“Gothic,” in popular usage, has come to be used broadly to mean any story of horror or terror. In academia “Gothic” is usually more precisely used as a descriptor of a genre of literature, which usually (thought not always) incorporated horror or terror elements, published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But for most of the eighteenth century “Gothic” did not refer to literature at all, instead meaning something medieval, obsolete, and outdated. The writers of the Gothics themselves, especially during the late eighteenth century, rarely applied the term to their own literature. But because Horace Walpole gave his novel the full title The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Romance–and Walpole’s novel was of signal importance in the genre–the term “Gothic” was eventually applied to the genre as a whole.

The history of the Gothic genre is customarily traced to the publication of Walpole’s novel in 1764. Certainly The Castle of Otranto provide a blueprint for the genre. But there were a range of works published in the decades and even centuries before Otranto that had Gothic elements, ranging from Shakespeare¹ to ballads to various English and German novels, including Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury. A Historical Romance (1762) and Hall Harston’s The Countess of Salisbury (1763).² So while Walpole deserves most of the credit he receives for the creation of the Gothic genre, it’s more accurate to say that he cohered and popularized pre-existing elements.

What happened after the publication of The Castle of Otranto was a wave of imitations, especially in women’s periodicals, of which there were dozens being published in the 1770-1800 time period. While always a minority, Gothic stories were a regularly-appearing minority in these magazines, and though they are overlooked in current Gothic scholarship these stories are interestingly prescient regarding how the Gothic novel would later evolve.³ Still, the reading audience’s appreciation for the Gothic genre did not become a craze for the genre until the 1794 publication of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. The publication two years later of M.G. Lewis’ The Monk provided writers with the two models of the Gothic which would dominate the genre for the next twenty-five years: the Radcliffean, female-centered, rational Gothic, and the Lewisian, male-centered, supernatural Gothic.

Hundreds of Gothic novels were written in the wake of Radcliffe and Lewis, with production of the Gothic novel peaking around 1810. The 1810s saw a decline in production and the occasional pointed satire, particularly in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). A second round of Gothic novels began in 1820, prompted by Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. But this late efflorescence of the genre only lasted a decade, and by 1830 the Gothic novel as it was created by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and M.G. Lewis was dead, killed by changing tastes and the rise of the historical novel (see: The Historical Romance).

However, the motifs and tropes and themes of the genre diffused through mainstream literature. There was a temporary revival of neo-Gothic material in the mid- and late-1830s following Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834), and a smaller revival in the penny bloods of the 1840s (see: Varney the Vampire) and in works like Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847), but the advent of the domestic novel in the 1850s and the sensation novel in the 1860s temporarily put an end to the neo-Gothics. It was not until the 1890s that the Gothic returned, reinterpreted for the fin-de-siècle by authors like Arthur Machen (see: “The Great God Pan”), Robert Louis Stevenson (see: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde), and Bram Stoker (see: Dracula).

The Gothic genre arose out of the confluence of numerous different elements, including but not limited to: the rise in scholarly and popular interest in antiquity; an increasing awareness of Middle Eastern cultures resulting from the rise in the colonial trade, leading to Arabesque Gothics such as Abdallah and Vathek; the rise in Jacobinism, the philosophy of the rights of the individual; the influence of the Burkean aesthetic of the sublime and the picturesque; sentimental literature and the Cult of Sensibility; a conservative Protestantism and nationalism reacting to developments on the Continent, including secret societies (real and rumored; see: Rosicrucians), Catholicism, and the movement for Catholic emancipation in England (see: The Yellow Peril); the propaganda of the French Revolution; and the German Sturm und Drang.

The influence of the Cult of Sensibility was particularly strong. The best example of the Sensibility and the sentimental genre is Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1779), a novel of lachrymose excess whose titular character, Harley, is controlled by his emotions to the point that he is overwhelmed by the sufferings of other human beings and appears to die from joy alone. Harley’s Sensibility is benevolence, compassion, and crying at the slightest opportunity taken to extremes. The heroes of Sensibility live in a society of injustice and evil and embody the feelings which others lack, but the heroes of Sensibility do not allow their emotions to be governed by self-interest. While The Man of Feeling contains an implicit critique of Sensibility–Harley’s uncontrollable emotions lead him to defeats, unnecessary self-denial, and an early death–the English who adopted Sensibility overlooked or ignored this criticism and stressed the superiority of emotions and emotional responses to logic and rational thought. Those who easily blushed, cried, and fainted in response to sad or happy art or situations were therefore thought to be particularly virtuous. Sensibility was common in the Gothics, both in the heroine’s personality and in the inability or unwillingness of the Gothic’s primary villain, the Hero-Villain, to resist his passions.

Literary critics have tended to focus their attention on the gothic as a primarily British phenomenon, taking cursory glances at France and Germany only sporadically and apparently grudgingly. But the recently discovered library in Corvey Castle, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and the bibliography of its holdings reveal that there was extensive borrowing and interaction between British and German gothicists, while many British titles from this period that can no longer be found in England are available in the German collection. Similarly, by focusing on England and France, Cohen and Dever have identified what they call a “cross-Channel zone of literary culture [that] produced a vision of the universally emotive human subject abstracted from national difference and historical specificity” (20). Additionally, Marshall Brown has criticized the “monoglot” tendency in Anglo-American discussions of the gothic, arguing that the “romantic gothic was a common enterprise developed by an international community of writers” (1). Peter Mortensen has also challenged what he called the “somewhat narrow construction of the gothic genre” that has been operative in the writings of Anglo-American critics by calling for a “more complex intertextual and transcultural exchange” between national productions. Mortensen claims that writers of the gothic should be understood as “participants in an international dialogue,” “allies instead of opponents, united in their aim of appropriating, absorbing, and counteracting the sexually arresting and politically threatening fictions inundating Britain from the continent towards the end of the eighteenth century” (2005, 271).⁴

The three dominant literary genres in Germany in the eighteenth century were the ritterroman, the räuberroman, and the schauerroman. The ritterroman (“knight novel”) told stories of chivalry, the Middle Ages, and knights in armor, and gave the Gothic feudal settings, Catholic conspiracy, and encounters with the supernatural. The räuberroman gave the Gothic the figure of the bandit lurking on the fringes of society.

But it was the schauerroman (“shudder novel”) which had the most influence on the English Gothic. The schauerroman, which predated the English Gothic, was a direct influence on the Gothics of supernatural excess and gore. The schauerromane were Grand Guignol, a century earlier, in their plunge into bloodbaths and horrors; Thomas Carlyle called them “bowl and dagger” novels. Recurring motifs in the schauerroman included walking corpses, the appearance of Satan, Satanist secret societies, ghostly nuns, and bandits engaging in human sacrifice.

The German Gothic, especially the colporteur novels (those sold by wandering peddlers), is comparable to the kriminalgeschichte (see: Detective): it preceded its English counterpart, developed apart from it, was popular in its homeland, and survived for decades longer. Colporteur Gothic novels remained popular until the end of the century, and stories about hangmen were particularly popular. The best-selling German novel of the nineteenth century–over a million copies sold–was Victor von Falk’s Der Scharfrichter von Berlin (1890-1892), a 3,000-page colporteur novel which fictionalized the life of Julius Krautz, the official executioner of Berlin. Among its many other Gothic-influenced Grand Guignol pleasures Der Scharfrichter von Berlin had insane asylums, parricides, innocent women hanged, orgies, poisonings, grave robberies, espionage, child kidnapping, child murder, train crashes, the fall of a trapeze acrobat, and living people buried alive.⁵

The German influence was constant throughout the lifespan of the Gothic genre, and the list of stock devices, motifs, tropes, and setting which authors repeatedly drew upon came as much from Germany as it did from England. The devices, motifs, etc. developed early and quickly in the genre, and lasted throughout its lifespan. These included: ancient architecture, usually a castle, usually supposed to be haunted; inside the castle were trapdoors, deserted wings, darkened staircases, and paintings of great significance to the central mystery of the story; beneath the castle were dungeons and claustrophobic tunnels; weather operated either as omen or as the objective correlative of the protagonist or villain; messages were delivered in dreams; high-pitched emotions abounded, including swoons and fits; the supernatural was an accepted part of life; the clergy, nearly always Catholic, was corrupt, if not frantically lust-filled; patriarchal figures were revealed to be tyrants; a device, from birthmark to miniature, was crucial in the resolution of the plot; and scenes take place in tombs and crypts.

Twentieth- and twenty-first century critics have found the Gothic to be fruitful ground for analysis. These critics have traditionally attempted to divide the Gothic into binary/oppositional categories. The most common interpretation of the Gothic is that stories in the genre can be divided into “male” or female.” (Though this judgment is often based on the sex of the writer, it is no postmodern critical gimmick: even during the eighteenth century the Gothic was thought of in sexual, gendered terms). Many of the Gothics’ writers were women, and the genre had a large female readership. During the mid-eighteenth century the novel was thought of as the province of men, but the Gothic changed this perception, so that before the rise of the historical novel the novel was thought to have been feminized. But for many decades Gothics were classified as male or female, usually depending on the gender of the story’s author.

The female Gothic is usually a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story for the female protagonist, with Sensibility as a dominant concern and with a male authority figure as the story’s villain. Conversely, the male Gothic puts a male figure at the center of a story of social, sexual, and/or religious transgression and a quest for recovered patrimony and usually reduces the heroine to the status of object, to be sexually and physically threatened, rescued, and married. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho was one of the earliest and was the most influential of the female Gothics. Lewis’ The Monk was a powerful response to Udolpho and is the quintessential male Gothic.

However, a simplistic classification of the Gothic into male-vs-female based on the gender of the author quickly breaks down. Radcliffe, responding to Lewis, wrote a male Gothic, The Italian, with Vincentio, the novel’s protagonist, the subject of the coming-of-age plot. Other female writers wrote male Gothics (see: Zofloya; or, The Moor) while male writers wrote female Gothics (see: The Abbess). Although most female Gothics were written by women and most male Gothics were written by men, this was by no means a constant.

Another way of categorizing the Gothic was provided by Ann Radcliffe. The “terror” Gothic, usually the female Gothic, provides an elevating sensation (“expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”⁶) and is based on physical fear, from physical threats to psychological terror. The “horror” Gothic (usually the male Gothic) provides dread, “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates”⁷ the intellect. The horror Gothic stresses motivations and the devastating consequences of acting on them.

A third categorizing scheme is the “external,” socially-oriented Gothic versus the “internal,” psychologically-oriented Gothic. The external Gothic is concerned with the home: the lineage and patrimony of the hero, his disinheritance by the villain, and the revelation of the hero’s true identity and the restoration of his estate. In the external Gothic the home is defined by the male’s possession of it (or the lack of same). External Gothics with female protagonists are love stories in which the lovers are separated and the home is damaged, and the resolution of the plot enables the lovers to come together in marriage and the home to be healed. The internal Gothic is about the male hero’s rebellion and exile or flight from home, which assumes a negative (ruled by a patriarchal figure who cannot be unseated) or unreachable status.

The Gothic novel that English readers had known since 1764 came to an end after the 1820 publication of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, but that “end” was only an interval in which the Gothic underwent a transformation.

What is certainly true is that while one manifestation of the Gothic came to an end with Maturin’s magnum opus, the form and tradition did not simply die in that moment, but were reborn and revivified in new ways, so that, as Julian Wolfreys has explained, after the 1820s Gothic cannot be ‘figured...as a single, identifiable corpus’. The genre fragmented and took up ghostly habitations elsewhere, indeed everywhere, in nineteenth-century culture: ‘Escaping from the tomb and the castle, the monastery and the mansion, the gothic arguably becomes more potentially terrifying because of its ability to manifest itself and variations of itself anywhere’. From the realist to the historical novel, from the strictest of rationalists to the most credulous of believers, the Gothic became ubiquitous. Wolfreys calls this survival of the Gothic the ‘haunting absence’ of the genre as a body of works in and of itself.⁸

Patrick Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013.

Emily Jane Cohen, “Fairy Machines: Gothic Thrills in 18^th and 19^th-Century France,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2001.

David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012.

Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature. Second Edition. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013.

Douglass Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank, eds., Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2001.

Ann B. Tracy, Gothic Novel, 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1981.

¹ Dale Townsend, “Gothic Shakespeare,” in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 38-63 is good on the eighteenth-century perception of “our Gothic Bard.”

² Frederick S. Frank, The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (New York: Garland, 1987) names and describes several of these pre-Walpole proto-Gothics.

³ Robert D. Mayo, “Gothic Romance in Magazines,” PMLA 65, no. 5 (Sept. 1950): 762-789 is necessary reading on this.

⁴ Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010), xvi-xvii.

⁵ Ronald A. Fullerton, “Creating a Mass Book Market in Germany: The Story of the ‘Colporteur Novel’ 1870-1890,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 3 (Spring, 1977): 271.

⁶ Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826), qtd. in Frederick S. Frank, “Glossary,” in Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), 349.

⁷ Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry.”

⁸ Jarlath Killeen, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature, 1825-1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 3.