The Watch Tower was written by T.J. Horsley Curties. Little is known about Curties (?-?) beyond the six novels he published from 1799-1807 and his acquaintance with London literary circles.

The Watch Tower is the rare Gothic novel whose historical setting is precisely defined: Scotland in 1314, during the wars of Robert the Bruce against King Edward II. But the historical backdrop is only a scrim on to which Curties projects a lengthy catalogue of Gothic tropes. The Watch-Tower is about the Ulthona family. Morcar tortured the Earl of Ulthona to death, burned his castle, and hounded the Earl’s sons, Sigismorn and Adelbert. They take refuge in the ruined watchtower of Ulthona castle, and there encounter Imogen and her father, who are also fleeing from Morcar and his ally, Etheldart of Dunbeth. Imogen and her father leave the watchtower, and Imogen is forced into a convent by her father. Etheldart finds her there, and her miseries begin. She is harassed by a priest, Father Uglio and threatened with rape by Etheldart. Morcar captures Adelbert and brings him to Stroma, Morcar’s mountain fortress. Stroma lies at the bottom of a ravine, and the only way in is through a crane attached to a cliff. Morcar uses the crane to lower his enemies into Stroma, where they quickly become victims of his extensive torture chambers. Sigismorn pursues Adelbert into Stroma, but Morcar, before having Sigismorn thrown in chains, shows him his brother’s body. (Adelbert has been tortured and drugged, but is not dead—but Sigismorn does not know this). Morcar forgoes torturing Sigismorn so that he can pursue Imogen; he corners her in a subterranean passage and rapes her. With Morcar away his daughter, the virtuous Etheline, frees Sigismorn from the torture chamber. Imogen, Sigismorn, and Adelbert escape from Stroma and join the forces of Robert the Bruce, and in the Battle of Bannockburn are triumphant over the English and Morcar. Imogen is revealed to be Robert the Bruce’s niece, Sigismorn kills Morcar, and Sigismorn and Imogen are married.

The Watch Tower is long and complex, filled with scenes of torture, horror, and sexual threats. It was consequently popular and sold very well.

Though exploited by a writer such as Ann Radcliffe, Nathan Drake’s “Shakspeare [sic] of Romance Writers,” in The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), the Macbethian couplings of villainy, moral culpability, and a predisposition toward spectral projection would reach their culmination in the fictions of T. J. Horsley Curties, perhaps no more so than in The Watch Tower: or, the Sons of Ulthona: An Historic Romance (1803– 4), a four-volume Gothic fiction set variously in the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland during 1303 and 1304....

As in so many other earlier Gothic texts, Macbeth furnishes Horsley Curties with a particular way of ghost-seeing, one in which the guilty mind of the villain conjures up specters and projects them onto the objects and people that surround him. Although the ghosts that haunt Morcar in The Watch Tower are thus explained away as being ultimately of psychological rather than supernatural origin, Curties’s narrative nonetheless conserves a sense of the “unexplained supernatural” through recourse to a different mode of ghost-seeing, and one that is equally modeled on a Shakespearean original....¹

However, as Curties’s The Watch Tower so clearly demonstrates, Gothic appropriations of Hamlet are counterbalanced by, and juxtaposed with, the alternative model for the envisaging of specters offered up by the guilty projections of Macbeth the regicide. Indeed, throughout early Gothic writing, the virtuous encounter ghosts as if through Hamlet, the villainous by way of Macbeth. This points to a shared system of hierarchical ordering tacitly informing the work of many early writers of Gothic romance, for in much the same way that it celebrated the obscurity of terror over the immediacy of horror, so Ann Radcliffe’s essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” did little to disguise its privileging of the supernatural in Hamlet over that of Macbeth....²

Morcar is no Hero-Villain. He lacks any conscience, is power-hungry, and thinks nothing of rape, torture, and mass murder. He takes great relish in tormenting his enemies, and has as much spirit as any Gothic villain.

Print: T.J. Horsley Curties, The Watch Tower; or the Sons of Ulthona: An Historic Romance. Brentford, UK: P. Norbury, 1804.

¹ Dale Townshend, “Gothic Shakespeare,” in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 47-48.

² Townshend, “Gothic Shakespeare,” 49.