Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken from Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic was written by John Moore. Moore (1729-1802) was a Scottish doctor and writer who is best-known for Zeluco, which was an influence on Byron.

Zeluco is a Sicilian of noble birth. He has “every advantage of person, birth, and fortune,”¹ but his father died while he was young and Zeluco grows up unrestrained. He is sadistic and has a quickly-roused temper. While a child he delighted in killing birds by squeezing them to death in his fists, and as an adult he takes great pleasure in strangling children. His other pleasures include torture, wanton seduction, and killing other men in duels. Zeluco’s wife, Laura, is an innocent young German. Zeluco married her out of revenge and enjoys tormenting her, both physically and emotionally. Zeluco’s true partner is Nerina, who enjoys doing evil as much as Zeluco and urges him on to ever viler acts. After ordering the flogging death of a West Indian slave, Nerina drives Zeluco to strangle Laura’s infant son, on the grounds that the child too closely resembles Nerina’s former lover Carlostein. Carlostein is a noble soldier who represents goodness in Zeluco, but Carlostein is unable to save Laura from going insane when she hears about what Zeluco has done. Carlostein challenges Zeluco to a duel, but while Zeluco is preparing for the duel he decides to consult Nerina. But she is with another man, and Zeluco attacks him and is killed. Laura recovers her sanity and Carlostein marries her.

Zeluco is a strange novel. It alternately glories in Zeluco’s evil and condemns it. Zeluco’s acts make for difficult reading, and Moore’s prose style does not improve matters. Zeluco is written in a dry, old-fashioned style, with thick, slow descriptive paragraphs and turgid, melodramatic dialogue. The interesting moments are rendered inaccessible by land mines of paragraphs which spray boredom everywhere when read. But for all its lack of readability Zeluco is interesting because of the main character. His sadism and unrelenting drive toward indulging his “every impulse of passion,”² no matter how evil or because they are evil, impressed many Gothic and Romantic authors, including Byron, who referred to Zeluco in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” Zeluco is not a Gothic Hero-Villain; there is no conflict in Zeluco’s soul between his desires and his conscience, for he has none of the latter and allows no impediment to the former. Zeluco has nothing of the Romantic hero and is not modeled on Milton’s Satan, the true source of the Hero-Villain. Zeluco’s forefathers were the depraved, sadistic villains of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Zeluco’s only redeeming quality is his personal courage. Otherwise, he is thoroughly contemptible. He is ambitious, insolent, hypocritical, and gains an almost sexual pleasure from his cruelty. That said, the “’Zeluco theme’—the remorseful or antisocial hero’s rejection of, and rejection by, Nature”³—would recur not only in Byron’s work but in a great deal of Romantic literature.

Zeluco isn’t much in itself, apart from the character of Zeluco, but the novel was influential beyond what its inherent qualities would assume, and is worth reading for that reason.

Print: John Moore, Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken From Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic. Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2008.

¹ John Moore, Zeluco: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken From Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic, volume 2 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810), 257.

² Moore, Zeluco, 191.

³ Peter L. Thorsley, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1962), 216.