Session 8: Gothic Romance and History

2nd Global Conference

Monday 16th May – Wednesday 18th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland

History and Romance: Reading Netley Abbey, 1764-1848
Dale Townshend
University of Stirling, UK

English culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries perceived in the Gothic architectural ruins that populated the landscape so many physical embodiments of the nation’s historical past.   For optimistic Whigs, middle-class patriots and High-Church Anglicans, the ruined Gothic architectural pile served as a useful, tangible remainder (and reminder) of the nation’s history, from the arrival of the Goths on British soil; through the dark and shameful past of Catholicism; and into the Reformation; the Glorious Revolution; the triumph of Whiggism, and beyond. Marked and scarred by the passage of time, and arranging the various temporal stages of cultural process in visually perceivable strata, Gothic architectural structures for the eighteenth century were palimpsestic in the extreme.  As palimpsest, though, the Gothic ruin was only ever partially legible.   Invariably in a state of disrepair, and by nature fragmented and incomplete, the Gothic structure both disclosed and entombed the secrets of history, ultimately posing to those who sought to restitute a secure sense of the past as many questions as answers.  Consequently, the ruined Gothic abbey, tower, monastery or castle became the object of intense cultural fascination and intrigue in the latter part of the eighteenth century, a site of sustained historical investigation, hermeneutical interrogation, philosophical interrogation and imaginative projection.  The Antiquarian recuperation of things ‘Gothic’, for instance, resulted in a slew of scholarly publications, topographies and etchings, while the Enlightenment’s project of ‘philosophical history’ made an increasing appeal to the ruin’s status as valuable empirical ‘evidence’; poets and literary essayists mused of the Gothic ruin’s sublime aspects, while Gothic romancers peopled these crumbling structures with their dark and horrible imaginings.  In most instances, the gaps and silences in history were filled with imaginative, fanciful projections.    This was perhaps no more the case with Netley Abbey, the ruin of a medieval Cistercian monastery situated in the small village of Netley near Southampton, Hampshire.  Since as early as the 1730s, Netley Abbey had come under the scrutiny of English Antiquarians, but by the 1790s, that decade which witnessed the consolidation of the Gothic fictional mode, interest in this national ruin was at its most intense.  This paper seeks to consider the complex interchange between romance and history, fancy and fact in the broad range of publications that arose out of, or were prompted and inspired by, the Gothic ruins of Netley Abbey between the years 1764 and 1848.  Having provided an account of received critical views of the vexed and problematic relationship between history and romance, fact and fiction in the period, the paper will provide a reading of the interchange between these two conceptual and generic modes in, inter alia, G. Keate’s The Ruins of Netley Abbey: A Poem (1764); the topographical surveys offered in A Colored [sic] View of the Interior of the East End of the Ruins of Netley Abbey (1790-1810); William Sotheby’s proto-Romantic ode, ‘Netley Abbey, Midnight’ (1790); the parodic Gothic dramas Netley: A Comic Opera (1794) by William Shield and Netley Abbey; An Operatic farce in Two Acts (1794) by William Pearce ; the lurid Gothic imagination of Richard Warner in Netley Abbey: A Gothic Story (1795); the popular Antiquarianism of John Bullar’s A Companion in a Visit to Netley Abbey (1800); and George Guillame’s Architectural Views and Details of Netley Abbey [. . .] (1848).   Drawing conclusions about the significance of  actual architectural space to the early Gothic imagination, the paper concludes by offering reflections on the relationship between history and romance in that literary form that has subsequently become ‘the Gothic.’

The Pestilential Breath of Fiction: Bentham, Blackstone, and the Romance of Law
Sue Chaplin
Leeds Metropolitan University, Yorkshire, UK

In an unfinished supplement to his 1776 Fragment on Government, Jeremy Bentham began a critique of what he regarded as a particularly digressive and eccentric portion (a ‘crooked rib’, he called it) of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. It was in Blackstone’s preface to the Commentaries, Bentham argued, that one first encountered Blackstone’s tendency towards the generation of ‘pernicious fictions’ of law: Blackstone’s account of English law was riddled from this point on with specious rhetorical gestures and absurd literary imaginings, ‘begotten in the bed of metaphor’, that had served in Bentham’s estimation to infect legal reasoning with the ‘pestilential breath of fiction’. For Bentham, legal language ought always to remain free of ‘fanciful embellishments’ for only then could the law’s texts transparently reflect the law’s ‘truth’.

Maria Aristodemou has identified a correlation between Bentham’s nascent legal positivism, which abhors Blackstone’s ‘romance’ of English law, and the emergence of literary Realism in the mid-eighteenth century: legal positivism and literary Realism are based upon legal and literary conceptualisations of ‘verisimilitude’. This paper examines Bentham’s engagement with Blackstone in terms of the challenge to legal ‘verisimilitude’ posed by a mode of romance writing that was especially disruptive of the relationship between ‘text’ and ‘truth’: Gothic fiction. The focus here is not primarily upon Blackstone’s ‘Gothicisation’ of English law (though this ‘romance’ of English legal history is, for Bentham, an important instance of the pernicious fictivity at work within Blackstone’s text); rather, the aim is to consider the extent to which Bentham’s fragment of the Fragment engages with and is subverted by a mode of textuality characterised by ‘fanciful embellishment’, digressive paratexts and eccentric, ‘crooked’ parts  – a ‘Gothic’ textuality. The Gothic has its origin in a text that Robert Miles refers to as an ‘abject fake’: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Gothic romances of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century (and forms of the Gothic ever since) undermine their textual integrity via, for example, ambivalent prefaces, digressive embedded narratives, textual elisions and unstable narrative frames; Gothic texts are often disorientating, aberrant, abyssal and their various digressions and parerga suggest only the absence of a stable conceptual foundation. When Bentham attempts to analyse and debunk the operation of ‘pernicious fictions’ in Blackstone’s Commentaries by isolating their origin in a particularly ‘eccentric part’ of Blackstone’s preface, he encounters precisely this mode of textuality and it de-rails his project entirely. Indeed, this portion of Bentham’s Fragment becomes eventually inextricably caught up in the ‘Gothic’ labyrinthine intricacies of a literary textuality that disruptively reproduces or re-structures itself within Bentham’s work; the supplement to the Fragment comes finally, in spite of its own methodological and theoretical commitments, to reflect the abyssal textuality of the subject of its own critique – Blackstone’s preface to his ‘romance’ of English law. Bentham had no idea what to do with a supplement to the Fragment that had frustratingly grown to monstrous proportions in response to Blackstone’s lengthy, digressive imaginings. Finally, he resolved to excise it from the text altogether and possibly publish it separately as ‘A Comment on the Commentaries’.  This project was never realised, however, and the ‘Comment’ remained as a peculiar digression outside of any textual frame – an amputated fragment, one might say, lacking a textual body that it might, however monstrously, complete.

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Where Does Romance Take Over From History? The Work of Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee
Angela Wright
School of English, University of Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK

Where and how does Gothic begin to crystallise into a recognisable literary genre in the eighteenth century? Although Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 innovated in its tethering of ‘A Gothic Story’ onto a new type of novel, my paper will argue that it is not until the 1780s that the literary genre begins to cohere under a specific set of values. This it does, I contend, through the bold and enterprising debates on history and romance undertaken by Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee. While Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) argued rather conservatively for a proper striation of romance and history, Sophia Lee, by contrast, undertook to teach ‘the student of history’ some lessons from romance. Spurred on, perhaps, by the success of her historical-Gothic work The Recess (1783-5), the didactic Preface to Lee’s later translational venture Warbeck claimed that the history of which she treats in Warbeck can re-educate any student of history. Lee argues boldly that England’s historical record is less persuasive, less tolerant than that of its neighbouring enemy France. The arguments rehearsed by Reeve and Lee both refer quite specifically to France, and ground romance quite specifically in debates upon history, nationhood and nationalism. Both authors suggest that romance is a dynamic, transformative force that can reshape history. My paper will explore the differences and similarities between the claims of Reeve and Lee, and will argue that these debates were the ones that Gothic authors of the 1790s and 1800s, engaged in the work of romance, responded to. In addition to exploring the differing claims of Reeve and Lee, I will also refer quite specifically to the sheer number and wealth of authors who responded imaginatively to the historical Gothic that Lee popularised in the 1780s, 1790s and 1800s. As a discursive discipline, I will argue, history becomes consumed by the repositioning of romance by these authors.