Gothic Sounds and the Foreshadowing of Victorian Soundscapes

Abstract

Pre-Victorian Britain, as a transitory period from the Enlightenment to the Age of Industrialisation, witnessed shifts in understandings of ‘noise’, ‘sound’ and ‘music’ and growing interest in acoustics and other sound studies. Traditionally ending in 1820 with the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer, the main period of gothic fiction precedes the Victorian Era while foreshadowing its concerns, notably through the questioning of sounds’ impact on people’s movements and mental health. Manipulating the readers’ emotions and interpretation through the evocation of horror and terror, novelists used sound as one of the key features in the creation of the gothic sublime. Gothic’s gloomy atmosphere tends to be associated with the Victorian period despite its being embedded in another time span, showing the impact of gothic sublimity as a key concern of the nineteenth century. This article studies the extent to which pre-Victorian gothic fiction’s soundscapes mirror the evolution in sound perception, understanding and treatment over the turn of the nineteenth century, and foreshadow subsequent acoustic concerns. Through the definition of both generic and specific gothic soundscapes, it analyses the impact of sound theories on reality and fiction.