1772 Bentley wrote

87
 Ramage, “Flying Maenads and Cupids,” 163–​5; Andrew Wallace-​Hadrill, Herculaneum: Past
and Future (London, 2011), 48–​57. On Ellena’s financial and aesthetic independence, see Ada
Sharpe, “Orphan, Embroiderer, Insect, Queen: The ‘Elegant and Ingenious’ Art of Being Ellena in
The Italian (1796),” European Romantic Review 23/​2 (2012), 123–​40.
88
 Horace Walpole heard about the publication of these books in 1757, and letters to his friend Sir
Horace Mann over the next decade show his desperation to get hold of them. In 1767, Mann finally
secured him a place on the royal list and a guarantee that he would receive the volumes as they
were published, but he asked Walpole to keep his source a secret, for fear of arousing jealousy in
others (Correspondence, xxii. 547).
89
 Letter and Report on the Discoveries at Herculaneum, trans. Carol C. Mattusch (Los Angeles,
2011), 83.
90
 Thomas Martyn and John Lettice, The Antiquities of Herculaneum; Translated from the Italian
(London, 1773), 77–​94.

110  |  Spectres of Antiquity

a periodical piece praising the images of the “dancing Nymphs” in the
Naples publication.91 These images formed the basis for Wedgwood’s own
works, and “Herculaneum dancing nymph” appears in the Wedgwood cat-
alog as an available design for a “chimney-​piece” ornament.92 Just as with
the busts of ancient poets in Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe has drawn
influence from the antique art designs of her uncle’s firm. All of these
surviving images of dancers from Herculaneum are markedly erotic. Many
of the plates in the English translation of Le antichità depict them in var-
ious states of undress or in transparent clothing, and the footnotes debate
how accurately this represents real conventions in antiquity. Although the
“Herculaneum Dancers” are fully clothed, they too were thought to em-
body an erotic charm. From her reading of travel narratives, Radcliffe was
no doubt aware of Emma Hamilton, wife of diplomat and archaeological
enthusiast Sir William Hamilton, who gained notoriety in the 1780s and
1790s for her reenactment of ancient paintings and sculptures, and was par-
ticularly famous for her performance of the Herculaneum Dancers. Horace
Walpole derogatively called her Hamilton’s “pantomime mistress—​ or
wife, who acts all the antique statues in an Indian shawl.”93
To an audience familiar with the imagery of dancing nymphs from
Herculaneum, their eroticism hints at possible danger for the innocent
Ellena and presages her victimization later in the novel. The narrator
explicitly describes Ellena as a reembodiment of the charms of ancient
nymphs, much as travelers described Emma Hamilton as an embodiment
of the Herculaneum dancers. Ellena’s features were “of the Grecian out-
line.” Describing the bewitching effect of her appearance on Vivaldi, the
narrator says that “the light drapery of her dress, her whole figure, air, and
attitude, were such as might have been copied for a Grecian nymph.”94
Ellena’s peril in The Italian will arise precisely from others’ projection of
eroticism on to her. Although she responds with almost obsessive concern
for propriety when Vivaldi courts her and offers marriage, other characters

91
 “The draperies of the dancing, or aerial, Nymphs, are wonderfully light and flowing, so that
one sees them suspended in the air almost without any idea of their gravity. The attitudes of some
of them are extremely elegant, and their motions apparently smooth and graceful”: review of Le
Pitture antiche d’Ercolano e Contorni incise con qualche spiegazione, Monthly Review, or, Literary
Journal 46 (June 1772), 631. The suspicion that the figures are flying, not dancing, is now shared
by scholars: Ramage, “Flying Maenads and Cupids,” 167.
92
 Anonymous, A Catalogue of Cameos, 36.
93
 Correspondence, xi. 337–​8. Goethe was more flattering when he saw “Hamilton’s poses”:Italian
Journey: 1786–​1788, trans. and ed. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London, 1962; repr. 1992),
315–​16.
94
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 10, 16.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 111

mistake her as a lower-​class woman seducing the young noble in order to
marry advantageously, and as a result Vivaldi’s mother sets in motion the
plan to kidnap and, later, murder her in order to preserve their family’s
aristocratic prestige. The susceptibility of nymphs to rape or abduction in
classical myth also foreshadows Ellena’s own imminent abduction in the
novel. The allusions to ancient art at the beginning of The Italian thus do
more than cast a romantic air of mystery around the Neapolitan settings,
or demonstrate Ellena’s independence as an artist. Instead, the image of
Ellena as the Herculaneum nymph sets the pattern for the misplaced erot-
icism that will threaten to entrap and destroy her throughout the novel.
Radcliffe’s male hero, Vivaldi, is also strongly connected to a remnant
from Ancient Rome, and one that also is aestheticized as a contempo-
rary work of art. Much of the early part of The Italian is set in or near
the fortress of Paluzzi, the ruins of a Roman fort in Naples.95 Radcliffe
stages a series of elaborate chase scenes between Vivaldi and a fleet-​footed
monk through the arches, columns, and passageways of this ancient struc-
ture, whose dimensions seem more and more expansive and fanciful as
the novel progresses. The narrator returns repeatedly to this structure,
which dominates the first part of the novel. When The Italian was adapted
into an opera in 1811, the opera was even titled “The Ruins of Paluzzi.”96
Very little of this Roman ruin, however, actually seems Roman. It offers
shadows, gloom, and endless rooms and tunnels, but is drained of any in-
terest as a site of history in itself. Indeed, when Vivaldi attempts to make
Schedoni confess that he was the mysterious monk in the fort, he describes
Paluzzi in deliberately generic terms, as a typical, picturesque ruin:

“That arch,” resumed Vivaldi, his eye still fixed on Schedoni, “that arch
suspended between two rocks, the one overtopped by the towers of the for-
tress, the other shadowed with pine and broad oak, has a fine effect. But a
picture of it would want human figures. Now either the grotesque shapes of
banditti lurking within the ruin, as if ready to start upon the traveller, or a
friar rolled up in his black garments, just stealing forth from under the shade
of the arch, and looking like some supernatural messenger of evil, would
finish the piece.”97

95
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 23: “Roman fort”; also at 27: “The citadel, a round tower of majestic
strength, with some Roman arches scattered near, was all that remained of this once important
fortress.”
96
 That is, Die Ruinen von Paluzzi by Andreas Romberg. The name Paluzzi, like the name Altieri
given to Ellena’s family villa, refers to a powerful family in the ecclesiastical politics of early
modern Rome, but the fort itself is a fiction.
97
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 60.

112  |  Spectres of Antiquity

As editors note, Radcliffe is here evoking the style of the seventeenth-​
century painter Salvator Rosa, whose landscapes juxtaposed fragmented
Roman ruins with savage, gloomy natural settings. Rosa’s rejection of
idealized classicism was grounded in his disdain for the corruption of
contemporary Rome and his somber, Stoic commitment to the transient
nature of all things. When eighteenth-​century Gothic writers invoked his
paintings, however, this specific challenge to the authority of the classical
was lost, and his preference for horror and wildness over clarity and calm
made him merely a convenient symbol for a broader turn in English aes-
thetics. The grand ghosts of classical antiquity became merely ghosts.98
When Vivaldi’s describes the ruins of Paluzzi as a Rosa-​esque land-
scape in The Italian, Radcliffe offers another demonstration of the Gothic
effacement of classical detail. The “well-​known” arch is represented as a
painting and begins to look like any picturesque ruin, an imprecision strik-
ingly different from the detailed descriptions of Roman military structures
in A Journey.99 Yet the ruins of Paluzzi do exercise a sway over the narra-
tive of The Italian, embodying a powerful force of their own. The tunnels
in the first part of the novel are mirrored in Radcliffe’s representation of
the prisons of the Inquisition later in the text. Both are labyrinthine un-
derground structures, networks of rooms with unexpected entrances and
exits, which symbolize the sway of patriarchal power over the individual.
Radcliffe even describes a “keep or dungeon” in Paluzzi, even though it
is a highly implausible architectural detail in an actual Roman fort. In
the Gothic text, the classical ruins become, as Diego Saglia puts it, both
“symbols and agents of repression.”100 By a somewhat fanciful historical
continuity, the shadowy fort links the power of ancient Rome to the op-
pressive theological authority of modern Italy.
Roman power surfaces again as a symbol for premodern tyranny later in
the text. When Vivaldi has rescued Ellena from the abbey of La Pietà, they
approach the town of Celano in the center of Italy and see the Fucine Lake.
In 52 CE, the Roman emperor Claudius began a grueling, expensive project

98
 On Rosa and classical culture, see Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New
Haven, 1995), esp. at 97–​8, 169. On the history of his legacy as an icon of Romantic aesthetics,
see Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-​Century England: A Study
Chiefly on the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, 1700–​1800
(New York, 1925).
99
 Cf., e.g., Radcliffe’s description in A Journey, 486, of a courtyard that was “supposed to have
been included within the limits of a castellum [fort], built by Agricola, of the fosse of which there
are still some faint vestiges.”
100
 “Looking at the Other: Cultural Difference and the Traveller’s Gaze in The Italian,” Studies in
the Novel 28/​1 (1996), 17.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 113

to drain part of this lake. He led an effort to dig a five-​and-​a-​half-​kilometer
tunnel through Mount Salviano, a project now recognized as “the greatest
tunnel executed in the ancient world.”101 This extraordinary undertaking,
which allegedly involved thirty thousand workers (presumably imprisoned
or enslaved), took eleven years to complete. It was celebrated at its conclu-
sion with a massive staged naval battle on the lake. In his chapter on the
affair in the Annals, Tacitus describes the extravagant nature of Claudius’
marine battle—​he claims that nineteen thousand prisoners were forced to
fight in the event—​but his anger is directed instead at the mismanagement
of the drainage effort. According to him, Claudius’ engineers bungled the
tunnel’s construction, and when the sluices were raised at the opening cer-
emony, the waters overflowed and flooded the banqueting dignitaries at
the event.102 When Vivaldi sees the Fucine Lake in The Italian, he says
nothing about the project’s scope or its practical failures (merely that it
was “arduous”). Instead, the memory of Claudius’ naval battle becomes
yet another symbol for tyrannical power and excess:

“And to such a scene as this,” said Vivaldi, “a Roman Emperor came, only
for the purpose of witnessing the most barbarous exhibition! to indulge the
most savage delights! Here, Claudius celebrated the accomplishment of his
arduous work, an aqueduct to carry the overflowing waters of the Celano
to Rome, by a naval fight, in which hundreds of wretched slaves perished
for his amusement! Its pure and polished surface was stained with human
blood, and roughened by the plunging bodies of the slain, while the gilded
gallies of the Emperor floated gaily around, and these beautiful shores were
made to echo with applauding yells, worthy of the furies!”

Vivaldi lyrically condemns the cruelty of the spectacle—​ though his

“hundreds of wretched slaves” drastically underestimates its probable
casualties—​and expresses shock at the incongruity between the beauty of
the place and the violence of its history. His response is akin to Emily’s re-
sponse to the deaths of Hannibal’s soldiers crossing the Alps in Udolpho,
or Radcliffe’s pity for victims of the massacre at Neuss in A Journey. A po-
tential instance of heroic achievement is transformed into an opportunity
for expressing pity for the innocent victims of war or political ambition.

101
 Klaus Grewe, “Tunnels and Canals,” in John Peter Oleson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (Oxford, 2008), 326–​7. The lake was
completely drained in 1878.
102
 Tacitus, Annales 12.56–​7. Josiah Osgood, Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early
Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2011), 188–​9) examines ancient attacks on the drainage project.

114  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Soon afterward, Vivaldi is captured by the Inquisition. He meditates in
very similar terms about the human capacity for tyranny: “Can man, who
calls himself endowed with reason, and immeasurably superior to every
other created being, argue himself into the commission of such horrible
folly, such inveterate cruelty?”103 Antiquity’s political tyranny inheres in
the landscape, ready to be reanimated by its modern sons.
Like Walpole, Radcliffe imagines the ruins of the past as an unearthly
force of giant size, half buried and yet still exerting power over contem-
porary minds. When Vivaldi is being led by his captors through Rome, he
meditates briefly on the lingering power of classical ruins:

At intervals, indeed, the moon, as the clouds passed away, shewed, for a
moment, some of those mighty monuments of Rome’s eternal name, those
sacred ruins, those gigantic skeletons, which once enclosed a soul, whose
energies governed a world! Even Vivaldi could not behold with indifference
the grandeur of those reliques, as the rays fell upon the hoary walls and
columns, or pass among those scenes of ancient story, without feeing a mel-
ancholy awe, a sacred enthusiasm, that withdrew him from himself. But the
illusion was transient; his own misfortunes pressed too heavily upon him to
be long unfelt, and his enthusiasm vanished like the moonlight.104

Radcliffe, in verses (presumably by her) opening the third volume of the

novel, similarly describes the ruins of an ancient castle as the “giant-​
spectre of departed power.”105 The image of antiquity as giant skeletons
and spectres links Radcliffe to the oversized helmet that inaugurated the
Gothic genre in the opening of The Castle of Otranto—​an image that was
already, as we saw in the introduction to this book, a version of the helmet
that crushes Dryden as he attempts to fight Virgil in Swift’s imagined con-
frontation between ancient and modern. Yet Radcliffe combats that power
by emphasizing more than ever the emptiness of these skeletal traces of
antiquity.
In Radcliffe’s influential vision of the Gothic, Rome’s ruins have faded
largely from view, and the concerns of a more recent age have been built
over their layers. Her works imagine modernity itself as a world in ruins—​
every wall is crumbling, every building is decayed, every church or mon-
astery is “ancient”—​and as a result, the ruins of a genuinely ancient world

103
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 229.
104
 Radcliffe, The Italian,  226–​7.
105
 Radcliffe, The Italian, 301.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 115

underneath become mostly invisible. Radcliffe’s novels were frequently
praised for an elegance that approximated the “classical,” and Stendhal
could recommend her novels to his cousin Gaetan among character-​
building epics from antiquity by Homer and Lucan. But the allusions to
antiquity in these novels are typically open ended and illusionistic—​a mere
“classical effect”—​and an interest in the particularities of ancient Empires
is a character trait of Radcliffe’s villains, not her heroines. In The Italian
as in her other novels, the Gothic becomes a mode of historical kenosis, an
emptying out of older periods in order to create an aura of romantic mys-
tery and antiquity around a more recent era of time. So it is with Vivaldi
as he moves through Rome. He sees the giant skeletons of Roman power.
They impress him with their grandeur, and inspire a brief vision of what
once was. But the “illusion was transient”; his interest passes distractedly
back to his own situation; and the flickering power of antiquity vanishes in
his mind, like the moon passing behind a cloud.

Awful Words: Classics and the Conservative Backlash

By the end of the 1790s, the fashion for Gothic novels had begun to arouse
the ire of conservative commentators. Periodical writers lamented the
sudden proliferation of sensationalistic works of fiction, which stirred
the imagination of readers—​ many of them women—​ without offering
any moral instruction or guidance. These Gothic novels had also begun
to be extremely repetitive. Satirists offered recipes for concocting new
“terrorist fictions,” as they called them. “Take an old castle, half of it ru-
inous,” wrote one anonymous wit, “a long gallery with a great many doors,
some secret ones; three murdered bodies, quite fresh; as many skeletons,
in chests and presses.” PROBATUM EST are the article’s last words (“it
is proven”): the pompous Latin tag implicitly distinguishes the knowing
reader of this satire from the unlearned enthusiast of Gothic texts.106 The
label “terrorist fiction” also made a political point. Since the explosion of
interest in Gothic fiction coincided with reports of the Reign of Terror in
revolutionary France, alarm grew among conservatives that young Britons
were imbibing dangerously liberatory ideas. This fiction encouraged them
to loosen their sense of restraint and experience delight through fear and
terror, a mindset that seemed dangerously close to the irrational passions

 Anonymous, “Terrorist Novel Writing,” The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 (London,
106

1798), 225. On this spate of anti-​Gothic satires, see Angela Wright, Gothic Fiction (Basingstoke,
UK, 2007), 17–​26.

116  |  Spectres of Antiquity

that were running riot on the continent. “So prone are we to imitation,”
wrote the author of another satirical essay, “that we have exactly and faith-
fully copied the SYSTEM OF TERROR, if not in our streets, and in our
fields, at least in our circulating libraries, and in our closets.”107
This satirical essay, entitled “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing,”
ends by combining as many clichés as possible into an imaginary Gothic
narrative.108 The author describes a dark castle, a heroine, and a faithful
maid (“Matilda, Gloriana, Rosalba, or any other name”). An old tapestry
moves mysteriously in the night. The “owls and bats are hooting and
flitting.” The intrepid heroine investigates. With “cautious tread, and glim-
mering taper,” she slowly approaches the horrid mystery of the moving
tapestry. It moves again! Nervously, tentatively, she extends her hand. She
lifts the tapestry, only to find underneath it the “tremendous solution of all
her difficulties, the awful word”:

HONORIFICABILITATUDINIBUSQUE!!!109

Awful—​and Latin. The anonymous author has added “-​que” (“and”) to

this lexical monstrosity, further enlarging a word that Samuel Johnson
had already described as the longest one known.110 The comically elon-
gated Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus (approximately “by the
states of being able to produce honor”) epitomized pretentiousness for
centuries. Erasmus cited it in the Adages when mocking a prig’s fond-
ness for obscure words, and it is spoken by the clown figure Costard in
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. William C. Carroll calls it “sound
as pure incantation; merely pronouncing it supplants any need for
interpreting its meaning.”111 By contrast, when this Latin word appears
as the shocking surprise for the Gothic heroine in “The Terrorist System
of Novel Writing,” it mocks by its very incongruousness a genre alleg-
edly devoid of any wit or learning. Gothic novels, this author asserts, are
as rudimentary as any book could be. “Any man or maid, I mean, ladies’
maid” can produce a Gothic novel; they are so devoid of learning that

107
 Anonymous, “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing,” Monthly Mirror 4/​21 (August
1797), 102.
108
 Anonymous, “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing,” 104.
109
 Anonymous, “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing,” 104.
110
 The Plays of William Shakespeare, 10 vols. (London, 1773), ii. 427: “This word, whencesoever
it comes, is often mentioned as the longest word known.”
111
 The Great Feast of Language in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Princeton, 1976). On the word’s history,
see James Hutton, “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” Modern Language Notes 46/​6 (1931), 392–​5.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 117

one merely needs to follow the recipe. Nothing could be more horrifying
to those who produce and consume this pablum than a long, difficult,
obscure Latin word. Unfortunately, the author has in fact misspelled the
Latin, and so rather than being mockingly learned, it really is nonsense.
What is the true horror?
The anti-​Gothic attacks of the 1790s helped to construct a hierarchy
of literary form, which entailed exclusions of both class and gender.
Circulating libraries made novels increasingly accessible to the middle
class and to women, and so attacks on novel reading made the Gothic
into a symbol for the resulting democratization, and perceived vulgari-
zation, of literary taste.112 To many critics, classical literature occupied
the opposite pole. The shrinking province of an upper-​class readership,
knowledge of Greek and Latin still remained useful as a symbol for elite
men (mainly) who wished to demonstrate their education and refinement.
In his invective on contemporary literary and political trends, The Pursuits
of Literature (1794–​7), Thomas James Mathias excluded Ann Radcliffe
from his assault on Gothic literature, praising her in extravagant terms as a
“mighty magician,” who was “bred and nourished by the Florentine Muses
in their secret, solitary caverns.”113 Woven on an expansive literary canvas,
Radcliffe’s epic novels managed the trick of approximating the respecta-
bility of classical literature, at least for some critics. But he pours scorn
on other Gothic authors, and none more so than on Radcliffe’s younger
contemporary Matthew Lewis, the subject of our next chapter, whose
scandalous novel The Monk depicted the “arts of lewd and systematick
seduction.” Lewis, said Mathias, was guilty of “the most open and unqual-
ified blasphemy.”114
Lewis was, though, learned in classical literature. Educated at Oxford,
he published translations from Greek and Latin during his life, and even
began his Gothic masterpiece The Monk with a full translation of a poem
from the Roman poet Horace. Earning enormous popular success with his
Gothic writing, Lewis was able to use these classical elements to com-
municate with different audiences simultaneously, brashly pursuing hor-
rific sensationalism with material from the English Gothic tradition, while
also covertly communicating through the classical material his fears and
insecurities about publication.

112
 Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic,  62–​9.
113
 The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues (7th edn., London, 1798), 58.
114
 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 239. I return to Mathias in Chapter 4.

118  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 These classical sources also constellate around the description of unre-
strained urges and desires, particularly homoerotic desires. His allusions
to the ancient past therefore constantly pose the risk of exposing too much.
Behind the tapestry, again there lurk awful words. For Lewis, though, they
hide something threatening—​something genuinely dangerous—​about the
private life of the author himself.

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances  | 119

 CHAPTER 4 Queer Urges and the Act
of Translation
Matthew Lewis

Matthew “Monk” Lewis, notorious as the author of the Gothic novel The
Monk (1796), enjoyed equal fame in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries as a translator. He was a leading figure in communicating
German Romanticism to an English audience, “the best-​read and best-​
informed Englishman of his time on the subject.”1 At age seventeen he
met Goethe while studying German in Weimar. He had translated one of
Goethe’s early ballads, the “Elf-​King” (Erlkönig), and he presented his
translation to the poet himself. Later he wrote to Goethe to remind him
of their meeting, informing him that his works enjoyed great acclaim in
England and that German Literature was “at present the prevailing taste.”2
At the Villa Diodati in 1816, when Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley
participated in the ghost story contest that gave rise to Frankenstein, Lewis
was there—​translating. He earned his keep at the villa by translating Faust,
according to Lord Byron, who was “naturally much struck” by the poem,
though he found Lewis an argumentative bore.3 Michael Gamer argues
that Lewis’s interest in German was a pivotal moment in the history of the
Gothic. A genre previously associated with English authors such as Walpole
and Reeve, and traceable to national attempts at literary-​historical self-​
fashioning, was now retrospectively recast by critics as an invasion from
abroad and a corruption of English morals by German tastes.4 Schiller’s

1
 Joseph James Irwin, M.G. “Monk” Lewis (Boston, 1976), 19.
2
 D. F. S. Scott, Some English Correspondents of Goethe (London, 1949), 1–​2.
3
 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1973–​82),
v. 206, 268; vii. 112; ix. 18.
4
 Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic,  77–​9.
The Ghost-​Seer (1789) had been translated into English in 1795, and it
was followed by a raft of Germanic “shudder-​novels” (Schauerromane),
some genuinely translated from German and others merely pretending to
be translations. Authors and publishers, eager to exploit moral panic about
continental influences, feigned foreign sources even for home-​bred Gothic
works.5
The Monk is the work of a consummate translator, but it has no single
source. Lewis’s style in the novel is instead an unpredictable mix of trans-
lation, quotation, and parody, flitting between irony and horror, original
and imitation. Among the intertexts are prominent moments of classical
translation; but because imitations of Latin and Greek are so easily seen as
obligatory appendages of eighteenth-​century prose, they are quite likely to
be passed over. This very marginality, I argue, gives them power. Imitations
of classical literature in Lewis’s writing cluster around certain themes: the
urge to write, the perils of publication, the danger of self-​exposure. Once
decoded, the classical moments within his works offer an ongoing com-
mentary, to a circle of readers willing and able to read it, about the risks
of being a Gothic author. Classical translations and quotations—​the most
“skippable” moments in The Monk, no doubt—​become the novel’s hidden
personal voice, communicating to certain sectors of Lewis’s readership
about both sexual desire and the fear of its public revelation.
The mixture of sensationalism and anxiety is typical of Lewis’s life and
work. On one hand, he made his reputation through a talent for shocking,
outlandish spectacle. After the scandal of The Monk, his Gothic drama
The Castle Spectre earned over fifteen thousand pounds at Drury Lane in
1797. The play featured a “live” ghost coming forth from the dark rear
of the stage, thanks to some innovative theatrical special effects, which
aroused horror of one kind from audiences and horror of another kind
from critics.6 The Captive (1803), a dramatic monologue, was so shocking
that it caused an attack of “hysterics” in two members of the audience
during its first performance, and in two more after the play was over.7 His
Timour the Tartar astonished audiences in 1811 by bringing live horses
on stage at Covent Garden, starting an unlikely fashion for “hippodrama”

5
 Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 140–​2; Watt, Contesting the Gothic,  80–​1.
6
 Jeffrey N. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–​1825 (Athens, OH, 1992), 206; on the play’s
reception, see D. L. MacDonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto, 2000), 136.
7
 Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 225. “Hysterics” is Lewis’s own description in a letter to his mother,
in which he bemoans the “mixture of applause and disapprobation” that met his drama: Louis F.
Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 221–​2.

122  |  Spectres of Antiquity

on both sides of the Atlantic.8 Walpole’s satiric predictions in The World
about the desire for reality over fiction on stage were realized half a cen-
tury later in Lewis’s garish extravaganzas. Yet Lewis also wanted to be
taken seriously, and he courted the attentions of high society. His father, a
successful civil servant and supporter of the Tory Prime Minister William
Pitt, had obtained a seat for him in the House of Commons representing
the tiny borough of Hindon in Wiltshire, at the cost of £2600.9 His tenure
as an MP started with a splash in 1796, when the Whig luminary Charles
James Fox crossed the House to welcome the famous author, but Lewis
demonstrated little interest in his parliamentary duties after that auspicious
debut. In six years, he is recorded to have spoken only once and voted only
twice. He became attached to the Whig social circle of Elizabeth Vassall
Fox, Lady Holland, corresponding with her and appearing at her dinner
parties, often to the chagrin of other guests. Contemporaries mocked the
Gothic author’s incongruous yearning to be accepted by the political elite.
He was “pathetically fond of anyone who had a title,” wrote Walter Scott.10
Much harder to confirm, but rumored at the time and now generally ac-
cepted by scholars, is his sexual attraction to men. D. L. Macdonald has
carefully assembled the evidence, which ranges from anecdotes about him
impersonating actresses as a child, to gossip attributed to Byron (“I re-
member Mrs. Hope once asking who was Lewis’s male-​love this season!”),
to adult expressions of strong emotional attachment to men in letters and
poems.11 The plot of his first and only novel—​the monk Ambrosio is
seduced into sexual sin by a beautiful woman (Matilda) who is initially
disguised as a boy (Rosario)—​is also inevitably suggestive. I am certainly
not the first to have seen in Lewis’s writings unmistakable allusions to
same-​sex desire, accompanied by a fear that such desires might be re-
vealed and punished. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential
analysis, the “paranoid plots” of the early Gothic novel transformed the
persecution of same-​sex desire into a central narrative trope.12 But in this

8
 Kimberly Poppiti, A History of Equestrian Drama in the United States: Hippodrama’s Pure Air
and Fire (New York, 2018), 48–​52.
9
 R. G. Thorne, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790–​1820, 5 vols.
(London, 1986), iv. 433. “Such seats were regularly controlled by a patron or sold to the highest
bidder”: Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, 43.
10
 J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1852), 81.
11
 MacDonald, Monk Lewis, 59–​92. Byron’s quip: Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron,
ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton, 1966), 235.
12
 Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), 90–​6. On
the mirroring of Lewis’s sexuality in The Monk, see Hogle, “The Ghost of the Counterfeit—​and
the Closet—​in The Monk”; Clara Tuite, “Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, the

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 123

chapter, I  emphasize the particular usefulness of classical allusion as a
veiled mode of giving voice to those ideas. There is little doubt that the
Oxford-​educated Lewis was familiar with Greek and Latin literature, and,
like other queer authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was
able to use it to say things that he could not say otherwise.13 Unmistakably
homoerotic are Lewis’s translations of the Greek epigrams of Anacreon,
unpublished in his lifetime, and his Poems (1812), printed only for a “few
friends,” which begins with a detailed description of Cupid as a boy whose
body unites “the pangs of Hell and Heaven’s delights,” offering the poet
“a forgiving kiss.”14 In The Monk, the imitations of homoerotic poetry
from antiquity have played a surprisingly small role in assessments of
the meaning of the work as a whole, but they have always been there for
readers to see.

Queer Antiquity in The Monk

The Castle of Otranto began with the translation of some lines from the
Roman poet Horace. The Monk amplifies that classicizing gesture. On the
novel’s title page, Lewis quotes two lines from Horace, Epistles 2.2.208–​9
(the so-​called “Epistle to Florus,” from 12 BCE),15 together with his own
free translation:

Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,

Nocturnos lemures, portentaque.
HORAT.
Dreams, magic terrors, spells of mighty power,
Witches, and ghosts who rove at midnight hour.

Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk,” Romanticism on the Net, no. 8 (Nov.
1997), https://​id.erudit.org/​iderudit/​005766ar.
13
 MacDonald, Monk Lewis, 98–​100. Cf. George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and
Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), 16: Writers who were “privileged enough
to receive a formal classical education often found in it the resources for the expression of
transgressive desire.”
14
 Matthew G. Lewis, Poems (London, 1812), 1–​5, adapting a Hellenistic epigram
(Greek Anthology 5.178); Greek text at A. S. F. Gow, and D. L. Page (eds.), The Greek
Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams (Cambridge, 1965), 227.
15
 On the dating, see Stephen Harrison, “There and Back Again: Horace’s Literary Career,”
in Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39–​58.

124  |  Spectres of Antiquity

These Horatian lines are less well known than those from the Ars
poetica adapted by Walpole, but for those who read with the Latin orig-
inal in mind, Lewis’s quotation discloses a typically Walpolian sleight
of hand. While the English rhymes create an illusion of completeness,
an absent metrical foot at the end of the Latin line shows the Latin
reader that something is missing. As well as omitting some of the items
in Horace’s catalogue of horrors, Lewis has erased the crucial final verb
at the end of the second line of the Latin: rides? (“do you mock?”).16
In the original context, the Roman poet was testing the virtue of his
addressee by asking whether he is susceptible to the ancient vice of
superstitio, a neurotic fear of the divine. Do you laugh at the fatuous
terrors, Horace challenges, that any right-​minded person would dismiss
out of hand? Lewis transforms an attack on excessive fear of the super-
natural into an epigraph for a novel that plays precisely upon a fear of
the supernatural. The affable Horace becomes “HORAT.,” portentous
and stately, a disembodied voice from the past—​or, indeed, the “ghost
of the counterfeit,” a mystified version of an historical object or idea
that was already empty or a fake.17 Readers who remember the ironic
humor of the original Latin will be implicitly alerted to the strain of
self-​mockery that will run through Lewis’s novel, and indeed, through
all of his Gothic works.
A more personal tone is set by the preface to The Monk, Lewis’s trans-
lation of Horace’s much-​imitated Epistles 1.20 (20–​19 BCE).18 Horace’s
poem expresses a nervousness about publication through a playful double
meaning. He addresses his book as if it were an enslaved boy who yearns to
leave the home. The poet warns that after being celebrated for a short time
in the big city, the boy will meet a sorry fate. Vulgarized and cheapened, the
book/​enslaved boy will flee to the provinces and—​the ultimate indignity—​
end up as an elementary school-​text, teaching children their ABCs. The
narrative of movement from poetic coterie to wider reading public is over-
laid with a further, erotic meaning. The author, fearful of the populariza-
tion of his text, is also a jealous lover, nervous about his beloved boy’s

16
 Epistles 2.2.208–​10: somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,/​nocturnos lemures, portentaque
Thessala rides? (“Do you mock dreams, magical terrors, miraculous portents, witches,/​nocturnal
spirits, and monsters from Thessaly?”). The text of Horace cited throughout this chapter is from
Bentley’s edition.
17
 Hogle, “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit.”
18
 “Imitation of Horace,” The Monk, eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough,
Canada, 2004), 35–​6. For the date, see Harrison, “There and Back Again,” 39.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 125

wish to exhibit himself to the wider world. He scornfully casts his book’s
desire for a wide readership as a willingness to become a male prostitute,
a realistic fate even after manumission in antiquity. You gaze longingly at
the booksellers’ streets, he charges, “no doubt so that you can stand on
display [prostes], polished with the Sosii’s pumice-​stone.” (Pumice was
used in Rome both to smooth the surface of the papyrus scroll and to
depilate the skin of effeminate men; the Sosii seem to have been well-​
known booksellers.)19 Shifting to explicitly erotic language, Horace says
that when the book’s “satiated lover is drooping,” and the book has been
“fondled and begun to be dirtied by the hands of the masses,” its value will
have been lowered forever.20 Boy and book are much more precious when
their availability is limited to Horace and his friends. In a Roman context,
speaking of an enslaved boy in erotic terms is far from shocking, and there
are Greek literary parallels for the equation of the circulating literary work
with a wandering lover.21 But in the eighteenth century, the homoeroticism
of Horace’s text is, of course, a problem. Lewis’s handling of the sexual
aspect of this poem is notably different from that of other writers of the
time, and it is key to the themes of The Monk.
It is certainly not the case that eighteenth-​century readers missed the
sexual point of Horace’s poem. William Baxter, in his popular and oft-​
reprinted selections from Horace, comments on the word prostes in line
two: “Dilogως [sic] posuit: nam prostant & libri & meretricii pueri” (“He
has used the word in two senses, since books and boy prostitutes both ‘stand
on display’ ”).22 The usual solution was to make the book into a woman
or a female prostitute. In George Crabbe’s version in the introduction to
“The Candidate” (1780), his verses, yearning for publication, are like poor
women aspiring to high fashion (“As maids neglected, do ye fondly dote,/​
On the fair Type, or the embroidered Coat”). Thomas Marriott, the author
of a female-​conduct book, describes his own text on the point of publica-
tion as a “wanton” woman who will “no longer be confined at home.”23

19
 Epistles 1.20.2: Scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus; see William Fitzgerald, Catullan
Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley, 1995), 39–​41.
20
 Epistles 1.20.8, 11–​12: plenus cum languet amator . . . contrectatus ubi manibus sordescere
volgi/​ coeperis.
21
 J. C. Bramble, Persius and the Programmatic Satire: A Study in Form and Imagery (Cambridge,
1974), 59–​62; Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations, 47–​9. On the sexual attitudes underlying
Horace’s poem, see Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (2nd edn., Oxford, 2010), 31.
22
 Q. Horatii Flacci Eclogae (London, 1725), 423.
23
 George Crabbe, The Complete Poetical Works, eds. Norma Dalrymple-​Champneys and Arthur
Pollard, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1988), i. 101–​2; Thomas Marriott, The Twentieth Epistle of Horace to his
Book, Modernized by the Author of Female Conduct (London, 1759), 2.

126  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Most explicit is Swift’s acid appropriation of the motif in Thoughts on
Various Subjects (1727):

A Copy of Verses kept in the Cabinet, and only shewn to a few Friends, is like
a Virgin much sought after and admired; but when printed and published, is
like a common Whore, whom any body may purchase for half a Crown.24

Unlike in the Roman original or in other eighteenth-​century adaptations,

it is unstated in The Monk whether the personified book is male or fe-
male. In Lewis’s version, the erotic implications remain provocatively un-
defined: the book is just “you,” entirely avoiding the strongly (and safely)
gendered translations of other eighteenth-​century interpreters of the poem.
His freshly written novel, which rashly desires publicity and acclaim in
London, is described as “vain,” “ill judging,” “young and new.” As in
Horace, there is an erotic intensity in the book’s desire to break its restraints
and breach decorum: you are “incensed” at remaining in obscurity, Lewis
says; you “scorn” the “prudent lock and key,” and you “pant” to be seen in
the booksellers’ windows.25 The book is called the author’s “delight,” but
its gender remains open. The teasing ambiguity prefigures an important
part of the novel’s plot. Ambrosio will be seduced by a servant of simi-
larly shifting and ambiguous gender: first the attendant is a beautiful boy,
Rosario, but he is then revealed to be a woman, Matilda. The fear of re-
prisal described in this classical imitation also reappears in Lewis’s novel.
In Horace’s text, the poet’s concern is that popularity will dim the value of
his poetry. It should remain exclusive, within an intimate circle of readers.
In Lewis’s imitation, publication is not cheapening but dangerous, a per-
ilous mode of self-​exposure. Booksellers are where reputations are “won
and lost,” he warns, where works are “condemned, despised,/​Neglected,
blamed, and criticised.” He prophesies that The Monk’s pages will be torn
and burnt, angrily punished, “doomed to suffer public scandal,” phrases
that poignantly evoke the punishment of both books and male sexual de-
sire in the period.26

24
 Swift, The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, iv. 249.
25
 “You pant well bound and gilt to see/​Your volume in the window” (Lewis, The Monk, 35).
The wording also echoes Pope’s “Who pants for glory finds but short repose” in his imitation of
Horace’s “Epistle to Augustus” (Imitations of Horace: The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt
[London, 1939], 221), a line also quoted later in The Monk (179).
26
 A number of critics have seen in the mob scenes of The Monk and other Gothic novels an
allusion to the contemporary punishment at the pillory of those convicted of sodomy: Tuite,
“Cloistered Closets”; MacDonald, Monk Lewis, 75–​6; George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana,
IL, 2006a), 45–​60.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 127

 At the end of Epistles 1.20, Horace tells his book what to say if it is ever
asked about its author. He offers a small, self-​effacing sketch of his life and
personality: born the son of a man freed from slavery, he rose to favor with
Rome’s elite (lines 19–​23), and remains “short of stature, prematurely grey,
made for sunshine/​quick to anger, but only so that I  can be appeased.”27
Horace is, as elsewhere in his poems, the mild-​mannered Epicurean. Lewis
expands this section of the poem from ten lines to twenty-​eight, but there is
nothing mild or small about Lewis except his height:

Of passions strong, of hasty nature,

Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving . . .
More passionate no creature living,
Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving,
But yet for those who kindness show,
Ready through smoke and fire to go. (35–​8, 47–​50)

This self-​dramatization blurs the line between autobiography and fiction.

Contemporary reports do indeed portray Lewis in terms similar to this,
given to prickling argument and bitter grudges.28 The twenty-​year-​old au-
thor also writes of his character in grandiose terms, as if staging himself
in a melodramatic drama, or indeed in a Gothic novel; for if the character
described in these lines sounds nothing like Horace, it does sound in many
respects like Ambrosio, the villainous antihero of The Monk. Ambrosio
is never shown rewarding “kindness,” and is described in the opening of
the novel as physically tall. But Ambrosio is characterized by the strength
of his passion;29 he is impetuous in his judgment;30 he is punished in the

27
 Epistles 1.20.24–​5: corporis exigui, praecanum, solibus aptum;/​irasci celerem, tamen ut
placabilis essem.
28
 Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, 50: “quick-​tempered and too easily offended.” Contemporary
sources present Lewis as singularly annoying. Lady Holland wrote, “Poor little man, he is
very irritable and quarrelsome, and will shortly be left not only friendless, but without many
acquaintances”: Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady Holland, The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland
(1791–​1811), ed. The Earl of Ilchester [Giles Stephen Holland Fox-​Strangways], 2 vols. (London,
1909), ii. 60.
29
 Lewis, The Monk, 50: he was “at that time of life when the passions are most vigorous,
unbridled, and despotic.”
30
 Lewis, The Monk, 214: “his passions were the very worst judges to whom he could possibly have
applied.”

128  |  Spectres of Antiquity

narrative for his incapacity to forgive;31 and he is characterized by his
overweening pride.32 From a formal perspective, the blur in this passage
between author and protagonist may be an instance of what Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick identified as the “contagion” of character in the Gothic novels,
the apparent passing of personality traits from one figure to the next.33
From a psychological perspective, it recalls Lewis’s willingness to be
identified with his villain. He was happier throughout his life to be called
“Monk” Lewis than Matthew or Gregory, names he despised.34 The clas-
sical imitation may be set off as a preface to the Gothic story, but its details
bleed into the narrative, calling into question the boundary between author
and creation, original and translation.
The next moment of explicit classical translation in The Monk is the rec-
itation of an Anacreontic poem written by a servant Theodore in one of the
inset tales.35 Although Lewis would not have known it, the poem Theodore
writes is an imitation of an imitation. The lyric poems called Anacreontea
were attributed until the nineteenth century to the archaic lyric poet
Anacreon, but scholars now agree that they were composed by a variety of
Greek writers across a long stretch of antiquity, possibly between the first
century BCE and the sixth century CE. The poems orbit the twin moons
of love and wine. They describe a landscape of Cupids, pleasant breezes,
and perfumes; of endlessly available love affairs, with both women and
boys; a world of surfaces, in which painters are asked to paint characters
into existence. Patricia A. Rosenmeyer has studied the distillation of the
Anacreontic tradition throughout antiquity. While the authentic Anacreon
was the author of hymns, epitaphs, and invectives as well as lyrics, over
time he was boiled down to become the model only for lyrics about love
and wine.36 This process continued in English adaptations of Anacreontic
lyric, which are typified by short drinking songs or erotic poems in simple,
repetitive meters. The aim of writing Anacreontics as a popular exercise

31
 In Agnes’s curse (Lewis, The Monk, 71–​2, 86); and also 214: “He was proud, vain, ambitious,
and disdainful . . . he was implacable when offended, and cruel in his revenge.”
32
 Lewis, The Monk, 361: the demon’s final accusation: “Is pride then a virtue?”
33
 “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96/​2
(1981), 261.
34
 He called his given names a “horror” and “abomination,” and, according to his nineteenth-​
century biographer, his mother was shocked that he could “make so much of a trifle”: Margaret
Baron-​Wilson, The Life and Correspondence of M.G. Lewis, 2 vols. (London, 1839), ii. 362–​3.
Other sources preserve hints of Lewis’s histrionic self-​staging. In a letter written from The Hague
in 1794 (Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, 208–​9), he asked his mother whether she thought he
resembled the villain Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
35
 Lewis, A Monk,  180–​7.
36
 The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge, 1992).

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 129

for poets from the Renaissance onward was not so much to communicate
ideas—​still less emotion—​but to sustain a mood: a pleasingly inexplicit,
erotic haze. English Anacreontea were, in a word, “undemanding.”37 They
were commonly attempted by poets of all kinds. Marshall Brown begins
his article on Anacreontic imitation by saying that he will “give an over-
view of the eighteenth-​century ordinary—​the sort of insignificant poem
any gentleman could write in his moments of leisure.”38
So there is nothing unusual in Theodore versifying in Anacreontic mold
in The Monk, and most readers have probably found the interlude in which
he and his master Raymond recite and review his efforts pretty banal.
Having squared off against murderous banditti, staged a thrilling plan to
rescue his beloved Agnes from the castle of Lindenberg, and faced noc-
turnal visitations by the corpse of the Bleeding Nun, Raymond now takes
a moment to monitor his page’s progress in the composition of light verse.
Entitled “Love and Age,” the poem Theodore has written is a version of
an Anacreontic text that had previously been imitated by Lewis himself,
as well as (among others) Herrick, La Fontaine, and the young Byron.39 In
the thirty-​two-​line original, the plot is simple. On a stormy night, a small
child—​the Greek is βρέφος [brephos], “baby”—​appears at the poet’s hut
and begs for admittance. It turns out to be Cupid and he shoots the poet
with one of his fateful arrows. Theodore’s imitation is almost four times
the length. In his version, Cupid is changed from a baby to a beautiful
boy. When he enters the cottage during the storm, Anacreon himself,
now an old man, begs him to leave. He has renounced all love affairs and
thinks bitterly of the pain they caused him. Cupid rebukes Anacreon for
his disavowal of love and describes the women he has found for the poet
in the past. Eventually, he shoots the old man with his arrow. Instantly the
“fairest dreams of fancy rise,” his breast glows hot with passion, and he
devotes himself afresh to the worship of Love.

37
 Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven,
1978), 197.
38
 “Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric,” ELH 66/​2 (1999), 374.
39
 Greek text: The Works of Anacreon, ed. John Addison (London, 1735), 10–​14; poem 33 in
contemporary ordering of the collection: David Campbell, Greek Lyric, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1988).
For other versions, see The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. Leonard Cyril Martin (Oxford,
1956), 26–​7; Jean de La Fontaine, Oeuvres complètes, eds. René Groos and Jacques Schiffrin,
2 vols. (Paris, 1954–​8), i. 529–​30; George G. Byron [Lord Byron], The Complete Poetical
Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1980–​93), i. 74–​5. Lewis’s earlier imitation was
published posthumously (Baron-​Wilson, The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, ii. 346–​8).
Translations of nearly half the Anacreontic corpus, some thirty poems, survive in Lewis’s hand in
MS 114 (National Library of Jamaica), but they were never published in his lifetime (MacDonald,
Monk Lewis, 236–​7).

130  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 Given how very ordinary it was for English poets of the period to pro-
duce verse of this kind, the most surprising element in the episode is the
vehemence with which Raymond denounces Theodore’s efforts. He urges
his page to swear off producing anything similar. “To enter the lists of
literature,” he says after reading it, “is wilfully to expose yourself to the
arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment.”40 As in his imita-
tion of Horace, Lewis presents publication as a potentially perilous form
of self-​exposure. The impulse to write is a psychological aberration, an
urge, dangerous and nearly impossible to control:

Authorship is a mania, to conquer which no reasons are sufficiently strong;

and you might as easily persuade me not to love, as I persuade you not to
write. However, if you cannot help being occasionally seized with a poet-
ical paroxysm, take at least the precaution of communicating your verses to
none but those whose partiality for you secures their approbation.41

Lauren Fitzgerald has argued that the entire scene expresses Lewis’s own
anxieties about publication.42 The thrill of composition for Lewis was
accompanied by the morbid fear that, in an eagerness for acclaim, he could
give away too much of himself, particularly his homoerotic desire. The
erotic and literary impulses were closely and dangerously connected for
Lewis, a link suggested by Raymond’s concession to Theodore that “you
might as easily persuade me not to love as I persuade you not to write.”43
Just as with the Horace imitation, here too there are parts of the poem
that appear to bleed into the narrative. After the old man tells Cupid to
leave him and his cottage, the god responds,

“Does age, old man, your wits confound?”

Replied the offended god, and frowned:
[His frown was sweet as is the virgin’s smile!]
“Do you to me these words address?
To me, who do not love you less,
Though you my friendship scorn, and pleasures past revile!”44

40
 Lewis, The Monk, 186.
41
 Lewis, The Monk, 186.
42
 “The Sexuality of Authorship in The Monk,” Romanticism on the Net 36–​7 (Nov. 2004–​Feb.
2005), http://​id.erudit.org/​iderudit/​011138ar.
43
 Lewis, The Monk, 186.
44
 Lewis, The Monk, 183.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 131

The line in brackets is the only one so marked in the poem in all four early
editions of the novel. It might signal a comment to the reader by the poet
outside the dramatic frame or denote a passing mental impression of the
character within the poem. But the brackets also draw attention to a line po-
tentially dangerous in its implications, for if “virgin” is here read as “Virgin,”
Theodore has equated the male, pagan beauty of Cupid with the female, di-
vine beauty of the Madonna. Earlier in The Monk, in the first of the novel’s
scandalous plot developments, we learn that Ambrosio has conceived an
erotic attachment to the picture of the Virgin Mary hanging in his cell, an
image that tempts him away from his vows of celibacy.45 Theodore’s very
ordinary classical exercise in fact recalls a shocking narrative strand in the
novel: Ambrosio is seduced by the beautiful Matilda (upon whom, we learn,
the image of Mary has been modeled), though Matilda herself is initially
disguised as an ephebic, Cupid-​like boy, Rosario. In the poem, Anacreon’s
will is overpowered. He ends up devoting himself entirely to the god of
Love, abandoning whichever deities he used to revere (“I no more/​at other
shrines my vows will pour”). In The Monk, Matilda leads Ambrosio to break
his vows of chastity, first with her and then by helping him to abduct and
rape the innocent Antonia. When Matilda summons a Demon from Hell to
help the monk satisfy his lust, it assumes a form obviously reminiscent of
Cupid: it is a naked young man with wings and a branch of myrtle, the char-
acteristic tree of Cupid’s mother, Venus, in classical iconography.46
The abduction and rape of Antonia is also specifically presaged in lines
that have no precedent in either the Anacreontic original or Lewis’s earlier
imitation of it. Cupid rebukes Anacreon for his ingratitude and reminds him
of the women he has found or made amenable to him in the past. The implicit
violence of these lines seems to have gone mostly unnoticed in scholarship:

“Ingrate! Who led thee to the wave,

At noon where Lesbia loved to lave?
Who named the bower alone where Daphne lay?
And who, when Celia shrieked for aid,
Bade you with kisses hush the maid?
What other was’t than Love, oh! false Anacreon, say!”47

The classical names suggest the timeless fantasy of pastoral romance, but
these scenes of female victims bathing, sleeping, and “shrieking for aid”
45
 Lewis, The Monk,  65–​6.
46
 Lewis, The Monk,  243–​4.
47
 Lewis, The Monk, 183.

132  |  Spectres of Antiquity

visualize, as if through Matilda’s enchanted mirror, the suffering that is still
to come for Antonia in The Monk. She too will be watched by Ambrosio
as she bathes. An infernal talisman will allow him entry unobserved into
her bedroom. Her mother dreams that her daughter is shrieking for help.48
When Matilda goads Ambrosio to indulge in impiety and sin, she wick-
edly recasts Anacreontic language. Forget your cares and embrace a life of
love, says the Anacreontic versifier; “banish those clouds from your brow,”
tempts Matilda, and “indulge in those pleasures freely, without which life
is a worthless gift.”49 If Theodore’s poetic interlude seems superficial—​a
glossy, classicizing world of decorative surfaces—​its enamel soon cracks
and its imagery reappears in the sordid narrative reality of the Gothic novel.
Lewis was all too aware of voices arising from the past to haunt his text.
In the “Advertisement” on the first page of The Monk, he declares that he
has based the novel on a series of sources that span many centuries and
languages, “but I doubt not many more may be found, of which I am at pre-
sent totally unconscious”; later in the novel, Raymond even tells Theodore
that “most of the best ideas are borrowed from other poets, though possibly
you are unconscious of the theft yourself.”50 Sure enough, in a postscript to
the play Adelmorn six years later, Lewis himself was forced to admit that
the plot of The Monk is very similar to the popular French novel Le Diable
amoureux (1772) by Jacques Cazotte.51 Lewis’s use of the word “uncon-
scious” in describing the sources of his text is particularly resonant, fitting
well with developing Romantic notions of the relationship between mind
and self. The word is used some thirteen times in The Monk. David Sigler
has observed that Lewis is part of a broader cultural shift from an “earlier-​
eighteenth-​century meaning of ‘unconscious,’ meaning simply knowledge
of which one is not aware, to the later-​eighteenth-​century notion that the
subject is controlled by and held captive to such knowledge, and that one’s
relation to this knowledge is determinative for sexual identity.”52 Lewis
uses the word in a recognizably psychological sense during the narrative
of the novel—​he speaks of the “unconscious breast” harboring “some
guilt to me unknown” and “some impure wish”—​but he also uses it to

48
 Lewis, The Monk, 239–​40, 261–​2, 262. Agnes is similarly depicted later in the novel (“I
stretched my voice to the extent of its compass, and shrieked for aid,” 336).
49
 Lewis, The Monk, 204.
50
 Lewis, The Monk, 38–​186.
51
 Adelmorn; or The Outlaw (London, 1801), xii–​ix; see Wright, Britain, France, and the
Gothic,  123–​4.
52
 Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism, 25.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 133

describe the re-​emergence of sources of his own texts, which periodically
emerge from the textual unconscious to destabilize the boundary between
what is original and what is translated.53 In The Monk, Lewis connects
the emergence of old textual voices from the past with the emergence of
buried urges from the self, linking translation and sexuality in an early
Gothic vision of what would later be dubbed the “textual unconscious.”54
Identity in The Monk is constantly being transferred:  Rosario, later re-
vealed to be Matilda, is later revealed to be a demon; Antonia, we learn in
the shocking denouement, is later revealed to be Ambrosio’s sister. Rather
than exemplifying a logic of veiling and disguise, perhaps the novel makes
a narrative trope out of its own practice of translation, a “carrying across”
(etymologically) of one state of being to the next. “Gothic translation”
could signify, then, not only the translation of Gothic texts or the com-
position of a Gothic narrative from translated sources. It could also sig-
nify a mode of writing in which individual authorship is constantly being
disrupted by imperfectly assimilated (or dissimulated) models from other
languages or textual worlds—​a spectral voice emerging, in true Gothic
fashion, from the past.

Wild Enthusiasm: The Gothic Horrors of Roman Satire

Lewis’s most complex and detailed reflection on Gothic authorship is also

one of his most under-​read texts. The Love of Gain (1799) is an imitation of
the thirteenth Satire of the second-​century CE Roman satirist Juvenal.55 It
expands the Latin original to almost twice its size (from 249 to 465 lines),
and the sheer excess of the imitation is highlighted by the physical format
of the book. Latin and English are printed line for line on facing pages, but
when Lewis deviates from the original there is empty space. Sometimes
there are entire empty pages on the left-​hand side, leading one reviewer to
complain that “no imitation perhaps was ever written with so little reference
to the original,” and another to warn readers not to pay three and sixpence

53
 Lewis, The Monk, 226. On Coleridge’s similar use of the word “unconscious” to describe his
borrowings from other writings, see Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the
Romantic Period (Philadelphia, 2007), 24–​7.
54
 Jonathan Culler, “Textual Self-​Consciousness and the Textual Unconscious,” Style 18/​3 (1984)
369–​74.
55
 The Love of Gain went through three editions in its first year, but still lacks a modern critical
edition. Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Juvenal in English (London, 2001), 296–​9, prints an excerpt with
helpful notes.

134  |  Spectres of Antiquity

for a volume that was a third “absolutely blank paper.”56 It was written and
published in early 1799, when Lewis was enjoying enormous popular suc-
cess with his drama The Castle Spectre, and was still being hounded by
conservative attacks on The Monk.57 Away from the crowds of Drury Lane
and the novel-​reading public, Lewis was also busily courting the attentions
of people high up in the Whig hierarchy. The Love of Gain is aimed at that
milieu. It is dedicated to Charles James Fox, and incorporates lines from the
future Prime Minister William Lamb, a darling of the Foxite crowd at the
time. One scholar speculates that Lewis had an erotic attachment to Lamb. If
this speculation is true, then Lewis’s insertion of a small passage composed
by him at the center of the poem is strangely suggestive.58 There is a poten-
tially erotic contrast between the restraint of Lamb, who chides the London
crowd in his twenty-​two-​line section for being “giddy, gay, and proud”
(247), and the manic, excessive onrush of Lewis, whose furious Juvenalian
voice censures mad passions if only to express them.59 “Now pause awhile!”
are the last words of Lamb’s inserted portion (269), yet Lewis rages on for
another two hundred lines. The poem dramatizes a struggle for control be-
tween Lewis and Lamb, and between Lewis and himself.
In explaining The Love of Gain, Lewis’s modern biographers uniformly
refer to the journal of Lady Holland. She refers to the poem with disdain.
She says that the classical imitation was “above his means”—​the phrase
suggests limitations of class as well as ability—​and suggests that it was
composed, “as I understand, at the request of his father, who was anxious
that he should give a classical turn to his literary reputation, as he laments
his ballad and green-​room tastes.”60 If one reads the rest of Lady Holland’s
journal entry for that day, she goes on to confess that she never actually
read the poem all the way through, so she hardly inspires much confidence
as an interpreter of the text. Critics have noticed the density of allusions
to The Monk and The Castle Spectre in The Love of Gain, but the poem
has not assumed any significance in scholarship as a statement on the na-
ture of Gothic authorship. Yet it dates from a crucial period in the genre’s

56
 The British Critic (January–​June 1799) 548; Analytical Review (May 1799) 524.
57
 He told Walter Scott that he was working on the poem (“a sort of Paraphrase of the 13th Satire of
Juvenal”) in a letter dated January 24, 1799: Karl S. Guthke, “Die erste Nachwirkung von Herders
Volksliedern in England: Unveröffentlichte Dokumente zu den ‘Tales of Wonder,’” Archiv für
das Studium der neueren Sprachen mit Literaturblatt und Bibliographie 193 (1957), 279. It was
published on February 12 of the same year (Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, 115).
58
 MacDonald, Monk Lewis,  68–​9.
59
 I cite the line numbers and Latin text from Lewis, The Love of Gain: A Poem (London, 1799).
60
 Fox, The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, i. 225.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 135

history, during the years when Lewis refused to make any public response
to the scandal of The Monk.61 Like the translations from Greek and Latin
in that popular novel, the classical form of The Love of Gain is an at-
tempt to open up a channel of communication about his own work with an
elite political circle whose approval Lewis craved. By recalling scenes and
images from The Monk and The Castle Spectre but setting them within an
emphatically moralistic frame, Lewis rejects the charges of atheism and
immorality that had been leveled at him. Those earlier works are and al-
ways were, the poem suggests, condemnations of atheism and vice rather
than celebrations of them. Yet here too translation emerges as a mode of
writing that is potentially risky and unstable, its sources impossible fully
to suppress or control. This hybrid of Latin poetry and Gothic spectacle
wavers between moralism and sensationalism in a manner often noted in
the work of Juvenal himself.
Lewis was right to worry about The Monk. In the years that followed
its publication, he faced a series of personal attacks and a threat of legal
action, and those circumstances are important for understanding The Love
of Gain. In the Horace translation at the opening of The Monk, he had
predicted that the novel would be “neglected, blamed, and criticised.” As
Angela Wright has noticed, in a scribbled footnote to a copy of the third
edition of The Monk now in the British Library, Lewis acknowledged the
force of his prediction: “Neglected it has not been, but criticised enough
of all conscience.”62 One of his most vocal opponents was Thomas James
Mathias, whose satirical poem The Pursuits of Literature (1794–​7) was
a conservative broadside against political, philosophical, and literary
fashions of the Revolutionary decade.63 In the prose preface to the fourth
dialogue, Mathias vociferated,

A legislator in our own parliament, a member of the House of Commons of

Great Britain, an elected guardian and defender of the laws, the religion, and
the good manners of the country, has neither scrupled nor blushed to depict,
and to publish to the world, the arts of lewd and systematick seduction, and

61
 To my knowledge, only two articles have examined the poem in any detail: William Kupersmith,
“Juvenal among the Whigs,” Forum 17/​1 (1979), 43–​51; and D. L. MacDonald, “Juvenal in
the 1790’s: The Imitation and the Plot of History,” Transactions of the North-​West Society for
Eighteenth-​Century Studies 18 (1989–​90), 183–​92.
62
 “European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the Marquis de
Sade’s La nouvelle Justine,” in Avril Horner (ed.), European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760–​
1960 (Manchester, UK, 2002), 53.
63
 The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues (7th edn., London, 1798).

136  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 to thrust upon the nation the most open and unqualified blasphemy against
the very code and volume of our religion. And all this, with his name, style,
and title, prefixed to the novel or romance called “THE MONK.”64

In a footnote that extends over three pages, Mathias identifies the partic-
ular chapter in the novel he thinks actionable at law, and does all that he
can to encourage a prosecution be brought against Lewis. He excerpts a
block of text from the chapter, cites as precedent the recent case of a pros-
ecution of the publisher Edward Curl for printing obscene books, and even
transcribes the official Latin indictment against Curl. The danger of legal
consequences was real. There were other high-​profile trials against authors
and publishers from the period, although in the end there is no record of
an action being formally brought against Lewis.65 The chapter to which
Mathias objected is not, as one might expect, a scene of rape or violence
perpetrated by the wicked monk Ambrosio. Ironically, it is a passage about
censorship, in which the “prudent mother” of Ambrosio’s young victim
prevents her daughter from reading the Bible. A work so full of sensuality
and vice, she chides, is potentially very dangerous for a young person’s
morals.66 Later in The Pursuits of Literature, Mathias advises Lewis that
he should at least “omit the indecent and blasphemous passages in an-
other edition.”67 This is effectively what Lewis did. He published his own
bowdlerized version of The Monk in 1798 under the title Ambrosio; or the
Monk, and omitted the offending scene entirely. The scene is obviously
meant to mock the hypocrisy of those who fulminate against sensuality
in novels but excuse it in hallowed works like the Bible. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, for one, missed the irony (or affected to do so), complaining in
his review of The Monk that the scene was blasphemous.68
In The Pursuits of Literature, Mathias’s judgments on decency and in-
decency are allied with a politics of literary form. He repeatedly decries the
fashion for the Gothic, associating it with a susceptibility to foreign influ-
ence and a weakening of English moral and military strength.69 The bastion

64
 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 239.
65
 On this episode, see André Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event 1796–​8
(Paris, 1960), 81–​143; Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic,  79–​89.
66
 Lewis, The Monk,  230–​1.
67
 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 346.
68
 Critical Review 19 (February 1797), 194–​200.
69
 Wright, Britain, France, and the Gothic, 72–​5. Note especially lines 541–​6 of the fourth
dialogue: “Have Gallick arms and unrelenting war/​Borne all her trophies from Britannia far?/​
Shall nought but ghosts and trinkets be display’d,/​Since Walpole ply’d the virtuoso’s trade,/​
Bade sober truth revers’d for fiction pass,/​And mus’d over Gothick toys through Gothick glass?”
(Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 402).

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 137

of conservative values, and the antithesis of such popular texts, is classical
literature. Mathias specifically praises the value of learning ancient Greek,
in part so that ancient philosophers can be enlisted as a defense against
liberal philosophers “of the French system” such as Godwin and Paine.70
Mathias’s own text is difficult to read without some knowledge of classical
languages, since it is stacked with an extraordinary number of untrans-
lated and sometimes very abstruse quotations in Latin and Greek, even
though Mathias claims implausibly that “no man has a greater contempt
for the parade of quotation (as such) as I have.”71 Juvenal is a particular
favorite. The satiric voice of the poem is Juvenalian rather than Horatian,
according to the standard opposition in eighteenth-​century literary criti-
cism: that is, it is an angry denunciation of contemporary affairs, in the
manner of Juvenal’s Satires, rather than a bemused critique of social and
literary foibles, in the manner of Horace’s Satires and Epistles. Mathias
also specifically deploys lines from Juvenal in his attack on The Monk,
quoting lines from two Satires that refer to men of rank degrading them-
selves with shameful behavior. The first quotation from Juvenal pointedly
refers to aristocrats cross-​dressing, a charge that might have landed with
particular sting on Lewis.72 Juvenal is enlisted for the conservative side.
Like a renewed and freshly politicized “Battel of the Books,” the writers of
ancient Rome are arrayed against the modern, liberal forces of the Gothic.
There is a specific point, then, in Matthew Lewis’s response to these
charges being made in the form of an extended imitation of Juvenal: he
refutes his opponents in their own classicizing mode. Juvenal’s thirteenth
Satire (c. 127 CE) was addressed to a man named Calvinus, whose money
was stolen by a friend who swore an oath to keep it safe. (Lewis, in his
translation, changes the addressee’s name from Calvinus to “Emilius”;
the name recalls the formative influence of Rousseau’s Émile in the
eighteenth-​century literature of sensibility, but is also peculiarly appro-
priate to a self-​conscious exercise in literary imitation, since it is related
etymologically to the Latin word for imitation, aemulatio). In Juvenal’s
poem, Calvinus angrily rebukes the gods for failing to punish this wrong-
doer, but the satirist instead offers a ghoulish vision of the terrors of
conscience to which the guilty man will be subject. He will suffer from

70
 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature,  266–​8.
71
 Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 269.
72
 Juvenal, Satires 2.121 (cited at Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 240–​1); also, Satires 8.181–​
2 (cited at Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, 243). For Lewis’s cross-​dressing as a child, see
Baron-​Wilson, The Life and Correspondence of M.G. Lewis, i. 12, 44; and as a theme in The Monk
in the character of Rosario/​Matilda, see Fitzgerald, “The Sexuality of Authorship.”

138  |  Spectres of Antiquity

“constant unease” (perpetua anxietas, 211), and will interpret any clap of
thunder or flash of lightning as a harbinger of punishment by the gods. He
will even see Calvinus’ image in his dreams: “your image, accursed and
superhuman in size, stirs his terror and forces him to confess.”73 It is not
hard to see why the thirteenth Satire might have been thought to bridge
Gothic and classical sensibilities. In fact, it had already appeared prom-
inently in John Moore’s popular novel Zeluco (1789), whose villainous
antihero foreshadowed the fascination with evil that would become prom-
inent in Gothic and Romantic literature.74 Moore prints seven lines from
the thirteenth Satire on the novel’s title page and other lines from the poem
as a chapter epigraph, and he echoes Juvenal’s wording and imagery when
Moore is describing the pangs of remorse that torment Zeluco, albeit very
belatedly, in the novel’s conclusion. For those who knew the Latin poem,
Moore’s references to it throughout Zeluco foreshadow its title character’s
ultimate fate.75
Lewis’s Gothic style in The Love of Gain elaborates considerably on
Juvenal’s original. The Latin text begins,

Exemplo quodcumque malo committitur, ipsi

Displicet auctori. Prima est haec ultio, quod, se
Iudice, nemo nocens absolvitur. (Satires 13.1–​3)
[Whatever act is committed and sets a bad example brings unhappi-
ness to the doer. This is the first vengeance: nobody guilty is acquitted
if the self is the judge.]

By comparison, here is the 1802 rendering of the same passage by William

Gifford, a man who, according to a quip of Byron’s biographer Leigh
Hunt, had the soul of a shoe:

Man, wretched man, whene’er he stoops to sin,

Feels, with the act, a strong remorse within;

73
 Tua sacra & major imago/​Humana turbat pavidum, cogitque fateri (Satires 13.231–​2). I print
the text and punctuation from the facing Latin text of The Love of Gain.
74
 Gary Kelly, “Enlightenment and Revolution: The Philosophical Novels of Dr John Moore,”
Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 1/​3 (1989), 231–​3.
75
 Zeluco, ed. Pam Perkins (Kansas City, MO, 2008), 1, 111. The quotation from the thirteenth
Satire on the title page begins, “Yet why would you assume that these people have escaped? For a
mind conscious of some awful crime keeps them quaking” (Satires 13.219–​21: cur tamen hos tu/​
evasisse putes, quod diri conscia facti/​mens habet attonitos).

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 139

 ’Tis the first vengeance: Conscience tries the cause,
And vindicates the violated laws.76

The style is declaratory, the rhythms staccato, the phrasing biblical

(“wretched man” alludes to Paul’s description in Romans of human sus-
ceptibility to sin).77 Lewis could not be more different:

Though oft the heart, when raging passions storm,

To Vice we kneel, and fain would veil her form,
Her native darkness ever mocks disguise,
And crimes look foul, e’en in their author’s eyes.
Here the first mark of heav’nly vengeance view;
Vice, false to others, to herself is true! (1–​6)

This is a world recognizable from The Monk and The Castle Spectre: a weak-​
hearted man is overcome by the seduction of evil and then is hounded by
his conscience. The poetic texture is woven from familiar Gothic threads.
As well as the play on Polonius’ “to thine own self be true,” the phrase
“raging passion” occurs in a poem of Matthew Prior quoted in The Monk,
and the image of the veil is also highly characteristic of Lewis’s Gothic
novel.78 The syntax is snaking, restlessly transforming itself, with a new
grammatical subject in every line; one reviewer complained that Lewis’s
grammar was as error strewn as his metrics.79 An equally striking element
is the insertion of the first-​person “we” (2), a departure from Juvenal’s pas-
sive verb (committitur, “is committed”) and Gifford’s coldly sermonizing
“man.” Throughout the poem, as William Kupersmith notes, Lewis
substitutes Juvenal’s attacks on others with first-​person verbs, making
more vivid the poet’s susceptibility to the very vices he attacks.80 “Yet
though ourselves still sin,” he writes, “not less we blame/​Our neighbour’s
sin” (63–​4). The Latin word auctor in the second line of Juvenal’s text
means the doer of an act but also the author of a poem, and Lewis’s trans-
lation (“crimes look foul, e’en in their author’s eyes”) captures both senses

76
 The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (London, 1802), 409; Leigh Hunt quip: Gary Dyer,
British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–​1832 (Cambridge, 1997), 24, 85.
77
 Romans 7:24 (King James version): “O wretched man! Who shall deliver me from this body of
death?”
78
 Lewis, The Monk, 316; on the significance of the veil in The Monk, see Sedgwick, “The
Character in the Veil, 256–​9.
79
 Analytical Review (May 1799), 524.
80
 Kupersmith, “Juvenal among the Whigs,” 47.

140  |  Spectres of Antiquity

well. Rather than being an impersonal exercise in classical imitation, The
Love of Gain constantly elides the distance between self and text.
Juvenal’s thirteenth Satire ends with a lurid catalogue of the noc-
turnal terrors to which the person with a guilty conscience is subject.
The equivalent nightmare at the end of The Love of Gain specifically
recalls the gory death of the monk Ambrosio in The Monk. In the final
pages of the novel, a demon cries, “Thus I secure my prey!”; it sinks
its talons into Ambrosio; it hurls him “headlong” until “the sharp point
of a rock received him”; he is “rolled from precipice to precipice” until
his “broken and dislocated limbs” leave his bloody wounds exposed to
insects and eagles, which eat out his innards, a Promethean fate.81 The
nightmare depicted in The Love of Gain is, almost exactly, a reprise of
that scene:

Swift at thy summons rush with hideous yell

Their prey to seize the Denizens of hell!
Headlong they hurl him on some ice-​rock’s point,
Mangle each limb, and dislocate each joint;
Or plunge him deep in blue sulphureous lakes;
Or lash his quivering flesh with twisted snakes;
Or in his brain their burning talons dart;
Or from his bosom rend his panting heart
To bathe their fiery lips in guilty gore!—​
Then starts he from his couch, while dews of horror pour
Down his dank forehead—​wrings his hands, and prays to sleep no
more. (389–​99)

The fate of Ambrosio becomes the imagined end of the criminal in The
Love of Gain, here capped with another twisted Shakespearean quotation,
this time from Macbeth. But here it is reset in an explicitly, unambigu-
ously moralizing frame. In the poem, Lewis strenuously attacks those who
lay their hands “boldly on the sacred book” only to swear falsely (lines
151–​2). He condemns atheists who “own that a Power Supreme exists
on high,/​But while they own a power, that power defy” (157–​8). He ret-
rospectively clarifies the lesson we should learn from Ambrosio’s fall, a
lesson obscured by the obvious sensationalism of the Gothic novel. By
rewriting passages of his earlier work in a classicizing text full of explicit

81
 Lewis, The Monk, 365.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 141

condemnations of atheism and immorality, he seeks to vindicate the mo-
rality of those earlier works.
Reading The Love of Gain in this way makes it clear that Lewis did in
fact comment on his Gothic productions during a period in which he is
generally thought to have avoided engaging with the criticisms leveled at
him. In 1801 he finally ended what he called a “seven years apprenticeship
to patience.” In the prefatory comments to the printing of his failed drama
Adelmorn, he made an explicit, belated public response to the charges
leveled against him on account of The Monk and The Castle Spectre. He
rejects the imputation that his work is “immoral and irreligious,” claiming
that the charge has its origin in a single scene in The Monk (the scene to
which Mathias objected), which was never intended, he says, to “bring
the sacred Writings into contempt.”82 If he kept mum for seven years in
statements to his Drury Lane audience and letters to the periodical press,
The Love of Gain is Lewis’s response to those attacks to a closer and more
politically elite circle of readers, in a form—​classical imitation—​already
established in that novel as a channel of private communication. At the
same time, the satire helps to create a certain ironic distance between the
author and his youthful Gothic productions. In Juvenal’s Satire 13, the in-
terlocutor Calvinus is naive in trusting people’s oaths. Emilius in The Love
of Gain often seems like a naive consumer of the Gothic, who views the
smallest crime through the lens of the histrionic imagery stereotypical in
the genre (“Tis true! tis true! with horror struck I heard/​The unblushing
villain speak the damning word,” 139–​40). Lewis mocks crowds who flock
to see “monsters” at the animal menagerie of the Exeter Exchange (95),
though of course it was precisely this sort of appetite for lurid spectacle
that led to his own success. As a reflection on his authorship and career,
The Love of Gain self-​effacingly casts the nightmarish terrors of his own
work as popular entertainment—​even childish and trivial—​but morally
unimpeachable and theologically sound.
Yet it is true that the poem seems to run away from its author, and
even in this translation of a classical satire, Lewis seems to dramatize
the “mania” of the authorial urge that was presented as so seductive and

82
 Lewis, Adelmorn, v: ““The Outlaw” is written by the author of “The Monk”; therefore it must
be immoral and irreligious. I positively deny the conclusion. . . . I have nearly served a seven years
apprenticeship to patience, under the attacks of the most uncandid criticism, unmitigated censure,
and exaggerating misrepresentation; nor have I ever written a line to right myself, or blame those
who magnified a single act of imprudence into charges equally discordant with my principles, and
insulting to my understanding.”

142  |  Spectres of Antiquity

dangerous in The Monk. As The Love of Gain grows longer and longer it
seems more and more conventionally Gothic, offering lurid and verbose
descriptions of the torments of a guilty conscience:

Now groans of tortur’d ghosts his ears affright;

Now ghastly phantoms dance before his sight;
And now he sees (and screams in frantic fear)
To size gigantic swell’d thy angry shade appear! (385–​8)

The real drama of the poem, I  would argue, lies in the tension between
Lewis’s anxiety about saying too much and his apparently irresistible im-
pulse to do so. Biographers have tended to invoke a libidinal rhetoric to ex-
plain the excessive length and Gothic detail of The Love of Gain. Lewis, “who
had recently cast Ambrosio headlong to a horrible death, finds the opportu-
nity for elaboration too tempting to resist”; he “cannot resist” elaborating
on Juvenal’s nightmarish imagery because of his “love of the horrible.”83 In
fact, this line of interpretation is anticipated by Lewis himself, who stages
within the poem his own drama of impulse and restraint. “Cease, wild en-
thusiast!” he cries at line 294, addressing not Emilius but himself, as he
attempts to moderate his poem’s excesses. Later, and long after blank space
has overtaken the Latin lines on the left side of the page, he muses, “And who
can say, ‘One step, and then no further?’ ” before finally imposing a forceful
end (“Here break we off!,” 449). It has long been recognized that Lewis’s
model, Juvenal, similarly destabilizes the moral authority of his poems by
thematizing the extreme emotion of his satiric voice. According to a line of
interpretation of Juvenal dating to the 1960s, part of the action of his poems
is to observe the speaker being consumed by the vices he attacks.84 In Lewis’s
case, the explicit depiction of the poet struggling to restrain his own flights of
Gothic fancy casts his writing, as in The Monk, as a mania. The Love of Gain
produces a truly Gothic Juvenal, since the satirist’s exaggerated outrage and
rhetoric are represented as the product of typical Gothic impulses: a desire for
grotesque spectacle and a lurid fascination with horror.
This vision of the Roman poet  also makes a point about the politics
of literary form. Lord Holland himself had published two anonymous,

 Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, 115; Irwin, M. G. “Monk” Lewis, 104.

83

 Most influentially, William S. Anderson argued in Anger in Juvenal and Seneca (Berkeley,
84

1964) that Juvenal’s poetic persona is itself the object of critique: he is a man with no control
over his emotions, who compromises his arguments through overheated rhetoric. More recently,
Tom Geue demonstrates that the danger of revealing too much is a constant preoccupation of the
Satires: Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (Cambridge, 2017).

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 143

explicitly political imitations of Juvenal in the 1790s, but the Juvenalian
mode in the Revolutionary decades was associated primarily with con-
servative authors. The terms in which conservative critics praised the
satires of Juvenal are frequently very similar to the terms in which they
condemned the Gothic. “The Juvenalian mode,” writes Gary Dyer in his
study of satire in the period, was designed to “induce fear.”85 It was conser-
vative sensationalism, which traded on readers’ appetite for descriptions
of scandalous vice as much as it generated a desire to see it scolded and
attacked. William Gifford praised Juvenal for displaying the “deformity
and horror of vice,” and excused the immorality of the Roman poet on
the understanding that his aim was to generate “alarm and disgust” with
his “terrible page.”86 Another conservative writer, George Daniel, praised
Juvenalian satire as a sublime form of rhetoric that appealed “not to the
tastes, but to the passions of men”87. Of course, none of this indulgence
was extended to Lewis, whose similar appeals to the passions were seen
as a social ill. Lewis’s Juvenalian Gothic challenges conservative appeals
to the moral authority of classical satire by drawing attention to the lurid
horror that was already a part of Juvenal’s texts, destabilizing critics’ spe-
cious distinction between edifying and entertaining descriptions of vice.
The most subversive aspect of The Love of Gain is not, then, the grafting
of Gothic material onto classical roots as something dissonant and strange;
it is the ease with which Lewis unites the two.

Translation/​Temptation: “The Fisherman” and “The

Mud-​King”

Lewis, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, was his generation’s best-​
known translator of German literature as well as a Gothic novelist and dram-
atist, and he played a crucial role in the transmission of German poetry and
drama to the English Romantics. That much is familiar to scholars in the
field, although there has been little work done on how Lewis’s actual practice

85
 Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 39.
86
 The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, li, lix. Michael Gamer argues that Gifford encouraged
his readers to identify him with Juvenal personally: “Authorizing The Baviad: William Gifford and
The Satires of Juvenal,” European Romantic Review 12/​2 (2001), 206–​15.
87
 The Times; or, The Prophecy (2nd edn., London, 1813), viii–​ix. Cf. the review of The Love of
Gain in the London Review (January–​June, 1799, 299), which makes Juvenal himself into a fully
Gothic figure: “The aweful gloom, clouding his compositions, gives a sublimity to his misanthropy
he cannot conceal.”

144  |  Spectres of Antiquity

as a German translator reflects the themes and ideas of his Gothic writing.88
The final text analyzed in this chapter is in fact two texts: Lewis’s translation
of an early poem by Goethe, which Lewis included in his ballad anthology
Tales of Wonder (1800), and an anonymous parody of that poem, which was
accompanied by a series of footnotes mocking Lewis through allusion to
Latin literature. In Goethe’s “Der Fischer” (1778) a fisherman sits calmly
beside a brook. Out of the burbling water, a mermaid appears. Why, she asks,
must he use his human wiles to tempt away her fish? Is he not tempted by the
beauty of the water and the reflection of his face on its surface? He enters the
waves and is never seen again. Jane K. Brown has interpreted this encounter
between the mermaid and the fisherman in Goethe as an allegory for the
self’s desire to know and understand his own subconscious.89 But Lewis’s
translation of the poem in Tales of Wonder mutes any aspect of self-​discovery,
emphasizing the temptations of the waters and the desire for self-​extinction.
“The Fisherman” is yet another text, I suggest, in which he comments criti-
cally on his own Gothic writing, presenting publishing as a dangerous urge to
which he all too easily succumbs. This reading is strengthened by a contem-
porary parody of the poem called “The Mud-​King.” Here Lewis himself is
the fisherman, seduced by a male merman. This time the tempting offer is to
write to his heart’s content, to enter the waters of romance, and to drink “from
Dutch or German brain/​the stream of sluggish song.”90
Lewis began gathering poems for Tales of Wonder in early 1798. He
translated some of the poems himself from German, and invited other
young poets, including Walter Scott and Robert Southey, to submit their
own renderings of supernatural ballads to the project, too.91 He also
reprinted some of his most popular poems from The Monk, making the
collection a covert narrative of his own career. Unfortunately, by the time
Tales of Wonder appeared after many delays in December 1800, his critical
reputation was on the decline. Still in his mid-​twenties, he was no longer

88
 Detailed analysis of Lewis’s extensive work as a translator is still terra incognita for Gothic
studies, but there are brief but useful accounts of his ballad translations by Jayne Winter,
“International Traditions: Ballad Translations by Johann Gottfried Herder and Matthew Lewis,”
German Life and Letters 67/​1 (2014), 22–​37; and Lis Møller, “‘They Dance All under the
Greenwood Tree’: British and Danish Romantic-​Period Adaptations of Two Danish ‘Elf-​Ballads,’ ”
in Cian Duffy (ed.), Romantic Norths: Anglo-​Nordic Exchanges, 1770–​1842 (Cham, Switzerland,
2017), 129–​52. On Lewis’s German sources in The Monk, see Syndy M. Conger, Matthew
G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretative Study of the Influence of
German Literature on Two Gothic Novels (New York, 1977).
89
 Goethe’s Allegories of Identity (Philadelphia, 2014), 155–​6.
90
 Matthew Lewis, Tales of Wonder, ed. Douglass H. Thomson (Peterborough, Canada, 2010), 283.
91
 For a helpful timeline, see Thomson’s introduction to Lewis, Tales of Wonder.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 145

the enfant terrible who had produced a scandalous novel at a prodigiously
young age. Although his dramas still drew large crowds, to many he had
become the faintly embarrassing face of a literary fashion that already
seemed puerile and stale. Reflecting later on the volume, Scott thought that
Lewis taxed readers’ patience too much by devoting every single poem to
the supernatural, comparing the theme to a “spring which is particularly
apt to lose its elasticity by being too much pressed upon.”92 Lewis’s pub-
lisher also aroused scorn by expanding the anthology into two volumes
with the inclusion of many previously available ballads, charging the high
price of a guinea for a scant portion of original material. Contemporary
wits retitled the work Tales of Plunder.93 Lewis also sabotaged his own
success with his usual bent for silliness, framing the Gothic ballads with
ironic headnotes and footnotes that appeared to mock the entire enter-
prise. Reviews were savage, and publication was followed by a slew of
satirical poems attacking both the book and its author. In one, Lewis is
cursed on the street by Mother Goose. Left destitute after the taste for
Gothic romances has supplanted her fairy tales, she steals The Monk and
his other successful productions, and leaves the author to “trifle his time/​
In epilogues, sonnets, and lady-​like rhyme.”94
Despite this ridicule, Tales of Wonder has a noteworthy position in one
of the major trends of the Romantic era. As with the Gothic genre itself, the
ballad revival of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected the
desire by writers in different national traditions to discover and preserve their
own enchanted literary pasts. Poets in England, Germany, and Scandinavia
turned to their own “ancient” ballads in an effort to infuse a new spirit in
poetic production in their countries. Lewis’s translations and imitations in
Tales of Wonder are idiosyncratic, though, in their constant foregrounding
of the translator himself. “I have taken great liberties,” he says of one poem,
“and the catastrophe is my own invention.” At the conclusion of his rend-
ering of a Danish ballad “The Water-​King,” he says that “I have taken great
liberties with this Ballad,” and appends a more literal translation to prove

92
 “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” (1830), in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F.
Henderson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1902), iv. 48.
93
 Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, iv. 51. The high cost of the book is a constant cause
for complaint in contemporary reviews; see the selection printed by Thomson in Lewis, Tales of
Wonder, 288–​92.
94
 “The Old Hag in a Red Cloak,” first printed in Anonymous (ed.), The School for Satire: A
Collection of Modern Satirical Poems (London, 1801). 411–​16; revised and reprinted in George
Watson-​Taylor, Pieces of Poetry; With Two Dramas, 2 vols. (Chiswick, 1830), i. 67–​79.

146  |  Spectres of Antiquity

the point. Lewis seems almost to triumph over the poets he is ostensibly
translating: “I have altered and added so much to this ballad,” he comments
at one point, “that I might almost claim it for my own.”95 At the same time,
footnotes qualify his assertions to originality by acknowledging other sources
and parallels. Voices from history periodically rise to the surface and emerge
into the present, not unlike the spectres and spirits in the ballads.
Lewis’s version of Goethe’s “The Fisherman” is a closer and more rev-
erential translation than his other contributions to Tales of Wonder, and yet
subtle changes nonetheless shift the meaning of this text.96 In Goethe’s
original, the seduction is obviously erotic, although the object of erotic
attention wanders. As he is being tempted into the water, the fisherman’s
“heart grew so full of longing/​as at the greeting of his beloved.”97 The
mermaid also tempts him with the reflection of his own face in the waters,
which has led David E. Wellbery to interpret the poem as a version of the
Narcissus myth.98 At lines 21–​8, we read the following:

“Lockt dich der tiefe Himmel nicht, “This sky-​like depth, it calls you not,
Das feuchtverklärte Blau? This dank transfigured blue?
Lockt dich dein eigen Angesicht Your mirrored form enthralls you not
Nicht her in ew’gen Tau?” To seek the endless dew?”

Das Wasser rauscht’, das Wasser schwoll, The water rushed, the water rose
Netzt’ ihm den nackten Fuß; And wet his naked feet;
Sein Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvoll His heart with yearning swells and grows,
Wie bei der Liebsten Gruß. As when two lovers meet.99

In Lewis’s translation, these stanzas become the following:

Tempts not this river’s glassy blue,

So crystal, clear, and bright?
Tempts not thy shade, which bathes in dew,
And shares our cool delight?

95
 Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 71, 90, 215.
96
 Goethe’s ballad appeared as the opening poem of Herder’s second volume of Volkslieder
(“Folksongs”), and was set to music by a number of contemporary composers, including
Schubert: Lorraine Byrne, Schubert’s Goethe Settings (Aldershot, UK, 2003), 215–​222. I cite the
text from Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz (7th edn., Hamburg, 1964), i. 153–​4.
97
 Lines 27–​8: Sein Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvoll/​Wie bei der Liebsten Gruß.
98
 The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford,
1996),  275–​7.
99
 This translation is by Edwin H. Zeydel, Goethe, the Lyrist (Chapel Hill, 1955), 98–​100.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 147

 The water rush’d, the water swell’d,
The fisherman sat nigh;
With wishful glance the flood beheld,
And long’d the wave to try.

The Narcissus element is less evident. When describing the reflection,

Lewis uses English “shade” in place of Goethe’s Angesicht (“face”),
suggesting a fainter, darker image in the water, and also suggesting the
shades of the Underworld whom the fisherman will soon join. He erases
the image of lovers meeting, and makes the rushing waters his tempta-
tion: “With wishful glance the flood beheld/​And long’d the wave to try.”
The fisherman seems not to lust after the mermaid or himself; he desires
to become one with the turbulent river. In the final lines of Goethe’s poem,
the mermaid “half pulls” the fisherman, and he “half sank’ (Halb zog sie
ihn, halb sank er hin). Lewis’s fisherman, by contrast, fights only against
himself. “Half in he fell, half in he sprung,” he translates, “and never more
was seen.” He succumbs to an internal urge to lose himself in the water.
As in the translation of Horace at the opening of The Monk, Lewis’s
version of “The Fisherman” is striking for its erasure of explicitly erotic
elements—​in this case, the image of the lovers meeting and the allusion
to Narcissus. A queer erotics is signaled by the absent and unsayable.100
Here too Lewis translates the scenario into a drama of competing urges.
Since Lewis’s fisherman is looking with “wishful glance” not at the mer-
maid but at the dangerous, rushing waters, I  argue that Lewis has con-
verted this poem into yet another allegory for one his favorite themes: the
temptations of writing. Wordsworth would speak in a late poem of the
“unremitting voice of nightly streams,” and indeed rushing waters were a
quintessential metaphor for Romantic verse, going back to Hurd’s vision
in Letters of Chivalry and Romance of the romance tradition as a “mighty
river that can lead a traveller out of his way.”101 In a versified introduc-
tory dialogue to Tales of Terror, a companion volume published in 1801
by Lewis’s publisher Joseph Bell, a Gothic author describes the thrills of
reading romance:

100
 The suppression of Goethe’s echoes of the Narcissus myth is particularly striking, given the
long history of that myth in articulating queer desire: see Steven Bruhm, Reflecting Narcissus: A
Queer Aesthetic (Minneapolis, 2001).
101
 Hurd, Works, iv. 241, a passage discussed in Chapter 1; William Wordsworth, Last Poems,
1821–​1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 102–​3.

148  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 The pale procession fading on the sight,
The flaming tapers, and the chaunted rite,
Rouse, in the trembling breast, delightful dreams,
And steep each feeling in romance’s streams!
Streams which afar in restless grandeur roll,
And burst tremendous on the wond’ring soul!102

The mind susceptible to Gothic pleasures is flooded, “steeped” in the

“streams” of romance. In “The Fisherman,” the rushing, swelling waters
are readily interpretable as a figure for those literary trends. Lewis’s poem
becomes yet another image in his work of writing as an almost irrepress-
ible urge. The author figure longs to try the “flood” and the “wave” and is
seduced into dangerous waves—​dangerous, because despite his delicacy
in omitting explicit aspects of sexuality, he always runs the risk of giving
away too much of himself.
This interpretation is strengthened by a similar vision of Lewis in a
contemporary parody of “The Fisherman” included in Tales of Terror.
“The Mud-​King” ingeniously combines the plot of Lewis’s translation
of Goethe’s text with characters and situations from Alexander Pope’s
Dunciad.103 Amid the comic games of the second book of The Dunciad,
Pope had depicted one of his opponents, the Whig poet and polemicist
Jonathan Smedley, taking part in a mud-​diving competition. Smedley
plunges into the sewer area of London called Fleet Ditch, but rises from the
muck later in the book to give a fantastical account of the Underworld be-
neath the dingy, polluted waters, replete with classicizing “mud-​nymphs,”
streams of Lethe, and a branch of the river Styx.104 From this already
fantastical scenario, the anonymous parodist in Tales of Terror offers a
new version of “The Fisherman”—​or, as he calls it, “ ‘The Fisherman’ by
Lutetia, the Younger.”105 In this poem, Smedley’s ghost plays the role of
the mermaid, and Matthew Lewis himself is the fisherman who is tempted
to go down under the waters. “The Mud-​King” can be read as a key for
understanding “The Fisherman,” since the parody is surprisingly sensi-
tive to the particular tendencies and anxieties manifested all throughout
Lewis’s work.

102
 Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 250.
103
 I cite the line numbers from Thomson’s text, printed in Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 277–​84.
104
 Dunciad 2.279–​82, 301–​28 (= Pope, The Dunciad, 135–​6, 139–​41).
105
 The sobriquet is a not-​so-​subtle charge of effeminacy against Lewis. Lutetia sounds like
“Lewis,” of course, but is also the name of a nymph in the Dunciad (2.309): “young Lutetia, softer
than the down.”

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 149

 In “The Mud-​King,” the ghost of Smedley tempts poor Lewis to sur-
render to the waves of romance:

Thyself would leave the hackney’d themes

That Pope, that Dryden tired;
Thyself indulge in German dreams,
By great Goëthe inspired. (21–​4)

If Lewis would only leap in and succumb to the turbulent streams, he

could happily flood the market with work after work of Gothic fiction, the
sort associated with William Lane’s highly prolific Minerva Press, which
had a reputation for crass commercialism (“For him Pactolus rolls in cash/​
From Lane’s Minerva-​press,” 59–​60).106 The crystalline, clear surface of
the water becomes the enticing blankness of an unwritten page:

A maze of milk-​white margin waits

Thy rivulet of text;
Designs, vignettes, subscriptions, plates,
Shall crown thy page the next. (61–​4)

Lewis is seduced. “I’ve heard advice enough,” he exclaims, “and what

can poets fear?” (71–​2). The question ironically reverses Lewis’s char-
acteristic preoccupation with everything authors can fear, the frightening
dangers that they face once their books have been published and they pass,
to quote Lewis’s Shakespearean rendering of Horace in The Monk, “that
dangerous bourn,/​Whence never book can back return.”107 He plunges in.
The final stanzas of “The Mud-​King” describe the author reveling with
shades under the surface of the water, submerged in a world of German
horror that matches the images and themes of Tales of Wonder. “Romance
enchants his spell-​bound head” (line 79).
“The Mud-​King” is made even more striking by its many footnotes.
The poem comes with its own densely muddy, mock-​scholarly apparatus,
in which the poet offers commentary on alleged lacunae in the text—​of
course invented—​and suggests parallel passages from Roman literature.
Yet this Latin commentary at the foot of the page, partially veiled in a code

106
 The river Pactolus, in modern Turkey, was famous for its gold. The poem was written during the
“zenith period” of the publication activity of the Minerva Press: Elizabeth A. Neiman, Minerva’s
Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780–​1820 (Cardiff, 2019), 4.
107
 Lewis, The Monk, 35.

150  |  Spectres of Antiquity

of dashes and truncated quotations, is in fact a highly specific warning
of the dangers of publishing. The footnotes repeatedly allude to authors
who had recently suffered scandal or prosecution for their writing. One
proposed emendation is attributed to “Gilbt. W–​ke–​d”:  that is, Gilbert
Wakefield, a Whig classicist and biblical scholar, who 1798 had published
a polemical tract attacking the Pitt government’s role in the war against
France and endured two years’ imprisonment as a result.108 The second is
attributed to “R. P–​s–​n”: Richard Porson, the editor of Euripides, who was
equally famous for tracts identifying textual corruptions in the Gospels.
He earned lasting criticism from conservative quarters for his alleged im-
piety.109 A reference to “D–​r–​n” comes with this footnote: “—​Hortorum
decus et tutela [‘glory and guard of gardens’]—​Dr.  D—​, will close the
line—​Nulli fas casto [‘no decent man can say it’].” The Latin quotation
refers to the hyper-​phallic garden god Priapus, and the writer licentious
enough to speak his name is Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles
Darwin, who scandalized the literary establishment with the sexual sug-
gestiveness of his didactic poetry about the reproductive lives of plants.110
A further footnote refers to Richard Payne Knight, an equally infamous
figure, whose privately printed Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786)
was met with severe, moralistic condemnation throughout the 1790s.111
Lewis had already joined their company of these men, at least according
to Thomas James Mathias, who attacked all of them in The Pursuits of
Literature.
The footnotes also draw attention, in an equally veiled way, to the
sexual ambiguity in the poem. “The Mud-​King” twists the erotic scenario
of “The Fisherman” so that the alluring female mermaid is replaced by the
male poet Smedley. This male ghost enacts the same scene of seduction in
newly homoerotic terms. One of the Latin quotations explicitly casts this
gender reversal in terms of cross-​dressing: when the ghost sees Lewis, he
is called a “brother muse,” but a footnote on the word “brother” reads “Et
sexus pariter decet! Polydamus is always united with his Troiades [‘Trojan
ladies’]—​And what have we now but master-​misses?” The first part of this
footnote is from Statius’ first-​century CE Achilleid, describing Achilles’
childhood experience disguised as a girl by his mother on the island of

108
 John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford, 2013), 13–​14, 148.
109
 M. L. Clarke, Richard Porson: A Biographical Essay (Cambridge, 1937), 51.
110
 The quotation is from Ovid, Fasti 1.415. On the scandal, see Martin Priestman, Poetry of
Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (London, 2013).
111
 On this work and the furor it aroused, see Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique
in Eighteenth-​Century England (Los Angeles, 2008), 113–​28.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 151

Scyros; the second refers to a line from the satirist Persius, attacking the ef-
feminacy of Roman critics who dislike his verses; the final part, impugning
a contemporary crowd of “master-​misses,” seems to be another crack at
Lewis being somehow less than a man, a familiar insult at the time.112
Other footnotes draw parallels between the narrative of the poem and an-
cient myths of erotic persecution or pursuit. One likens Smedley to Acis,
who in Ovid’s Metamorphoses was transformed into a river nymph by his
lover Galatea; another likens the tempting waters of the river to the pool in
which Actaeon saw the naked Diana.113 Yet other footnotes use allusions to
Latin literature to create an impression of erotic double meanings. When
Lewis revels underwater, he is compared to a warrior drunk on “beer and
mead,” drinks that inspire “gods and men.” That does not sound particu-
larly sexual in English, but the word “men” is accompanied by a citation to
a famous Latin line that praises the sexual powers of Venus, the “pleasure
of gods and people.”114 When Lewis plunges into the river and the mud
nymphs cushion his fall, a footnote draws an eye-​opening parallel with the
homoerotic myth of Hylas, the beautiful boy-​lover of Hercules, who also
fell in a pool and was stolen away by nymphs.115
Who wrote this poem? Could it even have been Lewis himself? That
would be an extreme instance of authorial self-​sabotage, though it would
be in keeping with Lewis’s characteristic blend of horror and farce.
Whoever it was, the classical footnotes mimic a specific aspect of his
writing to a remarkable degree. The quotations at the base of the page form
a critical commentary on the personal risks of publishing, communicating
an anxiety about Gothic authorship that resembles the Horatian imitation
in The Monk and the self-​censuring of The Love of Gain. Allusions to
classical antiquity also function as a coded way of drawing attention to
same-​sex desire, giving voice to an aspect of the author that would be
unspeakable in the English-​language portions of his texts.116 As I  have
suggested throughout this chapter, Lewis is a Gothic translator as much
as he is Gothic author. His writings are undergirded by a vast literary

112
 Statius, Achilleid 1.605, describing Achilles’ attractiveness as he infiltrates a women-​only
religious rite: et sexus pariter decet et mendacia matris (“his own sex and his mother’s deceptions
were equally charming”); Persius, Satires 1.3–​5, with Bramble, Persius and the Programmatic
Satire, 68–​9. For stereotypes of Lewis’s effeminacy (a “slim, skinny, sinical [sic] fop,” according to
one account), see MacDonald, Monk Lewis,  65–​6.
113
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.896–​7 (footnote to line 5), 3.161 (footnote to line 62).
114
 Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.1 (footnote to line 78).
115
 Propertius, Elegies 1.20.47 (footnote to line 74).
116
 For the “unspeakable” as “one of the most distinctive Gothic tropes,” see Sedgwick, Between
Men,  94–​6.

152  |  Spectres of Antiquity

unconsciousness. Texts from the past can rise to the surface in his plots,
making explicit themes and ideas that had to remain implicit in English.
Precisely because of the popular scandal of The Monk and because of his
reputation for generating horror, Lewis might seem to have little to do with
the culture of classical imitation in his period. The opposite is true: much
more than Radcliffe or any other Gothic author of the 1790s, Lewis found
in Latin and Greek literature a resource for expressing terror—​not, per-
haps, the terror of the supernatural, but the all too real terror of personal
condemnation and sexual exposure.
In the opening to Poems (1812), published some sixteen years after The
Monk and six years before Lewis’s untimely death from yellow fever, he
begins with a complaint about his perennial targeting by critics. On the
title page, he prints a couplet from the tenth book of Martial’s Epigrams,
published in 95 CE:

Cur Ego laborem notus esse tam stulte,

Cum stare gratis cum silentio possim?
MARTIAL

The Latin asks, “Why should I work so foolishly to be famous” [or “for
foolish fame”], “when I could remain silent for free?” In the original poem
(Epigrams 10.3), a certain imitator had scrawled some abusive verses and
passed them off as Martial’s work, and now Martial was facing underserved
abuse. He pleads for “dark fame” (nigra . . . fama) to fly far from him.117
The situation has obvious relevance for Lewis’s own life, since he too was
widely imitated, and he too had long faced criticism that he thought un-
deserved. But there is one small textual difference in Lewis’s quotation.
In Martial’s original text, the search for fame (or the fame itself) is not
merely stulte, “foolish.” It is prave—​“perverse,” “twisted,” “evil.”118 The
idea of suffering an “evil” reputation is, of course, all too appropriate for
Matthew “Monk” Lewis, whose entire life was shaped by his association
with the villain of the Gothic novel that he published at age twenty. The
change from prave to stulte could be a lapse of memory, but it could also be
Lewis’s deliberate alteration. Perhaps he was trying, in these more polite

117
 As Victoria Rimell puts it, in this poem Martial “faces the flipside of fame”: Martial’s
Rome: Empire and the Ideology of Epigram (Cambridge, 2008), 71.
118
 In William Hay’s edition (Select Epigrams of Martial (London, 1755), 140), the original couplet
reads Cur ego laborem notus esse tam prave,/​Constare gratis cum silentium possit? There are
alterations in both lines, but the shift in the second does not change the line’s meaning.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 153

and classicizing poems, to evade the Gothic label for once. As Martial
knew, and Lewis learned all too well, dark fame is difficult to escape.

A Grotesque Picture

In The Monthly Magazine in 1800, an article appeared entitled “Remarks

on a Passage in Virgil.” A literary critical dialogue, this piece includes ideas
that would have been instantly familiar to anyone who remembered Hurd’s
Letters on Chivalry and Romance. One character is surprised that the other
takes such pleasure in reading romances and English ballads, despite the
fact that classical literary works by Lucretius and Virgil are visible on his
shelf. He responds that the Aeneid is no less full of monsters, adducing the
example of Polyphemus and the Sibyl: “giants with one eye in their fore-
head; a witch that can shew the way to hell, and unfold future events.” In
an earlier piece, this same author had similarly criticized the “monstrous
fables, absurdities, and contradictions” of the Aeneid, describing the poem
as a mélange of “monsters and phantoms.” Hurd’s Letters had contributed
to a nationalistic refashioning of English literary history. He underlined
similarities between classical epic and medieval romance in order to ques-
tion the literary prejudice that accorded value to Greek and Latin classics,
but denied it to Spenser and Milton. The author of this piece has other sorts
of national concerns. By writing the Aeneid to celebrate the autocratic rule
of the emperor Augustus, he says that Virgil has “given a remarkable in-
stance of servile adulation to tyrants.” The author chooses a passage “at
random” to illustrate the improbable aspects of the poem’s plot, but he
chooses a passage with obvious political significance: Virgil’s allegorical
description in book 1 of Aeolus, king of the winds, who has the power to
“bridle spirits and control rages” (mollitque animos et temperat iras). In
1790, Edmund Burke chose the same passage to describe the need to re-
strain the storm of revolution across Europe.119
These periodical pieces were not, however, composed by another fol-
lower of Young and Hurd, and their author had no interest in strengthening
the pride of England in its literary history. The Monthly Magazine, and
American Review was published in New  York City between April 1799
and December 1800, a quarter-​century after American independence and

 Aeolus: Aeneid 1.52–​7; cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G.
119

Mitchell (Oxford, 1993), 58.

154  |  Spectres of Antiquity

barely a decade after the ratification of the United States Constitution.
The author was Charles Brockden Brown, the subject of Chapter 5, who
is often adduced as the first author in the history of the United States to
make a living exclusively from writing.120 Brown was also the editor of
The Monthly Magazine, and despite the fact that its articles were attributed
to a variety of pseudonyms, he seems to have written almost entire issues
by himself.121 His description of Virgil as an apologist for autocratic tyr-
anny can be paralleled in other early American texts.122 Yet the charge that
the Roman poet was naively enthralled to myths of the past—​that he had
a “superstitious reverence for antiquity”—​is especially characteristic of
Brown’s thinking, and clearly a product of his revolutionary moment.123
Although Brown is eager to establish himself as a broadly educated man of
letters, informed about both world history and current events, he is consist-
ently skeptical about the inherited authority of European, and particularly
classical, images and ideas. His editorship of The Monthly Magazine also
overlapped with an eighteen-​month period in which—​remarkably—​he
published four Gothic novels. According to an oft-​quoted preface, these
novels aimed to replace the “puerile superstition and exploded manners”
of English and German Gothic texts with plots better fitted to the “condi-
tion of our country.”124 In adapting the dark vision of classical antiquity
from Hurd, Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis, Brown gave it new political
meaning.

120
 “Remarks on a Passage in Virgil,” The Monthly Magazine and the American Review 2/​4 (April
1800), 243–​7; his earlier attack on Virgil is in his Review of Joan of Arc, An Epic Poem by Robert
Southey, The Monthly Magazine and the American Review 1/​3 (June 1799), 226.
121
 See Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer’s introduction in Charles Brockden Brown, Literary
Essays and Review (Frankfurt, 1992), xi–​xix. On the mantle of “first professional author,” see
Weinstock, Charles Brockden Brown,  2–​4.
122
 On Brown’s criticisms of Virgil, see John P. McWilliams Jr., The American Epic: Transforming
a Genre, 1770–​1860 (Cambridge, 1989), 22–​4; on the broader ambivalence toward Virgil’s politics
in the early United States, see Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: “Pessimistic” Readings of the
Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2007), 182–​95.
123
 Brown, Review of Joan of Arc, 226.
124
 Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, eds. Philip Barnard and
Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis, 2006), 3–​4.

Queer Urges and the Act of Translation  | 155

 CHAPTER 5 Classical Idols and the Early
American Gothic
The Skepticism of Charles Brockden Brown

One of the most memorable images in Charles Brockden Brown’s

Wieland; or, the Transformation; An American Tale (1798) is of a man
conducting strange rituals on a rocky hill in Pennsylvania, in a classical
temple he has built himself. At exactly noon and midnight each day, he
undertakes acts of religious devotion in this isolated building, which is
“edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and covered by an undulating dome.”1
It is there that the novel’s first shocking event takes place. One night the
elder Wieland is summoned as if by a strange power to his temple. He
is overwhelmed by a blinding flash of light. When he emerges, his body
is completely burnt; apparently he has spontaneously burst into flames.2
The novel never explains this baffling incident, and we know only what
our narrator, his daughter Clara, can tell us about it. Later, Clara and
her brother Theodore renovate this fateful building into a shrine to their
own intellectual interests. Theodore buys a bust of the first-​century BCE
Roman orator Cicero, and the siblings spend time there debating a variety
of topics, including Cicero himself.3 Yet Theodore also begins to show
signs of his father’s religious fanaticism. His strange, patriarchal reverence
leads him to create a monument not to his late father, but to the “divinity of

1
 Wieland; or, the Transformation; An American Tale, eds. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro
(Indianapolis, 2009b), 12. I cite the Hackett editions of Brown’s Gothic novels edited by Philip
Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, and acknowledge a particular debt to their detailed annotations. The
Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition (http://​brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.
edu) is also an invaluable resource for all scholars of Brown.
2
 Brown, Wieland,  17–​19.
3
 Brown, Wieland,  23–​5.
Cicero,” whose Latin he spends his days imitating. The older generation’s
superstitious reverence has not been quashed but merely redirected. When
a roving traveler named Carwin, a sinister “biloquist,” begins to manipu-
late the siblings and their circle by impersonating their voices, Theodore
succumbs to madness; and as tragedy strikes, the family’s pretensions to
enlightened rationality are progressively undermined.
In Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture,
John Levi Barnard describes the ways in which writers critical of classi-
cism in American culture put its iconography in provocative or damning
juxtapositions. The frontispiece image to William Wells Brown’s Clotel;
or, the President’s Daughter (1853), for example, depicts the title char-
acter, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter by his enslaved mistress, jumping to
her death from a bridge to avoid slave catchers, while the neoclassical
dome of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, is visible in the back-
ground. The combination of images suggests that slavery, no less than de-
mocracy or citizenship, is a part of the nation’s cultural inheritance from
antiquity.4 Writing in an earlier period, Charles Brockden Brown creates a
similar juxtaposition by making the classicizing structure of the Wielands’
temple the setting for inexplicable and irrational acts of violence. Unlike
the criticisms of the writers studied by Barnard, Brown’s antipathy to-
ward the classical is not grounded in a searching ideological critique of
the social values of the ancient world. Nonetheless, his writing reflects a
suspicion of blind, unexamined adoration of authority, and particularly a
suspicion of inherited symbols of power from British and European cul-
ture. The image of the temple in Wieland is unsettling partly because of its
familiarity: the dome and columns replicate in miniature the classical ico-
nography of structures such as the Capitol or Jefferson’s Monticello, and
Theodore’s cultish veneration of Cicero reproduces in sinister, exaggerated
form the respect of the Founders toward the icons of Roman Republican
virtue. By transforming this building into a place of violence and madness,
Brown expresses a powerful skepticism about the civilizing force of clas-
sical antiquity in the new nation.
Previous scholars have discussed Brown’s representation of Greek
and Roman antiquity in individual works, but no unified account exists
of his attitude toward classicism in both his periodical writing and his

4
 John Levi Barnard, Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (Oxford,
2018), 100–​4. Bridget Bennett (“‘The Silence Surrounding the Hut’: Architecture and Absence in
Wieland,” Early American Literature 53/​2 [2018], 369–​404) argues that the classical architecture
of the temple in Wieland reminds readers of an aspect markedly absent from the novel’s vision of
early America: slave labor, a system “ineluctably connected” to Greece and Rome.

158  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Gothic novels.5 Although critics have long debated an alleged transition
in Brown’s political thought, from an early identification with British and
European radical philosophy to a conservative Federalism later in life,
his skepticism about the value of classical learning is remarkably con-
sistent. After Wieland, Brown published three other Gothic novels in quick
succession:  Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (1799), the two-​part Arthur
Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799 and 1800), and Edgar Huntly;
or, Memoirs of a Sleep-​Walker (1799). In Wieland, he uses the archetypal
trope of the Gothic novel—​the strange and uncanny power of the past over
the present—​to criticize the superstitious sway of ancient influence over
American minds, depicting the veneration of Greece and Rome as a sort of
irrational superstition. Later, in Ormond, the narrator of that work, Sophia,
exemplifies a similar veneration of antiquity: she comments consistently
about the classical learning of all the major characters, and adds her own
praise of ancient thinkers to the narration, even in moments when it is dis-
tinctly out of place. She uses classical allusion to create the plot’s central
polarity, representing its villains as Ovidian, metamorphic figures—​agents
of cultural instability, flux, and change—​and its heroine, Constantia, as an
epitome of classical virtue. Yet as we become aware of Constantia’s own
partial and biased description of events, the novel forces us also to test her
conservative faith in tradition against a more dynamic vision of cultural
progress and change.
Brown’s questioning of the mythic power of classical culture in
American life is part of a wider challenge to authority in his work. Julia
Stern has identified in Brown an “abiding antipatriarchalism, a hostility to
the regime of the fathers,” an attitude that inspires him to produce “complex

5
 On the representation of Ciceronian rhetoric in Wieland, see Christopher Looby, Voicing
America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago, 1996), 158–​
65; Marcia Nichols, “Cicero’s Pro Cluentio and the ‘Mazy’ Rhetorical Strategies of Wieland,”
Law and Literature 20/​3 (2008), 459–​76. On classical themes in Brown’s short fiction, see
Oliver Scheiding, “‘Nothing but a Disjointed and Mutilated Tale’: Zur narrativen Strategie der
Doppelperspektive in Charles Brockden Browns historischer Erzählung ‘Thessalonica: A Roman
Story,’” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 38 (1997), 93–​110; Scheiding, “‘Plena exemplorum
est historia’: Rewriting Exemplary History in Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Death of Cicero,’” in
Bernd Engler and Oliver Scheiding (eds.), Re-​visioning the Past: Historical Self-​Reflexivity in
American Short Fiction (Trier, Germany, 1998), 39–​50; Scheiding, “Brown and Classicism,” in
Philip Barnard, Hilary Emmett, and Stephen Shapiro (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Charles
Brockden Brown (Oxford, 2019), 455–​68. For classical texts in Brown’s literary criticism, see
Ernest Marchand, “The Literary Opinions of Charles Brockden Brown,” Studies in Philology 31/​
4 (1934), 541–​66; Wolfgang Schäfer, Charles Brockden Brown als Literaturkritik (Frankfurt,
1991),  152–​4.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 159

countervisions to the myth of the Founding.”6 Bonds of fatherhood and
brotherhood, the symbolic bases of the new nation, are broken apart in
his Gothic novels, which instead depict powerful, educated women and
deranged or ineffectual fathers and sons. There is an antipatriarchal force,
too, in his challenge to the status of figures such as Cicero and Virgil.
But I have chosen “skepticism” as the key term for my analysis, since it
emphasizes the premium that Brown and his intellectual circles put on
knowledge and rational inquiry as well as critique. In the first published
biography of Brown, his biographer William Dunlap identified this skepti-
cism as one stamp of his character:

Ever fond of analysis, Charles, even in very early life, would take no opinion
upon trust. He found in his own mind abundant reason to reject many of
the perceived opinions of mankind, and to doubt the reality of many facts
upon which those opinions are founded. Much of his reading at this time
tended to bewilder rather than enlighten and to confirm his predisposition to
scepticism. In common with many others, he imputed to wrong causes the
defects which are but too apparent in existing systems. He saw the wrong
and injustice and evil which exist, and instead of attributing them to the ig-
norance and selfishness of individuals, he assigned as the cause the errors or
inefficiency of those codes which are intended to enlighten or to restrain.7

Dunlap describes Brown’s inveterate skepticism toward the “existing sys-

tems” of his time, contrasting it at the end of this excerpt with his own,
more conservative worldview, which assigns fault to individual sin rather
than to institutions or modes of belief.8 To speak of skepticism is very
likely to remind a Gothic or Romantic specialist of Hume, and a classi-
cist of Cicero; certainly Brown knew both figures well.9 In his skepticism
toward classical authority, though, the theological sense is especially per-
tinent, since Brown consistently uses the figurative language of religion
to attack the reverence toward classicism in America. Just as Theodore’s

6
 “The State of ‘Women’ in Ormond; or, Patricide in the New Nation,” in Philip Barnard, Mark L.
Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro (eds.), Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and
Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville, 2004), 182, 185.
7
 The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1815), i. 70
8
 Dunlap revised and completed an initial draft of this biography by Paul Allen: see the history of
the text in Paul Allen, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Charles E. Bennett (Delmar, NY,
1975), v–​xxii. In this paragraph, the word “skepticism” is Dunlap’s own addition (cf. Allen, The
Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 70).
9
 On Cicero and the tradition of Academic Skepticism, see Harald Thorsud, Ancient Scepticism
(Berkeley, 2009), 84–​101.

160  |  Spectres of Antiquity

veneration of “the divinity of Cicero” in Wieland mirrors his father’s reli-
gious fanaticism, so he speaks elsewhere of a “superstitious reverence for
antiquity” and an “excessive veneration for antiquity.”10 If the skeptic is
“one who doubts, or pretends to doubt of everything,” to quote the defini-
tion by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (1755), then Brown is one who
doubts the quasi-​religious belief in the classical idols of his own intellec-
tual world.11
Brown learned Latin and Greek from a young age at the Friends Latin
School, a Quaker establishment in Philadelphia, which he attended be-
tween the ages of eleven and sixteen (1781–​6).12 Whether because of his
father’s Quaker background and the religious orientation of the school or
because of an innate tendency to interrogate established ideas, from an
early point Brown expressed doubts about the value of Greek and Latin
learning. In an early autobiographical poem “Devotion:  An Epistle”
(1794), he describes a longing to contemplate the classics:  “Oft has
Achaia’s tower’d pride/​And Roman grandeurs fill’d my eager eye . . . the
eye too narrow seem’d/​to grasp the vast design, the brain too small/​to
harbor the gigantic thought.” Yet already there is something more threat-
ening than grand about this towering legacy of Greece and Rome: Brown
imagines a dome symbolizing Roman power as large as the domed sky
of heaven, as “majestic as a slumbering deity,” “averse to yield obedi-
ence” to any power.13 In his early epistolary fiction Letters to Henrietta
(1792) he staged a conversation about the value of classical learning, al-
beit in stylized and overstated form. Henrietta does not merely want to be
taught some Greek and Latin; she wants to become a female scholar, to be
“placed by the side of Mrs. Carter”—​that is, the bluestocking Elizabeth
Carter, the most renowned female classicist of the eighteenth century.14
In response, the male speaker is at first coyly humble—​my knowledge
of Latin and Greek “will by no means qualify me to instruct others,” he

10
 Brown, Review of Joan of Arc, 226; Brown, “Spenser’s Fairy Queen Modernized,” The Literary
Magazine and American Register 3/​21 (June 1805), 424. For Brown’s authorship of the latter
essay, see the arguments of Weber and Schäfer in Brown, Literary Essays and Reviews,  250–​1.
11
 Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language s.v. Skeptick.
12
 On Brown’s schooling, see David Lindsey Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of
America (Durham, NC, 1952) 18–​22; Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the
Birth of the American Gothic (Philadelphia, 1952), 46–​8; on his classical education in particular,
see Scheiding, “Brown and Classicism,” 455–​6.
13
 Clark, Charles Brockden Brown, 324; the poem is printed as an appendix to his biography of
Brown. For discussion, see Alan Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin,
1983),  31–​3.
14
 Brown, Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown: Letters and Early Epistolary Writings,
eds. Philip Barnard, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Mark L. Kamrath (Lewisburg, PA, 2013), 687.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 161

says—​and then he parades his knowledge of different classical authors be-
fore the woman he wants to impress. But then he abruptly claims that no
pleasure or usefulness can be found in any ancient author, and assures her
that any benefit to be gained from Latin and Greek would be dispropor-
tionate to the time required to learn them.15 This fictional interaction, with
its polarization between classical mastery and strident rejection, is an early
instance of Brown’s tendency to turn the classics into an object of debate.
He unsettles authority by staging a dramatic interaction between extreme
views on both sides.
The ability to read Latin is oddly ubiquitous in Brown’s Gothic novels.
Somehow even the title character of Arthur Mervyn is “well instructed
in Latin,” despite being “an indigent and uneducated rustic” and “unedu-
cated, ignorant and poor.”16 Yet the novels are equally full of scenes that
depict classical learning being outmoded by more modern knowledge or
by new kinds of prestige. When the shipwrecked Weymouth uses Latin
to communicate with monks in Portugal in Edgar Huntly, the detail helps
to paint a picture of antiquated, Catholic Europe pointedly removed from
Weymouth’s commercial milieu of merchant sailing.17 In Ormond, the
Latin learning of the heroine Constantia seems quaint by comparison with
the more cosmopolitan Martinette, who has both a “classical and math-
ematical education” and a knowledge of current European affairs.18 In
the same novel, the young apprentice Thomas Craig has “acquired more
than the rudiments of Latin,” but this genteel accomplishment is part of
a disguise designed to win the trust of Constantia’s Europe-​loving fa-
ther, whom he then robs.19 At a key point in Arthur Mervyn, Arthur sets
to work using his Latin to decode an old manuscript in an archaic dialect
of Italian. Arthur describes his “phantastic and impracticable” effort in
laboriously deducing the meaning of the Tuscan words from their Latin
origins. He praises the intangible value and “unspeakable pleasure” he has
drawn from his translation of the old text, which itself concerns the dis-
covery of treasure in the “ruins of a Roman fortress.” Yet this intangible

15
 Brown, Collected Writings, 694. David Lindsey Clark was inclined to see these letters
as genuinely autobiographical (Charles Brockden Brown, 55), but this is clearly a fictional
correspondence: see Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution,  51–​6
16
 Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, eds. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro
(Indianapolis, 2008), 92, 158, 162. William Dunlap specifically objected to the implausibility of
Arthur being able to read Latin (The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, ii. 25).
17
 Brown, Edgar Huntly, 98.
18
 Ormond; or, the Secret Witness, eds. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis,
2009a),  141–​2.
19
 Brown, Ormond, 8.

162  |  Spectres of Antiquity

value abruptly becomes tangible when he finds banknotes hidden in sewn-​
together pages at the end of the book.20 There could be no better symbolic
representation of the displacement of the authority of classical learning by
modern capital. Later, the scheming Wellbeck comes looking for the same
book precisely because he suspects it is a hiding place for money. He too,
he says, used to hide cash in books filled with “extracts from the Roman
and Greek poets.”21
The ambivalence with which Brown and his circle viewed classical
learning can be linked to the growing inaccessibility of classical education
and the changing demography of the reading public. In an unsigned piece
entitled “On Mottos and Quotations from the Ancients,” published in The
Monthly Magazine, the writer argues that it is time to end the practice
of filling English publications with ostentatious and unnecessary classical
quotations. Certainly, the author affirms, there are “few disputants hardy
enough to affirm that a man may possess an ingenious and enlightened
mind, without a knowledge of Greek or Latin.”22 From the Renaissance
onward, these ancient languages formed a common tongue for learned
communication across nations. But now their use is an outdated con-
ceit, especially since growing numbers of readers never learned them in
schools, especially “the female sex, whom every author is now accus-
tomed to number among his readers.”23 The writer singles out for partic-
ular criticism The Pursuits of Literature by Thomas James Mathias, the
conservative foe of Matthew Lewis. “Very few will be found to admire
his propensity to borrowings from the Greeks and Romans,” the writer
says, and the appearance of translations beneath all his quotations puts his
excessive affectation in a “ridiculous light.”24 The author also draws a dis-
tinction between England and America:

This defection from classical authorities, though not confined to the new
world, is yet more conspicuous on this than on the other side of the ocean;
and the practice of learned quotation is therefore more objectionable in
American, than in European writers. A man need not be endued with any
supernatural foresight to discover that, in no long time, Greek and Latin
will cease to be regularly taught in the fashionable seminaries of America;

20
 Brown, Arthur Mervyn,  97–​8.
21
 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 149.
22
 Anonymous, “On Mottos and Quotations from the Ancients,” The Monthly Magazine and the
American Review 3/​6 (December 1800), 405.
23
 Anonymous, “On Mottos and Quotations,” 406.
24
 Anonymous, “On Mottos and Quotations,” 406.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 163

 and that the erudite essayists of the present age will be then regarded as
we now regard the sermon-​makers of the last century, who mixed up with
their barbarous English at least an equal proportion of Attic salt and Roman
mustard.25

Writers should underline the modernity of the new nation by rejecting the
totemic status of classical authority, which typifies European sensibilities
of previous centuries. This article is unsigned, and we have no certain way
of knowing who wrote it. But the mockery of pseudo-​religious deference
to classical authors is certainly reminiscent of Brown. Earlier generations
had their “reverence for antiquity,” the writer says. The lingering “super-
stition” of their power is a remnant of earlier times. We still lay stress
upon their “random effusions” as we would upon the “dictates of divine
inspiration.”26
If Brown was openly skeptical about the value of classical learning,
however, that does not mean he was willing to forego it himself. Brown and
his circle of associates (the “Friendly Club”) in the 1790s made a public
show of their omnivorous reading habits and wide erudition, establishing
their reputation as cultivated intellectuals.27 When he edited his second
periodical, The Literary Magazine and American Register in 1803–​7, ar-
ticles entitled “Verbal Wonders in Latin” and “Didactic Poetry and the
Georgics” appeared alongside pieces such as “Sea Currents Explained,”
“Why Are Diamonds Valuable?” and “Situations of Coal.”28 Specifically,
Brown felt the need to rebut the assumption that Americans lacked the cul-
tivated interests of their European counterparts. “It is needless to dwell on
the enormity of that prejudice which can describe the people of America as
worse than Goths, Vandals, or Saracens,” he wrote contemptuously.29 This

25
 Anonymous, “On Mottos and Quotations,” 406. The comparison between classicizing and
cookery is a stock motif in earlier eighteenth-​century literary critical discourse: Henry Power,
Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature
(Oxford, 2015).
26
 Anonymous, “On Mottos and Quotations,” 404. In a later essay entitled “On Classical Learning”
(The Literary Magazine and American Register 3/​19 [April 1805], 256–​8), Brown argues against
the usefulness of teaching Greek and Latin in schools. The arguments closely resemble those made
in other criticisms of classical education by American educational reformers of the period: John C.
Shields, The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self (Knoxville, 2001), 259–​77.
27
 Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of
American Literature (Baltimore, 2007), 6.
28
 I describe volume 3, number 21 (June 1805).
29
 Review of Poems, Chiefly Occasional, by William Cliffton, The Monthly Magazine and the
American Review 3/​6 (December 1800), 428; arguments for authorship in Brown, Literary Essays
and Reviews, 239.

164  |  Spectres of Antiquity

investment in tradition, even when it is the object of critique, highlights the
fallacy of drawing any simple distinction between “Old World” and “New
World” in Brown’s texts. In interpreting American Gothic novels there is
a natural tendency to focus on recognizably American and contemporary
aspects. Yet the monolingual and narrowly local writer that often emerges
from such accounts bears little resemblance to Brown and his group.30
Self-​consciously cosmopolitan in their reading and interests, informed
about French and German as well as English and classical texts, these
American intellectuals desired to claim their place—​even skeptically—​
within global networks of language, literature, and history.

An Excessive Veneration for Antiquity: The Cult of Cicero

in Wieland

Wieland; or the Transformation. An American Tale (1798) is a novel that

highlights the immanent presence of European traditions in the lives of
its American protagonists. As Stefan Schöberlein writes, the “first thing
one might notice when reading Wieland is how strangely foreign this self-​
termed ‘American tale’ is.”31 The novel’s central characters, Clara and
Theodore Wieland, are second-​generation German-​Americans living in
rural Pennsylvania. They are also—​in a startling fictionalization of con-
temporary history—​invented relatives of the still-​living poet Christoph
Martin Wieland, who was in Brown’s era at the height of his popularity
among English readers.32 The novel describes the interruption of their lives
by a mysterious, wandering ventriloquist (or “biloquist”) named Carwin,
who impersonates the voices of Clara and her circle of friends, inspiring
a murderous mania in Theodore and bringing the group to tragic ruin. As
well as impersonating voices, Carwin also epitomizes a suspicious form of
cultural ventriloquism: a character first saw him in Spain, where he passed

30
 Barnard and Shapiro call the recovery of the European milieu of Brown’s circle “something of
a lost world for American Studies” (Brown, Ormond, xi). I am indebted to Leonard von Morzé for
sharing his unpublished paper “Did Early America Have a Multilingual Public Sphere?” (delivered
at Harvard University, March 22, 2017), which criticizes the tendency for scholars to ignore the
polyglot nature of early American publishing.
31
 “Speaking in Tongues, Speaking without Tongues: Transplanted Voices in Charles Brockden
Brown’s Wieland,” Journal of American Studies 51/​2 (2017), 537 (emphasis original).
32
 Violet A. A. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England, 1750–​1830 (London, 1929),
76–​105. Twenty-​five of Wieland’s works were available in English translation by 1800: Lieselotte
E. Kurth-​Voigt, “The Reception of C.M. Wieland in America,” in Gerhard K. Friesen and Walter
Schatzberg (eds.), The German Contribution to the Building of the Americas (Worcester, MA,
1977), 102.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 165

as Spanish; then he says that he was born in England; then it is revealed
at the climax of the novel that this pretender was an American all along.33
In representing characters’ various ties with different European religious
sects and literary movements, Wieland explores multiple modes of civic
self-​fashioning and cultural belonging in a still-​embryonic republic. The
novel’s allusions to continental politics, literature, and religious history,
dismissed by earlier critics as evidence of a “bookish mind”34 or “over-
weening intellectualism,”35 instead reflect a contemporary debate about
which parts of the past should make up the new national self.
One of these cultural ties to Europe was classicism, which, in the words of
Caroline Winterer, was “the central intellectual project in America before the
late nineteenth century.” Cicero was a source of especial cultural authority.36
Winterer cites the claim of the second president, John Adams, that since “all
the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philoso-
pher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight.”37 Yet even at
the beginning of Wieland, Theodore’s adoration of the Roman orator Cicero
seems strangely obsessive. In the renovated temple where the elder Wieland
was once inexplicably burnt alive, Clara tells us that Theodore imitates his
“darling”:

The chief object of his veneration was Cicero. He was never tired of con-
ning and rehearsing his productions. To understand them was not sufficient.
He was anxious to discover the gestures and cadences with which they ought
to be delivered. He was very scrupulous in selecting a true scheme of pro-
nunciation for the Latin tongue, and in adapting it to the words of his darling
writer. His favorite occupations consisted in embellishing his rhetoric with all
the proprieties of gesticulation and utterance.38

Jay Fliegelman has described an “elocutionary revolution” in eighteenth-​

century America, in which the arousal of passions rather than persuasion
through argument was the primary aim, and the face and body of the

33
 Brown, Wieland, 58–​9, 151. The novel’s only use of “transformation,” the word in its subtitle, is
to describe Carwin’s self-​invention as a Spaniard (at 59).
34
 Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (New York, 1957), 31.
35
 Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown, 114.
36
 The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–​1910
(Baltimore, 2002), 1, 25–​6.
37
 The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles F. Adams, 10 vols.
(Boston, 1850–​6), iv. 295.
38
 Brown, Wieland,  23–​4.

166  |  Spectres of Antiquity

speaker was judged the most effective mode of influencing the audience.39
Theodore can plausibly be seen as expressing this ideal, embodying what
Joy Connolly has called the “physical stylistics of democratic discourse,”
a particular emphasis on bodily posture and gesture in the rhetorical theory
of the early United States.40 Yet the faithful replication of ancient rhe-
torical postures is far from the standard ideal. Hugh Blair’s Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the most widely circulated treatise on rhet-
oric in the early United States, distinguishes the naturalistic speech of the
modern age with the musical tones and theatrical gestures of the Roman
rhetoricians. The “vehemence” of ancient actors and orators, he says, is
foreign to contemporary taste; the Roman actor Roscius “would have
seemed a madman to us.”41 Theodore’s recitation of Cicero’s speeches in
Latin may reflect the heroization of the Roman orator in contemporary po-
litical discourse, but by having his character aspire so literally to assume
the voice and bearing of the classical exemplar, Brown draws attention
to the strange anachrony of taking ancient models for modern statesmen.
The religious overtones of Theodore’s devotion—​ Clara refers to
Cicero as her brother’s “divinity”—​also associate Theodore with a satiric
archetype that would appear in Brown’s other work. In 1805, an essay
was published in The Literary Magazine, and American Register called
“Ciceronians,” which draws its title and theme from Erasmus’ Renaissance
satire of imitators of Cicero, “The Ciceronian” (Ciceronianus, 1528).42
The author of the essay (probably but not certainly Brown)43 wrote that it
is “difficult for us of the present times to conceive the degree of reverence
which was paid by mankind, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries, to the ancients in general, but more particularly to Cicero.”
These “votaries,” the stylistic imitators who were the targets of Erasmus’
original satire, are described as a cloistered and obsessive cult. They have
“fled from the society of the living” and devoted themselves only to the

39
 Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance
(Stanford, 1993).
40
 “Classical Education and the Early American Democratic Style,” in Susan A. Stephens and
Phiroze Vasunia (eds.), Classics and National Cultures (Oxford, 2010), 92.
41
 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, i. 138. Blair’s work was republished in complete
form in the United States twenty-​seven times from 1784 to 1826, and in abridged versions fifty-​
four times between 1788 and 1830: Stephen L. Carr, “The Circulation of Blair’s Lectures,”
Rhetorical Society Quarterly 32/​4 (2002), 83.
42
 The Literary Magazine and American Register 2/​21 (June 1805), 404–​5, reprinted in Brown,
Wieland,  205–​7.
43
 Brown was The Literary Magazine’s editor and main contributor between 1803 and 1807. The
essay is signed “R.,” a signature that Brown is known to have used: see Weber and Schäfer in
Brown, Literary Essays and Reviews, 209–​12.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 167

fetishistic cultivation of Cicero’s words and memory. In the essay’s final
sentence, there is a scene highly reminiscent of Wieland: within a temple-​
like building, “a fraternity of classical devotees assembled on stated days,
when certain portions of his works were read, and voices and instruments
joined in echoing his praise, in presence of his statue.”44 The target of the
essay’s satire is never stated, but presumably it is aimed at contemporaries
who focus only on ancient words. “They preferred the honour of collecting
certain words and arranging a round and nicely cadenced period, to the
performance of any generous action.”45 Theodore too is an anodyne imita-
tion of a real orator: he merely rehearses the same speeches constantly to
a closed circle of friends. In Brown’s Gothic novel, the temple setting and
the language of “veneration” and “divinity” also take on a more sinister
cast, since they suggest a continuity between the religious worship of the
father and the apparently secular enthusiasms of the son.
Brown also undermines Theodore’s devotion to Cicero by subtly
suggesting that Theodore has misinterpreted the object of his reverence.
In the description of the temple, certain details spark suspicion that the
siblings’ statue of Cicero is a fake, and may even bear little resemblance
to the ancient orator. Here is Clara’s account of its origins:

From an Italian adventurer, who erroneously imagined that he could find

employment for his skill, and sale for his sculptures in America, my brother
had purchased a bust of Cicero. He professed to have copied this piece
from an antique dug up with his own hands in the environs of Modena. Of
the truth of his assertions we were not qualified to judge; but the marble
was pure and polished, and we were contented to admire the performance,
without waiting for the sanction of connoisseurs.46

The discovery of antiquities and their relocation in private collections

and museums made international news across the Atlantic, and Brown
frequently reported the movement of ancient objects in his updates on
European affairs. Compared to that well-​documented trade, Clara’s ac-
count inevitably raises suspicion. A wandering adventurer and failed en-
trepreneur told the sheltered siblings that he had dug up the bust in the
“environs outside Modena” (the Roman ruins are outside the boundaries
of the modern town) and then copied it, as both archeologist and artist.

44
 Brown, “Ciceronians,” 405.
45
 Brown, “Ciceronians,” 404–​5.
46
 Brown, Wieland, 23.

168  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Clara and her brother, admiring the look of the statue, have refrained from
consulting connoisseurs about whether it was an accurate copy of a gen-
uine original or not. In a motif that will become common in the novel, the
enlightened pretensions of the protagonists are undermined not only by ir-
rational and inexplicable occurrences, but by the suggestion that the words
and ideas upon which they rely are inauthentic (a motif reminiscent of the
many levels of fakery we have observed in the representation of antiquity
in other Gothic novels in this book). Moreover, when the novel’s villain
Carwin appears, another character (Henry Pleyel) recalls having seen him
among the ruins in Spain, reading a book about Roman architecture;47 and
in Wieland’s unfinished prequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, we
learn that Carwin has a “passion for antiquities” and was once hired to
catalogue a wealthy man’s collection of ancient objects.48 In short, Carwin
is just the sort of “connoisseur” who could have judged the truth of the
siblings’ bust. When he finally relates his backstory to Clara, he tells her
that he had secretly spent many hours looking at “the ornaments” of their
temple.49 It is tempting to speculate that the siblings’ questionable bust of
Cicero gave him some clue to their gullibility.
The suspicion engendered about the siblings’ bust matches the skep-
ticism about the veracity of representations of history in Brown’s other
writings. “We accustom ourselves to pay too liberal an admiration to the
great characters recorded in modern, to say nothing of ancient, history,” he
wrote. The “phantom of history” inflates ordinary people into giants; if we
were accustomed to view historical figures as the human beings they were,
we would not view them with such awe.50 Soon after Wieland, Brown
demonstrated the point by publishing his own account of the Roman or-
ator, “The Death of Cicero,” which was first printed at the end of the third
volume of Brown’s Gothic novel Edgar Huntly.51 This story of Cicero’s
last days is told by Tiro, who was enslaved and worked as Cicero’s aman-
uensis before his manumission. (It is the only one of Brown’s texts written
from the perspective of someone who has been enslaved.) The story depicts

47
 Brown, Wieland, 58. He is reading the “work of the deacon Marti”; that is, the description of the
Roman amphitheatre at Saguntum written in Latin by Manuel Martí y Zaragoza in 1705, widely
translated and republished throughout the eighteenth century.
48
 Brown, Wieland,  266–​7.
49
 Brown, Wieland, 151.
50
 “Historical Characters are False Representations of Nature,” The Literary Magazine and
American Register 5/​29 (February 1806), 32, 34. Weber and Schäfer offer evidence for Brown’s
authorship at Brown, Literary Essays and Reviews,  255–​6.
51
 Barnard and Shapiro print the work in their edition of Wieland and I cite their text, although
I argue that its original placing in Edgar Huntly is important for its interpretation.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 169

Cicero’s pursuit by his political enemies at the very end of his life. He
is exhausted, dirty, defeated, and driven into hiding, vacillating between
his urge to flee and his desire to give himself up to death. The real Tiro
did indeed write a biography of Cicero—​now lost—​which has often been
regarded as a primary source for ancient accounts of his death, so Brown
extrapolates from history rather than rewriting it entirely.52 The story is
also far from an attack on Cicero, who does eventually make the noble
Roman choice to surrender to death rather than flee. But it does portray
him as subject to very ordinary fears, and this pointedly human depiction
is true to Brown’s antipatriarchal ideals. “Let the monarch lose his crown,
and the minister his place,” he wrote; “let the casque fall from the hero,
and the cap from the cardinal.”53
When “The Death of Cicero” is read directly after Edgar Huntly, as its
first readers would have encountered it, it naturally invites comparison be-
tween the historical narrative and the fictional one. Besides the rhyming
similarity of the characters’ names—​the plot of Edgar Huntly concerns a
man named Clithero—​both are chase narratives, stories of terror and sus-
pense revolving around murder and betrayal. In both, a man of elite status,
as a result of some calamity, briefly experiences life incognito among the
poor and enslaved in the provinces (“Death of Cicero”) or among poor
settlers and American Indian communities (Edgar Huntly). In a key scene,
the once noble, now fugitive Cicero takes shelter and sleeps in the unoccu-
pied hut of a poor fisherman, just as Edgar, also a fugitive, takes shelter in
the hut of a Native American woman named Deb.54 By subtly underlining
the narrative motifs shared by both history and fiction, Brown suggests
that the conventions of storytelling inevitably frame our access to histor-
ical events. By the time we read about the past, historians or poets have
already shaped it into stories. As Oliver Scheiding argues, “The Death of
Cicero” makes the reader aware of the “unavoidable partiality” of Tiro’s
retelling of events.55 With typical skepticism, Brown underlines our lim-
itations in knowing the truth about an ancient figure—​especially one as
lionized as Cicero.
In a later scene of Wieland, Clara describes a debate between Theodore
and Pleyel about one of Cicero’s particular works, the courtroom ora-
tion Pro Cluentio (“In Defense of Cluentius”). “The point discussed was

52
 William C. McDermott, “M. Cicero and M. Tiro,” Historia 21/​2 (1972), 269, 284.
53
 Brown, “Historical Characters are False Representations of Nature,” 33.
54
 Brown, Wieland, 211–​12; cf. at 138–​40.
55
 Scheiding, “Plena exemplorum est historia,” 43.

170  |  Spectres of Antiquity

the merit of the oration for Cluentius,” she says, “as descriptive, first, of
the genius of the speaker; and, secondly of the manners of the times.”56
Pleyel argues that the Roman orator had “embraced a bad cause” in his
defense of Cluentius, and he rejects the fallacy of relying on an advocate’s
exaggerations to “sketch the condition of a nation.” Before the conversa-
tion can continue, however, Pleyel claims that Theodore has misquoted
the Latin. He accuses him of “saying polliceatur when he should have
said polliceretur”—​that is, of using the present subjunctive rather than
the imperfect subjunctive form of the verb “to promise.”57 Although the
scrambling of a classical quotation stands at the very beginning of the
eighteenth-​century Gothic—​on the title page of The Castle of Otranto—​
here is a singular moment in the genre, when two characters actually de-
bate a point of Latin grammar amid the events of the Gothic plot. On the
grammatical point, Theodore is correct. But Pleyel is certainly right about
the morality of the speech: Cicero is forced to admit halfway through the
oration that he had previously defended one of the criminals he is now
attacking.58 In the Pro Cluentio, as Christopher Looby observes, Cicero
also “talks around the issues constantly, strays from the point persist-
ently, and in countless ways makes his oration a catalogue of devices of
rhetorical mystification and outright dishonesty.”59 According to another
ancient text, Cicero “boasted that, in the case of Cluentius, he had cast
shadows over the jurors,” deliberately confusing them with his presenta-
tion of the case.60 The implication is that Theodore is morally naive. His
loving rehearsal of ancient words has blinded him to the dubious ethics of
his classical idol.
Indeed, the more familiar the reader of Wieland is with Cicero’s speech—​
and it was summarized and excerpted at length in Blair’s Lectures (1783)
as an example of “eloquence at the bar”61—​the more ironic Theodore’s
affection for it becomes. Cicero’s assignment in the case was to defend his

56
 Brown, Wieland, 29.
57
 Brown, Wieland, 29–​30. This form appears in chap. 26 of the Pro Cluentio: capit hoc consilium,
ut pecuniam quibusdam iudicibus levissimis polliceatur, deinde eam postea supprimat (“He adopts
this plan: to promise the cash to some of the most fickle judges, then afterwards keep it himself”).
I cite the Latin text and chapter numbers from a ten-​volume collection of Cicero’s works (Oxford,
1783, no editor listed); the Pro Cluentio is at vol. five, pp. 25–​97. This edition was held at the
Library Company of Philadelphia: A Catalogue of the Books, Belonging to the Library Company of
Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1807), 56.
58
 Cicero, Pro Cluentio 17.
59
 Looby, Voicing America, 162.
60
 Quintilian 2.17: se tenebras offudisse iudicibus in causa Cluentii gloriatus est (text: Gibson’s
edition, p. 113).
61
 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ii. 35–​45.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 171

client Cluentius from charges of poisoning his father-​in-​law, Oppianicus,
and of bribing a jury that had convicted Oppianicus eight years earlier.
But Cicero diverts attention from these charges through a character as-
sassination of Oppianicus himself, who is painted in gory terms as a vi-
cious monster, a man to whom “nothing was barred, nothing was sacred,”
whom everyone avoided “like some huge and destructive beast and di-
sease.”62 Cicero narrates a long series of intra-​familial murders he is al-
leged to have committed. According to a summary near the end of the
speech, Oppianicus “murdered his son’s uncle while he was a slave and
in bondage, he arranged for inhabitants of his home town to be put on
a hit-​list and slain, he married the wife of a man he had killed, he gave
her money for an abortion, he murdered his mother-​in-​law and wife, he
killed on a single occasion his brother’s wife, their unborn children, and
his very brother, and, finally, he killed his own children.”63 The last act of
filicide is described with extraordinary pathos. “The boy,” Cicero laments,
“who had been seen in public in perfect health at the eleventh hour was
dead before nightfall. He was burnt on a pyre the next day before dawn.”64
Even as eighteenth-​century readers admired Cicero’s oratorical skill in the
case, they were shocked by its gruesome horrors. The Pro Cluentio, wrote
Conyers Middleton in his 1741 biography of Cicero, “lays open a scene of
such complicated villainy, by poison, murder, incest, suborning witnesses,
corrupting judges, as the Poets themselves have never feigned in any one
family.”65 To see the reference to the Pro Cluentio in Wieland as just a
typical sample of enlightened conversation is to miss the savage irony of
the scene; for these characters casually discuss verb tenses in a speech
famous for its lurid, bloody descriptions of intra-​familial violence. Even
more specifically, the acts described in the Pro Cluentio specifically fore-
shadow the acts perpetrated by Theodore himself, since he too will be led
by growing madness to murder his own wife and children. The Ciceronian
devotee will end up perpetrating the very crimes against which his Roman
idol inveighed.

62
 Pro Cluentio 11: nihil ei clausum, nihil sanctum; 14: ut aliquam immanem ac perniciosam
bestiam pestemque.
63
 Pro Cluentio 44: avunculum filii sui in servitute ac vinculis necarit; qui municipes suos
proscribendos occidendosque curarit; qui eius uxorem, quem occiderat, in matrimonium duxerit;
qui pecuniam pro abortione dederit; qui socrum, qui uxorem, qui uno tempore fratris uxorem,
speratosque liberos, fratremque ipsum, qui denique suos liberos interfecerit.
64
 Pro Cluentio 9: puer, hora undecima cum in publico valens visus esset, ante noctem mortuus, et
postridie, antequam luceret, combustus est.
65
 The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 3 vols. (London, 1741), i. 129.

172  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 As the plot of Wieland progresses, the characters begin to hear mys-
terious, disembodied voices. Carwin, the itinerant “biloquist,” gradually
turns the members of the group against one another. At first he imitates
the voice of Theodore’s wife, Catharine, confusing Theodore; and then
he imitates the voice of Clara, leading Pleyel to accuse her of immoral
behavior. Carwin begins to prey upon Clara, and in one tense scene, when
she is alone in her house late at night, she finds him lurking in her closet.
Later, Clara is horrified to discover the corpse of Theodore’s wife, and she
learns that his children too are dead. When we read Theodore’s confession,
we hear that he was commanded to kill his family. Presumably, Carwin
has imitated the voice of God, although the novel is surprisingly ambig-
uous about the true cause of Theodore’s slide into religious delusion.66
The novel ends, like other novels by Brown, with the surviving characters
traveling to Europe, a place where, in the imaginary of Brown’s texts, the
relationship between antiquity and modernity is less fraught. When Clara
steps off the boat, she says that she has set foot “on the shore of the ancient
world.” As she contemplates “the monuments of past ages,” her tranquility
is restored.67
Carwin’s villainous impersonations are, as some scholars have noted,
a perverse realization of early American ambitions for the powers of rhet-
oric. As Fliegelman has shown, eighteenth-​ century writers attributed
extraordinary powers to the orator. According to James Burgh’s Art of
Speaking (1787), “true eloquence” has the power to affect a listener so
completely that “his passions are no longer his own. The orator has taken
possession of them; and with superior power, works them to whatever he
pleases.”68 Carwin’s impersonations illustrate the extreme, even fright-
ening influence that rhetoric could wield. By presenting these voices as
disembodied, Brown highlights the danger of such a power when it is
allied to no virtue and has become only a series of physical skills. As
Axelrod puts it, “Cicero’s powers make him a potential Carwin—​and, for
that matter, Carwin’s powers (had he developed commensurate moral prin-
ciples) make him a potential Cicero.”69 Axelrod’s clause in parentheses is

66
 “The contrivance was mine,” says Carwin (Wieland, 165), but the circumstances are never fully
explained. Another character, Mr. Cambridge, suggests that Wieland’s “maniacal conduct” was
due to his own mental infirmity, though Carwin “indirectly but powerfully predisposed him” to his
spell of insanity (Wieland, 179).
67
 Brown, Wieland, 178. Ormond also ends with the central character traveling to Europe, and at
the end of Arthur Mervyn, a trip to Europe is planned for the future.
68
 James Burgh, The Art of Speaking (7th edn., London, 1792), 29, quoted by Fliegelman,
Declaring Independence, 32.
69
 Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown, 82.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 173

important, since detaching the merely physical skill of speaking from the
ethics of the orator is antithetical to the classical rhetorical ideal, which
defined the orator as a “good man skilled in speech.”70 Carwin’s ventrilo-
quism represents a threatening extreme of mimesis: the perfect replication
of a model, the perfect disappearance of the speaker himself. In realizing
Theodore’s dream of imitating exactly the voice and character of another
person, Carwin demonstrates the dangers of divorcing the power of speech
from the ethics of individual personalities.
There is another, smaller detail about Carwin’s ventriloquism that has not
attracted attention. Brown describes it with an invented Latin word. When
Carwin first confesses his ability to Clara, he does not know what to call
it. The author’s footnote posits a new term, biloquium, “double-​speech”:

Biloquium, or ventrilocution. Sound is varied according to the variations of

direction and distance. The art of the ventriloquist consists in modifying his
voice according to all these variations, without changing his place.71

Brown invents biloquium on the pattern of other rhetorical terms such as

proloquium (“proposition” or “preamble”), anteloquium (“preface”), or
soliloquium (“self-​address”). Brown’s invented Latin is a tiny, inconspic-
uous oddity in the text, tucked away at the base of the page. Yet it stands
out when set against the background of Brown’s other writing. Like many
other educated figures of his time, Brown could be a savage critic of other
people’s Latin, and one customary requirement of “good” Latin has tra-
ditionally been the use of words attested in the authors of the classical
period of Roman literature; Cicero’s works are the gold standard. In a
periodical piece in The Monthly Magazine, or American Review in 1800,
Brown critiqued a recent oration by the then-​president of Harvard, Joseph
Willard, which commemorated the death of George Washington.72 Even

70
 Vir bonus peritus dicendi, an oft-​quoted Roman ideal; cf. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres, ii. 460: “In order to be a truly eloquent or persuasive speaker, nothing is more necessary
than to be a virtuous man.”
71
 Brown, Wieland, 150.
72
 Review of An Address, in Latin, by Joseph Willard, The Monthly Magazine and the American
Review 3/​1 (July, 1800), 47–​50. The review is classified in the Brockden Brown Electronic Archive
as “possibly” by Brown and is not listed in the annotated bibliography of Brown’s periodical
writing by Weber and Schäfer (Brown, Literary Essays and Reviews, 209–​63). But the case for
authorship is strengthened by a parallel with one of Brown’s other pieces: in both “Remarks on a
Passage in Virgil” (48) and this review (245), the author argues in similar terms that the Latin word
patria (“fatherland”) has a more specific social and political meaning than the English “country.”
For another example of Brown as an arbiter of correct Latin usage, cf. the letter to the jurist John
Elihu Hall (November 21, 1806), who has consulted Brown about the propriety of using the Latin

174  |  Spectres of Antiquity

those with “Cicero and Caesar in their hands,” Brown wrote, find it hard
to speak proper Latin, but Willard’s address is vitiated by embarrassing
errors, poor style, and the failure to preserve the “classic purity” of proper
Roman models. Willard uses Latin words with anglicized meanings—​
eventum [outcome] for “event,” suggestum [platform] for “suggestion”—​
or chooses words etymologically related to English but rare or inelegant in
Latin: consecutiones for “consequences,” sublimus (rather than sublimis)
for “sublime.” When set against this milieu of competitive surveillance
of others’ Latinity, Brown’s unclassical invention seems newly strange.
Brown seems to have coined the English word “biloquist” in the novel,
and so biloquium is presumably an impromptu Latinization of that crea-
tion. But if Carwin’s rhetorical powers can be seen throughout Wieland as
a sinister perversion of a classical ideal, an empty but immensely powerful
fulfillment of the promise of rhetoric, then it is fitting that it be labeled
with a word whose history is equally empty, a pseudoclassical term whose
connection to antiquity turns out, on closer inspection, to be false.
The thematic union of classical erudition and religious enthusiasm in
Wieland might not seem a particularly natural or intuitive one today, when
knowledge of Latin and Greek has become an increasingly narrow sort of
expertise. But the combination of cultish veneration and classical learning
rings hauntingly true at the end of the eighteenth century, when a personal
acquaintance with Cicero or Plato was still key to initiation into elite intel-
lectual life. Brown himself proves the point in an early extant letter. Aged
twenty-​one, writing in a mood of Gothic melodrama to an old schoolmate,
he complains that his chances of literary glory are over:

Drooping and tarnished are the laureate honours of Cicero. I am no longer
irresitably [sic] attracted to the shrines of Roman and Attic Eloquence . . . Ye
phantoms of Elysian felicity! At whose appearance the host of domestic
Solicitudes vanished! Thou ghost of Pericles! that formerly haunted my be-
nighted footsteps, and thou, spirrit [sic] of reanimated Cicero! that so often
hast harangued from the rostra of my Imagination, whose presence has so
often changed the naked heath into a crowded forum.73

word Adversaria as the title for a regular column of miscellaneous observations: Brown, Collected
Writings,  655–​8.
 Letter to Joseph Bringhurst, Jr, May 20, 1792 (Brown, Collected Writings, 85–​105, quotation at
73

88). On Brown’s tendency towards self-​dramatization in these letters, see Caleb Crain, American
Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, 2001), 58–​66.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 175

Brown laments that the Greek and Roman spectres able to transform a
place into what it is not—​from a Pennsylvania heath to a Roman senate
house—​have all fled his presence, and with them has fled his ability to
conjure scenes in his fiction. Six years later in Wieland, he has created
a character, Theodore, who is similarly entranced by spectres, similarly
enamored with the ghosts of the classical dead. If Brown himself was ever
truly an enthusiast, his ironic portrayal of Theodore’s classical interests
reflects his adult skepticism about the improving effects of Greco-​Roman
learning and the ethical authority of the ancient world in the American
Republic. Brown tempts his readers to think he is sketching the condition
of the new nation in Wieland (he sent the novel to Jefferson).74 It is a na-
tion, he suggests, insecurely rested on the shoulders of ancient giants.

Ovidian Metamorphosis and Revolutionary

Monsters: Ormond

If Brown’s first published novel used Gothic tropes to critique the super-
stitious reverence and irrational power accorded to classical authors in the
early American republic, his second novel interrogates the use of classical
images—​ particularly Ovidian metamorphosis—​ to construct polemical
visions of politics and history in the contentious culture wars of the rev-
olutionary 1790s. Ormond; or the Secret Witness was published just four
months after Wieland, in January 1799. Even more explicitly an image of
American life and manners, it relates incidents in the life of Constantia
Dudley, who goes from comparative security to poverty in Philadelphia,
lives through the yellow-​fever epidemic of 1793, and is entangled with the
lives of two mysterious and charismatic figures, Ormond and Martinette,
who are revealed at the conclusion to be brother and sister. All of this
is told from the perspective of another woman, Sophia Courtland, who
addresses her narrative to a German man unacquainted with “the modes
of life, the influence of public events upon the character and happi-
ness of individuals in America.”75 As a narrator, Sophia is openly hos-
tile to Ormond and fearful of his influence on Constantia. “I had seen
too much of innovation and imposture in France and Italy,” she writes,

74
 Letter from Charles Brockden Brown to Thomas Jefferson, December 25, 1799 (The Papers of
Thomas Jefferson, Volume 31: 1 February 1799–​31 May 1800, ed. Barbara B. Oberg [Princeton,
2004], 275–​6). Jefferson acknowledged that he had received it (letter from Thomas Jefferson to
Charles Brockden Brown, January 15, 1800), though there is no evidence that he read it.
75
 Brown, Ormond, 4.

176  |  Spectres of Antiquity

“not to regard a man like this, with aversion and fear.”76 She forces the
novel’s plot into a polarity between stability and flux, a theme figured
in the heroines’ names: constantia, Latin for “constancy” or “integrity”;
sophia (σοφία), Greek for “wisdom.” By contrast, she attributes ideas to
both Ormond and Martinette that are recognizable as distortions of the
ideas of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose radical philos-
ophy was a Transatlantic influence on Brown and his circle.77 It has long
been recognized that Sophia is a suspiciously partisan and untrustworthy
narrator, and that part of the drama in the novel comes from our attempt to
peek behind her depiction of events.78 Sophia inflates the progressive fig-
ures into Gothic villains, and Brown therefore allows us to watch an exer-
cise in conservative mischaracterization—​in the stigmatizing, controlling,
and containing of revolutionary ideas. It is also this untrustworthy narrator
to whom Brown attributes a reverence for classical antiquity. The conser-
vative Sophia, not unlike Theodore in Wieland, makes frequent reference
to classical literature, even recounting a visit to the Colosseum, within
whose walls she met her husband.79 I argue that by subtly drawing atten-
tion to her biased account of the novel’s events, Brown also encourages a
broader skepticism of her worldview, her wishful vision of American cul-
ture as a continuation of classical values and ideas.
The transparent model for Ormond is William Godwin, whose
criticisms of the conventions of family life, though limited to an appendix
to the second edition of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1795),
were accorded disproportionate emphasis in attacks on him by conserva-
tive writers.80 As well as disdaining the traditional sanctity of family life,
Ormond more literally violates the sanctity of the home by using his talent
for imitation to spy on families’ domestic behavior. In a key moment, he
decides to spy on Constantia, and Sophia likens his disguise to an Ovidian
metamorphosis:

It was the most entire and grotesque metamorphosis imaginable. It was

stepping from the highest to the lowest rank of society, and shifting himself

76
 Brown, Ormond, 194.
77
 See Waterman, Republic of Intellect, 116–​29. Waterman demonstrates that Ormond’s ideas
do not match those of Godwin exactly; in representing her villain, Sophia has produced an
exaggerated caricature of Godwinian themes.
78
 Carl A. Nelson, “A Just Reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” Early American
Literature 8/​2 (1973), 163–​78.
79
 Brown, Ormond, 176.
80
 See M. O. Grenby on Godwin’s standard role as the “murderer of any and all familial
attachments” among conservative writers: The Anti-​Jacobin Novel (Cambridge, 2001), 86–​7.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 177

 into a form, as remote from his own, as those recorded by Ovid. In a word,
it was sometimes his practice to exchange his complexion and habiliments
for those of a negro and a chimney-​sweep, and to call at certain doors for
employment.81

In Transformable Race, Katy L.  Chiles has assembled evidence for

eighteenth-​century understandings of race as an external and changeable
aspect of individual identity. Debates about the exact nature of racial dif-
ference proliferated in early America, shaped by reports of frontier vio-
lence between settlers and Native Americans and by abolitionist polemics
about the slave trade. Miraculous, allegedly true reports of racial transfor-
mation in one person from one race to another circulated in the periodical
press. Chiles discusses an article in the Monthly Magazine of February 24,
1798 that is entitled “Account of a Singular Change of Colour in a Negro,”
which calls for abolition of the slave trade, since, if the races are poten-
tially reversible, anyone could fall into its clutches.82 Ormond’s disguise
is merely a costume, but it recalls similar reports of actual bodily transfor-
mation between races in the period.
Sophia likens this change to the fantastical narratives of the
Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE). The nearly 250 interlocked mythical stories of
Ovid’s epic were widely used as a school text in American institutions that
taught the classical languages, such as Brown’s own school, and it con-
tinued to function as an encyclopedia for Greek and Roman myth.83 Brown
can depend upon readers being familiar with the particular characteristics
of metamorphosis in the poem. Transformation in Ovid is an emphatically
physical process. The very first sentence of the Metamorphoses describes
its subject matter as “forms shaped into new bodies” (in nova . . . mutatas
formas/​ corpora), and Ovid lingers in famous and celebrated detail over the

81
 Brown, Ormond, 100.
82
 Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (Oxford,
2014),  131–​2.
83
 On early American school texts of the Metamorphoses, see Mark Morford, “Early American
School Editions of Ovid,” Classical Journal 78/​2 (1982), 150–​8. Jean S. Straub (“Quaker School
Life in Philadelphia before 1800,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 89/​4
[1965], 449) notes evidence of concern at Quaker schools about the theological implications of
teaching the Metamorphoses. But an anonymous writer from the period, possibly Brown himself,
wrote that “at the school where I was initiated in Greek and Latin, I cannot, at the distance of
twenty years, recollect that the tutor ever expatiated upon the impossibility of the events related
by Ovid, or ever cautioned the student against implicitly believing them; neither do I recollect
believing when such cautions were necessary to the rectitude of my belief”: “Classical Learning
No Anti-​Christian Tendency,” The Literary Magazine and American Register 4/​24 (September
1805), 186.

178  |  Spectres of Antiquity

imagined stages of bodily change: scales of bark hardening over Daphne’s
skin as she becomes a tree, the widening brow and lengthening neck of
Actaeon as he becomes a deer. The poet encourages a strong sense of iden-
tification with the pain and terror of such transformations, an aspect of the
epic that makes it particularly congenial to Gothic adaptation, and a facet
of the Metamorphoses that even school texts in the eighteenth century
appreciated and expressed to readers.84 Transformation for Ovid emerges
from a complex interaction between internal and external forces. While
an individual’s metamorphosis in the poem is rarely self-​willed—​indeed,
it is often the terrifying result of violence and force—​often the end result
exposes some inner truth or characteristic about the individual, clarifying
or revealing something previously hidden.85 The Metamorphoses encodes
a broader vision of life in which everything is mutable, nothing is fixed.
To enter into the imaginative world of Ovid is to accept that everything
around you is inevitably the result of some sort of transformation, and that
things therefore are susceptible to future change. The “never-​ending stream
of transformations in the poem,” as Katharina Volk writes, expresses the
“idea of an unstable world that is in continuous flux.”86
To liken Ormond’s “grotesque” racial disguise to an Ovidian transfor-
mation therefore encodes a number of relevant associations. The compar-
ison expresses the abject status of the Black worker in Brown’s society.
When a wealthy white man becomes a “negro and a chimney-​sweep,” he
becomes an entirely new being, a grotesque and unfamiliar body.87 Ovid
also pays particular attention to voice in the Metamorphoses. As many
scholars have noted, losing the ability to speak is frequently the final and
most painful disappearance when a person undergoes metamorphosis in
the poem.88 Ormond, of course, dons this disguise because he wants to spy
on Constantia. He wants to become silent and invisible. But the compar-
ison between a racial disguise and an Ovidian metamorphosis suggests a

84
 See this note in an American school text of the Metamorphoses on a passage describing Apollo’s
pursuit of the nymph Daphne: “The nymph first hears behind her the sounding steps of the deity;
she then perceives that his shadow has reached her, and last of all feels his breath panting upon her
neck. The reader is by this means acquainted with the several successions of fear as they arise in
the mind of the nymph, sees her danger, and is in pain for her every moment”: P. Ovidii Nasonis
Metamorphoseon libri x; Or, Ten Select Books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. John Clarke and
James P. Davidson (Philadelphia, 1790), 16.
85
 Joseph Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill, 1988), 175–​6.
86
 Ovid (Malden, MA, 2010), 12.
87
 For a detailed reading of this scene, see Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent
in the Early American Novel (Chicago, 1997), 212–​21.
88
 See Daniel Libatique, “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela: Speech, Silence, and the Voice of
Gender,” Ph.D. thesis (Boston University, 2018), with references there to previous work.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 179

more involuntary voicelessness and invisibility, because, as the talkative
Ormond becomes the Black chimney sweep, he temporarily experiences
the social loss of voice endured by enslaved and poor workers in his so-
ciety. Ormond practices his skills in this disguise, we learn, by cleaning
the chimney of his own home and spying on his own slaves. In doing so
he hears the things that they would never be able to say in his presence.89
As an instance of Ovidian change, Ormond’s “entire” transforma-
tion, which is adopted and laid aside at will, also suggests a broader in-
stability, a wider world of flux. When Ormond visits Constantia’s house,
he is struck by the disparity between the “dignity” and “elegance” of
Constantia and the “decay” of their surrounds. She has suffered a sudden
social fall because of bankruptcy as a victim of fraud, her father’s abrupt
blindness, and the ravages of the yellow-​fever epidemic. Ormond’s shape-
shifting thus appears as just one instance of the radical involution of social
norms and class identity in plague-​ridden Philadelphia. The tradition of
the plague narrative is also, of course, grounded in ancient experience,
and early in the novel, Sophia likens the yellow-​fever epidemic to the an-
cient plagues of Greece and Egypt. Brown’s close friend Elihu Hubbard
Smith wrote an article for a medical journal on Thucydides’ account of
the Plague of Athens (430 BCE), arguing that its symptoms suggest that
it was “in all particulars, the same disease” as the one they faced in the
epidemics of Philadelphia and New York City. Smith himself who would
fall victim to the yellow fever in 1798, only days before the publication of
Brown’s first novel.90 It is worth noting that Ovid too draws connections
between plague and metamorphosis in his text, drawing influence from
the moving accounts of plague in Lucretius and Virgil. For both Ovid and
Brown, plague is depicted as a force that loosens society’s hold on its
conventions, and dissolves a person’s sense of his or her own bounded,
delimited personhood.91
The image of metamorphosis in Ormond also reflects a specific po-
litical discourse in the 1790s about the spread of revolutionary ideas,
and the re-​emergence of what Edmund Burke contemptuously called
the “spirit of change.”92 Many intellectuals in the United States initially

89
 Brown, Ormond, 101.
90
 “The Plague of Athens,” Medical Repository 1/​1 (August 1797), 30. On this text, see Thomas
Apel, “The Thucydidean Moment: History, Science, and the Yellow-​Fever Controversy, 1793–​
1805,” Journal of the Early Republic 34/​3 (2014), 330–​3.
91
 On Ovid and plague, see Gareth D. Williams, “Apollo, Aesculapius and the Poetics of Illness in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in Francis Cairns and Miriam Griffin (eds.), Papers of the Langford Latin
Seminar: Fourteenth Volume (Cambridge, 2010), 63–​92.
92
 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 25.

180  |  Spectres of Antiquity

hailed the French Revolution as an extension of the ideas of the American
Revolution. The writings of progressive, pro-​revolutionary writers like
Godwin circulated widely and influentially.93 By the time Ormond was
published, the tide had turned. Struggling to establish stable principles for
the new nation, American writers and politicians watched with growing
anxiety the terrors in France, the rebellions in Haiti, and the uprisings in
Ireland. “Rational philosophy” was increasingly viewed as a cover for vi-
olent rebellion. Ormond himself, beneath the polished surface of educated
civility, is later revealed to have volunteered as a youth in the Russian
army as part of another global conflict, the Russo-​Turkish War (1787–​
1792); and later, in Berlin, Sophia claims he fell under the influence of
men who “aimed at the new-​modelling of the world, and the subversion
of all that has hitherto been conceived elementary and fundamental, in the
constitution of man and of government.”94 Suspicions in the United States
culminated in 1798, the year of Ormond’s publication, with the passing
of the Alien and Sedition Acts under the second president, John Adams,
which empowered the government to prosecute those who expressed ideas
critical of the administration and to apprehend or remove citizens of “hos-
tile nations,” including France. Sophia’s conservative fears in the novel are
typical of her era. “Everybody was suspicious of everybody else,” wrote
one French writer living in Philadelphia in 1798. “Everywhere one saw
murderous glances.”95
Revolution was frequently associated by conservative writers with
monstrous and unnatural change. Edmund Burke’s attacks on the French
Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), published
over thirty years after his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime of the Beautiful (1757), represented events in France
as an incredible and paradoxical combination of opposing forces, the most
“astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world,” a “monstrous
tragi-​comic scene” that calls forth “alternate laughter and tears; alter-
nate scorn and horror.”96 He imagines the “strange and frightful transfor-
mation” that Louis XVI must have witnessed in his formerly “civilized

93
 For the influence of Godwin on Brown and the other members of the Friendly Club, see Pamela
Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley
(Oxford, 1993), 106–​38.
94
 Brown, Ormond, 162, 202, 193.
95
 That is, the scholar Moreau de Saint-​Méry in his Voyage aux États-​Unis de l’Amérique: Moreau
de St. Méry’s American Journey (1793–​1798), trans. Kenneth Lewis Roberts and Anna S. Mosser
Roberts (Garden City, NY: 1947), 252.
96
 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 10.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 181

subjects.”97 As Ronald Paulson argues in Representations of Revolution,
Ovidian metamorphosis is a mythic paradigm that also underlies con-
temporary responses to Burke. Liberal opponents put equal emphasis on
transformations of the French body politic, though insisting on the positive
potential of change.98 Ormond’s “entire and grotesque metamorphosis,”
then, which inverts the “highest” and “lowest” ranks and throws social
distinctions into array, does not merely describe a personal inversion of
status. It recalls a wider set of images that were used at the time to cast
revolutionary figures as agents of monstrous change. At the novel’s Gothic
conclusion, when Constantia has become the imprisoned heroine, Ormond
exclaims threateningly,

Can your discernment reach the bounds of my knowledge and the bottoms
of my purposes? Catch you not a view of the monsters that are starting into
birth here (and he put his left hand to his forehead).99

Ormond has terrible things planned. The “monsters” of his mind are
“starting into birth.” But Ormond’s words—​or Sophia’s account of them,
although, significantly, she was not there—​invite us to visualize some-
thing at once more fanciful and more literal: a physical sprouting of some-
thing monstrous, a metamorphosis in action. Fleetingly Ormond is Jupiter,
whose violent tyranny and rape of innocent women are depicted throughout
the Metamorphoses, and he gives birth from his head to Minerva, herself a
potent symbol in the French Revolution.100 At Ormond’s most threatening
moment, Sophia describes him with a characteristically Ovidian image of
hybrid form.
The transgression of gender roles is also described in the novel as a
shifting of physical shape. As the plot progresses, Constantia becomes
fascinated with a mysterious woman called Miss Monrose, whose real
(?) name is Martinette. Initially she seems to speak only French, but she

97
 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 75.
98
 Representations of Revolution (1789–​1820) (New Haven, 1983), 163–​7.
99
 Brown, Ormond, 196.
100
 A statue of Liberty modeled after Minerva stood over the guillotines in the Place de la
Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde), and Minerva was adopted as the emblem of the
newly founded Académie des Sciences morales et politiques in 1795. A later oration by one of
its presidents described the Académie emerging from the French people “like Minerva, fully
armed, from the brain of Jupiter” (comme Minerve toute armée du cerveau de Jupiter): Jean-​
Félix Nourrisson,”Séance publique annuelle du samedi 8 novembre, 1884,” Séances et travaux
de L’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, 122 (1884), 822. (My thanks to Elizabeth
C. Goldsmith on this point.)

182  |  Spectres of Antiquity

later tells Constantia (in perfect English) that she has led an itinerant and
cosmopolitan existence, and has taken part in revolutionary conflicts in
American and France. Even though she never does anything particularly
threatening, Sophia paints her as a villain anyway, linking her to a standard
bête noire for conservative writers in the Revolutionary 1790s:  Mary
Wollstonecraft. The first of some fifty published responses to Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was by Wollstonecraft.
She would gain even greater notoriety two years later with the publica-
tion of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1793), a pioneering at-
tack on the limitations and stereotypes of female education and a cry for
women to assume power over themselves. Conservative critics cast Mary
Wollstonecraft as a destroyer of femininity in the domestic sphere and
an Amazonian warrior in the political sphere, taking joy in the terrors of
the Revolution. Recalling the fury Allecto, who was sent to spark war in
book seven of Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace Walpole speaks derisively of “Mrs
Woolstencroft [sic], who to this day discharges her ink and gall on Marie
Antoinette, whose unparalleled sufferings have not yet staunched that
Alecto’s [sic] blazing ferocity.”101 Martinette similarly shocks Constantia
with her unabashed bloodlust. Recalling her time as a soldier for the
French revolutionary militia, she asks,

Have women, I beseech thee, no capacity to reason and infer? Are they less
open than men to the influence of habit? My hand never faultered when li-
berty demanded the victim. If thou wert with me at Paris, I could shew thee
a fusil of two barrels, which is precious beyond any other relique, merely
because it enabled me to kill thirteen officers at Jemappe.102

The speech cynically blends maxims about the female capacity for reason
with hostile caricatures of Wollstonecraft, gleeful over the shedding of
blood in France. Martinette’s ideals make her vicious and unsympathetic;
she is a Gothic villain constructed from the clichés of conservative rhetoric
about the spread of progressive “Gallic principles.”
Sophia also associates Martinette, as she does Ormond, with phys-
ical metamorphosis. In Martinette’s case there is no explicit reference to
Ovid. But Sophia’s characterization nonetheless draws from a motif that
we might recognize as characteristically Ovidian, in which the boundaries
between one being and another are rendered unstable, and genders shift

101
 Walpole, Correspondence, xxxi. 397.
102
 Brown, Ormond, 158.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 183

unpredictably. Wollstonecraft was hailed in mock-​heroic terms as the
“intrepid champion” of an army of “Unsex’d Females” in a conservative
poem by Richard Polwhele, dedicated to Thomas James Mathias and pat-
terned after The Pursuits of Literature; the poem depicted Wollstonecraft
and other female writers as androgynous non-​women who have laid aside
“NATURE’s law” in order to take up arms against men.103 Sophia’s warlike
vision of Martinette alludes to this conservative vision of revolutionary fe-
male thinkers, but puts additional emphasis on the shifting of identities, the
unstable metamorphosis from femininity to masculinity and back again.
This description replaces the conservative type of the “unsex’d” woman
with an imagined process of unsexing:

I delighted to assume the male dress, to acquire skill at the sword, and dex-
terity in every boisterous exercise. The timidity that commonly
attends women, gradually vanished. I felt as if embued by a soul that was a
stranger to the sexual distinction.104

Martinette’s use of the adverb “gradually” encourages us to imagine

her transformation as a process:  first, the assumption of male clothes;
second, the vanishing of recognizably female characteristics; third, ani-
mation by a new spirit that is a “stranger to the sexual distinction.” Such
transformations were a particular feature of the Metamorphoses. His poem
describes Hermaphroditus, for example, a man transformed by union with
a nymph into a “form” that—​to quote an American school edition of the
Metamorphoses—​“is doubtful; so that it could be called neither woman
nor boy; it seems neither, and yet both.”105 Ovid also describes Caeneus,
born a woman and transformed into a male warrior; Iphis, whose love for
another woman is divinely sanctioned when she is transformed into a man;
and Tiresias, transformed at seven-​year intervals from a man into a woman
and then into a man again.106 Martinette’s transgression of social conven-
tion is represented as another kind of Ovidian metamorphosis, another
instance of revolutionary thought coded as an unstable movement between
physical forms.
Sophia’s explicit reference to Ovid when she is describing Ormond is
characteristic of the curiously insistent focus on classical exemplars in

103
 The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (London, 1798), 6, 13.
104
 Brown, Ormond, 154.
105
 Clarke and Davidson, P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoseon libri x, 109, translating
Metamorphoses 4.378–​9.
106
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.429–​535; 9.666–​797; 3.224–​331.

184  |  Spectres of Antiquity

her narration—​one that emerges, in fact, even when she is describing
characters who seem to epitomize very unclassical worldviews. We get
a strong sense of Sophia’s character when she adds the incidental remark
early in the novel that Italy has produced the “most precious materials
of the moral history of mankind.”107 But do we also perceive Sophia’s
bias when she has Ormond declare that the “sages of Rome and Athens”
are “perennial fountains of wisdom and refinement,” or when Ormond
laments that his mistress cannot read Latin or Greek?108 How about when
the revolutionary Martinette pauses to explain that it was easy for her
mother to learn Spanish, Italian, and French, because “Latin is the mother
of them all,” and so “of course” the study of Latin presented itself “to her
studious attention”?109 It is true that Godwin recommended that young
people continue to be taught Latin and Greek. But this was certainly not
the case with Mary Wollstonecraft, who refused to “reverence the rust of
antiquity,” and proposed a modern and egalitarian mode of education not
founded upon the “dead languages.”110 Nor was it the case with Brown
himself, whose periodical essay “On Classical Learning” explicitly refutes
Godwin’s arguments in support of classical education. If Ormond is a
novel whose drama lies in the dynamic clash between the ideology of its
narrator and the perspectives of its characters, Sophia’s praise of classical
origins adumbrates a veneration of antiquity deliberately at odds with her
villains’ revolutionary convictions.
While Sophia’s analogical thinking draws parallels between antiquity
and modernity, asserting connections and continuities between the two,
Ormond and Martinette epitomize revolution as a radical break in dis-
course, a force for the new that severs any originary tie with the past. The
clash between a nostalgic vision of reborn classicism and the desire to
break with convention reflects what John C. Shields has called a “radical
shift” after American independence. The 1780s and 1790s mark the tip-
ping point in etiologies of American culture, in which a cultural narrative
of Western movement of empires begins to be replaced by a new emphasis
on Adamic rebirth, and calls for schools to prioritize English and modern
languages over Latin and Greek intensified.111 Appeals to classical au-
thority certainly remained in the discourse of the Founders, but as Shields

107
 Brown, Ormond, 21.
108
 Brown, Ormond, 95.
109
 Brown, Ormond, 146.
110
 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ed. Janet Todd
(Oxford, 1993), 8, 253.
111
 Shields, The American Aeneas, 216–​96.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 185

demonstrates, often in the mixed form of what he calls the “acceptance and
denial pattern”: writers who proclaim a modern, patriotic departure from
European antiquity nonetheless still invoke images and ideas indebted to
the classical world, inevitably, it seems, shadowed by its legacy. I  have
argued throughout this book that the spectralization of the classics in the
Gothic occurs as a result of Greece and Rome moving from a position of
centrality in eighteenth-​century Britain. Antiquity becomes a ghost rather
than a guide, a power from the past haunting modernity from its margins.
This process is retraced in the early American Gothic, which similarly
draws attention to the powerful ruins of a premodern, pre-​Revolutionary
past in a nation still constituting its identity. In a nascent society burdened
by the weight of an oversized history, antiquity persisted—​a spectral rem-
nant at the birth of a new world.

From Brown to Shelley: Gothic and Romantic Antiquities

One of Brockden Brown’s enthusiastic young readers was the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley. In 1810, the year of Brown’s death, Shelley published
the first of his Gothic novels, Zastrozzi (1810), with the second fol-
lowing the next year (St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian). According to the
“Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley” (1868) by his friend Thomas Love
Peacock, Shelley considered all four of Brown’s Gothic novels, together
with Schiller’s Robbers and Goethe’s Faust, as the works of literature that
“took the deepest root in his mind, and had the strongest influence on the
formation of his character.”112 Brown’s novels were remarkably popular
in Britain, and were reprinted regularly in the early nineteenth century by
William Lane’s Minerva Press, and then by other publishers as the century
wore on.113 Shelley’s interest was particularly drawn to the image of the
temple in Wieland:

He was especially fond of the novels of Brown—​ Charles Brockden

Brown, the American, who died at the age of thirty-​nine. The first of these
novels was Wieland. Wieland’s father passed much of his time alone in a

 Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (London, 1970), 42–​3.
112

 Eve Tavor Bannet, “Charles Brockden Brown and England: Of Genres, the Minerva Press, and
113

the Early Republican Reprint Trade,” in Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright (eds.), Transatlantic
Literary Exchanges, 1790–​1870 (Farnham, UK, 2011), 151; on the “interconnected system” of the
Transatlantic book trade more broadly, see Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial
Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–​1850 (Philadelphia, 2015), 25–​39.

186  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 summer-​house, where he died of spontaneous combustion. This summer
house made a great impression on Shelley, and in looking for a country
house he always examined if he could find such a summer-​house, or a place
to erect one.

Shelley’s strange fascination with this site of death, and his seemingly per-
verse desire to recreate it himself, are potent symbols for his generation’s
positive reclamation of Gothic ideas. In the late 1790s, Coleridge and
Wordsworth had attacked the degradation of literary taste represented by
the proliferation of Gothic romances. In the preface to the second edi-
tion of Lyrical Ballads (1800; revised again in 1802), Wordsworth and
Coleridge decried the “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies,
and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” that had inundated
the literary scene, promising instead to write poems in a language that was
“regular and natural.” This pledge was despite the fact that Wordsworth
had written in a Gothic vein not long before, and that both poets’ work
in Lyrical Ballads continued to alchemize Gothic tropes.114 A generation
later, Byron, Shelley, and their peers were much more open to exploring
the themes and images from the reading of their youth. The sharp lines
that the first-​generation Romantics had drawn against the Gothic began to
dissolve with second-​generation Romanticism in the willingness of major
figures to incorporate aspects of the Gothic into their works. Now fully
in the wake of the French Revolution, they turned to the Gothic genre to
express the uneasy balance between a fear of reviving passions and an un-
certain striving toward the future.115
Another aspect of second-​generation Romanticism was a renewed in-
terest in the literature and myth of Greece and Rome, albeit in the “inter-
nally differentiated” form described by Jonathan Sachs, by which Rome
is increasingly associated with empire and public virtues and Greece as-
sociated with artistic liberation and personal freedom.116 Byron, Shelley,
Polidori, and (at the end of his life) Keats all spent time in Italy. Their
allusive revival of Greek and Roman texts contrasts with the political
skepticism toward antiquity among liberal thinkers in the 1790s, and
with the artistic aversion to imitation in Wordsworth. Within a decade,

114
 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser,
3 vols. (Oxford, 1974), i. 128, 130. See Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, 103, on Lyrical
Ballads’ “extremely complicated dance with popular gothicism.”
115
 Tom Duggett, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (New York, 2010);
Hogle, “Gothic and Second-​Generation Romanticism.”
116
 Sachs, Romantic Antiquity,  11–​12.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 187

Shelley himself shifted from challenging Godwin on the value of classical
education—​he wrote to his hero in 1812 to voice his displeasure about
this aspect of Godwin’s thought—​to writing Prometheus Unbound and
embracing the cause of philhellenism in the Greek War of Independence.
Shelley’s strong attraction to the elder Wieland’s classicizing temple in
Brown’s novel, partly by its very inscrutability, manages to capture both
these strands in Romantic thought in the 1810s and 1820s: the revived in-
terest in the Gothic form and a renewed desire to identify and embody the
creative spark of classical antiquity.117
Mary Shelley, the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the daughter of Mary
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, also read Brown’s Gothic novels.
When Mary recorded the books she had read in the year 1814, Edgar
Huntly appeared alongside works by her mother and father, Radcliffe’s The
Italian, and Lewis’s The Monk. She read Ormond and Wieland in 1815, and
Arthur Mervyn in 1817.118 To introduce Mary Shelley at the end of a list
of all the other famous writers in her life accurately represents her place at
the node of an interlocking network of Romantic writers, but it inevitably
underplays what is distinctive and individual about her own contribution.
Scholars have rightly deprecated the tendency to emphasize Mary’s bi-
ography as the determining force in her writing, an emphasis that makes
all her work part of the same claustrophobic psychodrama. Yet Shelley
herself seems to provoke this focus on biography, since, as Julie Carlson
has argued, she prompts a deliberate confusion in readers’ minds between
her art and her life.119 Ideas, for Shelley, were connected with the people
and bodies she knew from her social and domestic world: the father who
taught her about history and classics as a child, the husband with whom
she read constantly in their too-​brief time together, the mother whose ab-
sence shaped her life (Wollstonecraft died only days after giving birth to
Mary). So too, when classical ideas appear in Shelley’s writings, they are
pervasively represented as people and bodies:  real, corporeal presences

117
 On P.B. Shelley and classical antiquity, see Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking
Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke, UK, 1997); on Polidori and antiquity: James Uden, “Gothic
Fiction, the Grand Tour, and the Seductions of Antiquity: Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1819),” in
Roberta Micallef (ed.), Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age (Boston,
2018), 60–​79; on Keats and antiquity, see Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney
School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle (Cambridge, 1998), 146–​86.
118
 The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–​1844, eds. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-​Kilvert, 2
vols. (Oxford, 1987), i. 86, 89, 91, 100.
119
 “Coming After: Shelley’s Proserpine,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41/​4 (1999),
352; cf. Graham Allen, “Beyond Biographism: Mary Shelley’s Matilda, Intertextuality and the
Wandering Subject,” Romanticism 3/​2 (1997), 170–​84.

188  |  Spectres of Antiquity

with which characters can interact, which can seem temptingly close or
frustratingly distant. Shelley was far less interested than other Romantic
figures in distilling any essence or spirit of antiquity, and far less confident
that it was possible to do so. As we will see, the engagement with antiquity
in her work becomes instead a series of frustrated encounters with bodies,
uncertainly reawakened in the present. This is never more so than in
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a work that exemplifies
the Walpolian Gothic tendency toward the grotesque collection of dispa-
rate parts, while also communicating unease with the Romantic promise
of reviving the spirit of the past. History in that novel and throughout her
writing is an undead body; the classics are a cold embrace.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic  | 189

 CHAPTER 6 Embodied Antiquity
Mary Shelley’s Relationships with the Past

In the closing pages of The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley paints an ex-
traordinary picture of classicism at the end of the world. By this point in the
novel, a plague has ravaged the earth, and all humanity has dwindled to a
single survivor. The Englishman Lionel Verney, the solitary endpoint of the
human race, makes his way to “Eternal Rome.” There at least Verney can be
surrounded by the ghosts of the ancient dead. Crazed and desperate, barely
recognizable with matted hair and unwashed clothes, marooned like Crusoe
on a desert earth, he roves wildly through museums and ruins:

I haunted the Vatican, and stood surrounded by marble forms of divine beauty.
Each stone deity was possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition
of love. They looked on me with unsympathizing complacency, and often
in wild accents I  reproached them for their supreme indifference—​for they
were human shapes, the human form divine was manifest in each fairest limb
and lineament. The perfect moulding brought with it the idea of colour and
motion; often, half in bitter mockery, half in self-​delusion, I clasped their icy
proportions, and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche’s lips, pressed the
unconceiving marble.1

The situation tests the limits of imagination—​a desperate, erotic attrac-

tion to classical statuary amid a plague-​ridden dystopia—​and yet the
scene does seem to recall moments in Shelley’s own life. It has often been

1
 Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994b), 465.
observed by scholars that the Cupid and Psyche myth captivated Shelley.2
In May 1817 she read the second-​century CE Latin writer Apuleius, whose
novel Metamorphoses (also called The Golden Ass) contains the fullest an-
cient account of the tale.3 Later that year, one of her endeavors between the
revision and the publication of Frankenstein was a translation of the Cupid
and Psyche episode from the Metamorphoses; some fifteen pages survive
and were published for the first time in 2002.4 The scene also resembles
elements of Shelley’s own experience. A letter from April 1819 recounts
her rambling through the Vatican with her three-​year-​old son, Will, who
was delighted with the classical statues and “dolefully lamented” when
they were broken.5 Shelley also seems to be describing a particular statue
that she must have seen during her time in Rome. A  life-​sized Roman
sculpture of Cupid and Psyche, rediscovered on the Aventine Hill in 1749
and installed in the Capitoline Museum in 1816, was widely discussed
in periodicals and travel literature of the period. In this piece, the bodies
of the two lovers face the viewer, inviting appreciation of their perfect
form, but their heads face each other as they kiss; Psyche holds Cupid pro-
tectively and Cupid tenderly presses her cheek, shielding part of it from
view. To squeeze between these two, as Verney says he did, must have felt
like a violent intrusion.6 The scene is thus full of potential analogies with
Shelley’s own life, and these parallels, writes Markley, make her allusions
to the Cupid and Psyche story “all the more poignant.”7 Classical myth
and biographical experience seem knitted together by a close resemblance.

2
 Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 128, 12–​3; A. A. Markley, “Curious
Transformations: Cupid, Psyche, and Apuleius in the Shelleys’ Works,” The Keats-​Shelley Review
17/​1 (2003), 120–​35; Benjamin Eldon Stevens, “Cupid and Psyche in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s
Apuleian Science Fiction,” in Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers (eds.),
Frankenstein and its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction (London,
2018), 123–​44. On this scene from The Last Man, see also Anne McWhir, “‘Unconceiving
Marble’: Anatomy and Animation in Frankenstein and The Last Man,” in Helen M. Buss, D.
L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir (eds.), Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives
(Waterloo, Canada, 2001), 169–​70.
3
 M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 169.
4
 M. Shelley, Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, general ed. Nora Crook, 4 vols.
(London, 2002), iv. 282–​95. On this translation, see Jean de Palacio, “Mary Shelley’s Latin
Studies: Her Unpublished Translation of Apuleius,” Revue de littérature comparée 38 (1964),
564–​71.
5
 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore,
1980–​8), i. 91.
6
 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture,
1500–​1900 (New Haven, 1982), 189–​91. Shelley writes in her diary for March 12, 1819, “Visit the
Capitol & see the most divine statues” (The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 252)
7
 Markley, “Curious Transformations,” 135.

192  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 Yet to focus only on parallels is to elide what is most powerful about
the scene: the yearning for connection that is unsatisfied by the statues,
the painful lack of analogy between the deserted Verney and the statues.
Coldly immortal, the classical figures make no response to the modern
who touches and “clasps” them, desperate to communicate. Shelley’s lan-
guage underlines difference, and in unexpected ways. The material statues
(Figure 6.1), sculpted from mute marble, represent emotions of gladness
and love. The human being, by contrast, has become almost without a
body, “haunting” the Vatican like a ghost. The classical statue is formal
perfection; the human is the ruin, remnant of a past era. The image of

Figure 6.1  Cupid and Psyche, first–​second century CE Roman version of Hellenistic

Greek original, Musei Capitolini. Photo Credit: Ghigo G. Roli/​Art Resource, NY.

Embodied Antiquity  | 193

him clasping and kissing the “unconceiving” statues in a wishful ménage
à trois is a scene of failed intimacy; its frustrated eroticism recalls the
deluded Pygmalion kissing his beloved statue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a
text that Shelley also knew well. If we are reading biographically, the cold
indifference of Cupid and Psyche to their modern admirer could express
Shelley’s own retrospective sense of disappointment and loss, the know-
ledge that her own story turned out very differently from that of Cupid and
Psyche; and yet the passage distills a broader theme in Shelley’s writing.
In her work, the desperate attraction to unresponsive ruins is a reversal of
a (largely male) Romantic paradigm in which the spirit of the ancient past
returns to inspire the imagination and creativity of the modern poet, and
there is a rapturous identification between the classical and the modern.
Shelley frequently imagines scenes of failed intimacy between the present
and the past. By imagining the past as a presence with which modernity
can interact, Shelley represents history in fully personal and bodily terms.
As a body, the past can seduce, and can tempt us into what seems like a
personal relationship; we can feel longing and desire for it; and we can feel
disappointment when we realize an inability to identify with it, or sense its
lack of sympathy with ourselves.
Reanimation has long been identified as one of the central concerns of
her fiction. This trope is obviously expressed in the famous creature of
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), but it is also prominent
in her short stories: “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman” (1819), about the
mysterious reemergence in the present day of a man from Ancient Rome;
“Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” (1826), about the un-
expected thawing of a man trapped in ice for a hundred seventy years; and
“The Mortal Immortal:  A Tale” (1833), about a three-​hundred-​year old
man who accidentally drank a potion for immortality rather than lovesick-
ness, and now laments the loss of everyone he ever loved.8 Graham Allen
instead proposes reversibility as Shelley’s master trope:  her stories aim
again and again to conjure the possibility of going backward in time and
restoring what has been lost.9 I would posit another variation: Shelley’s
preeminent desire in her work is to make time meet—​to imagine poles of
time as bodies that can interact. These interactions can be, and indeed are
so often in Shelley’s fiction, disappointing, or even horrifying. She also

8
 Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore, 1976), 332–​46,
43–​50, 219–​30. On “Valerius,” see later in this chapter.
9
 “Reanimation or Reversibility in ‘Valerius: The Reanimated Roman’: A Response to Elena
Anastasaki,” Connotations 19 (2009–​10), 21–​33.

194  |  Spectres of Antiquity

expresses the positive desire to reach out to history and to recognize some-
thing of oneself in it. That desire is often frustrated in her fiction by the
awareness of difference between past and present, and a lack of sympathy
between individuals from distant stages of time. This is no abstract his-
torical theorizing. By imagining touching, clasping, holding, fighting, or
kissing an embodied past, she expresses in startlingly vivid terms the real,
bodily force that history exerts on individual human lives.
Shelley’s representation of history and antiquity in intensely personal
terms in her fiction reflects the circumstances of her own education.
The daughter of two figures who both wrote about childhood education
(William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Shelley seems never to have
gone to school. Instead, Godwin’s books on classical history and myth,
which he wrote pseudonymously for his children’s publishing firm estab-
lished after Wollstonecraft’s death, seem to show us the sort of subjects
he taught Mary at home when she was a child.10 Her married life was also
filled with books. After she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814,
throughout all the tumultuousness of their eight years before his death
in 1822, the pair spent much of their time reading. Her diary of that pe-
riod includes detailed reading lists, including works in Latin and (in her
husband’s case) Greek.
Her classical reading is extremely ambitious. In a two-​year project from
1818 to 1820, for example, she read all thirty-​five surviving books of the
first-​century BCE historian Livy, something that few professional Latinists
can honestly claim to have done.11 In Frankenstein, Victor describes how
he and Elizabeth learned Latin and English together at home rather than
through any formal schooling, and because they were fired by their own
desire to learn, the books they read took on a powerful emotional charge.
They “loved” to apply themselves to subjects that what would have been
“labours” to other children, he says.12 Shelley also seems to represent her
own experience in one of the two central female characters of her second
novel, Valperga (1823), who is taught as a child to read “the polished

10
 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, her Fiction, her Monsters (New York, 1988), 8–​10;
Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston, 1989), 39.
11
 M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, June 26, 1818 to July 9, 1820. On Shelley’s Latin
reading, see de Palacio, “Mary Shelley’s Latin Studies,” and de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son
oeuvre: Contribution aux études shelleyennes (Paris, 1969), 188–​9. Besides Livy and Apuleius, de
Palacio collects evidence for Mary’s reading of Cicero, Sallust, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Ovid,
Lucan, Quintus Curtius, Pliny the Younger, and Tacitus—​a wider range of classical reading than
was typical of most educated men in her period.
12
 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford,
1994a),  21–​2.

Embodied Antiquity  | 195

language of Cicero and Virgil,” and learns from her father the “history
of the Roman Republic.”13 In addition, Jennifer Wallace has documented
Shelley’s attempts to learn Greek during her marriage, and suggests that
the “illicit world” of Greek literacy became eroticized, associated with the
scandalous nonconformity of their marriage.14 In her fiction as in her life,
access to antiquity came through channels of personal experience. Unlike
many of the male authors studied in this book, Mary Shelley never took
her classical learning for granted, because she was never expected to have
it in the first place.
When Shelley describes the classical statues of Cupid and Psyche as
“unsympathizing” in The Last Man, she also evokes a specific eighteenth-​
century discourse about the emotions. In A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739), David Hume influentially described sympathy as a basic precon-
dition of social relationships, and argued that the feeling of sympathy was
stimulated by our perception of a resemblance between other people and
our ideas of ourselves. The natural tendency to share the emotions of an-
other person (or a representation of a person, as in a drama) is based on
our understanding of analogy between that person and us. Moreover, our
feeling of sympathy is strengthened by the degree of similarity we per-
ceive with other people. The “minds of men,” Hume wrote, are “mirrors
to one another.”15 Percy Bysshe Shelley illustrates well how this notion
of sympathy could extend to a relationship not only with contemporaries,
but also with people of different eras. He declares in his famous preface to
Hellas (1822) that he wrote the drama because of the “intense sympathy”
he felt for the Greeks and their cause during their War of Independence.
That sympathy is grounded on the common desire for liberty among the
oppressed, and also on a recognition of cultural similarity through shared
origins (“Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root
in Greece”). Shelley expresses this recognition of similarity as a radical
claim of identification: “We are all Greeks.”16 It is almost impossible, he

13
 Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford,
1997), 21, 104. In Shelley’s final novel, Falkner (1837), her heroine finds “infinite delight in the
pages of ancient history,” a typical passion for “young and ardent minds” (The Novels and Selected
Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook, 8 vols. [London, 1996], vii. 39).
14
 “‘Copying Shelley’s Letters’: Mary Shelley and the Uncanny Erotics of Greek,” Women’s Studies
40/​4 (2011), 404–​28.
15
 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-​Bigge (Oxford, 1888; repr. 1965), 365. On the
pervasive influence of Hume’s theory in literature of the Romantic period, see Adela Pinch,
Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, 1996).
16
 P. B. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (2nd edn.,
New York, 2002b), 431.

196  |  Spectres of Antiquity

says, to see a resemblance between oneself and figures from antiquity—​
those “glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure
to itself as belonging to our kind.” Almost, but not entirely impossible;
and the preface to Hellas clearly encourages us to aspire to see ourselves
as sharing a resemblance not only with modern Greeks (though shared
origins) but with the glory of the ancient Greeks themselves. His call to
political action is based on intersecting lines of human sympathy: a lateral
sort of sympathy with contemporaries in Greece, and a perpendicular sort
that moves back in time, positing a chain of resemblance from ancient to
modern.
In Mary’s note appended to the posthumous republication of Hellas in
1839, she praises the drama’s beauty and its enthusiasm for the cause of
Greece. But she does not share her husband’s first-​person calls to identi-
fication with an eternal spirit of antiquity, or identification with the glory
of revolution. Instead, she speaks of his “assertion” of Greece’s “intel-
lectual empire,” phrases that reflect little sense of personal inclusion or
any shared dream of classical self-​identification.17 That feeling of alien-
ation from idealizing analogies with antiquity is also expressed in Mary
Shelley’s bitterly ironic vision of ancient statues “unsympathizing” with
the plight of modern man in The Last Man. In Romantic Intimacy, Nancy
Yousef describes the ways in which Romantic-​era writers recast the ideal
of sympathy by focusing on intimacy, a word that, paradoxically, implies
both a desire for closeness with another person (“to be intimate”) and a
desire to protect the privacy of the self (“my intimate thoughts”). Whereas
sympathy depends upon the recognition of resemblance, intimacy does
not, and indeed moments of intimacy in Romantic literature frequently
involve the “demurral, disappointment, and frustration of the mutual iden-
tification and recognition that eighteenth-​century theories of sympathy
presupposed.”18 Yousef bases her study on the close analysis of Wordsworth
and Austen, but the movement she traces from sympathy to intimacy can be
seen also in Mary Shelley, with the added element that Shelley frequently
imagines relationships across time. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s later work,
he increasingly celebrated the potential for identification with a unifying

17
 “Note on Hellas,” The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ii. 289. Mary Shelley’s praise
of “Hellas” can be contrasted with the explicit skepticism toward revolutionary heroism shown
in her novel Valperga, which explores the disastrous consequences of male military fervor for all
those around them. “Triumph is a feeling that oppresses the human heart,” she writes in that novel,
“and that strangely fashioned instrument seems more adapted for suffering than enjoyment” (129).
18
 Romantic Intimacy (Stanford, 2013), 34–​5.

Embodied Antiquity  | 197

and eternal process.19 Mary Shelley, by contrast, described entities from
different times encountering one another, only to be disappointed with
the lack of resemblance, thereby leading to moments of failed or frus-
trated intimacy. In place of self-​congratulatory analogizing, her fiction
undermines any easy identification of modernity with antiquity. Instead,
she emphasizes the uncomfortable—​and sometimes horrific—​realization
of unbridgeable difference.

The Search for Historical Sympathy: Frankenstein

In Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), an archaic dream

of raising the dead becomes a reality through the prosaic mechanisms of
modern science. Scholars have long identified the frustrated search for
sympathetic companionship as a central motif of the novel. In the frame
narrative, Victor Frankenstein appears on an iceberg while locked in his
desperate quest to destroy the being he has created; he is rescued by the
lonely explorer Walton, who is overjoyed to find someone with whom to
share his own quest in the Arctic. “I thank you for your sympathy,” he tells
Walton, “but it is useless; my fate is nearly fulfilled.”20 After reanimating
the creature, Victor is progressively estranged from his family and his
fiancée Elizabeth, unable to share the terrible secret of his horrific experi-
ment. Later, the creature himself longs for sympathy and understanding—​
from the exiled family whom he observes and from whom he learns to
speak, and from his creator—​but is constantly frustrated by his own iso-
lating uniqueness and his lack of resemblance to any other living entity.21
The failures of sympathy and identification between characters are also
replicated on a temporal axis. Throughout Frankenstein, characters are
haunted by a breach between the enchanted romance of the past and the
“realities of little worth” in the present. Shelley does not depict characters
relentlessly looking forward to new scientific ideas or to new models of

19
 See Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of his
Major Works (Oxford, 1988), 266) on P. B. Shelley’s late fascination with a unifying principle,
an “analogical interplay that might create the ‘one harmonious soul of many a soul’ ” [citing
Prometheus Unbound, line 400]. In Hogle’s account, P. B. Shelley does not uncritically accept the
possibility of such a final principle, since his descriptions of it habitually devolve into other ends
or ideas.
20
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 17.
21
 On the failure to establish sympathy between characters as a central theme of Frankenstein, see
David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary
Shelley (Chicago, 1988), 195–​213; Jeanne M. Britton, “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 48/​1 (2009), 3–​22.

198  |  Spectres of Antiquity

social relationship. They long to give life to old ideas and reanimate an
idealized past. Shelley’s Gothic vision traces the failure of flawed modern
beings to realize the dreams and ambitions of an earlier age, and the failure
of its hero truly to become a “modern Prometheus.”
Readers have been fascinated by the most prescient aspects of
Frankenstein, its intersections with evolving notions in physiology and
chemistry. Yet the novel emphatically presents Victor’s attempts to rean-
imate the dead as the result of a stubborn attachment to premodern texts
and ideas. As Jesse Weiner has argued, Victor’s interests at the opening of
the Frankenstein mark him as “archaic in comparison with his teachers
and peers.” Before he can “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing”
of the creature, Victor himself, in a parallel way, is animated by the spark
of the writers scornfully characterized by his teacher, Professor Krempe,
as “ancient” and “a thousand years old.”22 When he reads the sixteenth-​
century alchemist Cornelius Agrippa for the first time, he says that “a new
light seemed to dawn upon my mind.” He longs for the “raising of ghosts
or devils” and is fired by the “search for the philosopher’s stone and the
elixir of life.” He would have dedicated himself to more rational theories
of chemistry, he says, if his “imagination” had not been “warmed as it
was.”23 An early demonstration of electricity “overthrew” the influence of
these writers temporarily, and yet instead of trading in ancient for modern
scientific theory, Victor turns back to a Latin work of the first century CE,
the Natural History of Pliny the Elder.24 He remains drawn to the “grand,
if futile” dreams of the premodern, and finds himself unable to “exchange
chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”25 When Victor
later begins obsessively to search for a method to reanimate matter, he
says that he would never have persisted in such a task “unless I had been
animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm” for the exploded ideas of
these antiquated writers.26 In the preface to the second edition of The Castle
of Otranto, Horace Walpole favorably contrasted the ancient romance, in

22
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 38, 29; see Jesse Weiner, “Lucretius, Lucan, and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (eds.), Classical
Presences: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (Oxford, 2015), 73.
23
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein,  23–​4.
24
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 25: “The professor discourses with the greatest fluency of potassium
and boron, of sulphates and oxyds, terms to which I could affix no idea; and I became disgusted
with the science of natural philosophy, although I still read Pliny and Buffon with delight, authors,
in my estimation, of nearly equal interest and utility.” Buffon is the man popularly known in the
eighteenth century as “the French Pliny”: that is, Georges-​Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, author
of a massive, thirty-​six volume Histoire naturelle (1749–​1804).
25
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 29, 30.
26
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 29, 33.

Embodied Antiquity  | 199

which “all was imagination and improbability,” with the modern romance,
in which “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict
adherence to common life.”27 Shelley turns this dichotomy into a contrast
between systems of knowledge, contrasting the imaginative possibilities
of alchemy and occult philosophy with the cold rationality of modern sci-
ence. The love of past ideas leads Victor Frankenstein astray.
Frankenstein’s persistent references to animating “spark” also echo
a broader Romantic ideal of reviving the spirit of history in the present.
One work that made a profound impression on the Shelleys, Byron, and
their circle was Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) by Anne-​Louise-​Germaine
Necker, better known as Madame de Staël. This French novel was one of
the most popular texts of its generation. It was quickly issued in English
(as Corinna, or Italy) in two different translations in 1807, and within its
first three years, it had gone through fourteen other editions in Europe.28
Mary read it first in February–​March 1815, then again in December 1818,
and then again in November 1820.29 The novel is a love story between
the Scottish Lord Nelvil and the vivacious, doomed Corinne, who, living
in Italy and extemporizing literary works in Italian, is able to rekindle
the spark of the classical world, offering an erotic ideal of antiquarian
reanimation. As Jerome McGann puts it, “Corinne’s function—​ her
novel’s function—​is to reanimate that spark in others.” Corinne is fre-
30

quently praised for her ability to re-​embody an imagined idea of classical

art and aesthetics. Everything in modern cities is “prosaic,” according to
Corinne—​Victor Frankenstein might say the same of modern chemistry—​
but classical relics, by contrast, are vivifying forces. “All at once,” she says,
“a broken column, a half-​destroyed bas-​relief, stones united by the inde-
structible means of the ancient architects, remind us, that there is in man
an eternal power, a spark of divinity, and that we must not omit to excite
it in ourselves, and to re-​animate it in others.” Nelvil praises Corinne and
her friends for bringing to life the dead matter of the past in their rambles
through Naples and Rome: “we might say that we gave a second life to
all that we discovered, and that the past reappeared from under the dust

27
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 9.
28
 On the popularity of this text and the incredible speed of its circulation, see Angela Wright,
“Corinne in Distress: Translation as Cultural Appropriation in the 1800s,” CW3 Journal (Winter
2004), https://​www2.shu.ac.uk/​corvey/​cw3journal/​issue%20two/​wright.html.
29
 M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 88, 243, 340. In 1839, she published a short
biography of de Staël in a series on famous French literary and scientific figures: M. Shelley, Mary
Shelley’s Literary Lives, iii. 457–​94.
30
 McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, 323.

200  |  Spectres of Antiquity

where it had been buried.”31 That ideal of the past re-​embodied turns out
to be surprisingly fragile, as Corinne herself ends up crushed and broken
by her love affair with the modern Nelvil. In Frankenstein, the results of
infusing a “spark of being into lifeless matter” are similarly disastrous, as
the experiment brings ruin to Victor and to those around him. Shelley’s
novel presents a dark variation of Corinne’s reanimation of ancient ideas.
The giant limbs of Frankenstein’s creature are the Gothic antitype to the
eroticized, statue-​like body of Corinne.
In a widely mocked sequence among the novel’s early readers, the
creature follows an emotional arc similar to that of his creator. He too
becomes ardently interested in texts from the past, and then experiences
disenchantment when he realizes the profound difference between an
idealized past and a debased present.32 Wandering across Switzerland after
escaping from Victor’s lab, the creature learns to communicate by secretly
observing the lives of a poor family from Paris. He overhears them reading
Volney’s Ruins of Empires,33 and then discovers in an abandoned portman-
teau Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and
“a volume” of the Parallel Lives by the first-​century CE Greek biographer
Plutarch, evidently the first volume, which contains the paired biographies
of Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, and Solon and Publicola
(all but the last are mentioned by the creature). At its best, reviewers found
the image of a reanimated corpse reading the classics humorous (“some
of the steps in his intellectual progress, we confess, made us smile”);34 at
worst, grossly improbable. “The monster,” commented one reviewer iron-
ically, “by due diligence becomes highly accomplished. Such were the
works which constituted the Greco-​Anglico-​Germanico-​Gallico-​Arabian
library of a Swabian hut, which if not numerous, was at least miscella-
neous.”35 In an otherwise positive review, Walter Scott called the creature a
“strange student,” remarking that it was just as probable that he could learn
to read by spying through the window of a house as that he could learn “the
problems of Euclid, or the art of book-​keeping” by the same method.36 The

31
 Corinna, or Italy, trans. Anon. 3 vols. (London, 1807), i. 187, 212.
32
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 95–​7,  102–​5.
33
 That is, Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791) by Constantin
François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, a work that was later translated in part by Thomas
Jefferson. Volney was an influential figure among progressive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was well known to Charles Brockden Brown, who published a translation of Volney’s Tableau
du climat et du sol des États-​Unis d’Amérique (1803) as A View of the Soil and Climate of the
United States of America (1804).
34
 The British Critic N.S. 9 (April 1818), 436.
35
 Quarterly Review 18/​36 (January 1818), 380.
36
 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2/​12 (March 1818), 617, 619.

Embodied Antiquity  | 201

repeated expressions of disquiet by reviewers at this particular aspect of
the plot seems to suggest an anxiety about something more profound than
its logic. Excluded from the walls of the hut, the creature learns through
domestic instruction, listening to the Frenchman Felix teach his Turkish
beloved Safie how to read French. Domestic instruction was indeed how
many women received their education, and learned women in the early-​
nineteenth century could equally be viewed as monstrous anomalies. It
is possible that Shelley is urging readers, by the very strangeness of the
scene, to reflect upon the specific prejudices that surround learning and
erudition. In some, it is regarded as normal and expected. In others—​the
socially marginalized, the working class, women—​it is incongruous and
strange.37
The incongruity is also important to the plot, since the books make the
creature realize how different he is from everyone around him:

As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and con-

dition. I  found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the
beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversations I was a listener.
I  sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I  was unformed in
mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none.38

Just as Lionel Verney is faced with the “unsympathizing” statues of clas-

sical figures in The Last Man, so Frankenstein’s creature is led by these
texts to realize the great gap between his own form and the people about
whom he reads, frustrating a desire for connection based on resemblance.
His own interpretation of Plutarch runs counter to analogizing readings
of this text in the eighteenth century. Both conservative and progressive
thinkers in the revolutionary 1790s elevate the heroes of the early Roman
Republic into political and ethical examples.39 By contrast, the creature’s
reading of Plutarch is ambivalent:  he learns that men in public affairs
could equally “massacre as well as govern their people,” and is drawn to
peaceful rulers like Numa, he says, over warlike ones, like Romulus.40 The

37
 Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the creature’s body combines various signifiers of cultural abjection
(effeminacy, ugliness, the hair and skin color of marginalized ethnic groups), and his form thereby
“suggests . . . a host of ‘othered’ levels of existence”: “Frankenstein as Neo-​Gothic: from the
Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection,” in Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright
(eds.), Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-​forming Literature, 1789–​1837
(Cambridge, 1998), 186.
38
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 103.
39
 Sachs, Romantic Antiquity,  49–​76.
40
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 104.

202  |  Spectres of Antiquity

text teaches him “high thoughts” and encourages him to “love the heroes
of past ages”—​again suggesting a strong, wishful emotional connection
with the past—​and yet these feelings only make him more disenchanted
with the actual world around him. When the townsfolk are horrified by his
appearance and attack him for no reason he can fathom, he vows venge-
ance against humanity, which has fallen far short of the elevated ideals he
has learned in books. His reading leads to an awareness of the distance
between ancient paradigms and modern reality.
Victor too falls short in comparison to the paradigms of antiquity, and
scholars have long suggested that the novel’s creation narrative is indebted
to models in classical literature, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
which Shelley read in the spring of 1815.41 A clear point of contact is the
episode of Pygmalion (Metamorphoses 10.243–​97), both a story about life
being given to lifeless matter and a moral lesson about the gods’ supe-
rior capacity to create.42 In Ovid’s text, a master sculptor carves an ivory
woman of extraordinary beauty and falls in love with it. After he prays to
Venus, the statue miraculously becomes human. The story climaxes with
the sculpted woman, newly alive, fearfully raising her eyes to meet the
eyes of her creator, and Ovid appends a brief notice at the end of the epi-
sode that they married and had a child. Alison Sharrock has influentially
argued that the episode “deconstructs the erotic realism” of Roman love
poetry, reducing to a literal extreme the masculine habit of representing
women as aesthetic objects of appreciation. Like Pygmalion, poets use
their art to create objects they can then love.43 Similarly, Bette London
suggests that Victor’s first description of the creature is a grotesque vari-
ation on the tradition of love poets cataloguing their beloved’s body parts
piece by piece:

41
 Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 73–​9. The fullest account of Frankenstein and Ovid is
now Genevieve Liveley, “Patchwork Paratexts and Monstrous Metapoetics: ‘After Tea M Reads
Ovid,’” in Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers (eds.), Frankenstein and
its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction (London: Bloomsbury,
2018),  25–​41.
42
 Andrew Feldherr, Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction (Princeton,
2010), 257. Scholars have suggested that Shelley may also have drawn from adaptations of
Ovid’s story. Wendy C. Nielsen suggests the influence of Rousseau’s dramatic version, Pygmalion
(“Rousseau’s Pygmalion and Automata in the Romantic Period,” in Angela Esterhammer,
Diana Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent (eds.], Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects
[Basingstoke, UK, 2015], 73; and Burton R. Pollin proposes the 1802 continuation of Rousseau’s
drama by Madame de Genlis (“Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein,” Comparative
Literature 17/​2 (1965), 100–​1).
43
 “Womanufacture,” Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991), 36.

Embodied Antiquity  | 203

 His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.
Beautiful!—​Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of mus-
cles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his
teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid
contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the
dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and
straight black lips.44

Shelley recalls but undermines the trope of a lover recounting the beauties
of his lover’s body. By describing a body that is already a corpse, Shelley
hints at the idea that such poetic catalogues deaden their object, re-
ducing the living subject to a lifeless collection of parts. The unsettling
incongruities in Victor’s alternately beautiful and horrific creature draw
attention to the perversity of the poetic urge to “dismember” women in
verse. In her article on Frankenstein, Bette London traces this tendency
to Petrarch, but the catalogues of the beloved’s body parts in Petrarch’s
sonnets are fundamentally shaped by the influence of Ovid.45
There is an even closer and more unsettling parallel between
Frankenstein and Ovid’s Pygmalion tale. In the passage immediately fol-
lowing the first breath of the creature, Victor says that he had “desired” the
success of his experiment with “an ardour that far exceeded moderation.”
But once it has been achieved, he rushes home in horror, and in his rest-
less state, he has a disturbing dream of his beloved Elizabeth, in which her
living body transforms into a corpse in his arms.46 The passage mirrors but
crucially inverts the scene in the Metamorphoses in which Pygmalion’s
beloved statue comes to life:

Ut rediit, simulacra suae petit ille puellae:

Incumbensque toro dedit oscula. Visa tepere est.
Admovit os iterum: manibus quoque pectora tentat.
Tentatum mollescit ebur: positoque rigore
Subsidit digitis . . .
. . .
Corpus erat: saliunt tentatae pollice venae.47

44
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 39; Bette London, “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of
Masculinity,” PMLA 108/​2 (1993), 261.
45
 London, “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity,” 261–​2; Lynn Enterline,
The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2000), 91–​124.
46
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 39.
47
 Metamorphoses 10.280–​4, 289. The Latin here and throughout the chapter is from John Clarke’s
school text of the Metamorphoses (London, 1735), which was frequently reprinted.

204  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 [When Pygmalion got home, he sought the statue of his girl. He
lolled on the couch and gave it kisses. She seemed warm! He moved
his mouth close again, and he even presses her breasts with his
hands. When pressed, the ivory grows soft; it lays aside its hardness
and yields beneath his fingers . . . She was flesh. He presses her veins
with his thumb—​they pulsate].

The movement from death is reversed in Victor’s nightmare in Frankenstein:

I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of

Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the
first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features
appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother
in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I  saw the grave-​worms
crawling in the folds of the flannel.48

Ovid’s passage already had disturbing undertones of violence: Pygmalion

does not merely “touch” his statue but “presses” or “handles” her (tempto/​
tento, a verb repeated three times in eight lines). Even when she is lifeless,
he fears he might leave a bruise (livor, 258) by touching her too forcefully.
These fears are realized in Shelley’s horrific variation, when Victor’s dread
kiss turns the living Elizabeth into a corpse (even more horrifyingly, the
corpse of his mother). The changes that Shelley rings on the ancient text
open up a huge gulf between the joy of the creator in the ancient story
and Victor’s anguished horror in the modern one. The classical text is less
Victor’s model than a measure of his failure.
Of course, the most prominent ancient paradigm for Shelley’s novel is
announced by its title, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Primary
in Shelley’s mind was the figure of Prometheus as the creator of mankind,
a myth that is briefly recounted by Ovid in the Metamorphoses as one pos-
sible origin for humankind (1.80–​4).49 But Shelley also alludes to the myth
of Prometheus as the rebel who hubristically steals fire to aid humankind
and is punished by having his liver eternally pecked out by an eagle; and the
myth of the trickster Prometheus, who swindles Zeus out of the best meat
in a sacrifice to give it to human beings. These visions of the character ap-
pear from the archaic period in Hesiod’s Theogony, and later in Aeschylus’

 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 39.
48

 On the paradoxes of Ovid’s creation narrative, which dissolves into a number of seemingly
49

mutually exclusive origins for humankind, see O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic,  113–​4.

Embodied Antiquity  | 205

fifth-​century BCE tragedy Prometheus Bound (and then in Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound).50 Another influence on Frankenstein is a
cultural phenomenon we might loosely call Romantic “Prometheanism”
or the “Prometheus idea,” a blending of the various myths to express both
artistic creation and antipatriarchal rebellion.51 The Prometheus idea be-
came a powerful vehicle in this period for writers to articulate their own
ideals, and it is not hard to see aspects of that idea throughout the novel.
With Titanic hubris, Victor wants to “break though” boundaries of life and
death, both creator and rebel. Guided dangerously by the Promethean par-
adigm, he dreams that a “new species” will bless him “as its creator and
source.” In the novel’s final scenes, Walton describes Victor as a figure
“noble and godlike in ruin,” a description that fits the stubborn defiance of
the tormented Prometheus in the Underworld.52
Yet a focus on these ostensible similarities ought not to obscure, at a
more fundamental level, how inexact an analogy Prometheus is for Victor
Frankenstein. Victor is not a culture hero. He brings no benefit to man-
kind, despite his desire to “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”53
He is not a master craftsman, since he fails to shape something perfect or
beautiful. He is not even a creator, since he does not fashion anything that
did not exist before. He constructs something out of other parts, then seeks
to restore the life it used to have. Unlike Prometheus, he does not found a
new race, or anything that can continue into the future. He does not even
champion the one figure he does construct. The creature says that he is
“miserable and abandoned . . . an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked,
and trampled on.”54 In William Godwin’s primer of classical mythology
(published under the pseudonym Edward Baldwin), Prometheus is almost
unrecognizably different from his modern equivalent in Frankenstein:

Prometheus, who surpassed the whole universe in mechanical skill and con-
trivance, formed a man of clay of such exquisite workmanship . . . the man

50
 On the variations of the Prometheus myth in antiquity see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 2
vols. (Baltimore, 1993), i. 152–​66; Carol Dougherty, Prometheus (London, 2006). On Shelley’s
adaptation of Aeschylean ideas in Frankenstein, see Ana González-​Rivas Fernández, “Aeschylus
and Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley,” in Rebecca Futo Kennedy (ed.),
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus (Leiden, 2017), 292–​322.
51
 See especially Stuart Curran, “The Political Prometheus,” Studies in Romanticism 25/​3 (1986),
429–​55; Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery
(Oxford, 2017).
52
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 36, 180.
53
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 36.
54
 M. Shelley, Frankenstein, 189–​90.

206  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 of Prometheus immediately moved, and thought, and spoke, and became
every thing that the fondest wishes of his creator could ask.55

If Victor is a “modern Prometheus,” then modernity’s version of the an-

cient paradigm is a sorry one indeed. The inexactness of the analogy is
consistent with the novel’s broader relationship with romantic visions of
the past. Like so many other elements in the novel, the title conjures a de-
sire to see a resemblance between ancient heroes and modern life that is ul-
timately frustrated by great difference. In this case “modern Prometheus”
suggests no true equivalence, but a replica, a distant imitation, a pale copy.
Modernity and myth are grotesquely unalike.56 To parse the title even more
closely, we might feel that the conjunction “or” is doing more work than
is usual in the novelistic conventions of the age. Is Frankenstein a modern
Prometheus? Is he a Prometheus at all? The outlines of the Prometheus
story are sufficiently visible to tempt the connection and invite an analogy.
But as with the statues of Cupid and Psyche at the end of The Last Man,
once we are brought up close, we start to realize what a disconnection
there is, just how different the realities of the modern world are from the
romance of the past.

Classical Identification in “Valerius,” Mathilda, and

Proserpine

While Frankenstein was gaining notoriety in England, Mary Shelley was

in Italy, where she lived between 1818 and 1823. Her descriptions of
the animating effect of the Italian landscape mirror those of many other
English travelers on the eighteenth-​century Grand Tour. In January 1819,
for example, she described her joy in reading Virgil’s agricultural poem,
the Georgics, and looking at almost the same scene that Virgil did, and
“reading about manners little changed since his days.”57 She learned
Italian and plunged with antiquarian fervor into research for her historical
novel set in Dante’s Italy, Valperga (1823). But the period was also punc-
tuated by almost constant tragedy. She had already given birth in 1815, at

55
 The Pantheon; or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (4th edn., London,
1814),  76–​7.
56
 Weiner, Stevens, and Rogers similarly ask in their introduction to Frankenstein and its Classics
whether Victor is “presented as a worthy successor to the original Prometheus, or rather as a
downgraded equivalent” (4).
57
 Letter of 22 January, 1819 (M. Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley i. 85), cited
by Sunstein, Mary Shelley, 161.

Embodied Antiquity  | 207

seventeen years old, to a daughter. That first child died barely a week after
birth.58 In 1818, she endured the death of her second daughter, Clara, who
fell ill and died in Venice. In 1819, her beloved three-​year-​old son William,
her only living child at that point, passed away in Rome, a particularly
devastating loss that brought on a deep and isolating depression. These
were unusually productive years for Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose works
in these years include the shocking incest drama The Cenci (1819); the
universal visions of Prometheus Unbound (1820), the Defence of Poetry
(1821), and Hellas (1822); and the unfinished The Triumph of Life (1822).
Mary Shelley’s writing during her Italian years demonstrate far less con-
fidence in the ability of the present to sustain an affirming relationship
with the past. The short story “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman” (1819–​
20), the novella Mathilda (1819), and the Ovidian verse drama Proserpine
(1820) all describe characters eager to identify with characters from Greek
and Roman antiquity. Through acts of the imagination or by fanciful turns
in the plot, characters come face to face with the embodied presence of
antiquity. Yet in each case, there is a sense of frustration and loss in these
encounters. In “Valerius,” the protagonist longs for but fails to establish
a sense of sympathy with a reanimated Roman character, and feels only
discomfort and alienation in his presence. In Mathilda and Proserpine,
wishful identifications with heroines from Greece and Rome offer no
guidance or learning, but set a pattern for the protagonists’ own tragic
falls. In all three cases, Shelley explores a dynamic in which frustration
and difference generate a desire to connect with antiquity, yet also prevent
that desire from being fulfilled. In these stories, the barriers between pre-
sent and past seduce as well as repel.
In November 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote an unfinished story,
“The Coliseum.” In what survives, he describes a meeting between two
English visitors and a mysterious, beautiful youth, seemingly from an-
other time, who “spoke Latin, and especially Greek, with fluency.” One of
the English visitors, inspired by the ruins of the Colosseum, gives a mys-
tical sermon on the kinship of Love, the “religion of eternity,” and the an-
cient figure feels an instant rapport, telling the traveler that he is delighted
with “the sound of your voice and the harmony of your thoughts.”59 Mary’s

58
 Feminist scholars have recognized that Shelley’s traumatic experiences with childbirth are an
important biographical element in the creation narrative of Frankenstein: see Ellen Moers, Literary
Women (New York, 1977), 140, 137–​51 ; Mellor, Mary Shelley,  40–​4.
59
 P. B. Shelley, “The Coliseum: A Fragment,” in Stephen C. Behrendt (ed.), Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne
(Peterborough, Canada, 2002a), 272, 275, 277. On this and other similar Romantic representations
of the Colosseum, see Webb, “Haunted City,” 204–​8.

208  |  Spectres of Antiquity

story “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman,” generally dated to 1819, is in
many ways the reverse of Percy’s tale.60 Here, Valerius—​an emphatically
Roman figure, who looks like “a statue of one of the Romans animated to
life”—​appears to two English travelers. Unlike in Frankenstein, his rean-
imation is never explained. This time, it is the Roman who does most of
the talking, describing his disorientation at finding himself in modern Italy
and his contempt for Catholic churches on the site of his beloved Rome.
Significantly, Valerius is also a Roman of the Republican era, belonging
to “the time of Cicero and Cato,” a time when, he says, “a new spirit had
arisen: men were again vivified by the sacred flame that burnt in the souls
of Camillus and Fabricius.”61 His words suggest that a kind of reanimation
is part of the political logic of Republicanism: rule is not passed down ge-
nealogically but through a process of rebirth, as ideals and exempla are ar-
tificially re-​embodied from generation to generation. Valerius’ Republican
origins alienate him even from ruins celebrated by Romantic writers, many
of which date from Rome’s Imperial age. P. B. Shelley’s ancient time trav-
eler hides in the familiar terrain of the Colosseum until he meets the con-
genial English travelers; Mary Shelley’s time traveler does not know what
the Colosseum is.
The manuscript for “Valerius:  The Reanimated Roman” appends
an additional portion in which the narrative voice shifts to a young fe-
male character. An English traveler in Rome, Isabell Harley, takes a
liking to Valerius and begins to teach him the parts of Roman history
that he missed. She reads the Georgics with him, shows him the baths
of Caracalla, and visits galleries full of Roman statues and paintings. In
her article on Valerius, Isobel Hurst suggests that this vision of a woman
imparting classical learning to a Roman himself is an idyllic representa-
tion of Mary Shelley’s own attainments as a Latinist. Hurst describes the
story as “a pleasant counter-​example to the prevalent images of exclusion,
frustration and censure associated with women’s classical studies” in the
period.62 Yet here again, Shelley describes the disconnection between an-
cient and modern, not a true meeting of minds. The delicate final words of

60
 The story is unfinished, and was published for the first time in 1976 (Shelley, Collected Tales
and Stories, 332–​44). Jean de Palacio (Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre, 189–​90) argues that the story
was written in May 1819, a date accepted by Robinson (Collected Tales and Stories, 397–​8) and
Sunstein (Mary Shelley, 164).
61
 M. Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories, 336.
62
 “Reanimating the Romans: Mary Shelley’s Response to Roman Ruins,” in Richard Wrigley (ed.),
Regarding Romantic Rome (Bern, 2007), 136.

Embodied Antiquity  | 209

the story, describing Isabell’s feelings toward Valerius, are worth quoting
at length:

His semblance was that of life, yet he belonged to the dead. I did not feel fear
or terror; I loved and revered him. I was warmly interested in his happiness,
but there was mingled with these commoner sensations an awe—​I cannot call
it dread, yet it had something allied to that repulsive feeling—​a sentiment for
which I can find no name, which mingled with all my thoughts and strangely
characterised all my intercourse with him. Often when borne on in discourse by
my thoughts, I encountered the glance of his bright yet placid eye; although it
beamed only in sympathy, yet it checked me. If he put his hand on mine, I did
not shudder, but, as it were, my thoughts paused in their course and my heart
heaved with something of an involuntary uneasiness until it was removed. Yet
this was all very slight; I hardly noticed it, and it could not diminish my love and
interest for him; perhaps if I would own all the truth, my affection was increased
by it; and not by endeavour but spontaneously I strove to repay by interest and
intellectual sympathy the earthly barrier there seemed placed between us.63

When Isabell is describing her relationship with Valerius, her language is

full of qualifications, concessions, small reversals. Rather than the grand
cycling of empires, there is instead a small, intimate circling of language.
She respects and even loves the Roman hero, but there is a barrier between
them that makes impossible any satisfying relationship, and his look of
sympathy is betrayed by the disquiet and unease he can generate by the
touch of his dead hand. The disconnection between these two characters
has broader allegorical potential as a questioning of other contemporary
accounts of intense sympathy across time and identification with the great
heroes of the classical past. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Coliseum,”
the reanimated figure instantly recognizes the Englishmen as kin, seeing
in them a shared continuity with the ideals of classical Greece and Rome.
The mysterious ancient stranger tells the Englishman that “it is painful for
me to live without communion with intelligent and affectionate beings.
You are such, I  feel.”64 By contrast, “Valerius:  the Reanimated Roman”
is pointedly without that sort of self-​congratulatory classical analogizing.
“Did Valerius sympathize with me?” asks Isabell. “Alas! No.”65 As with

63
 M. Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories,  343–​4.
64
 P. B. Shelley, “The Coliseum: A Fragment,” 278.
65
 M. Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories, 343. On Isabell’s attempts to “overcome the blockage
of sympathy” in this scene, see also Jane Stabler, The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian
Writers in Italy (Oxford, 2013), 176.

210  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Verney in the Vatican, she is drawn to a classical figure, here come to life,
but Isabell finds a genuine connection impossible.
In Mathilda, her novella from 1819, Shelley creates a character who
is burdened not by unsuccessful identification, but by excessive and cha-
otic over-​identification with figures from the past. The mother of the title
character dies of complications from childbirth. Mathilda’s father then
flees England in a fit of grief. When he returns after sixteen years, the two
enjoy a brief period of happiness together, until, horrifically, Mathilda’s
father realizes that he has fallen in love with his daughter, a revelation that
drives both characters to seek death. The novella was never published in
Shelley’s lifetime, because William Godwin confiscated the manuscript,
fearful that the public would misinterpret the story as their family history.
It was not published until 1959. Mathilda is yet another one of Shelley’s
protagonists who yearn to form human relationships with figures from lit-
erature and history. During her lonely childhood, she says that she brought
characters from Shakespeare and Milton to life to be her companions.66
Later, crushed and alone after the revelation of her father’s secret, she
seeks sympathy with historical figures (“I began to study more; to sympa-
thize more in the thoughts of others as expressed in books; to read history,
and to lose my individuality in the crowd that had existed before me”).67
Mathilda’s bookish fantasies are central to the work. As Graham
Allen has argued, Mathilda is a thoroughly intertextual protagonist: she
seeks to articulate her own personality through identification with lit-
erary and mythological archetypes, and other characters continually pro-
ject identifications on to her.68 The plot’s horrible secret seems to have
been inspired by Vittorio Alfieri’s incest drama Mirra (1786), which is
itself based on the classical myth of Myrrha and Cinyras that Shelley
would have known through her reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In
one scene before the revelation of her father’s secret, Mathilda mentions
Alfieri’s play and observes signs of inner turmoil on her father’s face.69
Elsewhere, Mathilda explicitly compares herself to the biblical David
and Job, and characters from Milton, Shakespeare, and Boccaccio.70 Her

66
 Mathilda, ed. Michelle Faubert (Peterborough, Canada, 2017), 51.
67
 M. Shelley, Mathilda, 89.
68
 Allen, “Beyond Biographism,” 177, 179.
69
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.298–​502; Shelley, Mathilda, 59. On the myth and its reworking in
Mathilda, see Judith Barbour, ‘ “The Meaning of the Tree”: The Tale of Mirra in Mary Shelley’s
Mathilda,” in Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (eds.), Iconoclastic
Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein (Madison, NJ, 1997), 98–​114.
70
 M. Shelley, Mathilda, 59, 84, 55, 85, 70.

Embodied Antiquity  | 211

father likens her to Dante’s Beatrice, and in one scene even urges her to
read from the volume of Dante at the page left open when her mother
died; she chooses Spenser instead.71 In an early version of the novella,
the story had an explicit classical frame—​it began in the Elysian Fields,
and an encounter with Diotima, the female sage from Plato’s Symposium,
survives in draft—​but the final version is also notable for the density of
its classical references.72 On the opening page, Mathilda compares her-
self to Oedipus. She likens her fleeting joy with her father to the early
happiness of Psyche (“Like Psyche I  lived for awhile in an enchanted
palace”) and then, less than a page later, she likens herself to Proserpine
(“Often  .  .  .  I  have compared myself to Proserpine who was gaily and
heedlessly gathering flowers in the sweet plains of Enna, when the king
of Hell snatched her away to the abodes of death and misery”).73 There
are so many comparisons, in fact, that the lines of identification become
hopelessly tangled:  it is impossible to plot the characters’ course from
these parallels because as soon as one myth or literary work is invoked,
another one is hurriedly overlaid in its place. Shelley’s character is forced
to struggle through a constant and excessive figuration as someone else.
As soon as Mathilda-​as-​Oedipus is fixed in our mind, she then becomes
Mathilda-​as-​Psyche, then Mathilda-​as-​Proserpine, while her father wants
her to be Mathilda-​as-​Beatrice, or even Mathilda-​as-​Aeneas.74 As Diane
Long Hoeveler has written, Mathilda “cannot see herself except through
the lenses of literary conventions.”75 The literary comparisons are not
clear pictures but fleeting refractions on a translucent surface. Mathilda
is less about the weight of hidden desires than it is about the emptiness
of having to reflect the desires of others: other characters, other periods,
other texts.

71
 M. M. Shelley, Mathilda, 75, 62.
72
 Shelley, Mathilda, 136–​41. On the novella’s genesis and evolution, see Pamela Clemit,
“From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley’s Changing Conception of her Novella,”
Romanticism 3/​2 (1997), 152–​69.
73
 M. Shelley, Mathilda, 41, 57, 58.
74
 M. Shelley, Mathilda, 75: “I loved you as a human father might be supposed to love a daughter
borne to him by a heavenly mother; as Anchises might have regarded the child of Venus if the sex
had been changed.”
75
 Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism, 170. For similarly excessive and overlapping identifications
with classical figures in Frankenstein, see Brett M. Rogers, “The Postmodern Prometheus and
Posthuman Reproductions in Science Fiction,” in Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett
M. Rogers (eds.), Frankenstein and its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science
Fiction (London, 2018), 210–​11.

212  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 The question of classical identification is explored again in Proserpine,
one of two verse dramas Shelley wrote in 1820, and another work that
she struggled to have published in her lifetime.76 The myth is recounted
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though it has a long history in earlier Greek
texts. Proserpine (Proserpina in Latin, Persephone in the Greek tradition)
is raped by Dis (Hades) and taken to the Underworld; Ceres (Demeter)
searches for her and refuses fertility to the earth until her daughter is
returned; Proserpine, it is agreed, will spend six months of every year in
the upper air with her mother, and six months below with Dis.77 In giving
the myth the structure of a tragedy, Shelley heightens the foreknowledge
that characters have of their fate. In the Metamorphoses, Proserpine is
abducted while she is blithely gathering flowers, and Ovid emphasizes
the preternatural speed of events.78 By contrast, Shelley’s drama begins
with Proserpine’s suspicion that she is in danger (the text’s first words are
“Dear Mother, leave me not!”), and Ceres fears quite specifically that if
her daughter is “wandering alone,” she might be lost “by feint or force.”79
The drama also begins with a scene of Proserpine, Ceres, and a circle of
nymphs eagerly telling stories to one another, one of which concerns the
victimization of a heroine by a god. Proserpine says to her mother,

Your Proserpine
Entreats you stay; sit on this shady bank
And as I twine a wreathe tell once again
The combat of the Titans and the Gods;
Or how the Python fell beneath the dart
Of dread Apollo; or of Daphne’s change,—​
That coyest Grecian maid, whose pointed leaves
Now shade her lover’s brow.80

76
 For the dating of these dramas, see André Koszul’s introduction to Mary Shelley, Proserpine and
Midas: Two Unpublished Mythological Dramas (London, 1922), xi–​xiv. Proserpine was rejected
for publication in 1824, but was eventually published in a revised and shortened form in the
illustrated annual The Winter’s Wreath for MDCCCXXXII (London, 1832), 1–​20.
77
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.385–​571; on Shelley’s sources, see de Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son
oeuvre,  444–​7.
78
 Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.395: paene simul visa est, dilectaque, raptaque Diti (“almost as soon as
she was seen, she was loved and raped by Dis”).
79
 M. Shelley, Proserpine and Midas, 5, 7. In the rewritten version of 1832, Proserpine’s fears are
even more prescient: “but if I should be hurled/​thee absent, to the dark Tartarean gulph,/​Nor ever
visit earth and thee again!/​Ah my foreboding soul—​will this not be?” (“Proserpine,” The Winter’s
Wreath, 2).
80
 M. Shelley, Proserpine and Midas, 5.

Embodied Antiquity  | 213

According to Susan Gubar, this opening scene to Shelley’s drama represents
a “pastoral time of communality between all women”; Julie Carlson in-
stead sees the women’s storytelling in the text as a form of rivalry.81 Yet
both readings underplay the importance of the stories themselves. Shelley’s
Proserpine, a character from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, asks her mother to
tell her three stories all of which appear—​in exactly the same order—​in
the first book of that poem. She wants to hear the battle between primeval
giants and the gods (= Metamorphoses 1.151–​76); then Apollo’s defeat
of the serpentine Python (1.438–​76); and then the attempted rape of the
nymph Daphne by Apollo, the first incident of sexual violence in Ovid’s
epic, and her subsequent transformation into a laurel tree (1.473–​567). The
women in Shelley’s drama are both characters from Ovid and readers of
him, a dynamic of textual self-​consciousness very familiar to scholars of
Ovid’s works.82 If Mathilda imagines a modern woman’s identification
with classical heroines, Proserpine imagines classical heroines’ identifica-
tion with other classical heroines. Yet these other characters are not models
or lessons from which Proserpine can learn. Rather, the myth is a narra-
tive of sexual violence that Proserpine will not, and cannot, escape. “Dear
Mother, leave me not!” is the cry of a character trapped in a plot of violence
that has already been determined for her by other texts.
The characters’ excessive knowledge of their own doom in Proserpine
gives the drama a weary sense of being completed as soon as it has begun.
People act and speak in present time, but their wishes and desires have al-
ready been foreclosed by events that happened before them, and so their
actions are a constant reminder of the past. Privately, Shelley expressed
something similar about herself. On July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley
drowned while sailing from Livorno to Lerici. In a letter from August 1823,
she represents herself as a broken classical statue, though she assures her-
self that it is better than never having been carved at all: “What dreams and
prospects I formed—​& all now dust—​but as evil destroys good, so may
good be at times the victor . . . a torso of the Ancients is better than a gal-
lery of sound limbed dainty unharmed modern blocks.”83 One month later,

81
 Susan Gubar, “Mother, Maiden, and the Marriage of Death: Women Writers and an Ancient
Myth,” Women’s Studies 6/​3 (1979), 303; Carlson, “Coming After,” 358.
82
 The now-​classic account is Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic
Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. Charles Segal (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 60–​2. Shelley
also imagines Proserpine’s friendship with the nymph Arethusa, whose own tale of attempted
sexual violence is told directly after that of Proserpine in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (5.572–​641).
83
 Letter to Leigh and Marianne Hunt, August 14, 1823 (Shelley, The Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley, i. 370).

214  |  Spectres of Antiquity

she writes that “I tried to collect my thoughts, and dared not think—​for
I am a ruin where owls & bats live only and I lost my last singing bird when
I left Albaro” (in Genoa; the singing bird is presumably P. B. Shelley, with
reference to his poem “To a Skylark”).84 Returning to London without him
was to be doubly exiled; “to be away from Italy is to lose you twice,” she
wrote.85 In these circumstances, she began preliminary work on her dys-
topian novel, The Last Man, about a plague that destroys all of humanity.
“The last man! Yes I  may well describe that solitary being’s feelings,
feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct
before me.”86 Critics often adduce this particular comment in the journal as
license to interpret the theme of her dystopian novel in biographical terms.
By the time she finished The Last Man, her husband was dead; Lord Byron
was dead; three of her children were dead. She had one surviving child,
who had been born in Florence. His name, Percy Florence Shelley, was a
constant reminder of times past. In her private writings, Mary portrayed
herself, like Frankenstein’s creature and Valerius, as an entity that was
somehow both dead and alive. She too, she felt, had become an embodied
form of history.

Shelley and Maturin: Ancient Texts, Future Ruins

In an apparent paradox, Mary Shelley’s only novel set in the future is also
the one that most consistently evokes the ancient world. Set in the year
2073, The Last Man describes a plague that destroys all of humanity, leaving
only the survivor of the title, Lionel Verney. Shelley’s dystopian vision is
very much of its time. It recalls scientific warnings of excessive population
growth, representations of the apocalypse in religious writings, and con-
temporary accounts of foreign epidemics, particularly the accounts of the
1793 Philadelphia yellow-​fever epidemic in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Ormond and Arthur Mervyn.87 Yet Shelley also represents the plague as
the fulfillment of an ancient Greek prophecy, and many of the novel’s rec-
ognizable Gothic motifs are explicitly classical. When characters descend
into a subterranean tunnel in the novel’s introduction, it is the Cave of the

84
 Letter to Leigh Hunt, September 9, 1823 (Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
i. 378).
85
 M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 477.
86
 M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 477. On this period in her life, see Angela Wright,
Mary Shelley (Cardiff, 2018), 89–​93.
87
 Lionel refers to the “masterly delineations of the author of Arthur Mervyn” (M. Shelley, The Last
Man, 259).

Embodied Antiquity  | 215

Sibyl; when characters eagerly decipher a rediscovered manuscript, it is the
Sibylline leaves; their odyssey around a picturesque European landscape
brings them to the antiquities collections of the Palazzo Colonna and the
Vatican.88 Shelley’s prophetic account of human disappearance is framed
by references to antiquity, which heighten the contrast between the death-
lessness of classical monuments and the tenuous fragility of individual
human existence. As the text describes people dwindling to extinction,
it increasingly emphasizes the gigantic sublimity of ancient ruins, which
persevere despite the looming absence of anyone to remember them. This
is the Gothic vision of antiquity: a spectral power that seems to exist out-
side of the ordinary processes of cultural memory or literary tradition, and
that haunts modernity with a superhuman power all its own. In her most
expansive and ambitious novel, Shelley once again expresses difference,
rather than affinity or community, between the present and the past.
“I visited Naples in the year 1818,” she begins. “We visited the so
called Elysian Fields and Avernus; and wandered through various ruined
temples, baths, and classic spots; at length we entered the gloomy cavern
of the Cumaean Sibyl.”89 This apparently autobiographical preface is
fictionalized in more ways than one. Percy and Mary Shelley did visit
Naples in December 1818, but neither of them responded with the “curi-
osity and enthusiasm” that Shelley describes. “Here we were conducted
to see the Mare Morto and the Elysian Fields, the spot on which Virgil
places the scenery of the Sixth Aeneid,” wrote P.  B. Shelley. “I confess
my disappointment . . . We then coasted by the bay of Baiae to the left,
in which we saw many picturesque and interesting ruins; but I  have to
remark that we never disembarked but we were disappointed.”90 Mary is
terse: “The Elysian fields—​Avernus Solfatura—​the Bay of Baiae is beau-
tiful but we are disappointed by the various places we visit.”91 Shelley’s
contemporaries expressed similar disillusionment with the alleged cave
of the Sibyl. Another traveler of the same period wrote that his “expecta-
tions were greatly disappointed: tradition has been guilty of an egregious
misnomer in proclaiming this excavation to have been the residence of the

88
 The most detailed analysis of the references to Greek and Latin literature in the novel is Maria
Teresa Muñoz García de Iturrospe, “Roma y la evocación reparadora de la Antigüedad en The Last
Man de Mary Shelley,” in María Asunción Sánchez Manzano (ed.), Retórica: Fundamentos del
estilo narrativo en la novela romantic (Berlin: 2015), 145–​64.
89
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 3.
90
 Letter to Thomas Love Peacock (17 or 18 December, 1818): The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), 61.
91
 M. Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, i. 242).

216  |  Spectres of Antiquity

Cumaean gipsy.” Antiquarian zeal drove him through frigid pools of water
in the cave and now, as a result, he has a “feverish illness” that could actu-
ally send him to the Underworld.92
In The Last Man, Shelley rewrites this common experience as one of
intense excitement and discovery. After initial disappointment, she and her
companion push through the waters flooding the grotto and then enter a
cavern, where scraps of leaves and bark are still strewn about, inscribed
with the prophecies of the ancient Sibyl. “This is the Sibyl’s cave,” her
companion exclaims; “these are Sibylline leaves.”93 Shelley replaces the
typical modern skepticism about the site with an enchanted sense of possi-
bility. This introduction to The Last Man is also remarkable for the degree
to which it interweaves the imagined antiquarian project with the author’s
own personal voice and her own experience of brokenness, ruin, and loss.
She makes repeated visits to the cave to gather the leaves of the Sibyl.
She describes assembling them, deciphering them, and transforming them
into narrative we are about to read. “I present the public with my latest
discoveries,” she writes, as if announcing a new archaeological find to her
readership.94 Deciphering the leaves, she says, has “cheered long hours of
solitude, and taken me out of a world, which has averted its own benig-
nant face from me, to one glowing with imagination and power.” When
she found the leaves they were “scattered and unconnected,” “obscure and
chaotic,” and “frail and attenuated.” Putting them together has “soothed
her sorrow”: a psychic project, not just a historical and scholarly one.
Shelley’s description also evokes a similar antiquarian project at another
site near Naples, the recovery of an entire library of ancient scrolls buried
by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Herculaneum in 79 CE. In a series
of letters printed in 1754 and 1755 in the London periodical Philosophical
Transactions, the sensational announcement was made to English readers
that an ancient library had been uncovered at the Roman site. The pa-
pyrus scrolls were so thoroughly charred by the volcanic blast that they
had become blocks of solid carbon, and could hardly be touched without
them disintegrating into tiny fragments.95 The romantic description of the

92
 Lewis Engelbech, Naples and the Campagna Felice, in a Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend
in England (London, 1815), 37–​8. In the Shelleys’ day, the “cave of the Sibyl” was in fact an
underground tunnel constructed in the first century BCE: R. J. Clark, “Vergil, Aeneid, 6, 40 ff.
and the Cumaean Sibyl’s Cave,” Latomus 36/​2 (1977), 486. This construction is different from the
tunnel currently shown to tourists as the cave of the Sibyl, which was uncovered in 1932.
93
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 5.
94
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 6.
95
 David Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (Los Angeles, 2005), 16–​23.

Embodied Antiquity  | 217

discovery by the excavator Camillo Paderni bears strong similarities to
Shelley’s depiction of her own imaginary find at Cumae. He and his team
spent twelve days in the underground chamber in recovering some 337
volumes, picking out isolated Latin and Greek words from the sheen of
the black ink still visible on the dark charcoal, and fearing to touch the
scrolls lest they fall into ashes.96 The discovery sparked the imagination
of enthusiasts in England and set off a competition to devise a means of
reading them. The botanist Sir Joseph Banks constructed a machine to
unroll the scrolls without them breaking apart, and the chemist Humphry
Davy smoked them with sulfur to separate the layers, neither with prom-
ising results.97 (Today scholars are using CT-​scan technology and 3D im-
aging to unroll the scrolls digitally). The Last Man’s dystopian vision of
desolate cities, suddenly emptied of inhabitants, has consequently been
linked to the contemporary fascination with the empty ghost towns of
Pompeii and Herculaneum—​not the grand ruins of a decayed civilization
but ordinary Roman cities, destroyed in an instant by the volcanic erup-
tion, and then preserved in eerie detail underground.98 Indeed, Shelley vis-
ited Herculaneum just three days before she saw the cave of the Sibyl, and
the real (and equally incredible) project of piecing together its scrolls has
many similarities with her imagined project of reconstructing the Sibyl’s
leaves.
One other major novel of the early nineteenth century links its Gothic
story to the Herculaneum papyri, and it is worth pausing to consider the
comparison, since it helps to elucidate what is distinct about Shelley’s
vision in The Last Man. In a scene in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), the
Irish novelist and clergyman Charles Robert Maturin likens the reading
of a fragmentary manuscript to the decipherment of one of the papyrus
scrolls from Herculaneum. Whereas Shelley associates this effort with the
reconstructive labor of grieving her husband’s death, Maturin sardonically
suggests something much less reputable behind the desire to decipher the
manuscript: a dangerous drive for what is hidden, and even a sexual desire
for the obscene. The novel’s title character, after all, is a Mephistopheles

96
 Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri,  18–​20.
97
 Sider, The Library of the Villa dei Papiri, 56. Wordsworth also imagined the “rapture” of
discovering some lost masterpiece among the Herculaneum scrolls: “Upon the Same Occasion”
(1819): Shorter Poems: 1807–​1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 284–​6.
98
 The best-​known example of this literary fashion is Edward Bulwer-​Lytton’s The Last Days
of Pompeii (1834), but that was only one of a spate of novels and poems set in Pompeii and
Herculaneum in the 1820s and 1830s. See Catherine Redford, “The Last Man and Romantic
Archaeology,” in Richard Gravil (ed.), Grasmere 2012: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth
Summer Conference (Penrith, UK, 2012).

218  |  Spectres of Antiquity

type who preys on human beings in their weakest moments, offering them
his assistance if they renounce Christian salvation. Melmoth is both an
imposing and a pathetic figure. He has lived for many centuries and often
startles his targets by how much he knows about their lives. But as an
emissary of Satan, he has very little success. He admits gloomily at the
end of the novel that he has never managed to persuade anyone to accept
the bargain he offers. The novel’s characteristic narrative technique is its
proliferating inset stories: the wanderer’s tale is narrated out of chrono-
logical order by different characters, who are often interrupted by other
characters with yet more stories about Melmoth’s life and career. For the
reader, there is less a feeling of progressive revelation or discovery than of
being submerged under multiplying narrative layers, like an archaeologist
forced to dig farther and farther underground.
Early in the novel, Maturin describes John Melmoth, a young descendant
of the infernal wanderer, anxiously searching a lacunose manuscript for
information about his ancestor. His frustrated endeavors are likened to an
antiquarian’s investigation of one of the charred (or “calcined”) scrolls
from Herculaneum:

The conclusion of this extraordinary manuscript was in such a state, that, in

fifteen mouldy and crumbling pages, Melmoth could hardly make out that
number of lines. No antiquarian, unfolding with trembling hand the calcined
leaves of an Herculaneum manuscript, and hoping to discover some lost
lines of the Aeneis in Virgil’s own autograph, or at least some unutterable
abomination of Petronius or Martial, happily elucidatory of the mysteries of
the Spintriae, or the orgies of the Phallic worshippers, ever pored with more
luckless diligence, or shook a head of more hopeless despondency over his
task. He could but just make out what tended rather to excite than assuage
that feverish thirst of curiosity which was consuming his inmost soul.99

This passage imagines the unsatisfied desire for knowledge as the driving
force of John Melmoth’s enquiry, and, by extension, of our own stop-​start
motion through the deep paths of Maturin’s long text. He imagines, as
Shelley also does, a process not of detached scholarly observation but of
intense emotional engagement. The antiquarian feels nervous anticipation,
hope, grim perseverance, and finally “hopeless despondency” when every
faded letter excites his dominant passion, a cycle that serves only to arouse

99
 Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford, 1972), 58.

Embodied Antiquity  | 219

the “feverish thirst of curiosity” that consumes his very soul. Maturin also
ironically undermines this desire for knowledge. If we look more closely
at the simile, what does Maturin’s eager antiquarian hope to find? The de-
sire to “discover some lost lines of the Aeneis” was common, since there
was a lively debate in the eighteenth century over whether the Aeneid’s
fifty-​eight incomplete lines were the result of accident or design. Less rep-
utable is the search for obscene epigrams of Martial or for new sections of
the Satyricon of Petronius, the fragmentary Roman novel whose knot of
overlapping narratives is a classical precursor to Melmoth’s tangled narra-
tive structure. Even less reputable are scholars who spend time searching
for details of rituals to the obscene deity Priapus;100 or those who seek to
elucidate the “mysteries of the Spintriae,” a word that the Roman emperor
Tiberius seems to have coined to describe a sexual act between men.101
Shelley describes the “curiosity and enthusiasm,” as well as the deep sense
of personal loss, that urges her to decode the leaves of the Sibyl. Maturin
mockingly suggests baser pleasures, intimating a sexual drive behind the
cycle of excitement and frustration in the antiquarian quest for discovery.
The irony of this passage is deepened by the name Melmoth, which was
also attached to a once-​imposing man of letters, later invoked as an example
of the transience of literary fame. “Pliny Melmoth” (William Melmoth) was
one of the eighteenth century’s most celebrated translators of Latin prose,
best known for his 1746 edition of the second-​century letters of Pliny the
Younger. Many if not most eighteenth-​century readers came to the letters
of Pliny through Melmoth, and Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon both
rated his translation above the Latin original.102 When the novelist Fanny
Burney met Melmoth at a dinner party in 1780, she remembered him as
arrogant and intimidating, with a “proud conceit in look & manner, mighty
forbidding.”103 In 1824, by contrast, when offered the chance to peruse a
“great trunk” of Melmoth’s papers, Thomas De Quincey could not work

100
 See, e.g., James Uden, “The Vanishing Gardens of Priapus,” Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology 105 (2010), 189–​219.
101
 On the spintriae, cf. Suetonius, Tiberius 43. 1: “he [Tiberius] gathered from everywhere herds
of women and male prostitutes [exoleti] and discoverers of monstrous sexuality which he called
spintriae, to take turns defiling themselves in front of him in threesomes.” Maturin’s contemporary,
the German philologist Friedrich Karl Forberg, argued that Tiberius’ spintriae were men anally
penetrated in the middle of a chain of three partners, deriving the word from the Greek σφιγκτήρ,
“sphincter”: Antonii Panormitae Hermaphroditus (Coburg, 1824), 373–​4.
102
 James Boswell, Boswell, the English Experiment, 1785–​1789, ed. Irma S. Lustig and
Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1986), 211, cited in Paul A. Doyle, “William Melmoth: A Critical
Biography,” Ph.D. thesis (Fordham University, 1954), 86.
103
 The Early Letters of Fanny Burney, Vol. 4: The Streatham Years, Part II: 1780–​1781, ed. Betty
Rizzo (Montreal, 2003), 99–​100.

220  |  Spectres of Antiquity

up the interest even to open it. Only a small trunk of Melmoth memorabilia
could possibly pique his interest, he said.104 Maturin’s Gothic Melmoth
is a composite figure, with many different cultural resonances. Yet the
half-​forgotten memory of Pliny Melmoth, both imposing and pathetic, is
nonetheless perceptible in his image of the learned wanderer, especially
in the chapter describing the eager antiquarian, since it begins with an ep-
igraph from Pliny: apparebat eidolon senex (“a phantom appeared, an old
man”).105 If a reader is led by the concatenation of “Pliny” and “Melmoth”
to remember the man who bore both names, then Melmoth the Wanderer
offers a particularly ignoble coda to that man’s literary legacy.
Maturin’s satiric tone is very different from that of Shelley in The Last
Man, and yet both represent antiquarian desire in explicitly personal terms.
Indeed, there is a curious and suggestive ambiguity in The Last Man about
just whose voice we hear in the novel. Critics were quick to point out a
logical inconsistency in the introduction, since Shelley alternates between
imagining the text as the translated words of the Sibyl and as her own fic-
titious narration. Describing the pleasure she has received from such grim
material, she says,

I confess, that I have not been unmoved by the development of the tale; and
that I have been depressed, nay, agonized at some parts of the recital, which
I have faithfully transcribed from my materials. Yet such is human nature,
that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter
of tempest and earthquake, or, worse, the stormy and ruin-​fraught passions
of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fic-
titious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain.106

Which is it? Is she “faithfully transcribing” the story or are these “ficti-
tious sorrows,” events of her own invention? The hostile reviewer of the
Panoramic Miscellany pounced. “Here then the machine, so elaborately
constructed is, at once, destroyed. The sibylline leaves are blown away at
a breath. It is no longer a transcript of future, or revealed history, but an
avowed fable or invention of the writer.”107 The dislocated logic, however,

104
 The Works of Thomas De Quincey, general ed. G. Lindop, 21 vols. (London, 2000–​3), iii. 188.
105
 Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, 28 = Pliny, Epistles 7.27.5. Pliny’s letter described an
encounter with a ghost in a haunted house (Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome, 62–​76); on its
significance for Maturin, see Ana González-​Rivas Fernández (“Melmoth, el fantasma de Charles
R. Maturin: Regreso espectral de la Literatura Grecolatina,” Epos: Revista de filología 24 [2008],
37–​54), who traces a network of allusions to classical ghosts in Maturin’s novel.
106
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 7.
107
 Anonymous, Review of The Last Man, Panoramic Miscellany 1 (March 1826), 382.

Embodied Antiquity  | 221

betrays an uncertainty about classical identification that is a quintessen-
tial aspect of Shelley’s writing. Far from embodying directly the ancient,
female voice of authority, the narrator of this introduction repeatedly
expresses concern over the insufficiency of her own efforts and the dis-
tance between her text and the ancient source. The leaves, she writes, have
“suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence,” and the
reader must judge her “imperfect powers” in giving them “form and sub-
stance.”108 The wandering ambiguity between classical translation and
personal voice epitomizes a familiar dynamic of Shelley’s thought. She
describes a desire to identify with a figure from classical antiquity, a de-
sire that ends, nonetheless, with a sense of disconnection and difference.
Ancient and modern come temptingly close, but in the end they never
quite align.
As the narrative of The Last Man develops, Lionel is consistently
shadowed by allusions to Rome. Untrained in learning or culture at the
novel’s opening, he “wandered among the hills of civilized England as
uncouth a savage as the wolf-​bred founder of old Rome.” Like Romulus,
he trusted in physical might, the “law” of the strongest.109 After he tells us
that he “read the histories of Greece and Rome,” he sees events around him
through classical eyes. “Adrian and Idris entered my cottage. They found
me Curius-​like, feasting on sorry fruits for supper; but they brought gifts
richer than the golden bribes of the Sabines.”110 Soon, he describes him-
self as “Cincinnatus-​like,” invoking another famous hero of the Roman
Republic.111 When the plague encroaches, Shelley describes a lamentable
degradation of ideals, as life—​the mere ability to breathe—​becomes the
highest of aspirations. “One living beggar had become of more worth than
a national peerage of dead lords—​alas the day!—​than of dead heroes,
patriots, or men of genius.”112 Charlotte Sussman argues that the plague
in The Last Man has the “unexpected side effect of devaluing the past.”
Shelley’s characters “dissociate themselves from a continuous culture” by
exiling themselves into a “world without nation and without history.”113
But the exact opposite is true. These classical figures and monuments seem

108
 M. Shelley, The Last Man,  6–​7
109
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 14.
110
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 79. Lionel alludes to the story of Manius Curius Dentatus: men sent
to bribe Dentatus found him in his hut as he was cooking turnips. He retorted that anyone happy
with so little could not possibly be tempted by anything more: Plutarch, Cato Maior  2.1–​2.
111
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 96.
112
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 293.
113
 “‘Islanded in the World’: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man,” PMLA 118/​
2 (2003), 296–​7.

222  |  Spectres of Antiquity

only more imposing and powerful once the lives of these doomed human
beings have begun to contract. Moreover, the characters’ movement from
England is not directionless wandering, but a specific movement toward
the epicenter of the classical figures with whom the characters have asso-
ciated themselves throughout the novel. The group believes that they will
submit more patiently to universal annihilation if they can lose themselves
in the contemplation of “sacred and eternal Rome.”114
When Lionel arrives in Rome, he describes the aesthetic pleasures—​or
rather the anesthetic pleasures—​of contemplating its grand edifices. “The
knowledge that I  was in Rome soothed me,” he writes; “I went to rest
that night; the eternal burning of my heart quenched,—​my senses tran-
quil.” He is consoled by the beauty and sublimity of what he sees; it takes
the “sting” from the thought of his own suffering, “arraying it only in
poetic ideality” (the phrasing echoes the novel’s preface). He hopes that
exercising his imagination in Rome will be “an opiate to my sleepless
sense of woe.”115 These inanimate monuments seem to have just the things
he lacks:  life, power, companionship. It is with this desperate sense of
difference between his own wretched condition and the timelessness of
ancient statues that he clasps the statues of Cupid and Psyche in the pas-
sage quoted at my chapter’s opening. He is desperate for sympathy from
a past unable and unwilling to give it. He imagines the places around him
bustling and full of people. The contrast with his own situation only makes
him feel even more alone: the “generations I had conjured up to my fancy,
contrasted more strongly with the end of all.”116 It is at this point, perhaps
not coincidentally, that Shelley decisively throws off the fiction that she is
transcribing the Sibyl’s leaves. By a notorious inconcinnity, we now learn
that Lionel has been writing this book all along, and he despairs that no-
body in the future will exist to read it.117 No longer accompanied or author-
ized by the ancient voice of the Sibyl, he is suddenly exposed and isolated,
alone among the antiquities in Rome.
Shelley’s climactic vision in The Last Man of the sublimity of classical
buildings represents a grand summation of eighteenth-​century Gothic clas-
sicism. Lionel experiences the city through a palimpsest of literary layers:

114
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 327.
115
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 461, 464.
116
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 463.
117
 M. Shelley, The Last Man,  466–​7.

Embodied Antiquity  | 223

 I remembered the dark monk, and floating figures of “The Italian,” and how
my boyish blood had thrilled at the description. I called to mind Corinna
ascending the Capitol to be crowned, and, passing from one heroine to the
author, how the Enchantress Spirit of Rome held sovereign sway over the
minds of the imaginative, until it rested on me—​sole remaining spectator
of its wonders.118

Lionel’s impressions reinforce the degree to which Gothic fiction had

shaped images of Rome as a haunted city in the Romantic era. When Lionel
sees the famous statue of the Colossal Horses with the statues of Castor
and Pollux in the Piazza di Monte Cavallo, he is overawed by the work’s
“undiminished grandeur” and terrifying power. “How many passing gener-
ations had their giant proportions outlived!” he cries.119 The phrase recalls
Radcliffe’s description of the ruins in Rome as “gigantic skeletons”; and,
further back, the giant helmet that crushed the feeble prince in the opening
of The Castle of Otranto. These images are characteristically Gothic be-
cause they represent a world haunted, even terrorized, by giant tradition.
Enlightenment and modernity were supposed to have swept away the
traces of this earlier, irrational attachment to symbols of antique power.
They did not. The symbols of classicism linger, taunting us with their own
longevity. They might have been transformed into dismembered quotations
and epigraphs, twisted out of shape as new versions of ancient myth. But
they remain:  abjected, marginalized, even transparent, and yet wielding
a power disproportionate to their age or apparent utility. Even in Gothic
texts in which the classical has become completely invisible, the struggle
against a deathless past preserves at its core this eighteenth-​century psy-
chic condition. The Gothic translates an oversized perception of history’s
vitality into supernatural visions of its return.

Spectres

Soon after Mary Shelley came back from Italy to London in 1823, she
wrote a letter to the essayist and poet Leigh Hunt. In halting, fractured
phrases, Shelley describes her feelings after being separated from both her
husband and her former life in Italy:

118
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 462.
119
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 461.

224  |  Spectres of Antiquity

 Oh what a change, dark &—​heavy has come over my scene of life—​
I struggle like an animal in a net—​I can only at times, when I  banish
thought—​endure it—​To have lived in Italy wd have been still to have kept
a part of my Shelley—​ here—​shades—​ well never mind—​ good night—​
tomorrow—​Greek shall lay this evil spirit in the company of Homer I am
with one of his best friends—​and in reading the books he best loved I col-
lect his acquaintances about me.120

Shelley hopes that by reading Homer she can console herself and lay the
“evil spirit” of her melancholy to rest. Yet it is also through her reading
of this Greek text that she can bring back the spirit of her husband. She
imagines—​if that is not too weak a word for grief’s ability to make
real the memory of the past—​that his “acquaintances,” presumably the
characters of Homer, are all around her. Shelley’s disconnected use of the
word “shades” here is ambiguous but evocative. Are these shadows in her
house? The evil spirit of her depression? The ghost of her former husband?
Or the spectral medium of the book itself, which can conjure Percy’s in-
tangible presence in her home? For books, indeed, can seem to have a
power that exceeds the individuals who write and read them. So it is in
The Last Man. In the final scene, Lionel is still alive, but he has launched
himself alone into the sea on a raft. The only things keeping him company
are his volumes of Homer and Shakespeare. But there are always more
books: the libraries of the world, he says, are “thrown open to me,” and at
“any port I can renew my stock.”121 Human beings cannot enjoy the same
longevity, nor can they so easily be replaced. History stretches out behind
us, a vast haven where giants walked. By comparison, our lives are tiny,
and our futures, unavoidably finite.

120
 Letter to Leigh Hunt, October 26, 1823 (M. Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
1980, i. 398).
121
 M. Shelley, The Last Man, 469.

Embodied Antiquity  | 225


Afterword
Haunting or Reception?

In Edgar Allan poe’s poem “The Coliseum” (1833), a traveler arrives

after a long journey in Rome. He makes a nocturnal visit to the ancient
site, intending to drink his fill of “grandeur, gloom, and glory.”1 In lan-
guage and imagery evocative of earlier Romantic verse, he describes the
ruin as a holy ground for visitors’ meditations (“a rich Reliquary/​of lofty
contemplation”) and as a Gothic locale, a place of “Silence,” “Desolation,”
and “dim Night.”2 The traveler begins a standard memento mori lament,
asking rhetorically if these stones are all that remains of a once-​great
power. “Not all,” is the ruins’ booming, terrifying response:

We rule the hearts of mightiest men—​we rule

With a despotic sway all giant minds.
We are not impotent—​we pallid stones.
Not all our power is gone—​not all our fame—​
Not all the wonder that encircles us—​
Not all the mysteries that in us lie—​
Not all the memories that hang upon
And cling around about us as a garment,
Clothing us in a robe of more than glory.3

1
 The Complete Tales and Poems (New York, 1975), 948–​9.
2
 On the Romantic tradition of nocturnal descriptions of the Colosseum, see Webb, “Haunted
City”; on Poe’s debt to this tradition, see Kent Ljungquist, The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s
Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (Potomac, MD, 1984), 171–​7.
3
 Poe, Complete Tales and Poems, 949.
The stones are startlingly alive. The traveler, thinking naively that he can
use the Roman ruins as a basis for his own placid meditations, soon learns
that the ruins will use him. Far from exemplifying the transience of passing
glory, they “rule all giant minds,” exerting an active force in the world by
shaping the principles, emotions, questions, and ideas of later generations.
In “The Coliseum,” Poe describes a relationship with classical antiquity
that can hardly be expressed by the idea of “appreciating” the past, or, to
use the word most commonly employed in contemporary classical studies,
by our “reception” of it. He describes something much less benign. The
legacy of the ancient world—​what Poe elsewhere dubs the “glory that was
Greece/​And the grandeur that was Rome”4—​here appears in more sin-
ister terms as a force that haunts and possesses modern thought. History
structures our identities in ways that we may not wish and may not even
know. In this Gothic vision, antiquity is neither immanent and always
visible, nor is it entirely absent and dead. Instead it is undead, given to
periodic reanimation, a process that threatens rather than bolsters our self-​
satisfied sense of mastery over our own minds.
In the words of Norman Vance, the classics enjoyed a “stubborn after-
life” in nineteenth-​century Britain.5 Greek and Latin literature could still
assume enormous value and cultural cachet in the public and private lives
of the Victorians, and could provoke powerful attachments between the
present and the past. But after the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth
century, the development of canons of national literature, the interrogation
of classical ideals after revolutions in Europe and the United States, and
the celebration of progress as the signal virtue of capitalist modernity, the
antique world seemed increasingly far away. In “Ghostwritten Classics,”
Edmund Richardson examines surprising connections between classical
scholarship and spiritualism in the Victorian era, adducing examples of
scholars who sought to communicate through seances with the authors
they studied.6 This “ghostwritten classics” could be seen partly as a de-
velopment of the spectral imagery of eighteenth-​century Gothic litera-
ture, but it also speaks eloquently to the enormous sense of difference that
had opened up between antiquity and modernity. Neither our doubles nor
our peers, the classical writers of Greece and Rome had become distant
ghosts, which had to be summoned across a vast gulf of time. Whereas

4
 “To Helen” (Poe, Complete Tales and Poems, 1017).
5
 The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1997), 3.
6
 “Ghostwritten Classics,” in Shane Butler (ed.), Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception
(London, 2016), 221–​38.

228  |  Afterword
Edward Young in Conjectures on Original Composition deprecatingly
described Roman poets as oversized spectres terrorizing the minds of
modern writers, Richardson’s spiritualist classicists actively solicited an
intimate relationship with ancient ghosts. It is the sort of reverence that
Young sought to expunge.
Other nineteenth-​century authors explored the continuing power of clas-
sical culture not in spite of, but because of, its death. In Valperga, Mary
Shelley described Rome as a “corpse,” the “broken image of what was
once great beyond all power of speech to express.”7 That idea is reiterated
in The Marble Faun (1860), in which Nathaniel Hawthorne imagines
Rome as the “dead corpse of a giant, decaying for centuries, with no sur-
vivor mighty enough even to bury it.”8 His novel centers on the evolving
relationship of four friends in Italy. One character, Miriam, is pursued by
a figure associated mysteriously with Memmius, a fictional Roman collab-
orator in the fourth-​century CE persecution of the Christians. The Marble
Faun draws pervasively from Romantic visions of Rome, and it likens its
central character Miriam to Madame de Staël’s doomed Italian heroine,
Corinne.9 It also rehearses the key themes of eighteenth-​century Gothic
classicism as I  have described them in this book. Contemporary life in
the novel seems exaggeratedly transient and insubstantial—​Hawthorne’s
living characters “haunt” Rome’s museums and monuments as if they
were only half there—​but history is oppressively superabundant, bearing
down on later eras with all its “weight and density.”10 In “The Marble Faun
and the Waste of History,” Millicent Bell describes Hawthorne’s Rome as
a “composite of meaningless vestiges,” a city littered with so much classic
art and architecture that its value has been dissipated by its sheer profu-
sion.11 I would argue, by contrast, that Hawthorne’s distinctively Gothic
vision of history lies in his simultaneous vision of the past as both waste
and weight. Hawthorne depicts a Rome full of artifacts that are frequently
ruined, grotesque, and shorn of their original contexts, and yet they ex-
ercise an extraordinary sway over their modern viewers. The “classics”
accumulate their abstract power even (or especially) when precise know-
ledge of them has become increasingly faint.
Hawthorne also describes the weight of the past in terms of communal
guilt. Rome in The Marble Faun has become progressively infected by

7
 Shelley, Valperga, 112.
8
 The Marble Faun, ed. Susan Manning (Oxford, 2002), 86–​7.
9
 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 113.
10
 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 8.
11
 The Southern Review 35/​2 (1999), 360.

Haunting or Reception?  | 229

what Hawthorne sees as moral evils:  the legacy of pagan antiquity, the
persecution of early Christians, the insidiousness of Catholic supersti-
tion, the alleged degeneracy of modern Italians.12 Traveling to Italy for the
first time in his mid-​fifties, Hawthorne suspected that he had gone from a
place with too little history to a place with too much of it. He describes
America in the novel’s preface as a nation where there is “no shadow, no
antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.”13 (His forefa-
ther in the American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown, had already found
his nation’s shadow in the violence of its colonial origins.) By contrast,
once the protagonists of The Marble Faun are in Rome, they are oppressed
by the sins of the past. The American sculptor Kenyon believes that there
“appeared to be a contagious element, rising foglike from the ancient de-
pravity of Rome, and brooding over the dead and half-​rotten city, as no-
where else on earth.”14 In the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Horace
Walpole said his story’s moral was that “the sins of fathers are visited on
their children to the third and fourth generation.”15 Hawthorne transforms
this idea from plot device into cosmic principle, tracing the gradual cor-
ruption of his characters both through their own flaws and through the
influence of their antique surroundings.
The depiction of the past as an active and violent force in the texts I dis-
cuss in this book raise methodological questions for scholars describing
the role and influence of classical antiquity today. First, how do we de-
scribe the continuing presence of the ancient past? (And what sort of met-
aphysics do we presume when we speak of the past as a “presence” at
all?) The concept of a classical “tradition,” from Latin tradere (“to hand
down”), emphasizes the movement of an agreed-​upon set of ideas from
them to us. But that model of handing down tradition overstates the co-
herence of ancient ideas and the continuity of their transmission, and in
any case is too easily co-​opted by assertions of cultural authority:  “our
tradition,” “the tradition.” We could speak of classical “echoes,” although
the word suggests a sound that becomes ever more faint as we move far-
ther from its source, a connotation that may not represent the dynamic of

12
 On the Protestant background to Hawthorne’s vision of the corruptions of Catholic Rome, see
Catharine Edwards, “The Romance of Roman Error: Encountering Antiquity in Hawthorne’s
The Marble Faun,” in Basil Dufallo (ed.), Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of
Rome’s Flaws (Oxford, 2017), 127–​52.
13
 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 4. On the widespread historical perception that the United
States and Australia are too “new” to be haunted, see Paul Manning, “No Ruins. No Ghosts,”
Preternature 6/​1 (2017) 63–​92.
14
 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 320.
15
 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 7.

230  |  Afterword
history as it is experienced. It may be that the power of a text or a cultural
myth grows as its origin becomes more distant and obscure. Currently, the
most popular model among classicists is that of “reception,” the study of
how writers and readers “receive” the material that has reached them from
antiquity. The word is a translation of the German Rezeption in the work
of the hermeneutic theorist Hans Robert Jauss, but in English it comes
with certain unavoidable associations.16 It imagines engagement with an-
tiquity as a willing, active, personal interaction. We “receive” a text, as a
host would a guest. But that metaphor of personal interaction sits uneasily
with any attempt to confront the past, or to engage with something broader
and not easily personalized, such as a principle or an ideology. Moreover,
while reception suggests a process that is deliberate (we are “receiving”
something outside of ourselves), the notion of voluntary engagement risks
underplaying the ways in which the past has already shaped our identities
and ideas, in ways that are outside our control. History has created
structures, hierarchies, and identities that envelop and precede any one
individual’s act of artistic imitation or emulation.
Gothic writers, by contrast, offer a different model for understanding
the continuing presence of antiquity:  it is like a ghost, something that
haunts or possesses us against our will, disrupting the stability and integ-
rity of present time and thought. We can summon it if we like, but the fact
of its continued existence suggests a power incommensurate with our own.
To speak of antiquity as a ghost is, admittedly, to overlay yet another meta-
phor onto a process of intergenerational communication that we may wish
to analyze in more grounded and specific terms, by tracking the reading
of particular texts, the viewership of certain artworks, and the citation of
particular historical examples. Yet the notion of the classical legacy as a
haunting aims precisely to convey a sense of the accumulated authority
that cannot be reduced to individual encounters, and that seems to become
more powerful even as knowledge of ancient culture becomes more ves-
tigial. “Haunting” describes a force that is more than textual. It can shape
how a body acts and reacts. Frankly, “reception” is a better fit when we
are talking about something attractive or desirable in the ancient canon.
At a time, though, when the discipline of classics has shifted to discussing
the often pernicious legacies of the classical world, engaging in critical
analysis of the ways in which Greek and Roman texts have structured

16
 On the history of the term and critiques that have been made of its usefulness, see James Uden,
“Reception,” in Roy K. Gibson and Christopher L. Whitton (eds.), The Cambridge Critical Guide
to Latin Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming) .

Haunting or Reception?  | 231

ideologies of race, gender, slavery, and colonialism, the Gothic metaphor
of haunting captures better the power and influence of classical systems.
The field of classical reception as currently conceived is also often
grounded implicitly or explicitly on resemblance—​this modern work is
like that ancient work; or this artist’s interest in antiquity is like my own—​
and so it runs the risk of eliding moments of political or aesthetic chal-
lenge. By contrast, Gothic writers’ preoccupation with difference rather
than homology encourages us to see resistance as well as reception, and
forces us to understand efforts to shatter, silence, or suppress the ancient
world as part of antiquity’s continuing existence. Even when we respond
affirmatively to aspects of the classical past, as classicists are understand-
ably wont to do, Gothic metaphors conceptualize a variety of responses
that go beyond the somewhat bland metaphor of reception. In the Gothic
classicism of eighteenth-​century literature, engagement with the classics
is figured as a disappointing personal relationship, a failed erotic liaison;
a channel of communication, a seductive means of voicing hidden know-
ledge of the self; as the superstitious veneration of an idol, or a skeptical
response to that veneration; and as terrifying awe, a frightening awareness
of fragility before something gigantic and seemingly eternal. The Gothic
vision of antiquity that I have described in this book may seem an unlikely
match for a discipline founded on the project of gaining and spreading
knowledge about that past. Yet few contemporary classicists, I  suspect,
could claim never to have felt haunted by the ancient works they study,
never to have sensed their thoughts being interrupted by ideas or images
radically out of time. Gothic criticism understands that anachrony as a
condition of political and cultural worlds as well as individual psyches.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Jonathan Harker sits alone by
lamplight. The protagonist of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Harker
spends his night in a room of the Count’s dark castle, writing in his diary
to fend off the “dread loneliness.”17 Yet he cannot fight off his fear. He feels
a presence in the castle that exceeds his understanding. “Unless my senses
deceive me,” he writes, “the old centuries had, and have powers of their
own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”18 With these words, Stoker does
not imagine the powers of classical antiquity specifically, though other
authors of the Victorian Gothic do describe the reanimation of Greek and
Roman culture as a source of fear and revulsion in the present.19 Instead,

17
 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford, 2011), 36.
18
 Stoker, Dracula, 37.
19
 The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895) by Stoker’s contemporary, Arthur Machen,
describes a coin of the Roman emperor Tiberius passed down through generations of a sinister

232  |  Afterword
Stoker voices the commonly felt perception that all the concrete advances
of modernity have not made our lives any less haunted by the past. Indeed,
the advent of spectral media such as photography and cinema has only
made it easier for us to disrupt the present with images and ideas from
history. Roland Barthes wrote that in every photograph we see “the re-
turn of the dead.”20 In the roots and origins of European languages, in
cultural standards regarding beauty and art, in global conceptions of state-
hood and citizenship, we see the continuing traces of classical civiliza-
tion. Frequently we observe not the conscious adoption of entire ideas
from ancient texts but, as in Gothic literature, the fractured fragments of
ancient discourse, sometimes consciously manipulated, often inherited or
imposed. Anyone who studies antiquity will attest to the fact that, once
you have attuned your eyes to see the ghosts of the classical world in
modern life, you see them everywhere. On one view, this spectral persist-
ence is an inspiring example of the ability of human beings to establish
something larger and more lasting than themselves. On another view, it is
a mark of the undead, a sign of our continuing vulnerability to those who
have preceded us.

cult (The Great God Pan, and Other Horror Stories, ed. Aaron Worth [Oxford, 2018], 85–​86, 182).
On the motif of “evil released through classical philology” in fin-​de-​siècle fiction, see Sarah Iles
Johnston, “The Great God Pan,” Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 1/​1–​2 (2016) 218–​33.
 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1982; orig.
20

1980), 9.

Haunting or Reception?  | 233

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INDEX
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Adams, John, 180–​81
Addison, Joseph, 28–​29, 68–​69, 83
Cato, 44–​45, 67
Remarks on Several Parts of Italy,
53–​54,  102–​3
aemulatio, 18, 34–​35, 138–​39
Aeschylus, 72–​73,  205–​6
Aikin, John, 88–​89
Alexander the Great, 36, 68–​69, 70–​71
Alfieri, Vittorio,  211–​12
Anacreon, 19–​20, 92, 123–​24
and Matthew Lewis, 129–​33
Apollo,  72–​73
and Daphne, 178–​79, 214
Apuleius, 51–​52, 191, 195–​96
Ariosto, Ludovico, 15–​16, 46–​47, 52, 85
Aristotle, 12–​13, 45–​46, 71, 81
Austen, Jane, 197–​98
Northanger Abbey, 16–​17,  91–​92
Pride and Prejudice,  86–​87
  
Bacon, Francis, 37–​38
ballad revival, 146–​47
Banks, Joseph, 217–​18
Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 88–​89, 91–​92
Barclay, John, 82–​83
Barthes, Roland, 86–​87, 232–​33
Baxter, William,  126–​27
Bede,  9–​10
Bentley, Richard, 47–​48, 64–​65
Bentley, Thomas, 88–​89,  110–​11
Bible, 38–​39, 137, 140, 141–​42
Blackwell, Thomas,  47–​48
Blair, Hugh, 64–​65, 166–​67, 171–​72
Boccaccio,  211–​12
Boethius,  7–​8
Brown, Charles Brockden, 157–​86, 201–​2
and Cicero, 165–​76
and Ovid, 176–​85
criticism of Latin usage,
170–​71,  174–​75
influence on P. B. Shelley, 186–​87
skepticism toward classical learning,
161–​62, 163–​64, 176–​77,  184–​86
WORKS
Arthur Mervyn, 158–​59, 162–​63,
188–​89,  215–​16
“The Death of Cicero,” 169–​70
“Devotion: An Epistle,” 161–​62
Edgar Huntly, 158–​59, 162–​63,
169–​70,  188–​89
Letters to Henrietta,  161–​62
Memoirs of Carwin the
Biloquist,  168–​69
259
Brown, Charles Brockden (cont.)
Ormond, 20–​21, 158–​59, 162–​63,
176–​86, 188–​89,  215–​16
periodical writing, 154–​55, 163–​64,
167–​68,  174–​75
Wieland, 20–​21, 157–​59,
165–​77,  186–​89
Brown, William Wells, 158
Burke, Edmund, 13–​14, 20–​21,
27–​28,  220–​21
Philosophical Enquiry, 17–​18,
39–​46,  181–​82
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
154,  180–​82
Burney, Fanny, 86–​87, 191–​92
Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron),
121–​22, 130, 187, 214–​15
  
Caesar, Julius, 43–​45, 68–​69, 70–​71,
97–​98,  174–​75
Caligula,  78–​79
canons, literary, 3–​4, 26–​27, 53
Caracalla, 55–​56, 75, 209–​10
Carter, Elizabeth, 161–​62
Catholicism, 10–​11, 38–​39, 65–​66,
73–​74, 87–​88, 103–​4, 162–​63,
208–​9,  229–​30
Cato the Younger, 43–​45, 65–​67,
104–​5,  208–​9
Cazotte, Jacques, 133–​34
Cervantes, Miguel de, 85
Chapelain, Jean, 47
Christianity, clash with classical
culture, 31–​33, 34–​35, 38–​39,
73–​74,  178–​79
See also Catholicism; Protestantism;
Quakers; Unitarianism
Cibber, Colley, 68–​69
Cicero, 15–​16, 20–​21, 23, 195–​96, 208–​9
and American Gothic, 157–​58,
160–​61,  165–​76
WORKS
Pro Cluentio,  170–​72
Circe, 31–​32, 40–​41,  50–​51
classical culture
and domesticity, 42–​43, 44–​45
260  |  Index
and political conservatism,
137–​38,  143–​44
and same-​sex desire, 43–​44, 78–​79,
123–​24, 125–​26,  151–​53
as sign of social status, 5–​6, 13–​14,
135–​36,  158
Greco-​Roman analogies in public
life, 3–​4, 13–​14, 17–​18, 59–​60,
158, 166–​67, 185–​86, 196–​98,
202–​3,  210–​11
classical education, 3–​4, 14–​15, 20–​21,
26–​27, 43–​44, 161–​63, 175,
178–​79,  184–​85
and women, 15–​16, 86–​87, 90, 91–​92,
96–​97, 161–​62, 163, 195–​96,
201–​2,  209–​10
“classical effect,” 86–​87, 115–​16
Claudius,  113–​14
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 137, 187
collection
“aesthetics of collection,” 57–​58, 67,
75–​76,  79–​80
of antiquities, 55–​58, 73–​79, 87–​88,
94,  168–​69
Collins, William, 28–​29,  86–​87
colonialism, 178, 229–​30
as model for original authorship, 37–​38
Constantine, 37
Crabbe, George, 126–​27
Creech, Thomas, 34
Cupid,  130–​32
and Psyche, 191–​94, 207, 211–​12
Curl, Edward, 137
  
Dacre, Charlotte, 23
Daniel, George, 143–​44
Dante Alighieri, 30–​31, 41–​42,
208–​9,  211–​12
Darwin, Erasmus, 150–​51
Davy, Humphry, 217–​18
de Polignac, Melchior, 33
De Quincey, Thomas, 220–​21
de Sade, Marquis (Donatien Alphonse
François),  14–​15
de Staël, Madame (de Staël-​Holstein, Anna
Louise Germaine), 200–​1, 224, 229
Derrida, Jacques, 5–​6
didactic poetry, 28–​29, 30–​31
Dio Chrysostom, 59–​60
Diotima,  211–​12
disappointment with antiquity, 21–​22,
193–​94, 210–​11,  216–​17
dismemberment, 55–​56, 61–​62,
63–​65,  204
Dryden, John, 2, 22–​23, 28–​29, 115, 150
Aeneid, 23, 31, 41
“Alexander’s Feast,” 106
Du Bellay, Joachim, 1–​2
Dunlap, William, 159–​61,  162–​63
  
Electra, 47–​48, 72
Engelbach, Lewis, 216–​17
Epicurus, 33–​34, 40, 128
Erasmus,  167–​68
Euripides,  70–​71
Alcestis,  29–​30
  
fancy, 28–​29, 68, 69–​70, 72–​73, 95,
199–​200
Fox, Charles James, 122–​23, 134–​35
Fox, Elizabeth Vassall (Lady Holland),
122–​23, 128–​29,  131
French Revolution, 13–​14, 18–​20, 100,
116–​17, 180–​81, 182–​83,  187
Fucine Lake, 113–​15
Furies, 31–​32, 64, 182–​83
  
Garrick, David, 68–​69, 83
German Romanticism. See Romanticism
“ghost of the counterfeit,” 4–​5, 6–​7,
125–​26,  168–​69
ghosts,  12–​13
and anachrony, 4–​6, 231–​33
in classical literature, 15–​16, 124
giants, 50–​51, 154
as fossils, 12–​13
as symbols of history, 1–​2, 10–​11,
21–​22, 35, 115, 161–​62, 169–​70,
224, 225
Gibbon, Edward, 46–​47, 108–​9, 220–​21
Gifford, William, 139–​41,  143–​44
Gilpin, William, 95, 100
Glover, Richard, 3
Godwin, William, 137–​38, 176–​77, 180–​
81, 184–​85, 187–​88, 195, 206, 211
Caleb Williams,  78–​79
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 177
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 111–​12,
121–​22,  150
“Der Fischer,” 144–​45, 147–​48
“Erklönig,”  121–​22
Faust, 22–​23, 121–​22, 186
The Sorrows of Young Werther,  201–​2
Goldsmith, Oliver, 28–​29
Gothic
architecture,  8–​9
changing definition of, 7–​11
lettering,  31–​32
as pan-​European phenomenon, 22–​23
Gothic fiction
name, 11
opposition to, 19–​20, 116–​18,
136–​38,  187
parodies of, 116–​18, 145–​46, 149–​53
popularity of, 18–​19, 22–​23,
88–​89,  186
Goths, the, 7–​8, 9–​10, 164–​65
graveyard poets, 28–​29, 30–​31
Gray, Thomas, 28–​29, 46–​47, 53–​54, 62–​
63, 72–​73,  75–​76
Greek War of Independence,
187–​88,  196–​97
grief, 21–​22, 207–​8, 217, 225
  
Habermas, Jürgen, 14–​15
Hamilton, Emma, 110–​12
Handel, George Frideric, 68–​69
Hannibal, 14–​15, 94–​96, 99, 114–​15
haunting
as critical paradigm, 230–​33
of modernity by antiquity, 26, 27–​28,
215–​16, 224, 228
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 229–​30
Herculaneum, 75–​76, 78–​79, 109–​12,  217–​20
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 147
Herrick, Robert, 130
Hesiod,  205–​6
Hippolytus,  63–​64
Index  | 261
Hobbes, Thomas,  49–​50
Homer, 31, 36, 47, 50–​51, 64–​65, 91–​92,
97, 99, 115–​16, 225
Iliad, 3, 15–​16, 26–​27, 47–​48, 59, 85,
86–​87,  96–​97
Odyssey, 3, 47–​48
homoeroticism. See same-​sex desire
Horace, 15–​16, 19–​20, 32, 36, 91–​94,
118,  195–​96
and Horace Walpole, 60–​63
and Matthew Lewis, 124–​29
WORKS
Ars Poetica, 47–​49,  60–​63
Epistles, 31, 51–​52, 124–​29, 137–​38
Odes, 92–​94,  108–​9
Satires,  137–​38
horror
in classical literature, 6–​7, 40, 51–​52,
71–​72,  143–​44
Hume, David, 42–​43, 160–​61, 196–​97
Huns, the, 7–​8
Hunt, Leigh, 139, 214–​15, 224
Hurd, Richard, 58–​59, 68, 70–​71
Commentaries on Horace, 47–​50
Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 15–​
16, 17–​18, 46–​47, 50–​53, 148, 154
imitation, 37–​38, 66–​67, 116–​17,
138–​39,  166–​68
incest, 63–​64, 67, 72–​73, 81–​82, 211–​12
intimacy,  197–​98
  
Jebb, John, 88–​89
Jebb, Richard, 88–​89
Jefferson, Thomas, 158, 176, 201–​2
Job, 45–​46,  211–​12
Johnson, Samuel, 28–​29, 117–​18, 160–​61
Jordanes,  7–​8
Juvenal, 19–​20,  101–​2
and Matthew Lewis, 134–​44
Kant, Immanuel, 42–​43
katabasis, 30–​31,  40–​42
Keats, John, 187–​88
Kemble, Fanny, 80–​81
Knight, Richard Payne, 150–​51
262  |  Index
knowledge of Greek and Latin. See
classical education
  
La Fontaine, Jean de, 130
Lamb, William,  134–​35
Lane, William, 150, 186
Lathom, Francis, 5–​6
Lee, Sophia, 88–​89
Lewis, Matthew, 118, 121–​54
and Anacreon, 123–​24,  129–​33
and Horace, 124–​29
and Juvenal, 134–​44
and same-​sex desire, 123–​24, 125–​27,
134–​35,  151–​52
as translator of German literature,
121–​22, 144–​48,  150
WORKS
Adelmorn, 133–​34, 142
The Captive,  122–​23
The Castle Spectre, 122–​23, 135–​36,
140–​41,  142
The Love of Gain,  134–​44
The Monk, 118, 123–​34, 135–​38,
140–​43, 145–​46, 150,  188–​89
Poems, 123–​24,  153–​54
Tales of Wonder,  144–​48
Timour the Tartar,  122–​23
Livy,  195–​96
Longinus,  39–​40
Lucan, 15–​16, 32, 43–​44, 51–​52,
64–​67, 85, 91–​92, 97–​98, 104–​5,
115–​16,  195–​96
and Horace Walpole, 64–​67
Lucian, 36, 59–​60
Lucretius, 33–​34, 40–​41, 101–​2, 151–​52,
154,  195–​96
and Edward Young, 34
  
Machen, Arthur,  232–​33
Macpherson, James, 47–​48
Mann, Horace, 67, 78–​79, 109–​10
Marcus Aurelius, 55–​56,  102–​3
Marriott, Thomas,  126–​27
Martial, 153–​54,  219–​20
Marx, Karl, 5–​6
Mason, William, 46–​47, 64
Mathias, Thomas James, 118, 136–​38,
142, 150–​51, 163, 183–​84
Maturin, Charles Robert, 75–​76, 218–​21
Mead, Richard, 77
medieval
and the Gothic, 8–​9, 11, 17–​18, 46–​47
Melmoth, William,  220–​21
Middleton, Conyers, 55–​56,
73–​74,  171–​72
Milton, John, 3–​4, 14–​15, 26–​27, 28–​29,
31, 37–​38, 45–​47, 53, 85–​87,
154,  211–​12
Paradise Lost, 30–​32,  201–​2
Paradise Regained,  51–​52
Minerva Press, 150, 186
monsters, 8–​9, 50–​51, 62–​63, 154
Moore, John, 138–​39
Murphy, Arthur, 80–​82, 83
  
Naples, 92–​94, 108–​11, 112,
200–​1,  216–​17
Narcissus, 147, 148
neoclassicism, 28–​29, 45–​46, 158
Nero, 64–​65,  78–​79
Newton, Isaac, 33, 37–​38
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72–​73
Nodier, Charles, 22–​23
Numa, 49–​50,  201–​3
nymphs, 109–​12, 149, 151–​52, 178–​79
  
obscenity, authors charged with,
137,  150–​51
Oedipus, 64, 72–​73, 211–​12
opera,  68–​70
oracles, 53–​54, 64, 65–​66
originality,  34–​39
Ossian,  47–​48
Ovid, 51–​52, 62–​63, 92, 195–​96
and Charles Brockden Brown, 176–​85
and Mary Shelley, 203–​6,
211–​12,  213–​14
Metamorphoses, 70–​71, 151–​52, 177,
178–​85,  193–​94
  
Paderni, Camillo, 217–​18
Paine, Thomas,  137–​38
Parnell, Thomas
“A Night-​Piece on Death,” 28–​29
Essay on the Life, Writings, and
Learning of Homer,  47–​48
pastoral literature, 29–​30, 132–​33, 214
Peacock, Thomas Love, 186
Persius, 45–​46,  151–​52
Petrarch, 91–​92, 97–​98, 204
Petronius, 92, 219–​20
picturesque, 95, 97–​98, 100, 106–​8, 113
Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 80–​81
Pitt, Christopher, 41
Pitt, William,  122–​23
plagues, 20–​21, 176–​77, 180, 215–​16
Plato, 12–​13, 51–​52, 175, 211–​12
Pliny the Elder, 199–​200
Pliny the Younger, 15–​16, 108–​9,
195–​96,  220–​21
Plutarch,  201–​3
Poe, Edgar Allan
“The Coliseum,” 227–​28
“To Helen,” 228
Polidori, John, 187–​88
politics of literary form, 116–​18,
137–​38,  143–​44
Polwhele, Richard, 183–​84
Pompeii,  217–​18
See also Herculaneum
Pope, Alexander, 22–​23, 38–​40,
45–​46,  150
Brutus,  10–​11
Dunciad, 79, 149
“Eloisa to Abelard,” 28–​29
“Epistle to Augustus,” 127
Essay on Criticism, 25
Essay on Man, 31
Iliad, 3, 31
Porson, Richard, 150–​51
Priapus, 73–​74, 150–​51,  219–​20
Priestley, Joseph, 88–​89
primitivism,  47–​48
Prior, Matthew, 140–​41
privacy, 17–​18, 39–​40,  42–​43
Prometheus, 33, 36, 141, 205
Propertius,  151–​52
Proserpine, 211–​12,  213–​14
Index  | 263
Protestantism, 28–​29, 38–​39, 87–​88,  103–​4
public sphere, 14–​15, 26–​27
publishing
anxieties concerning, 127, 131,
143, 150
cost of books, 134–​35, 145–​46
money earned by authors, 88–​89
Pygmalion, 193–​94,  203–​5
  
Quakers, 20–​21, 161–​62,  178–​79
Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,
12–​13, 17–​18, 34–​35,  47
Quintilian,  61–​62
Quintus Curtius, 195–​96
  
Racine, Jean, 63–​64
Radcliffe, Ann, 16–​17, 18–​19, 75–​76,
83–​84,  85–​116
and Roman art, 109–​12
and Tacitus,  103–​7
“classical effect,” 86–​87, 115–​16
knowledge of classical languages,
18–​19, 86–​87, 88–​89,  101–​2
vision of history, 18–​19, 95–​96, 105–​6,
107–​8, 113,  115–​16
WORKS
The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne,  88–​89
Gaston de Blondeville, 88–​89, 99
A Journey Made in the Summer of
1794,  100–​8
The Romance of the Forest, 86–​87,
88–​89,  92–​94
The Italian, 40, 85–​86, 88–​89,
108–​16, 188–​89,  224
The Mysteries of Udolpho,
85–​87, 88–​89, 91–​92, 94–​99,
103–​4,  128–​29
A Sicilian Romance, 83, 88–​89
Radcliffe, William, 89–​91, 101–​2,
105–​6,  108–​9
reanimation, 188–​89, 194–​95, 199–​201,
208–​11,  232–​33
reception
as critical paradigm, 230–​33
and resistance, 6–​7, 14–​15, 232
264  |  Index
Reeve, Clara, 91–​92
The Old English Baron, 11, 82–​83
The Progress of Romance, 15–​16,  82–​83
remembrance
as mode of allusivity, 86–​87,
91–​92,  96–​97
contrasted with memory, 86–​87
rhetoric, classical ideals of,
166–​67,  173–​74
Rich, John, 68–​69
Richardson, Samuel, 34–​35, 37,
42–​43,  44–​45
Roche, Regina Maria, 23
romance, 15–​16, 46–​47, 50,
69–​70,  82–​83
Romanticism
and classical literature,
21–​22,  186–​89
German, 22–​23, 37–​38, 68, 121–​22
Preromanticism,  28–​29
roman noir, 22–​23
Rome, city of, 7–​9, 32, 35, 37, 49–​50,
55–​56, 78–​79, 88–​89, 97–​98, 105,
191–​94, 200–​1, 207–​9, 222–​24,
227, 228
Rosa, Salvator, 113
Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques,  138–​39
ruins, aesthetic discourse of, 75, 86–​87,
96, 97–​98, 113, 208–​9, 227, 228
  
Sallust, 43–​44,  195–​96
same-​sex desire, 19–​20, 43–​44, 78–​79,
118, 123–​24, 125–​27, 130–​31,
148, 151–​52, 184
satire, Roman, 134–​44
Saxons, the, 9–​10
Schiller, Friedrich, 121–​22, 186
Schubert, Franz, 147
Scott, Walter, 122–​23, 134–​35,
145–​46,  201–​2
Seneca, 15–​16,  51–​52
Phaedra,  63–​64
sensibility, 86–​87, 94, 95–​96, 97–​98
Seven Years War,  59–​60
Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley-​Cooper,
3rd Earl of Shaftesbury), 15–​16
Shakespeare, William, 3–​4, 13–​14, 15–​16,
18–​19, 26–​27, 28–​29, 37–​38, 46–​
47, 53, 69–​71, 85–​86, 211–​12, 225
Hamlet,  140–​41
Love’s Labour’s Lost,  117–​18
Macbeth, 32, 51, 141–​42
The Tempest,  51–​52
Shelley, Mary, 75–​76, 91–​92, 121–​22,
188–​89, 191–​225
and classical education, 195–​96,
197–​98,  201–​2
and Cupid and Psyche, 191–​94
and Ovid, 193–​94, 203–​6
sympathy with the past, 193–​95,
196–​207,  210–​11
time spent in Italy, 191–​92, 207–​8, 217
WORKS
Falkner,  195–​96
Frankenstein, 21–​22, 188–​89,
194–​95, 198–​207, 208–​9,  214–​15
The Last Man, 21–​22, 191–​94,
214–​18,  221–​25
Mathilda, 81–​82, 207–​8,  211–​12
Proserpine, 207–​8,  213–​14
“Roger Dodsworth: the Reanimated
Englishman,”  194–​95
“The Mortal Immortal: A
Tale,”  194–​95
“Valerius: the Reanimated Roman,”
21–​22, 194–​95, 207–​11,  214–​15
Valperga, 195–​96, 197–​98,
207–​8,  229
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 121–​22, 186, 187,
195–​98, 214–​15, 217, 225
WORKS
The Cenci,  207–​8
“The Coliseum,” 208–​9, 210–​11
The Defence of Poetry,  207–​8
Hellas, 196–​98,  207–​8
Prometheus Unbound, 187–​88,
197–​98, 205–​6,  207–​8
St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian, 186
“To a Skylark,” 214–​15
The Triumph of Life,  207–​8
Zastrozzi, 186
Sibyl, 41–​42, 154, 215–​17, 219–​20
Sicily, 80–​81, 83
skepticism, 20–​21, 159–​60, 176–​77, 217
slavery, 125–​26, 158, 169–​70, 178, 179–​80
Sleath, Eleanor, 91–​92
sodomy, 127, 219–​20
Sophocles, 64, 72–​73
Southey, Robert, 145–​46
spectres, classical authors as, 17–​18, 34, 35
spectralization of antiquity,
27–​30,  185–​86
See also ghosts; giants
Spenser, Edmund, 3–​4, 13–​14, 26–​27,
28–​29, 37–​38, 46–​47, 52, 53,
85–​86, 154,  211–​12
spiritualism,  228–​29
Statius,  151–​52
statues, 23, 92–​94, 168–​69, 191–​94,
204–​5, 208–​10,  214–​15
Stendhal (Beyle, Marie-​Henri), 85–​86,
99,  115–​16
Sterne, Lawrence, 28–​29
Stoicism, 65–​66, 67, 113
Stoker, Bram, 232–​33
Strawberry Hill, 18, 55–​58, 75–​76
collection of antiquities, 55–​58, 73–​79
publishing, 59, 64–​65
sublime, 27–​28, 39–​46, 83–​84, 95, 99
Suetonius,  78–​79
Swift, Jonathan, 36
“The Battel of the Books,” 2, 13–​14,
34–​35, 115,  137–​38
“On Poetry,” 39–​40
Thoughts on Various Subjects,  126–​27
sympathy, 95–​96, 105–​6, 107–​8,
193–​95, 196–​99, 207,  210–​11
Swinburne, Henry, 108–​9
  
Tacitus,  195–​96
and Ann Radcliffe, 103–​7
WORKS
Annals, 106, 113–​14
Germania, 103–​4,  106–​7
Histories, 103–​4, 105
Tales of Terror,  148–​53
Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 90
Tasso, Torquato, 46–​47, 51, 68–​69, 85
Index  | 265
Taylor, John, 88–​89
Temple, William
An Introduction to the History of
England,  9–​10
On Poets,  12–​13
Upon the Ancient and Modern
Learning,  12–​13
Thomson, James, 86–​87, 101–​2
Tiberius, 55–​56, 219–​20,  232–​33
Tibullus, 92
tragedy, Greek, 15–​16, 18, 63–​64,
68,  71–​72
tragicomedy,  69–​70
translatio imperii,  10–​11
translation
as Gothic trope, 19–​20, 133–​34
of classical literature within Gothic
fiction, 34, 65–​67, 124–​34, 135–​36,
138–​44,  174–​75
of German literature, 121–​22, 144–​45
of Gothic fiction, 22–​23
travel, 75–​76, 87–​88, 100–​8, 207–​8,
216–​17,  229–​30
Trojan War, 14–​15, 59–​60,  98–​99
  
Underworld, the, 30–​31, 36, 52–​53,
148, 213
and the sublime, 40–​42, 45–​46
Unitarianism,  88–​89
United States
and classical culture, 20–​21, 154–​55,
158, 163–​64, 166, 185–​86
  
vagueness in literary style, 91–​92, 99
Vandals, the, 7–​8, 164–​65
Vasari, Giorgio, 8–​9
Venice, 96
Verstegen, Richard, 9–​10
Vespasian, 55–​56,  78–​79
Vesuvius, Mount, 75–​76,
108–​9,  217–​18
Virgil, 2, 15–​16, 22–​23, 26, 32, 36,
40–​41, 45–​46, 47, 64–​65, 91–​92,
115, 159–​60,  195–​96
and Edmund Burke, 40–​42
266  |  Index
WORKS
Aeneid, 17–​18, 26–​28, 30–​31, 39–​42,
53–​54, 63–​64, 99, 154, 182–​83,
211–​12, 216–​17,  219–​20
Eclogues,  51–​52
Georgics, 207–​8,  209–​10
Vocula, Dillius, 104–​5
Volney, Constantin François de
Chasseboeuf, comte de, 201–​2
votive objects, 55–​56
  
Wakefield, Gilbert, 150–​51
Walpole, Horace, 6–​7, 53–​54,
55–​80, 109–​11, 137–​38,
182–​83,  188–​89
and Greek tragedy, 63–​64, 71–​73
and Herculaneum, 75–​76
and Horace, 60–​63
and Lucan, 64–​67
as collector of antiquities,
55–​58,  73–​79
periodical writing, 68–​71, 122–​23
WORKS
The Castle of Otranto, 1–​3, 11,
15–​16, 18, 56, 58–​59, 60–​64, 68,
69–​70, 79–​80, 83, 88–​89, 115,
124, 199–​200, 224, 229–​30
Hieroglyphic Tales, 59
The Mysterious Mother, 18, 59, 64–​67,
71–​72,  81–​82
War of the First Coalition, 103
Warton, Joseph, 29–​30
An Essay on the Writings and
Genius of Pope, 15–​16,
44–​45,  102–​3
Odes on Various Subjects, 26, 29
Warton, Thomas, 26
Washington, George, 174–​75
Wedgwood, Josiah, 88–​89, 110–​11
Wedgwood & Bentley, 88–​89,
92–​94,  110–​11
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 165–​66
Willard, Joseph, 174–​75
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 
110–​11
witches, 15–​16, 17–​18, 32, 51–​52, 125
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 176–​77, 182–​83,
184–​85, 188–​89,  195
Wordsworth, William, 148,
187,  197–​98
yellow fever, 20–​21, 176–​77, 180
Young, Edward, 27–​29
Conjectures on Original Composition,
17–​18, 34–​39, 42–​43,  228–​29
Night Thoughts, 17–​18, 30–​34
Index  | 267