Klosterheim; or, The Masque was written by Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey (1785-1859) was an English essayist and writer whose unsavory reputation rests largely on his opium addiction, which resulted in his writing Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), the work which earned him fame, if not entirely of the sort he desired, and which he continues to be known by. But De Quincey wrote widely, in a variety of forms, and if his fiction is today mostly forgotten it was not so obscure during his lifetime and for a long time afterward. One of these works is of particular interest for scholars of superheroes: Klosterheim (1832).

Klosterheim, set during the Thirty Years’ War, is a Gothic. “Klosterheim. . . is an imaginary city groaning under the despotic occupation of a Protestant Landgrave who is determined to crush the religious rights of the citizens. A sordid atmosphere of religious terror and persecution like that found in the monastery shockers of the period hangs sullenly over the story.”¹ Fortunately for the people of Klosterheim, one man, the costumed “Masque,” stands up to the Landgrave. “The Masque makes timely appearances, performing bold and occasionally supernatural deeds in behalf of the oppressed. He is also adept at unmasking and liquidating traitors, spies, and other political undesirables.”² The Landgrave attempts to hunt him down, but fails, and after a number of other plot twists, including the requisite romantic plot, the Landgrave is deposed and dies of remorse and the Masque unveils himself as Prince Maximilian, a veteran of the War and rightful heir to Klosterheim, which at the end of the novel he rules.

De Quincey was not comfortable writing fiction—it was not a genre he knew well—but publisher William Blackwood had offered De Quincey £100 for a work of fiction, and since De Quincey was somewhat familiar with Gothics, he wrote one to claim Blackwood’s money. The result was Klosterheim, which had as influences Schiller’s The Robbers, Zschokke’s Abällino, and Harriet Lee’s Kruitzner (1801). Klosterheim has traditionally been described as “the last, imitative survivor of a moribund school, that of the ‘tales of terror’”³ (a.k.a. the schauerromane). But as Patrick Bridgwater notes, Klosterheim is much too well-written for a typical Gothic—subversively so—and though the novel contains a catalogue of Gothic tropes it is ultimately a wish-fulfillment novel masquerading as a Gothic, with De Quincey’s Me character, his Gary Stu,⁴ being the Masque himself.⁵

Ever since De Quincey declined to allow this Gothic novella to be included in the collected edition of his works published in his lifetime, it has been supposed that he had something to hide in terms of too close a model, but this was a canard. The real reason was that he knew Klosterheim both to be far more personal than it seems, and to expose his main weakness as a writer, by which I mean the fact that his imagination was that of the ‘schoolman’ and historian rather than the creative writer; the opium-eating is explicable, in part, as an attempt to remedy this deficiency....

Klosterheim is overwritten, whereas almost all Gothic romances – let alone the average German Gothic potboiler – are underwritten, often vilely so. In this case the passages of purple (‘impassioned’) prose seem inappropriate....if Klosterheim is weak, it is so not because De Quincey has donned an outmoded (‘Gothic’) imaginative straightjacket, but because he has shown himself unable to do so anything so straightforward. The ostensibly inappropriate style of the novel, the clash between style and content, is accordingly explicable as an example of the textual instability of Gothic.⁶

Klosterheim’s relevance to modern literature springs not only from its innate quality (which is good) and from the fact that it was De Quincey’s only novel-length work, but also because of its ongoing influence on modern popular culture. Klosterheim may be an obscurity now, but it was given substantial coverage in Alexander Japp’s 1877 biography of De Quincey and was anthologized and used for literary criticism in the 1930s. The novel sold well enough for multiple editions to be issued during the nineteenth century, and it made its way into the zeitgest no less than many of the novels in this work did.

Specifically, Klosterheim is important in modern popular culture because of the character of the Masque. The Masque is an 1830s version of the hidden master of the city last seen with Count Rosalvo (see: Abällino the Great Bandit) and that would appear more memorably in the next decade in the characters of Rodolphe von Gerolstein (see: The Mysteries of Paris) and Edmond Dantès (see: The Count of Monte Cristo). “The Masque takes his place in their company in the category of hidden urban ruler, the masked/costumed/disguised vigilante who is the true ruler of the city in which he operates.”⁷ As the Masque tells the Landgrave in a note, "Landgrave, beware! henceforth not you, but I, govern in Klosterheim."⁸ This undemocratic assumption of rulership (less charitably, seizing of power) is not a very long way from Batman’s dictatorship in Gothic City, and many another heroic character’s rulership of their fictional locales.

Klosterheim, though naturally aged, still has the power to divert—De Quincey overwrote where most Gothic authors underwrote, and De Quincey’s overwriting is an entertaining thing—and also stands as a significant (if forgotten) work in popular culture history.

Print: Thomas De Quincey, Klosterheim; or, The Masque. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.

¹ Frederick Frank, The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (New York: Garland, 1987), 92.

² Frank, The First Gothics, 92.

³ Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, transl. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University, 1956), 76.

⁴ A “Gary Stu” is the male version of a “Mary Sue” character, a wish-fulfillment self-insertion into a narrative. See the Under Two Flags entry for more on the Mary Sue.

⁵ Patrick Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 144-147.

⁶ Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade, 142-143.

⁷ Nevins, The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger, 98.

⁸ Thomas De Quincey, Klosterheim; or, The Masque (Boston: Whittemore, Niles, and Hall, 1855), 144.