ON THE CLIFF EDGE OF ENGLAND: TOURISM AND IMPERIAL GOTHIC IN CORNWALL

Abstract

The final chapters of Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) are set in a house on the “very verge” of a cliff in Cornwall, the peninsula located at the far south west of England. The narrator, Malcolm Ross, travels overnight from London to Cornwall, then describes his first sight of the house, and a little later the position of the dining-room, its walls hanging over the sea: We were all impressed by the house as it appeared in the bright moonlight. A great grey stone mansion of the Jacobean period; vast and spacious, standing high over the sea on the very verge of a high cliff. When we had swept round the curve of the avenue cut through the rock, and come out on the high plateau on which the house stood, the crash and murmur of waves breaking against rock far below us came with an invigorating breath of moist sea air . . .We had supper in the great dining-room on the south side, the walls of which actually hung over the sea. The murmur came up muffled, but it never ceased. As the little promontory stood well out into the sea, the northern side of the house was open; and the due north was in no way shut out by the great mass of rock, which, reared high above us, shut out the rest of the world. Far off across the bay we could see the trembling lights of the castle, and here and there along the shore the faint light of a fisher's window. For the rest the sea was a dark blue plain with here and there a flicker of light as the gleam of starlight fell on the slope of a swelling wave. (195–96; ch. 17) In this liminal place, there is a confusion of categories: the sea not only crosses the boundary into land (the sound of its “murmur” and its moistness in the air) but seems itself to become land (a “dark blue plain”). The actual land is in contrast invisible from the house, being shut out by a mass of rock that rears high above. From the far distant shore, on the other side of the bay, the lights vibrate across both land and sea, further collapsing the sense of a distinction between them: from the “trembling lights” of the castle to the intermittent “flicker of light” on the waves.