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Gothic forms of time: Architecture, Romanticism, Medievalism

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 Chapter 18

Gothic Forms of Time: Architecture,

Romanticism, Medievalism
Tom Duggett

Watching flames ravage the Palace of Westminster on 16 October

1834, the correspondent for the Gentleman’s Magazine felt, ‘as an
antiquary and a British subject’, ‘as if a link would be burst asunder
in my national existence’. With the loss of this ‘giant of the Gothic
age’, ‘the history of my native land was about to become . . . a dream’
(Gentleman’s Magazine 1834: 477). This vision of personal ‘national
existence’ in architectural form opens up a hall of mirrors reaching
far into British cultural and constitutional history. The writer’s words
resonate with Horace Walpole in the 1760s condensing into ‘Gothic
Story’ his own dreams of ancient architecture, the poetic ‘canon’ of
Shakespeare, and the long tradition dating back to the 1600s of writ-
ing ‘English history as Gothic history’ (Silver 2014: 3). They also
anticipate John Ruskin in the mid nineteenth century, classifying the
historical sense into ‘Classicalism, Mediaevalism, and Modernism’,
and defining the newly coined ‘medievalism’ as a ‘Gothic form’ of soci-
ety, fusing ‘architecture’, ‘religion’ and ‘national life and character’
(Ruskin 1854: 21, 193; Peterson in Tucker 2014: 405–6).
But the ‘Gothic’ vision expressed in the Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1834 is not precisely that of either Walpole or Ruskin. ‘Romantic
Gothic’ is perhaps a better description. The Romantic period is defined
by an emotive public debate about reform to what William Blackstone
metaphorically described as the ‘castle’ of the ‘Gothic constitution’.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt after the 1832 Reform Act that ‘England
is – no more!’ (Gilmartin 2007: 252). The prospect of Reform and
Catholic Emancipation drove the sometime utopian Robert Southey,
the period’s ‘only existing entire man of letters’, to pass his ‘days
among the dead’, communing with the ghosts of England in the 1530s

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 340 Tom Duggett

(Madden 1972: 157; Southey 2012: I.313–4). After the Act, William
Wordsworth altered his ‘history of a poet’s mind’ to make St John’s,
Cambridge, not just ‘gloomy’ but ‘Gothic’, having already in 1832
added a scene of Edmund Burke in old St Stephen’s Chapel, Westmin-
ster, proclaiming the ‘majesty . . . / Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by
time’ (Wordsworth 1995: [1850], Book III, 47; VII, 525–6). Romantic-
period antiquaries, novelists, poets, essayists, architects and design-
ers set about an architectural reimagining of inwardness: from Ann
Radcliffe’s La Motte feeling ‘a suspension of mingled astonishment
and awe’ upon comparing ‘himself and the gradations of decay’ amid
‘the Gothic remains of an abbey’ (Radcliffe 2009: 15–16), through
Thomas De Quincey taking Wordsworth’s ‘wilderness of building,
sinking far / And self-withdrawn’ as the model for his ‘vast Gothic
halls’ of ‘self-reproduction’ (De Quincey 2009: 70–1), to the outline in
an 1805 book of architectural plans of a Gothic cottage for a ‘respect-
able family, partly formed in ruins’ (Lugar 1805: 21).
The Gentleman’s sense of a personal ‘national existence’ in ruins
thus bears the specific cultural-political imprint of Romanticism.
But the vision also reflects a longer history of cultural Gothicism,
for which the Gentleman’s Magazine itself provided a medium. In
the magazine’s archives from December 1739 were strangely simi-
lar comments on rebuilding Parliament House ‘intirely [sic] in the
ancient Gothick Stile, after one of those excellent Plans left us by
our Saxon ancestors’, and on the ‘Constitutional Sort of Reverence’
that such architecture created for ‘Our old Gothick Constitution’
(Gentleman’s Magazine 1739: 635, 641). Throughout the years of
the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the magazine had
continued to appear with a Gothic gate as a frontispiece, offering
its own continuity as a ‘Shelter . . . from the Tumults of the World’
and any pretensions of ‘a new Aera in . . . history’. From the late
1790s, the Gentleman’s provided the forum for John Carter’s chau-
vinistic campaign to claim the immemorial Englishness of the Gothic
style of architecture, dateable back to the foundation of Malmesbury
Abbey in 675 CE (Duggett 2012: 34–6). But the magazine started a
‘new series’ in 1833, suggesting that Reform was precisely the start
of a new era. The significance of the Westminster fire report in the
second number of that new series is its traumatic recognition that
the Gentleman’s model of the ‘Gothic’ subject was now defunct,
‘burst asunder’. It thus signals an end point for what Dale Townsh-
end, adapting Mikhail Bakhtin, calls the ‘Gothic chronotope’ – the
distinctive ‘form of time’ developed in eighteenth-century represen-
tations of the ‘castle’, a space newly understood to be ‘saturated’

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 Gothic Forms of Time 341

with the (newly disowned) genealogical ‘time of the historical past’

(Townshend 2014: xl–xliii).
But as is clear from Ruskin’s sense of ‘medievalism’ as ‘Gothic
form’ existence, the ‘Gothic chronotope’ survived its original context –
to ‘become . . . a dream’. ‘And yet the building stood as if sustained /
By its own spirit’ (Wordsworth 1995: [1805], Book II, 295–6). The
lines are from Wordsworth’s Prelude (1798–1850), a poem about
the growth of a poet’s mind that formed part of a larger project, The
Recluse, to build a ‘gothic Church’ in poetry – complete with ‘little
Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses’ (‘Preface’ to The Excur-
sion; Wordsworth 2007: 38). This Gothic ‘wilderness of building’
was, in turn, one of a ramifying series of works from the 1790s to the
1830s in which the first-generation Romantics developed the Gothic
legacy into new ways of doing and understanding history, making
new ‘forms of time’.
Britain in the early nineteenth century was a self-consciously
‘Gothic’ culture. The 1790s generation was, as Walter Scott’s epon-
ymous Antiquary put it, a ‘Gothic generation’ (Scott 2002: 150),
raised on the work of writers and antiquaries for whom England
was a Gothic nation, and the English literary tradition was properly
described as ‘Gothic Story’. Like Thomas Warton before him, Rich-
ard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) developed a
longstanding contrast between ‘Grecian’ and ‘Gothic’ architecture
into a prototypical historical-formalist reading of Spenser’s ‘Faerie
Queene . . . with an eye to its Gothic original . . . as a Gothic poem’,
which derived its form ‘from the established modes and ideas of chiv-
alry’ (Hurd 1811: IV.296–7). For Hurd, Spenser was the last of the
Goths. Thomas Percy suggested similarly that Shakespeare and the
popular ballad tradition had preserved Gothic England for future res-
toration. Positioning his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
as ‘lineal’ descendants of ‘the ancient historical songs of the Gothic
Bards’, Percy took as an epigraph Nicholas Rowe’s 1714 lines on
Shakespeare and his ‘age’ (Percy 1775: III.vi–viii). Altering Rowe’s
‘Those’ to ‘These’, and generalising references to Shakespeare, Percy
made the Reliques stand for an English Gothic literary tradition
newly available to the coming generation:

These venerable antient Song-enditers

Soar’d many a pitch above our modern writers.
With rough majestic force they mov’d the heart,
And strength and nature made amends for Art.
(Percy 1775: I. frontispiece)

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 342 Tom Duggett

The complex emergence of an eighteenth-century Gothic aesthetic is

nicely caught in Percy’s recycling of these neoclassical couplets on the
‘rough majestic force’ of ancient song.
The Gothic novel, too, emerged in the 1760s from this context
of cultural Gothicism. E. J. Clery notes that ‘it was at precisely the
moment’ that Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764–5) ‘was revealed to
be a modern work that the adjective “gothic” was first applied to it.
There is a dislocation: “Gothic” is no longer a historical description;
it marks the initiation of a new genre’ (Walpole 2008: xv). However,
Gothic remained a term of ‘historical description’ – from Edmund
Burke to Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the 1790s, Burke pictured
the British constitution as an ‘armorial’ Gothic hall, produced in a
long pan-European process whereby ‘the old Germanic or Gothic
custumary [sic]’ and ‘the feudal institutions’ it had ‘emanated’ were
‘improved and digested into a system and discipline by the Roman
Law’ (Burke 1987: 30–2; Burke 1796: 110). In 1814, Robert Southey
offered a similarly ‘rich and complicated’ account of the Romano-
Gothic legacy developing into modern European nations, in his epic
about the Moorish conquest of Spain, Roderick, the Last of the
Goths (Southey 2012: II.xvi). The deposed Visigothic king redeems
lost ‘Gothic Virtue’ as nascent patriot-heroism, taking the disguise of
a monk and devoting himself to the rule of the ‘native’ Prince Pelayo
and the start of the Reconquista.
But Walpole’s Otranto does indeed mark a lasting ‘dislocation’
inasmuch as ‘Gothic’ after the 1760s signifies less a fixed ‘histori-
cal past’ than an immemorial dimension to the present, a sense of
tradition as fundamentally a process of transition. Gothic becomes
the architectural emblem of this abyssal sense of history in the
1824 illustrated edition of Southey’s Roderick, where the eighth-
century hero stands surrounded by ruins built in a Gothic style that
would not be invented for another four hundred years (Duggett
2012: 171). The different editions of Otranto helped produce
such ‘dislocated’ forms of time. The first edition gave a mock-
historicist account of the text as historically momentous: ‘printed
at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529’, from the manu-
script of an ‘artful priest’, at a moment when ‘the reformers’ and
the new culture of ‘letters’ were dispelling ‘the empire of supersti-
tion’ (Walpole 2008: 5). The second edition collapsed this careful
calibration of historical distance into the term ‘Gothic’. Claiming
authorship and describing the ‘story’ as a modern effort to ‘blend’
the novel with ancient ‘romance’ (Walpole 2008: 9), Walpole

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 Gothic Forms of Time 343

transferred historical otherness from traces of the past in texts and

buildings, to archaic structures in the present minds of both author
and reader. Rather than a rudimentary stage towards modernity,
Walpole’s ‘Gothic Story’ now embodies a time-paradox, much like
the architectural ruin, which as Sophie Thomas puts it, is so oddly
evocative because it ‘represent[s] . . . the modern form of the past’
(Thomas 2008: 80).
The successors and imitators of Percy and Walpole regularised
their Gothic forms of time. By 1813, James Mackintosh was able to
set out in the Edinburgh Review a sort of stadial theory of English
poetry. Representing ‘the most illustrious of German nations’ and a
culture ‘more gothic than classical’, the ‘history of English poetry’
was a meter of European civilisation: ‘We have successively culti-
vated a Gothic poetry from nature, a classical poetry from imita-
tion, and a second Gothic from the study of our own ancient poets’
(Edinburgh Review 1813: 205–7). This ‘second Gothic’ was not, as
Robert Miles notes, ‘the tale of terror’, but rather the start of what
came to be known as ‘Romanticism’: William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (Miles 2007: 16). In its own
time, Romanticism was the Gothic.
Mackintosh’s positioning of the Lake Poets as the pioneers of ‘sec-
ond Gothic’ reflected their own sense of cultural mission. Southey
produced a series of increasingly ‘Gothic’ publications on medi-
eval Spain and Portugal, and on English literary history. There was
an almost dialectical connection between the two. Like Walpole’s
Otranto, where cultural legacies of superstition and tyranny pre-
vent a possible short circuit of English history from 1485 to 1688,
Southey’s Iberia was a place that had failed to live up to a shared
inheritance of ‘Gothic Virtue’. ‘Cintra is too good a place for the
Portuguese,’ Southey wrote in the summer of 1800: ‘It is only fit for
us Goths – for Germans or English’ (Southey 1960: 99). In England,
by contrast, ‘our laws and institutions’, ‘our national character
and our language’ had ‘acted upon each other’ to ‘purchase con-
densation and strength’ (Quarterly Review 1814: 60–6). Portray-
ing Thomas Percy as returning English poetry to its Saxon origins,
Southey concluded that, ‘[t]o borrow a phrase from the Methodists,
there has been a great revival in our days – a poetry out of the spirit’
(Quarterly Review 1814: 90). The proof was there in Southey’s own
poem of 1814, which anglicised Spanish history and marked his
own poetic rebirth and greatest popular success to date, Roderick,
the Last of the Goths (Speck 2006: 126–7, 159).

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 344 Tom Duggett

The same spirit of cultural Gothicism also animated Wordsworth

and Coleridge’s plans for a philosophical epic, The Recluse. As
I noted above, Wordsworth likened the poem to a ‘gothic Church’,
and Coleridge imagined it being produced like a medieval cathe-
dral, with a ‘plan . . . not distinct from the execution’ (Coleridge
1987: II.60), attaining to philosophy ‘if only it be . . . a faithful
transcript of [Wordsworth’s] habitual Feelings & Modes of seeing
and hearing’ (Coleridge 1956–71: II.1034). Wordsworth, it fol-
lowed, was Coleridge’s idea of ‘the last of the Goths’: the modern
type of the ancient Germanic tribes who ‘lived in the bosom of
nature, and worshipped an invisible and unknown deity’ (Coleridge
1987: 79). The Excursion of 1814 disappointed Coleridge because,
as a ‘dramatic’ poem rather than a ‘transcript’ of Wordsworth’s
thought, it was not naively Gothic enough (see Coleridge 1956–71:
IV.573–4 and Coleridge 1990: I.306–11). But the poem is indeed
‘Gothic’ in the more subterranean (and Walpolean) sense implied
by ‘sepulchral Recesses’. The burden of the poem is an effort to
redeem what the character of the Solitary, a former Jacobin now
living like an anchorite in a cell, calls our ‘sad dependance upon
time’ (Wordsworth 2007: Book IV, 424). Each of the characters
embodies historical dislocation. The Wanderer is doubly obsoles-
cent as a peddler and latter-day minstrel, the Pastor less an evan-
gelist than an antiquary. Their attempts to ‘correct’ the Solitary’s
post-revolutionary ‘despondency’ through conversation also move
through various forms of time: from naturalised myths of creation
and fall in Books I and II, to antiquarianism and autobiography in
Book III, religious syncretism in Book IV, and epitaphs and tradi-
tionalism in Books V to VII. The closing three books then describe
a single discursive movement that adumbrates medievalism. The
story of an Elizabethan ‘knight’ outliving the age of chivalry leads
into a contrast between a ‘many-windowed’ modern factory and
a ‘Conventual Church’ ‘of old’ (Wordsworth 2007: Book VII,
933–97, 1030–72; Book VIII, 36–83, 152–97). And the poem ends
with a series of Gothic vignettes, in which Britain ‘cast[s]off / Her
swarms’; the ‘venerable Halls’ of Parliament reform education and
complete the Reformation; and visions of ‘The thing that hath been
as the thing that is’ allow an imaginative grasp of the historical
distance between modern faith and a barbarous pre-Christian past
of idolatrous rites and sacrificial wicker-men (Wordsworth 2007:
Book IX, 379–80, 401–18, 679–716).
The Excursion thus continues the historiographical effort
begun in Lyrical Ballads (1798–1802), midway between Burke

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 Gothic Forms of Time 345

and Mackintosh, to gauge the state of the ‘Gothic custumary’ by

capturing in the texture of modern poetry (the ‘lyrical’ ballad)
the uneven development of the national tongue. Binding into one
‘human society’ the ‘great national events’ of commercial moder-
nity and the unremembered acts of ‘rustics’ inhabiting an ancestral
time that makes no difference between the living and those ‘in the
church-yard laid’, Wordsworth’s Poet shows the persistence of the
Goths in England (see Wordsworth 1974: I.140–67; ‘We are Seven’
in Wordsworth 2009: I.332–4; and Duggett 2012: 52–5). Word-
sworth’s attack on ‘frantic novels’ and ‘sickly and stupid German
Tragedies’ is to some extent a rejection of more codified forms of
‘Gothic Story’ (Wordsworth 1974: I.128–30; Punter 1996: I.87,
112). But by aligning his work with the ‘elder writers’ William
Shakespeare and John Milton, Wordsworth makes a choice of lit-
erary inheritance that is, if anything, still more clearly ‘Gothic’.
From Alexander Pope to Horace Walpole, Shakespeare was ‘an
ancient majestick piece of Gothic Architecture’, while Paradise
Lost provided Burke with a poetic equivalent to the cathedral’s
architectural sublime (Pope 1728: I.xxv; Burke 1757: 49–53).
In the terms of Burke’s 1790s discourse of deep European his-
tory, the poet improving the ‘real language of men’ is the ‘Gothic
custumary’ given ‘Roman Law’.
Wordsworth’s reception in the 1830s suggests that readers under-
stood him as attempting to produce Gothic poetry in this sense. In ‘To
Wordsworth’ (1831), Edward Bulwer-Lytton depicted Wordsworth
as the genius of English (Protestant) Gothic, whose works breathe ‘a
dim and antique holiness’, ‘A religious and a reverent Awe’,

Not from the dark Obscure of priestly law,

But that which burns – the Centre of Creation –
A Love, a Mystery, and a Fear – the unseen
Source of all worship since the world hath been!
(Bulwer-Lytton 1831: 296)

Bulwer-Lytton’s lines recall ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the debate on nat-

ural religion in book four of The Excursion (1814), associated with
either the ‘massy Piles’ of ‘Romish Phantasy’ (Wordsworth 2007:
Book IV, 895–8, 903–4), or the ‘all-pervading spirit, upon whom /
Our dark foundations rest’ (Wordsworth 2007: Book IV, 965–6).
Two years later, in England and the English (1833), Bulwer-Lytton
further celebrated Wordsworth for a poetry that ‘unvulgarizes
the mind’ and that has ‘repaired to us the want of an immaterial

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 346 Tom Duggett

philosophy – it is philosophy’ (Bulwer-Lytton 1831: 101). Unlike

the worldly Lord Byron and Walter Scott, Wordsworth is a deep
and emergent influence:

Wordsworth’s genius is peculiarly German. This assertion may startle

those who have been accustomed to believe the German genius only
evinced by extravagant tales, bombastic passion, and mystical dia-
bleries. Wordsworth is German from his singular householdness of
feeling . . . [H]is ideas, too, fall into that refined and refining toryism,
the result of a mingled veneration for the past – of a disdain for . . .
that vast abyss which we call the public, and of a firm desire for Peace
as the best nurse to high and undiurnal thoughts . . . (Bulwer-Lytton
1833: II.97)

With his ‘householdness of feeling’ and ‘mingled veneration for

the past’, Wordsworth is, as it were, an English German. The non-
currency of the term ‘Gothic’ to describe ‘extravagant tales . . . and
mystical diableries’ creates a kink in literary-historical transmission.
But the idea of Wordsworth the English German also reflects the
ongoing hold of ‘Gothic historiography’: the essentially anachronis-
tic and transumptive process whereby libertarian claims about the
‘immemoriality of Saxon . . . custom’ in England led to claims of a
still-deeper ‘Gothic’ origin, projecting post–1640s Englishness back-
wards into the mythic past (Silver 2014: 4–6). This time-shifted sense
that the English were the Goths, while – if not, somehow, before –
the Goths became the English, underlies the progressive-regressive
ethos of the Gothic Revival.
Wordsworth and the Lake Poets were themselves paradig-
matic of this time-shifted ‘Gothic historiography’. Positioned by
both Mackintosh and Bulwer-Lytton as first and last of the Goths,
Wordsworth was eclipsed in his own historical moment. In 1831,
Scott told Dora Wordsworth that ‘but for your Father’s sake’, he
‘should not have done anything’ in the poetry of time and place
(Wordsworth and Fenwick 2007: 138–9). But where Wordsworth
invoked the stern republican tradition of Milton and an ‘ancient
English dower / Of inward happiness’ (see ‘London, 1802’ in Word-
sworth 2009: I.646), Walter Scott’s border minstrelsy performed a
bardic function for all Britain, and made an entire reading nation
of modern-day medievals. Poems such as The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) managed, said the Eclectic
Review in 1811, to ‘reconcile us to the manners they illustrate,
and assimilate us’ to the ‘fierce and licentious age’ they describe

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 Gothic Forms of Time 347

(qtd in Bainbridge 2003: 138). Coleridge had been there first, with
his ‘Romantic Poetry’ of ‘witchery by daylight’, ‘Christabel’, writ-
ten in 1797–1800, excluded from Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth,
and not published until 1816 (Coleridge 1990: I.410). But he, along
with Wordsworth and Southey, was soon left trailing by what Word-
sworth called Scott’s ‘industrious Antiquarianism’. The ‘second
Gothic’ pioneers were left appealing to posterity – reframing a lack
of popularity as a creative paradox whereby ‘every Author, as far as
he is great and at the same time original, has . . . the task of creating
the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ (Wordsworth 1974: III.80).
When Coleridge finally published ‘Christabel’, he asserted that the
‘celebrated poets’ (Scott and Byron) he seemed now to be imitat-
ing ‘would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge’ of
plagiarism (Coleridge 1816: vi–vii). But if Coleridge thus reclaimed
some measure of priority, he was also tacitly admitting his failure
publicly to lead the ‘second Gothic’ movement, and his dependency
on others for creating the Gothic taste that had belatedly made the
poem publishable. For the Augustan Review, Coleridge was the last
of the Goths only in this undermined sense. While ‘Christabel’ was
clearly a poem ‘in the manner of Walter Scott and Lord Byron’, it
was ‘absurd’ to attempt to ‘support’ such ‘bold and massive entab-
latures . . . upon the slender and grotesque columns of the architects
of the Lakes’ (Augustan Review 1816: 16).
By the mid 1810s, however, the Lake Poets’ bid to reclaim and
reinvent the Gothic was already well under way. Wordsworth’s ‘new
style of local poetry’ – as the British Review called it (British Review
1820: 38) – began to flourish as the history-making procedures of
‘archaeologists, antiquarians, historians, and . . . museum curators’
permeated literary culture (Garrett 2008: 150). In October 1810,
Coleridge suggested the salvage of the ‘second Gothic’ project from
under the rubble of Scott’s popularity, applying to Scott’s ballads
the same ‘recipe’ technique used by the Anti-Jacobin to satirise Ann
Radcliffe. ‘[W]hatever suits Mrs. Radcliff [sic] . . . will do’, he told
Wordsworth, going on to list ingredients including ‘a vast string
of patronymics’, ‘all the nomenclature of Gothic Architecture’,
‘Heraldry’, ‘Arms’, and a ‘Bard . . . and Songs’ (Hayden 1996: 59–60).
‘[H]owever thread-bare in the Romance Shelves of the circulating
Library’, Coleridge concluded, ‘it is to be taken as quite new so soon
as told in Rhyme’ (Hayden 1996: 59–60). Wordsworth’s own Preface
to Lyrical Ballads claimed that poetry and prose were ‘one and the
same language’ (Wordsworth 1974: I.191). But in the Biographia
Literaria (1817), Coleridge represented such absences of ‘essential’

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 348 Tom Duggett

distinction between writers and types of writing as belying higher-

order differences of architectural style:

[T]he style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essentially dif-

ferent from that of Saint Paul, even though both had been built with
blocks cut into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only in
this . . . sense . . . must it have been denied by Mr Wordsworth . . . that
the language of poetry (i.e. the formal construction, or architecture,
of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose.
(Coleridge 1983: II.63)

If Scott was a consummate literary professional, adapting ‘the size

of his poem . . . to that of the building it was written to pay for’ – as
Wordsworth told Crabb Robinson (Robinson 1938: II.534) – then
Wordsworth was a primitive Gothic architect, following what in
1833 Coleridge called the Gothic architectural ‘principle’ of ‘Infinity,
made imaginable’ (Coleridge 1990: I.396).
Coleridge’s joke at Scott’s expense thus became Wordsworth’s mis-
sion: to move beyond Walpolean and Radcliffean ‘Gothic Story’ and
a superficial ‘antiquarian humour’ that he associated with Scott (The
Excursion; Wordsworth 2007: Book III, 137–40), to create genuinely
original Gothic poetry. ‘The unimaginable touch of time, / Or shoul-
dering winds, had split with ruin deep / The towers’ – Wordsworth
wrote in 1796, in an abandoned notebook drafting for ‘A Gothic
Tale’ (Wordsworth 1981: 752). In Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822,
Wordsworth reclaimed these lines for the final line of ‘Mutability’,
a sonnet near the end of the sequence. ‘Truth’, he now wrote, ‘fails
not’, ‘but her outward forms’

. . . drop like the tower sublime

Of yesterday, which royally did wear
Its crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.
(Wordsworth 2009: III.407–8)

The line is transfigured as it is recycled: function, metre and meaning

alter together. The addition of the ‘Or’ deforms the iambic pattern.
Or rather, the opening alternative and the firm iambic rhythm on
‘touch of Time’ both work to buttress the vaulting metrical shape
of ‘unimaginable’. The line thus comes to evoke not soundless dam-
age but miraculous preservation. The poise of the words recreates in

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 Gothic Forms of Time 349

virtual form the ‘tower sublime / Of yesterday’, articulating the per-

sistence in poetry of what fails in history. Gothic architectural form
is not, as in 1796, just a topic for a verse tale, but is now the inward
pattern of the poem.
In making an imaginative span from 1796 to 1822, the line on the
‘touch of Time’ indicates the Gothic form of Wordsworth’s career.
The poet who in December 1814 claimed that it was ‘frequently true
of second words as of second thoughts, that they are the best’ also
wrote in May 1805 of finding ‘incurable’ faults at the foundations of
his poems, present ‘in the first conception’ (Wordsworth and Word-
sworth 1967–93: II.179 and I.586–7). In lines composed in 1804 for
his poem on the growth of a poet’s mind, Wordsworth anticipates
the ethos of the Gothic Revival as he speaks of giving, ‘as far as
words can give’, ‘A substance and a life to what I feel – / I would
enshrine the spirit of the past / For future restoration’ (Wordsworth
1995: [1805], Book XI, 339–42). In 1843, Wordsworth recalled
these lines as he spoke to Isabella Fenwick of the ‘delightful’ experi-
ence of encountering in poems ‘these moments of far-distant days,
which probably would have been forgotten if the impression had
not been transferred to verse’ (Wordsworth and Fenwick 2007: 81).
Again, continuity across decades also measures a transition. Stephen
Gill comments that in the first version of The Prelude, from 1799,
‘memory was the redeeming agent; in 1805 it is Poetry’ (Gill 2011:
46). In 1843, ‘poetry’ has hardened further into ‘verse’. Not ‘forgot-
ten’, the ‘spirit of the past’ is, in a richly material sense, ‘Disowned
by memory’ (Wordsworth 1995: [1805], Book I, 643).
Wordsworth’s attempt to move beyond Scott and the Walpole-
Radcliffe line of ‘Gothic Story’ emerges most clearly with his poem
of ‘feudal times’ (Wordsworth and Fenwick 2007: 102), set in
the remains of Bolton Priory, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815).
When, in early 1808, Scott offered to pass on some antiquarian
details about the 1569 Catholic uprising, Wordsworth pronounced
‘a plague upon your industrious Antiquarianism that has put my
fine story to confusion’. The joke was in deadly earnest. ‘[S]o far
from being serviceable to my Poem’, Wordsworth continued, the
historical details ‘would stand in the way of it; as I have followed
(as I was in duty bound to do) the traditionary and common historic
records’ (Wordsworth and Wordsworth 1967–93: II.237). As in the
1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth insists that the poet
is a traditionalist, ‘an upholder and preserver’ rather than a man
of (historical) science (Wordsworth 1974: I.167). Wordsworth later
described The White Doe as shifting focus from Scott’s ‘surfaces’

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 350 Tom Duggett

to the ‘moral & spiritual’ dimensions of things, from ‘the outward

& social forms of life . . . to its internal spirit’ (Wordsworth and
Fenwick 2007: 103). By August 1808, Wordsworth had turned the
tables on Scott, proposing his own way of doing Gothic poetry.
Marmion had gained its end, but it was ‘not in every respect the end
which I should wish you to propose to yourself . . . both as to mat-
ter and manner’ (Wordsworth and Wordsworth 1967–93: II.264).
In attempting to revive the ‘internal spirit’ of the past in ‘matter
and manner’, Wordsworth forged a new form for The White Doe,
combining ‘feudal’ story with a frontispiece engraving taken from a
George Beaumont drawing of the ruins of Bolton Priory (Fig. 18.1),
and fragments of ‘black letter’ or ‘Gothic’ type.
Eighteenth-century print culture encoded the advent of modernity
as a transition from black letter or ‘Gothic’ to roman type. Locke’s

Figure 18.1 George Beaumont print of Bolton Priory. By permission

of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

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 Gothic Forms of Time 351

Two Treatises of Government (1690) moves from ‘False Principles’ of

‘Government’ to the ‘True Original’ of ‘Civil Government’ (Korte et al.
2000: 115). Wordsworth’s poem refashions this convention, suggest-
ing a past both preserved and transformed as Gothic fragments gain
resonance over time. The heroine, Emily Norton, survives the wreck of
her family in the 1569 Rising of the North, living to find new national-
historical meaning in the words of the old religion:

When the Bells of Rylstone played

Their Sabbath music—‘God us ayde!’
That was the sound they seemed to speak;
Inscriptive legend, which I ween
May on those holy Bells be seen,
That legend and her grandsire’s name;
And oftentimes the Lady meek
Had in her childhood read the same,
Words which she slighted at that day;
But now, when such sad change was wrought,
And of that lonely name she thought,
The Bells of Rylstone seemed to say,
While she sate listening in the shade,
With vocal music, ‘God us ayde!’
And all the Hills were glad to bear
Their part in this effectual prayer.
(ll. 1780–95; Wordsworth 1988: 142)

The ‘Hills’ coming alive to the Gothic music of the bells signifies
a still deeper interfusion of landscape, history and the ‘national
character’.
A similar Gothic music sounds in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’
(1798), where the poet is ‘stirred and haunted’ by the pealing bells
of ‘the old church-tower’, ‘falling on mine ear / Most like articu-
late sounds of things to come!’ (ll. 28–33; Coleridge 1985: 87–9).
Coleridge developed this latent sense of ‘articulate’ prophecy in the
music and architecture of the past in his 1818 lecture-series on the
‘Gothic Mind’. In remarks that echo the internal ‘revival’ and the
symphonic ‘building’ at the end of ‘Kubla Khan’ (Coleridge 1985:
102–4]), Coleridge called the church organ a ‘Gothic instrument’,
and described the Gothic cathedral as a sort of chrysalis, the outward
form of an internal transformation:

the Gothic architecture impresses the beholder with a sense of self-

annihilation; he becomes, as it were, a part of the work contemplated.
An endless complexity and variety are united into one whole, the

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 352 Tom Duggett

plan of which is not distinct from the execution. A Gothic cathedral

is the petrifaction of our religion. (Coleridge 1987: II.60)

In the following lectures, Coleridge gave ‘Gothic’ a still higher his-

toriographical charge. ‘Gothic’ was not only a term in transition
(from Nordic tribes to Elizabethan plays), but the mode of transi-
tion itself. ‘[I]n one form or other’, Coleridge suggested, ‘the Roman
provinces became Gothic Kingdoms, and the Western Empire our
modern Christendom: and the process of Re-union constitutes the
History and the philosophy of the History of the Dark or Middle
Ages’ (Coleridge 1987: II.74). Symbolising ‘the commencement of
this æra’ in ‘the Palace of the imperial Goth the great Theoderic,
frowning opposite to the Christian Temple, <that alone overlooks
it >’, Coleridge went on to figure the Middle Ages as an architec-
tural form simultaneously ‘grotesque’ and ‘harmonious’, with the
‘all-transforming Spirit’ of Christianity reconciling ‘Grecian Genius’,
the ‘ordonnant Mind of civilizing Rome’, and ‘the deep feelings, the
high imagination, the chivalrous courtesies, and strong breathings
after immortality of the Goths’ (Coleridge 1987: II.74–5). The near-
monstrous ‘annihilating’ nature of Gothic architecture gives expres-
sion to this unimaginably complex process of historical becoming.
Gothic took human form, too. The fourth-century Latin poet
Claudian was, Coleridge suggested, ‘the first of the Moderns – or at
least the transitional link between the Classic and the Gothic mode
of thought’ (Coleridge 1990: I. 439). If Walpole’s second Preface
posited the Gothic as the ‘modern form of the past’, Coleridge
comes to understand ‘Gothic thought’ as a ‘first’ form of an always
incomplete modernity. England and English exemplify the Gothic
in politics and language, distinguished from classical forms in hav-
ing each a ‘structure . . . complete in each part’ that preserves ‘the
rights and interests of the individual in conjunction with those of
the whole’ (Coleridge 1987: II.231). In this framework, Shake-
speare and his theatre become the last ‘Gothic’ prototypes of the
modern subject and nation, epitomising the time before and rather
enriched than replaced in time after. In a lecture of February 1819,
Coleridge described Shakespeare translating ‘the <poetic> Heroes
[of]Paganism into the not less rude but . . . more featurely Warriors
of Christian Chivalry’, turning the ‘Outlines of the Homeric Epic
into the flesh and blood of the Romantic Drama’ (Coleridge 1987:
II.378). ‘I scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength
and pregnancy of the Gothic mind’ (Coleridge 1990: I.447).

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 Gothic Forms of Time 353

Southey had a similar understanding of history as poetic trans-

formation. He was, he said in 1805, ‘a good poet – but a better
historian, & the better for having been accustomed to feel & think
as a poet’ (Southey 2009: 1024). Coleridge claimed in 1830 that
Southey took on his ideas: ‘His opinions now are mine occasion-
ally of ten years ago. I can put my finger upon mine own in all his
books’ (Coleridge 1990: I.194). But Southey also took forward
Coleridge’s Gothic historiography. Southey’s 1829 publication, Sir
Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Soci-
ety, appeared before Coleridge’s parallel book, On the Constitution
of Church and State (1830). In Colloquies, Southey also looked deep
into the constitution of the ‘Gothic mind’, past Shakespeare and the
architectural self-fashioning of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, to Sir Thomas More: the man who, as Stephen Greenblatt puts
it, ‘wishes . . . to stop modern history before it starts’; his property-
less Utopia forestalling the deep interiority installed in the subject by
‘guilt and private ownership’ at the Reformation (Greenblatt 2005:
54). Reviewers complained that the book’s dialogue between South-
ey’s alter ego, ‘Montesinos’, and the ghost of Thomas More was
more like a relay race between ‘two Southeys’ (Madden 1972: 350,
335–6). But by dividing himself in two, Southey survives Coleridge’s
‘sense of self-annihilation’ before the Gothic, and sets a ‘petrifying’
history back in motion. In a representative passage from the final col-
loquy, the ghost of Sir Thomas outlines a darkling vision of ‘Religion
and Impiety’, democracy and feudalism, clashing in the historical
night of Britain under the ‘manufacturing system’. Southey’s textual
alter ego, ‘Montesinos’, meanwhile, advances a Christianised version
of Kant’s Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of
View, read out of Thomas De Quincey’s translation in the London
Magazine (Southey 1829: II.314–25; Craig 2007: 134). Showing the
dialectical growth of Victorian medievalism from 1790s radical cos-
mopolitanism, Colloquies provides an index of the spirit of the age
(Speck 2001: 473–5).
For the Whig historian Thomas Macaulay, Colloquies was the
work of a literary writer who had ‘still the very alphabet to learn’
of historical science. Southey had replaced ‘statistical tables’ with
‘picturesque excursions’ and a ghost story: ‘What cost in machin-
ery, yet what poverty of effect!’ (Madden 1972: 341–54). But the
book is also ‘picturesque’ or ‘literary’ history in a strong sense. The
conceit of conversing with a ghost gives figurative expression to the
way historical knowledge forms from extensive reading, what Keith

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 354 Tom Duggett

Thomas, following G. M. Young, calls ‘reading until I can hear the

people talking’, gathering ‘casual and unpredictable references’ until
‘a pattern . . . forms’ (Thomas 2010: 36–7). Engaging with Thomas
More in particular allows Southey to transume the Gothic literary
origin-myth of Hamlet. The ghostly Sir Thomas is a ‘questionable
shape’ (Southey 1829: I.12) who comes and goes within an ‘indivis-
ible point of time’, ‘as if exemplifying the difference between to be
and not to be’ (Southey 1829: I.20). The ghost stalks not battle-
ments but the still more Gothic space of Southey’s library – a ‘cem-
etery’ of undead minds that enfolds alike ‘Ancient and Modern, Jew
and Gentile, Mahommedan and Crusader . . . Cranmer and Stephen
Gardiner . . . Jesuit and Philosophe’ (Southey 1829: II.342). Like
Shakespeare’s Ghost, Sir Thomas represents the burden of the past
and the modern sense of temporal disjuncture, as well as a poten-
tially ‘redemptive, sense-making role’ for ‘the historical imagina-
tion’ (Connell 2001: 260).
Indeed, Southey’s ghost story constitutes an innovative response
to the medieval historian Sharon Turner’s contemporary vision of a
new history at once ‘more comprehensive’ and ‘more picturesque’
(Turner 1825: I.xi). Because ‘the mighty events of the last fifty years
[made] the histories of preceding times almost dwindle into insignifi-
cance’, Turner called for new histories to ‘drop much of the detail
[and] bring events together more in their connected masses; and to
exhibit them in [their] great operations and results’ (Turner 1825:
I.xi–xii). ‘[P]ut[ting] together a great deal of historical matter in these
interlocutions’ (Southey 1849–50: V.16–17), Southey manages in one
colloquy to cover the time between the English and French Revolu-
tions within the space of only two pages (Southey 1829: I.98–9).
Southey also responds to the nineteenth-century sense of historical
acceleration by combining contrasting modes of discourse. Two of
the colloquies in the second volume contain abrupt transitions from
detailed ‘monkish’ chronicles of local saints and landowners to medi-
tations on ‘[t]he weight of time’ from the Druids, Romans and Danes
till now, and conversations that move fluently between topics such
as the Reformation and the governments of America (Southey 1829:
II.1–30, 33, 157–70).
Southey was self-conscious about his experiment in history writing.
Sir Thomas warns Montesinos to ‘Beware how you allow words to
pass with you for more than they are worth, and bear in mind what
alteration is sometimes produced in their current value by the course of
time’ (Southey 1829: II.219–20). Dwindling context potentially turns
the antiquary into ‘the dupe of words’ (Southey 1829: I.68). But the

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 Gothic Forms of Time 355

dissolution of contextual limits also produces a ‘current’ in ‘the course

of time’. In colloquy thirteen, Southey’s blend of antiquarianism and
ghost story produces effects that anticipate Victorian medievalism (as
well as recalling the end of Wordsworth’s Excursion). Sir Thomas joins
Montesinos overlooking a cotton mill beside the river Greta, which
‘with the dwelling-houses and other buildings appertaining to such an
establishment’, forms a settlement for which English has no word, but
which inevitably ‘reminds one of a convent’ (Southey 1829: II.241).
Invited to contemplate and compare the cotton mill and the convent,
Montesinos applies a ‘great scale’ of historical ‘improvement’ (Southey
1829: I.30). At different ‘times and places’, each institution may pro-
mote or ‘retard’ ‘progress’ (Southey 1829: II.242). The ‘manufacturing
system’ embodied in the mill is part of a continuous historical process
from the sixteenth century, remaking the ‘means’ and ‘men’ previously
‘devoured’ by enclosure and sheep farming (Southey 1829: I.76–81).
Sir Thomas replies with a more timeless view of good and evil: ‘Bad as
the feudal times were, they were less injurious than these commercial
ones to the kindly and generous feelings of human nature, and far, far
more favourable to the principles of honour and integrity’ (Southey
1829: II.246–7).
Between these statements, the ‘prospect’ nevertheless emerges of
‘feudal times’ being reconstituted in commercial society. This was
a form of time for which, like the ‘establishment’ beside the Greta,
English had as yet no word. ‘Mediaeval’ had only entered the
lexicon – through the Gentleman’s Magazine – in 1827 (Simmons
2011: 2). But nostalgia for ‘feudal times’ begins to turn into some-
thing like Ruskin’s dynamic force of ‘medievalism’ as Sir Thomas
asks: ‘May not the manufacturing system be . . . tending to work
out, by means of the very excess to which it is carried, a remedy
for the evils which it has brought with it?’ Montesinos replies by
envisioning just such a ‘remedial process . . . going on’:

[P]erhaps,. . were time allowed,. . we might then hope for a palingen-

sia, a restoration of national sanity and strength, a second birth:. .
perhaps, I say, for I say this doubtfully, and that ghostly shake of the
head with which it is received does not lessen the melancholy distrust
wherewith it is expressed. (Southey 1829: II.245)

The hesitations and ellipses mime the effect of ghostly apparition.

Montesinos falters in his speech at Sir Thomas’s ‘ghostly shake of
the head’. Thus registering an ‘unimaginable touch of time’, Southey
gestures towards the recrudescence within modernity of the medieval

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 356 Tom Duggett

past, a ‘second birth’ of Gothic England. History in Colloquies is not

(as for Macaulay) a political-economic chart of incremental devel-
opment, but rather a complex form of time: ‘Society has its critical
periods, and its climacterics’ (Southey 1829: I.198–9). Refurbishing
the historical parallel with a Romantic sense – in Jonathan Sachs’s
phrase – of ‘historical time . . . as progressive . . . [and] the present . . .
accelerating away from the past’ (Sachs 2012: 33), Southey makes
the 1830s into Thomas More’s 1530s, but on a higher winding of
the historical stair.
Southey predicted a long journey into posterity for his attempt to
speak with the dead. The Colloquies would ‘be read hereafter, what-
ever be their fortune now’ (Southey 1849–50: VI.22). ‘[T]he first, and
in some ways most extreme example of [the] nostalgic, neo-feudalist
variety of conservative historicism’, Colloquies was a literary harbinger
of Young England and the Gothic Revival (Connell 2001: 1–5, 258–9;
Andrews 2011: 190). A ‘fancydress version of Coleridge’s clerisy’, Col-
loquies marks the onset of Victorian medievalism, providing a model
for Pugin’s 1841 ‘illustrations comparing medieval with nineteenth-
century towns’ (Smith 1987: 157).
But the midwinter spring of Romantic Gothic is its own season,
too. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey creates a form of time
that grows ever deeper in place, a history of underground streams and
‘indirect’ courses, everlastingly in motion, ‘slow, silent, and unper-
ceived’ (Southey 1829: II.98, 224). If this is ‘picturesque’ history, it
is so in Jacqueline Labbe’s strongly Wordsworthian sense: ‘neither
harmonious nor overtly unified but rather variegated and complexly,
imminently unified’ (Labbe 1998: 54). It is what Ruskin, who was
‘much pleased’ when he read the Colloquies in 1843 (Ruskin 1956:
I.252), would understand as a design for life in ‘Gothic form’.

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