VictorianGothic

What is Victorian Gothic? In a purely technical sense, the term could be taken to cover any Gothic text written within Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), but usually the writings of the last two decades of the nineteenth century are seen to be under the heading of the fin de siècle, so I will here focus on works written within the middle decades of the century (seefin‐de‐siècle gothic). The “original Gothic,” it has often been said, came to an end with the major publications of the 1810s and 1820s, principally Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein(1818) (seeshelley, mary wollstonecraft) and C. R. Maturin'sMelmoth the Wanderer(1820) (seematurin, charles robert); but in fact many of the major themes, tropes, and emphases of Gothic continued right through the nineteenth century, influencing some of the major works of the age. At the same time, the conventions of the Victorian period exerted their own influence on the Gothic, so that it is indeed possible to identify a “Victorian Gothic” that has major continuities with what preceded it and yet encodes its own cultural and social preoccupations. Largely gone, as the age goes on, are the medieval and aristocratic emphases of the turn of the century; in their place, to an extent, are scenarios that are very much of the “present time,” and yet issues to do with imprisonment, claustrophobia, and madness continue to haunt these very different settings and locales. Over all this, it has been said, looms the shadow of Victoria herself, a queen who, on the death of her consort, appears to have managed to plunge the whole nation into varieties of prolonged mourning, the shadows of which are felt everywhere in the literature and culture of the period. What follows will address four key aspects of the Victorian Gothic: the historical novel, the political Gothic, the “sensation novel” (seesensation fiction), and the ghost story. There will then follow something about the three major Victorian novelists who were most impressively influenced by the Gothic: Charles Dickens (seedickens, charles) and Charlotte and Emily Brontë.