Coleridge's Gothic Readings

 

A sight to dream of, not to tell! “Christabel” (247)

The vicious taste of our modern Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, German Romances--take as a specimen the last, I have read, the Bravo of Venice / in the combinations of the highest sensation, wonder produced by supernatural power, without the means--thus gratifying our instinct of free-will that would fain be emancipated from the thraldom of ordinary nature--& and would indeed annihilate both space & time--with the lowest of all human scarce-human faculties--viz--Cunning--Trap door--picklocks--low confederacies &c / Can these things be admired without a bad effect on the mind

Notebooks 1808 Vol. 3 (ed. Coburn) 3449


One important episode in STC's powerful interest in the Gothic concerns his reviews of novels by Lewis, Radcliffe, and Robinson:

 

 . . . indeed I am almost weary of the Terrible, having been a hireling in the Critical Review for the last six or eight months--I have been reviewing the Monk, the Italian, Hubert de Servac &c &c &c in all of which dungeons, and old castles, & solitary Houses by the SeaSide & Caverns & Woods & extraordinary characters & all the tribe of Horror & Mystery, have crowded on me--even to surfeiting. (Letter to Bowles 16 March 1797)

 

The authorship of these reviews, with the exception of the one on The Monk (generally accepted as STC's), is in question. For texts of the reviews: Michael Gamer's Romantic Resources Page (Coleridge Reviews). For discussion of the authorship controversy:

Patterson, Charles I. "The Authenticity of Coleridge's Reviews of Gothic Romances." JEGP 50 (1951): 512-521 (disputes STC's authorship of Radcliffe reviews).

Roper, Derek. "Coleridge, Dyer, and The Mysteries of Udolpho." N&Q 19 (1972): 287-89 (attributes Udolpho review to Dyer).

Erdman, David. "Immoral Acts of a Literary Comorant. The Extent of Coleridge's Contributions to the Critical Review." BNYPL 63: 433-54; 515-30; 575-587 (generally accepts STC's authorship of the reviews).
 

 

·        Bürger, Gottfried August. Gedichte (1777). Letter to William Taylor (translator of some of Bürger's ballads) concerning W.W.'s and S.T.C.'s "controversy" about the poet, 25 Jan. 1800: " . . . not that I thought Bürger a great poet, but that he really possessed some excellences which Wordsworth denied him."

 

·        Godwin, William. Caleb Williams (1794). See Osborn's discussion in his "Preface" to The Borderers.

 

---. St. Leon. Letter to Southey 12 Feb. 1800: "[Longman] wonders (most wonderful!) that you do not write a Novel. That would be the Thing! And truly if by no more pains than a St. Leon requires, you could get 400 pounds!!"

 

·        Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. In addition to his review of The Monk in The Critical Review 2.19 (Feb 1797), 194-200, STC alludes to the novel quite frequently in his letters notebooks, and other writings, nowhere more dramatically than in his letter to Mary Robinson 27 Dec. 1802. Alarmed by the inclusion of his "A Stranger Minstrel" in her daughter's edition of Mrs. Robinson's posthumous Memoirs (1801), STC writes "I have a wife, I have sons, I have an infant Daughter--what excuse could I offer to my own conscience if by suffering my name to be connected with those of Mr. Lewis, or Mr. Moore, I was occasion of their reading The Monk . . . . Should I not be an infamous Pander to the Devil in the seduction of my own offspring?--My head turns giddy, my heart sickens at the very thought of seeing such books in the hands of a child of mine."

 

---. Castle Spectre (1797). Letter to W. W. 23 Jan. 1798: "The play proves how accurately you conjectured concerning theatric merit. The merit of the Castle Spectre consists wholly in its situations. These are all borrowed and absolutely pantomimical . . . . There is not much bustle but situations forever."

 

In "On the Principles of Genial Criticism" (1814), STC argues that if art pleases "merely by chance," we would "be no more justified in assigning a corruption or absence of taste to a man who should prefer . . . the Castle Spectre to Othello, than to a man for preferring a black pudding to a sirloin of beef" (Shawcross edition of Biographia Literaria, with His Aesthetical Essays 227). Read the Castle Spectre, courtesy of Diego Saglia of the University of Parma.

               ---. Bravo of Venice (1804). See entry from Notebooks above.

·        Maturin, Charles Robert. Bertram (1816). STC offers an extensive critique of the play (which reaches well beyond Bertram to comment on the current state of the theatre and its deplorable taste for "German Drama") in five issues of the Courier (1816), later published as Chapter 23 of Biographia Literaria (Princeton CW vol. 7.2 207-223). See entry below under Castle of Otranto and Alethea Hayter, "Coleridge, Maturin's Bertram, and Drury Lane" in New Approaches to Coleridge, ed. Donald Sultana (1981): 17-37. 

---. The Fatal Revenge: or, The Family of Montorio (1807). In his review of Bertram, Coleridge attributes the acceptance of Maturin's play to "the praises that had generally been awarded to the Family of Montorio, a novel of no small reputation in the bold and terrific line" (Princeton CW vol. 7.2 259).

---. Manuel: A Tragedy (1817). In his review for the Courier, 11 March 1817, STC finds Maturin's latest drama an improvement on Bertram: "for I found the play of last Saturday, only dull and inconsistent; not dull and loathsome" (Princeton CW vol. 3 447).

·        Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797). In addition to the question of the reviews, see letter to W. W. early Oct. 1810: "I amused myself a day or two ago on reading a Romance in Mrs. Radcliff's style with making out a scheme, which was to serve for all romances a priori--only varying the proportions . . . A Baron or Baroness ignorant of their birth, and in some dependent situation--Castle--on a Rock--a Sepulchre--at some distance from the Rock--Deserted Rooms--Underground Passages--Pictures--A ghost, so believed--or--a written record--blood on it! A wonderful Cut throat &c. &c. &c."

 

·        Robinson, Mary. (?)Vancenza, or the Dangers of Credulity (1792); Hubert de Servac (1798): See reviews.

 

·        Schiller, Friedrich. The Robbers (1792). Letter to Southey Nov. 1794: "My God Southey? Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? Did he write his Tragedy amid the yelling of Fiends?"

 

·        Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto (1765). From the Biographia Literaria chapter (23) on Bertram, an interesting recipe for German drama: "Now we have only to combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Harvey['s Meditations] . . . with the strained thoughts . . . of Young['s Night Thoughts] on the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility of Richardson['s Clarissa] on the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious villains (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the author's words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author (themselves the literary brood of the Castle of Otranto, the translations of which . . . were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as the originals were making in England),--and as the compound of these ingredients, you will recognize the so-called German Drama" (Princeton CW vol. 7.2 211).

 

---. The Mysterious Mother (1768). Table Talk: "The Mysterious Mother is the most disgusting, detestable, vile composition that ever came from the hand of a man. No one with one spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it" (Princeton CW, Vol 7, 469-70).