The Three Brothers: A Romance was written by Joshua Pickersgill, Jr. Pickersgill, Jr. (1780-1818) was an officer of the Bengal Army and published The Three Brothers a year before he joined the military. The Three Brothers is a mediocre Gothic full of depravity.

The titular brothers are Arnaud, Louis, and Henri, the sons of the Marquis de Souvricour. The Marquis, however, is unkind and separates the three brothers, having Claudio and Henri raised apart from each other and ignorant of their father’s true identity. The Marquis keeps Arnaud but treats him more as a pet than a human being. More unfortunate for Arnaud, he had once been handsome, “extraordinary in Beauty and Intellect,” but he was captured by a group of bandits and tortured by them, so that he is left a hunchback with an “excrescent” shoulder. After this, Arnaud’s brothers and friends spurn him and no woman will accept his love. Arnaud is so embittered that he decides to kill himself, but at the last moment changes his mind and decides to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for a new, healthy, handsome body. Satan agrees and puts Arnaud’s soul into the new body and gives Arnaud a new name, “Julian,” but demands that Arnaud’s old body remain in the cave where Arnaud performed the infernal summoning. Arnaud, as Julian, begins pursuing his grudges against his brothers, kidnapping them, bringing them to the cave, and torturing them. Arnaud’s new mistress, Lady Laurina, sexually teases the bound Henri in a scene reminiscent of de Sade. The Inquisition begins pursuing Arnaud and he decides to return to his old body, but Satan will only do this for Arnaud if he will kill one of his brothers. Arnaud kidnaps Claudio and takes him to the cave, but Henri, who has escaped, pursues Arnaud, intent on killing both Arnaud and Claudio. But Arnaud is too clever for Henri and easily captures him and plans on killing him rather than Claudio. But Arnaud’s plan does not go swimmingly: while he is stabbing Henri so as to bleed him slowly, and forcing Henri to renounce God while being killed, so that Henri will go straight to Hell after he dies, Claudio shoots Arnaud. The sacrifice of Henri fails and the Inquisition arrives and sentences Arnaud to death at the auto-da-fé.

The Three Brothers is one of the more over-the-top Gothic novels, taking the sexual and supernatural elements of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk and exaggerating them for the sake of sensationalism rather than the moral points (such as they are) which Lewis intended to make. In its depravity The Three Brothers anticipates Charlotte Dacre’s still-more explicit Zofloya: Or, The Moor and the ultimate in porno-Gothics, George Lippard’s The Quaker City. From Laurina’s arousal of Henri to the murder of an Moorish baby by peasants who want to see whether a black baby can fly, The Three Brothers is a long wallow in restraint-free sinning and vileness. Unfortunately, Pickersgill lacks the skill to replicate the realism of Ambrosio’s emotional torment or Dacre’s joy in unbridled female sexuality. The plot of The Three Brothers is tangled and confusing; brevity is not one of Pickersgill’s skills as a writer, nor is narrative coherence, and the occasional exciting effect or entertaining moment is outweighed by the lengthy stretches of dullness. Pickersgill wants to revel in atrocity but lacks the skill to make it fun.

Arnaud is a Hero-Villain, a man of great passion and ability, but his torment at the hands of the bandits warped him. The Captain of the band of thieves nursed him back to help, but this did not leave Arnaud grateful, and his bitter awareness of his new deformity drove him to the darkest acts.

Lord Byron acknowledged that The Three Brothers was the source for his Deformed Transformed,¹ but the latter only shows the difference between the poetaster and the poet.

Print: Joshua Pickersgill, The Three Brothers: A Romance. London: John Stockdale, 1803.

¹ Frederick Burwick, “Lord Byron’s Faustian Plays Manfred (1817), Cain (1821), and The Deformed Transformed (1822),” in Lorna Fitzsimmons, ed., Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2016), 47.