The Cambridge History of The Gothic, Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge History of The Gothic, Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright Roger Luckhurst (bio) The Cambridge History of The Gothic, Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright; pp. xvii + 541. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £120.00, $155.00, $42.00 ebook. The Cambridge History of The Gothic, Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, is the middle volume of a three-volume, sixty-essay set, bracketed by Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century (2020, also edited by Townshend and Wright) on one side and Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century (2021, edited by [End Page 717] Townshend and Catherine Spooner) on the other. It is slightly tricky to extract the middle volume in a series for review, but this panel of the triptych stands up well on its own because its arguments about national architecture at the start of the century, the Gothic tinges to British Romanticism in the 1810s, and the famous ghost-story competition at Villa Diodati in 1816 are seen as points of rupture and transformation that produce a distinct nineteenth-century iteration of the Gothic. The collection is structured as a loosely chronological set of twenty-one essays on topics such as Gothic Romanticism and the impact of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s sweet revenge on Lord Byron via “The Vampyre” (1819), the Shilling Shockers and Penny Bloods that shadow the work of Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins at mid-century, and the late-Victorian imperial Gothic. The chapters’ authors are principally from British universities, resulting in fairly conventional canonical English literary history coverage—as one might expect to read from the imprimatur of the Cambridge History series. There is a traditional formal thread that covers principal media (chapbooks, serials, poetry, the short tale, architecture, theater, popular magic performance) and a cluster of essays that makes some welcome attempts to displace the early Anglocentric focus of the collection (with essays on the Gothic in the literary works of Spain, Italy, and America, as well as the important Celtic fringes of Scotland and Ireland). Maisha Wester’s strong essay on the history of slavery in American and British Gothic hints at significant new axes in Gothic historiography, an indication of the major decolonial project on our organizing literary historical concepts being undertaken across nineteenth-century studies. On the whole, however, the collection is a relatively cautious consolidation of a familiar trajectory rather than a radical recasting or revision. The modest claims made by Townshend in his very useful introduction suggest that we need to expand beyond national boundaries and to correct the common notion that there is a first wave of the Gothic that ends somewhere around Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and only really returns with the late-Victorian revival, having been dispersed into serial melodrama, sensation fiction, or the ghost story in the intervening period. These seem by now fairly uncontentious arguments. It is important to remember and praise the immense academic labor this volume represents as a consistent, meticulously edited, and highly readable body of essays. These types of collections are always exemplary works of service to a disciplinary area, incredibly helpful to orient new students and scholars, and yet also (let’s be honest) slightly devalued. Research directors—in the United Kingdom anyway—routinely advise their staff to stay away from writing for so-called handbooks, which are considered universally summative and not formative forms of research and are thus likely to be judged poorly in the elaborate torture device that is the Research Excellence Framework. Townshend (an eighteenth-century expert) and Wright (a Mary Shelley scholar) have done an excellent service to Gothic studies by providing an authoritative survey of the literary history of the Gothic as it is conceived in 2020. The best essays push at the shape of conventional historical trajectories, though. The book might choose to start at the mythical point of origin in the Villa Diodati, but Maximiliaan van Woudenberg does some excellent work exploring the European circulation...