SESSION 12 – PRE-ROMANTICISM

THE GOTHIC NOVEL

POETRY: GRAY
Reading:
Background: summary of the lecture (handbook 30), “The test of a poet’s true mettle […] enduring
popularity” (Norton C 22), “An age of great prose […] continues to haunt our dreams” (Norton C 28-
30), biographical introduction to Thomas Gray (Norton C 994)
Texts: Horace WALPOLE, synopsis of The Castle of Otranto (1765) and preface to the first edition of
the novel (handbook 89-91), Ann RADCLIFFE, from The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) (handbook
92-96), Thomas GRAY, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (ca. 1742-50) (Norton C 998-
1001), James THOMSON, extract from The Seasons (1730) (Norton 991-993), Nicolas BOILEAU,
Art Poétique Chant II, ll. 25-32 (handbook 63)

Language
Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’
l. 2: ‘wind’: this is the verb ‘to wind’ [waind] , meaning ‘to move along a twisting path’.
l. 2: ‘lea’: meadow.
ll. 7, 9: ‘save’: except.
l. 9: ‘yonder ivy-mantled tower’: that tower covered with ivy.
l. 10: ‘moping’: wandering unhappily.
l. 12: ‘molest’: disturb.
l. 17: ‘Morn’: morning.
l. 23: ‘sire’: father.
l. 26: ‘broke’: broken
l. 27: ‘drive their team afield’: plough a field with draught animals
l. 30: ‘homely’: plain, simple.
l. 37: ‘these’: the poor.
l. 61-64: the various infinitives are the objects of ‘forbade’ in line 65.
l. 65: ‘their lot’: their fate
l. 65: ‘nor circumscribed alone…’: [their lot] did not only limit…
l. 73: ‘madding’: maddening.
l. 92: ‘wonted’: usual
l. 95: ‘If chance…’: ‘if it happens that’.
l. 97: ‘haply’: perhaps.
l. 97: ‘hoary-headed swain’: old peasant with grey hair.
l. 101: ‘yonder nodding beech’: that nodding beech over there.
l. 105: ‘yon wood’: that wood over there.
l. 109: ‘customed hill’: the hill where he used to walk.
ll. 111, 113: ‘Another … The next’: ‘morning’ is implied
l. 111: ‘rill’: very small stream.
l. 113: ‘dirges’: funeral songs.
l. 114: ‘slow…we saw him borne’: we saw his funeral pass slowly.
l. 126: ‘their dread abode’: the frightening place where they are
 THE GOTHIC NOVEL

On the face of it, eerie tales of terror filled with suggestions of supernatural happenings are
the antithesis of the realist fiction produced in an age of Enlightenment. The Gothic novel
certainly harks back to earlier modes of fiction like the mediaeval romance, which Walpole
nostalgically invokes in his preface (p. 89, l.30); like pre-Romantic poetry, the Gothic novel is
evidence of a fascination for aspects of a historical period that 18th-century classicism
regarded as barbarous. Gothic fiction, however, does not fully embrace the mediaeval world
that is central to its themes and aesthetics: instead of being obscurantist critics of 18th-century
realism and Enlightenment, the English Gothic novelists of the late 18th century actually
remained faithful to a British ideology of progress that celebrated their country’s
modernity. While they transported their audience to distant lands and remote periods where
supernatural events seemed possible, Gothic writers reassured British readers that they were
privileged enough to live in a country and age that were dominated by rational
intercourse and modern institutions. Whether readers who were keen on experiencing the
thrills of the Gothic always paid attention to such reassurances was another matter: in that
respect, Gothic fiction remains a fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon, divided as it is
between the extravagant mediaevalism of its subject matter and the enlightened attitudes it
tried to promote toward such material.
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was the literary sensation of 1764/65: its
extravagant supernaturalism seemed to introduce a wholly new genre into English fiction. But
for all its originality, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto did not appear out of the blue. The
‘graveyard’ poetry of the 1740s (to which ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by
Walpole’s sometime friend Thomas Gray is affiliated) had made morbid thoughts fashionable.
Walpole’s initial assertion that the tale was the translation of a mediaeval manuscript
aligns his novel with contemporary work that made similar claims. In 1760, James
Macpherson had generated considerable interest and debate with the publication of the Ossian
poems, which he tried to pass off as translations of old Gaelic epics. Such work fitted in with
the rise of antiquarianism, an emerging interest in the (native) past and popular culture that
partly came as a reaction against the dominant classicism of the age. In 1765, Thomas Percy
published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry which, unlike Macpherson’s and Walpole’s
work, were actual popular ballads, if also extensively reworked for publication. Finally, if
Walpole’s emphasis on the thrills afforded by fear heralded a new genre that lives on till this
day in horror novels and films, his dedicatory poem draws out the analogy that Gothic
fiction bears to the sentimental novel: Walpole’s narrative sometimes dwells on the ‘hopes
and fears’ of helpless female characters (e.g. the “womanish terror and foibles” he mentions,
p. 90, l.50) whose ordeals are supposed to produce pity as well as vicarious fear in the reader.
The distance between the moralising sensibility of Richardson and the sensationalism of
Walpole was not so great, as both exploited emotion in their own ways. Many of Walpole’s
followers in the field of Gothic fiction would be women writers, Ann Radcliffe being the most
distinguished and influential example: like the novel of sensibility, Gothic fiction could also
appeal very directly to women readers; being a new genre which allowed creative freedom, it
could also prompt them to try their hand at writing their own versions. Like sentimental
fiction, the Gothic novel is also fairly shamelessly commercial – to this day, both genres are
often stigmatized as ‘trashy’ forms of literature whose popularity is matched by the
predictability of their formats.
The pioneer of the Gothic novel was no mere sensationalist, however. As his preface
makes clear, and as the occasionally tongue-in-cheek quality of his narrative suggests,
Walpole was enough of a child of the Enlightenment to poke fun at and unmask the very
terrors he took such pains to generate. Horace Walpole was also the youngest son of the Whig
Prime Minister Robert Walpole: a Whig MP himself, he subscribed to the view that Britain
was fortunate in being a modern Protestant country that had left feudalism, absolute
monarchy and Catholicism behind. If he set his fiction in mediaeval, Southern Europe and
hid behind the fake identity of the Italian monk he presents as the author of his ‘found
manuscript’, his preface also stresses a contempt for the obscurantism of a religion associated
with “the darkest ages of Christianity” (p. 90, l.4). In so far as it stages miracles and
supernatural interventions, the ‘found manuscript’ seeks to “confirm the populace in their
ancient errors and superstitions” (p. 90, l.20): apologising for the “air of the miraculous” (p.
90, l.36) in his tale, Walpole expects his readers to enjoy supernatural thrills as an
imaginary holiday from the safe reality which they inhabit as modern Britons. By
depicting the vicissitudes of aristocratic rule in Southern Europe, and by making the lord of
the castle the villain of the novel, Walpole’s Gothic also delivers an implicit message about
the superiority of modern British institutions. The world of the Gothic novel is only to be
enjoyed through pure escapism: the readers Walpole addresses are expected to share his
rationalism.

The Gothic novel became a literary craze by the end of the 18th century, with various authors
producing variations on the formula initiated by Walpole. The genre further lent itself to
pastiche and ridicule:
Take - An old castle, half of it ruinous.

A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.

Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.
As many skeletons, in chests and presses.
An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.
Assassins and desperadoes ‘quant suff’
Noise, whispers and groans, threescore at least.

Mix them together, in the form of three volumes to be taken at any of the watering places
before going to bed.1
By the 1790s, however, it also faced another kind of criticism. Its reputation a “terrorist”
form of writing meant it was associated with the Terror that the French revolutionaries had
unleashed. If such links seem to stretch the meaning of term ‘terrorism’, it should be
remembered that the typical Gothic novel did not simply rely on the production of terror as a
basic emotion. It was also an anti-Catholic, anti-feudalist genre that depicted the
aristocracy and dominant Church of continental Europe as oppressive systems that
Britain had swept away through its Glorious revolution against a Catholic Stuart
monarch in 1688/89. In 1789, some British Whigs had first expressed sympathy for a
revolution that challenged Britain’s old and powerful enemy, i.e. the absolutist and Catholic
French monarchy (the ‘Blefuscu’ of Gullivers’ Travels). Within years, however, it became
clear that the French Revolution would be much more radical and violent than the Glorious
Revolution – if the latter was also known as the ‘Bloodless’ Revolution, the French
Revolution was accompanied by much bloodshed. Mainstream British opinion swung
decisively to the right: from being a country that prided itself on its modernity, Britain
reinvented itself as a stronghold of gradually evolving tradition.
This new ideological climate would have a major impact on the reception of Gothic novels.
Attacks on the Church of Rome and on continental aristocracies were no longer a Whig
1 ?
Anonymous, “Terrorist Novel Writing” (1797). Reprinted in the Norton Anthology, vol. 2.
fantasy, but a reality in revolutionary France. The typical formula of the Gothic novel
became ideologically suspect, in the same way that the modern genre of the disaster movie in
which New York is wrecked by invading aliens or supernatural monsters became problematic
once reality caught up with fiction on 9/11.
If Gothic novelists wanted to avoid being associated with the Terror of the French
Revolution, they had to tread very carefully. Ann Radcliffe tried to rescue the genre from
the dubious taint of revolutionary sympathies and also bolstered its literary credentials.
Her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), while sharing basic plot structures and settings with
Walpole’s seminal Castle of Otranto, also introduce distinctive elements that would make
Radcliffe the most reputable Gothic novelist of her day.
Radcliffe’s Gothic shows clear similarities with sentimental fiction: even more so than in
Walpole’s still largely male-dominated fictional world, the focus is on the female
protagonist’s ordeals as she is confronted with a variety of threats emanating from
oppressive male figures. The narrative frequently dwells on her lonely thoughts as she reflects
on her uncertain fate (see e.g. the extracts on p. 94): like Clarissa, who writes her letters by
lamplight deep into the night, Emily is also a solitary night watcher whose heart is agitated by
hopes and (chiefly) fears. Radcliffe also endows the Gothic novel with psychological depth
as she spends much time describing the evolution of her protagonist’s feelings.
The melancholy atmosphere that dominates many a scene in The Mysteries of Udolpho is
sometimes directly reminiscent of graveyard poetry, the descriptions of landscape reprinted
on p. 92 can easily be compared with the opening stanzas of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard’, with their blend of melancholy moods, darkening landscapes and
natural sounds. Such atmospheric descriptions helped lift the prestige of Gothic fiction by
showing how its evocative powers could match those of poets.
For all her appeals to feelings, Radcliffe is also a rationalist. One distinctive feature of her
Gothic fiction is the ‘explained supernatural’: while the terrors that are visited on her
protagonist seem to find their origin in supernatural agency, her novels’ endings typically
reveal that all those threats can be explained rationally: thus, the “ghastly countenance” that
confronted Emily (p. 95, l. 9) finally turns out to be a statue made of wax – a Catholic
memento mori typical of the “fierce severity, which monkish superstition has sometimes
inflicted on mankind”: while Walpole used his preface to blame his tale’s supernaturalism on
the craftiness of a monkish author, Radcliffe dispels the supernatural element within her
narrative itself, as Catholic “superstition” is exposed as a trick in the eyes of her own,
finally enlightened characters.
Radcliffe’s careful blend of sensibility and rationalism is also evident from the warnings
that Emily’s father gives her against the excesses of sensibility (p. 93). While valuing
feelings, Emily’s father (who also functions as an authorial mouthpiece putting the reader on
his/her guard) criticizes the effects of an “ill-governed sensibility”: unchecked by reason,
sensibility run wild becomes a danger. This critique of an exclusive cult of sensibility (which
will also be found in the writings of Jane Austen) is part of a broader reaction against Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, one of the 18th-century thinkers whose influence was closely associated
with the French Revolution: the democratic cult of the heart, of the energies of nature as
opposed to the conventions of culture, was now seen as part of a dangerous ideology.
Faced with the ordeals that follow her father’s death, Emily does not quite heed his
warnings and sometimes lets her feelings (often fear, that most basic human emotion)
overpower her. Radcliffe’s readers, though, are not allowed to forget St Aubert’s vain
warnings to his daughter: if she resembles the typical heroine of a Richardson novel in many
respects, Emily is also different in that she is not the narrator of her own tale. She is often its
focalizer, which allows readers to identify with her perspective on events. But at various
crucial stages, an authorial omniscient narrator intervenes to point out the limitations of
Emily’s interpretation of events, and to point forward to the resolution of mysteries that
takes place at the end of the novel - see e.g. sentences like “her imagination, ever awake to
circumstance, suggested even more terrors than her reason could justify” (p. 94, ll. 19-20), or
“this unaccountable circumstance […] affected Emily’s imagination with a superstitious awe,
to which, after having detected the fallacies at Udolpho, she might not have yielded, had she
been ignorant of the unhappy story, related by the housekeeper” (p. 95, ll. 13-16). As she
overcomes both her ordeals and the flights of feelings and imagination that had attended them,
the Gothic heroine is also restored to reason: since she emerges from her trials as a confirmed
rationalist who bears a French aristocratic name, the development of Emily St Aubert also
gives shape to Radcliffe’s strategy to rebut the charge of literary ‘Terrorism’. Faced with
the spectacle of the French Terror, Ann Radcliffe kept her head cool, and asked her readers to
do so as well.
 PRE-ROMANTICISM - ‘EARLY ROMANTICISM’

REACTION AGAINST (SOME) AUGUSTAN PRINCIPLES

POETRY, LYRICISM AND EMOTION
Emotion = strange -> Augustan poets regarded poetry as a vehicle for rhetorical
persuasion
POPULAR/NATIVE TRADITIONS:
(Augustans)Go back to the classics -> define what you can write as poetry -> not care
about Middle Ages (Latin was just language of the church)
Popular poetry = not necessarily written
Native -> interested in development of English tradition -> go back to Middle Ages
- PERCY, RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY (1765)
Interested in collecting Folklore -> collection of ballads (he heard on the country
side, …) -> life on the countryside or popular heroes m-> not poetry for Augustans
Not ancient as in Rome, but Old English poetry -> survive in few manuscripts
- CHATTERTON’S FORGERIES
Based/translations on/of Old English poems
Thomas Chatterton does that
- MACPHERSON’S OSSIAN
Scottish poet -> from old Scottish poem in Gallic -> but wrote own poem based
on things that may have existed on the Scottish country side

THOMAS GRAY
‘ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD’ (1742-50)
Partly influenced by certain form of medieval poetry
FORM:
IAMBIC PENTAMETERS
QUATRAINS ABAB (KNOWN AS ‘ELEGIAC QUATRAINS’)
…?
Different from heroic couplet (=dominant form in Augustan poetry in early 18th
century)-> revolution -> makes the poem original
LATINATE SYNTAX (AUGUSTAN FEATURE)
Poetic language still looks and sounds artificial, not the language of the ordinary people
-> tortured and unusual syntactic structure (r.35) -> like Latin -> criticised for this
Didn’t write for the ordinary people, but was interested in them and wanted to write
about them

ll. 1-8
SETTING …?
SOUND v. SIGHT (compare with Thomson’s description of evening and night):
It doesn’t show you a seen you have to listen
You only see cows in the distance -> they are a detail -> author probably only noticed
them, because he heard them
Dark -> soon he will see nothing -> not primarily looking around him, but listening ->
he is alerted of what is happening around him when he is taken out of his daydream ,
when he hears noises -> lost in dark thoughts
First line -> the day is dying -> church bell sounds like a knell -> the funeral of the day
His surroundings only become noticeable by the sounds around him
A DEPARTURE FROM THE CLASSICAL ‘UT PICTURA POESIS’
 Poetry should be like painting -> eye can analyse the painting
Sound is more vague -> rather appears to the feelings than to the intellect ->
more emotional -> connected with the idea the poetry should be like music, appeals
more easily to your feelings -> art of paint asks to be analysed & is static <-> music flows
Silence around the poet -> he hears the beetle -> you only see the beetle after you heard
him (same with cows and their bells) -> hear owl before you see it in a tree
<-> James Thomson’s The Season = visual descriptions of the nightfall -> falling
darkness can be analysed by the eye
FROM LANDSCAPE POETRY TO TENTATIVE LYRICISM
Poet lets the scene dissolve into his own thoughts
THE SOLITARY SELF
R4 ‘me’ -> his own dark thoughts -> not much different between darkness and the poet -
> thoughts about death -> wondering in landscape in his thought, not looking around
him, just hearing sounds
Romantic feature -> poetry as the way in which the self of the poet can express itself ->
innovative in the 18th century
THE PASTORAL AND CLASSICAL INSPIRATION (compare Virgil, Eclogues ii 66-67:
‘See, the ox comes home/ With plough up-tilted, and the shadows grow/To twice their
length with the departing sun’)
Title -> you are in a rural scene -> Augtans = to write about the countryside you should
follow classical models
Herd/plowman -> echoing Vergil rather than describing a scene he saw -> plowing was
done in the morning -> not authentic visual impressions => mostly lost in his own
thoughts -> subject back to Vergil
ALLITERATION, THE PLOUGHMAN AND THE ANGLO-SAXON MYTH: GRAY AND
‘NATIVE’ INSPIRATION
not innocent -> very specific alliteration -> repletion in both halves of the line (pl & ?) ->
tradition of alliterative revival -> Piers Plowman ->…?
Alliterates in lifes that …? -> when he feels he is talking about the common people of
England ->alliterates in a line that mentions the word ‘plowman’ -> through his interest
in medieval poetry he would have come in contact with Piers Plowman (most copies) ->
influence in various part of elegy => Gray going to revive Anglo-Saxon myth …? =native
tradition
 Combines classic tradition and native tradition
ll. 13-16
GRAY AND THE ‘GRAVEYARD SCHOOL’
Poems connected in books called night thoughts …?
Thoughts to the people who lie buried in the graveyard -> imagine their lives
ll. 21-28
GRAY’S PASTORAL VISION
Writes in a soothing way -> pastoral = …? -> Roman poets who needed to escape to the
country side.
Before his death the peasant had a peaceful life (r.21) & work = not so hard -> yields,
jocund (<Latin) -> they did it cheerfully
ll. 29-36
A CRITIQUE OF (AUGUSTAN) LAUGHTER AND SUPERIORITY (cf. Boileau, Chant II)
DEATH AS A SOCIAL LEVELLER: EGALITARIANISM (compare ll. 33-36 with ll. 45-49
from Passus 6 of Piers Plowman, Norton A 402)
You had to you the classic -> there was almost a shame in writing about peasant (low
people)
Gray -> we should not make apologies -> Augustans love to mock (mock-epic) -> they
maybe very simple and unsophisticated, but we should not mock them
In the end we are all the same -> in death we are all alike -> death = ultimate social
leveller
Central in Piers Plowman -> everybody is equal in the face of death
PUNCTUATION AND SYNTAX: CUTTING GRANDEUR DOWN TO SIZE
Grand themes -> 3rd line -> the grand themes before = not subject -> subject = the
inevitable hour. -> normally full stop at the end of the quartrain => stops the grand
themes right in their paths, when death comes.
ll. 41-44
GRAY’S ‘THEOLOGY’: RHETORICAL QUESTIONS OR METAPHYSICAL
QUESTIONINGS? (see also ll. 85-88)

ll. 45-48
EMOTION AND LYRICISM
…?
All of them could have had the potential to be great (poets, musicians, politicians) ->
sentimentalist…?
Heart is seed of inspiration <-> Augustans -> poetry is seed of the mind
You need soul to find poetic inspiration -> not enough to learn the art of writing poetry -
> you still need to be educated & peasants were denied that education -> no knowledge
of the classics -> everyone can be creative, but to turn that inspiration into poetry you
need the proper education
Noble rage = high passion -> cannot achieve great things trough those feeling because of
their chill penury (= poverty)
First mention of poverty -> life of the peasants should not be idealised -> not only
cheerful & calming way of living = not pastoral poetry, but rather satirical (Juvenal)
ll. 49-52
AUGUSTAN KNOWLEDGE AND THE ROMANTIC SOUL
ANTI-PASTORAL ? SOCIAL SATIRE? (compare Juvenal, Satire III, lines 164-5: “Haud
facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obstatres angusta domi.” Translation: “It is not easy for
men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.” Variant translation by Samuel
Johnson: “Slow rises Worth, by Poverty deprest.”)
First mention of poverty -> life of the peasants should not be idealised -> not only
cheerful & calming way of living = not pastoral poetry, but rather satirical (Juvenal)
Classical models (Juvinal) & medieval models (Piers Plowman)
 Reflection on political revolution
ll. 57-60
GRAY’S AMBIVALENT VIEW OF THE PURITAN REVOLUTION: BETWEEN
RADICALISM AND CONSERVATISM
Hamden stood up to authority -> village equivalent -> a hero of popular resistance
(Robin Hood)
Milton -> they could’ve become poets -> Milton was also a puritan revolutionary -> lot
of people focused only on his epic poetry & tried to forget his politics -> Gray = going to
combine them
Cromwell
 All names associated with revolution against king or queen
Speaking up for common people? -> on the side of the revolutionaries? -> his view on
Puritan revolution is ambivalent -> they became great poets, but they maybe did some
questionable things -> Cromwell -> bloody revolution
They could have done great things but also evil things -> Milton is great, Cromwell =
murderer
Radicalism (praising Milton & Hamden) <-> conservatism (Cromwell is a murderer)
ll.61-72 (THE CENTRE OF THE POEM)
ENJAMBEMENT BETWEEN QUATRAINS
Ask to be read together -> syntactically they belong together -> potential for virtue goes
together with potential for evil = Augustan
GRAY’S POLITICAL AMBIGUITY

ll. 73-84
POETRY AND THE ‘UNLETTERED MUSE’
Good become like Milton, but also poets who praised the aristocracy -> sang for their
supper -> used poetic inspiration not to axpress great feelings, but to praise aristocracy
and to earn money -> Milton = on side of revolution
Langland in Piers Plowman -> didn’t write for aristocracy -> denounced poets who sang
for entertainment of A
Poets should follow the unlettered muse -> toumbstones in graveyards -> sculpture who
couldn’t read or write = low job-> poet should take them as a model
THE DIVORCE BETWEEN POETRY AND PATRONAGE (cf. l. 72),2 AND THE SOCIAL
MARGINALIZATION OF THE POET
Increasingly dissolving -> depend on other sources of income -> depends on the market
place -> modern literature for increasing literate audience -> public that is willing to
buy => socially marginalized -> poets side with the lowest class
ll. 85-116
2
For an interesting, accessible discussion of the decline of patronage and the rise of a literary marketplace in the
18th-century, see https://arcdigital.media/rising-above-a-flood-tide-of-writers-7a1eb456a44c
HINTS OF SUICIDE? THE MELANCHOLY POET AS A DOOMED FIGURE?
Poet = doomed figure -> forgotten, lost in his thoughts -> tempted to join his subject
matter (the death)
Resigned -> leaving
ll. 93-96
SHIFT TO THE POET (‘FOR THEE…’)
For thee -> poet addresses himself -> artless = artful

ll. 97-116
THE PEASANT’S SPEECH:
BETWEEN LATINATE SYNTAX AND ‘NATIVE’ ALLITERATION
Peasant will speak in alliterative verse
He was a lonely, melancholy poet = doomed figure that would rather join his subject
matter than praise the Luxury & Pride
Poetry not longer secure as highest/most financially rewarded literature
THE ANGLO-SAXON MYTH: A PRE-ROMANTIC INTELLECTUAL’S VIEW OF THE
‘COMMON PEOPLE’ OF ENGLAND.

ll. 117-28
THE EPITAPH
He wasn’t born in a high family, but had a classical education (Science)
GRAY’S ELEGY: FOR WHOM?
Eledy for the poor? -> for the poet himself? -> both for poet & nameless, unglorious
death -> he wants to be seen as one of them
ANONYMITY, MARGINALIZATION AND THE POET’S SOLIDARITY WITH THE
LOWER CLASSES
Sides with the lowest classes -> he wants to be buried in their midst