Books That Go Bump in the Night, Part 2

One of the most popular of the Gothic writers, long after her death, was Ann Radcliffe. Originally published in 1794, her Mysteries of Udolpho continued to be a bestseller, particularly among young ladies, throughout the nineteenth century in both England and America.

Born Ann Ward in 1766, she married William Radcliffe, a journalist and newspaper publisher, in Bath in 1788. Like her heroines, she was beautiful, quiet, and virtuous. She turned to writing for amusement and was amazed at her own success. She hated being in the limelight so much that, when she ventured to the opera with her husband, she sat in the pit rather than in a box so no one would recognize her.

But she understood that fine line between being terrified and being horrified. Because of her success, she inspired countless imitators, some of whom took their suspense stories like those she penned and added gruesome murders or detailed tortures.

But Ann drew the line at such things. She saw a huge difference between enjoying a good scare and being grossed out. “Terror and horror,” she wrote in a preface to her book of poetry, “are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties, to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”

That is perhaps the true power of the Gothic novel. It titillates and teases us, suggests something amazing is afoot, and keeps us turning the pages to find out. Her stories epitomize that philosophy. Take this description of a spooky ruined abbey from The Romance of the Forest (1791), her most popular work:

He entered what appeared to have been the chapel of the abbey where the hymn of devotion had once been raised and the tear of penitence had once been shed sounds which could now only be recalled by imagination--tears of penitence which had been long since fixed in fate. La Motte paused a moment for he felt a sensation of sublimity rising into terror, a suspension of mingled astonishment and awe. He surveyed the vastness of the place and as he contemplated its ruins fancy bore him back to past ages. And these walls, said he, where once superstition lurked and austerity anticipated an earthly purgatory now tremble over the mortal remains of the beings who reared them.

Not horror, then, but a fascination of things beyond them is what drove young ladies to read Gothic novels long into the night. And isn’t that what all good books do today?

Books, Part II: Fordyce's Sermons, Mad Monks, and Silver Fork Novels

So what did a well-brought-up young lady read?

Well, there was frequently a difference between what she was expected to read and what she wanted to read. Reading material was supposed to be uplifting and improving, so the Bible was always a safe choice, as were other religious works. The most famous of these was James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, published in 1766 but still read (and eventually laughed at) well into the 1800s. They emphasized the weakness and delicacy of young women and preached subordination to men in all things, and were dreadfully sentimental in tone to boot. So it can definitely be surmised that many a young lady may have concealed other books inside their copies of Fordyce to fool watchful parents and governesses… books like:

Evelina: Fanny Burney was a reader to Their Majesties George III and Queen Charlotte, and was evidently inspired by her job to try her own hand at penning books. Evelina, Cecelia, and Camilla were stories about young women entering society and learning to distinguish between rakes and reputable men. Nothing racy, but nowhere near as improving as Mr. F.

The Monk: This 1795 novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis (who was forever after known as “Monk” Lewis) was racy stuff, involving a young woman disguising herself as a monk and entering a monastery for love of the monastery’s abbot…except that she turns out to be a demon in disguise. If you were caught with this novel tucked inside your Fordyce, you were in BIG trouble.

The Mystery of Udolpho: Ann Radcliffe wrote several spooky, over-the-top dramatic gothic novels in the late 1790s that were extremely popular. They generally featured beautiful young heroines being somehow endangered by sinister but handsome villains in exotic locales and eventually rescued by equally handsome but noble heroes. Definitely not Fordyce-ish. Other of Mrs. Radcliffe’s titles include The Romance of the Forest, The Castle of Wolfenbach, and The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents.

Not everyone was swept up in the Gothic novel craze, with their fevered plots and supernatural overtones. Walter Scott’s 32 Scottish historical novels, the first of which, Waverley, came out in 1814, were enormously popular and actually still readable today. Those were books you might not have to hide behind Fordyce. Ditto for the novels of the divine Jane Austen, which were also very popular, from Pride and Prejudice to Northanger Abbey, which makes fun of gothic novels.

In the 1830s and 1840s, Charles Dickens was, of course, everyone’s favorite novelist. But also popular were so-called “silver fork novels”, a series of glitz-and-glamour, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous type novels released by publisher Henry Colburn, complete with mention of product names like Macassar Oil (and you thought the recent uproar over Cover Girl product placement in books was a new phenomenon?). By the time these were popular, though, Fordyce was mostly a thing of the past…which in a way was too bad. He’d been frightfully useful to hide other books behind.