Black Gate

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of posts about Romanticism and the development of fantasy fiction; you can find previous installments here, here, here, and here. To recap so far: I’ve looked at the emergence of the fantastic in English literature in the 18th century up to about 1789, noting that it was connected to a strain of antiquarianism. Then I looked at developments in French literature, which included the creation of a tradition of literary fairy tales as well as stories based on the Arabian Nights; last week I looked at German writing, and noted that the 1789 publication of Friedrich Schiller’s popular Der Geist-Sehrer, The Ghost-Seer, helped foster a tradition of popular horror writing in German which had a complex relationship of mutual influence with another horror tradition in England. That English tradition is what I aim to write about this week: the Gothic novel.

Today, the adjective ‘gothic’ implies a certain aesthetic, deriving from the word’s use to describe a certain kind of horror writing that had its height in the 1790s. That usage is a largely modern phenomenon. At the time, writers of books we now call ‘gothic’ mostly described their works as ‘romances.’ (Certain critics, incidentally, have argued that gothic writing is distinct from Romanticism proper; my definition of Romanticism is broad, and certainly includes works self-consciously written in the romance tradition.)

Why ‘gothic’? Before about the middle of the 18th century, ‘gothic’ referred to the Germanic peoples who sacked Rome, and by extension to the Middle Ages that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. ‘Gothic’ therefore also meant things that were outdated or obsolete, and particuarly all that was crude or tasteless. It tended to imply superstition, and the marvellous. It was implicitly opposed to the classical. As an adjective, it could mean English or German, Druidical, Norman, Tudor, even, in some contexts, ‘Oriental’.

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This is the latest in a series of posts about Romanticism and the development of fantasy. You can find prior posts here, here, here, and here. I intend in this series to focus primarily on Romanticism in British literature, but last week I looked at the French experience and the French Revolution, and this week I want to look at German literature, which at this period is closely linked to British writing. The caveats I mentioned last week should be borne in mind; I am not a professional historian or academic, and I do not speak or read German — I’m familiar with a fair amount of this writing, but only in translation.

The German Romantic experience through to the 1830s is of an order of richness and genius at least equivalent to English Romanticism, and in order to be clear about how it all fits together, it’s probably worthwhile explaining some of the historical background. To begin with, in the middle of the 18th century, Germany wasn’t Germany. There was a vague sense of identity among German-language speakers, but their territory was divided up into 300 different polities of various sizes loosely linked together as the Holy Roman Empire (the obligatory historical joke is: The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor really much of an Empire). Certain noble and ecclesiastical positions among these states inherited the right to vote for the Imperial succession.

By the 18th century, this arrangement was running out of steam. Many of the states involved were finding their interests lay outside of the Empire — the House of Hanover, for example, had become the ruling family of Britain in 1714, while Austria was ruled by the powerful House of Hapsburg, who not only had effectively taken over the Imperial title but controlled a number of other states across Europe. The Holy Roman Empire in any event had suffered particularly badly in the 30 Years’ War, and arguably never fully recovered. Economically it was behind France and Britain. Three quarters of the population were poorly-educated peasantry. And because of the political division, no one German city had the central signficance of London or Paris — each state tended to be focused around its own capital; Vienna, the capital of Austria, one of the largest and most powerful states, was the closest thing to a central German metropolis. Whereas British and French literatures of the time seem dominated by writers and publishers clustered in their respective imperial capitals, the equivalent German movements developed through networks in many different places. The literary culture of Germany was overall somewhat underdeveloped, though strong traditions of popular drama had emerged, particularly in the form of stories about kings and bandits, and also in puppet-shows based on such tales as Faust (all versions of these Faust stories, incidentally, seem to be ultimately derived from Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus).

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In my previous posts about Romanticism and fantasy, I looked at British literature in the 18th century through to 1789, and tried to track the emergence of a certain kind of fantastic fiction. In order to understand what happens in British writing (and politics) after 1789, though, we have to look at what happens in France.

Before continuing, I need to emphasise: I am not an academic, or a professional historian. I’ve read a fair amount about the period, and I have an intense fascination with Romantic literature in English. These posts come out of that fascination, and are an attempt to relate what I see in that literature with the contemporary fantasy fiction that seems to me to be its direct descendant. All of which is to say that in writing about French literature and history, I am even more of a dilettante than in discussing British writing. There are people who dedicate their lives and careers to making sense of these subjects, and dissecting their various meanings; I am not one of them.

Having said that, it seems to me that the element of fantasy I found in English literature in the late eighteenth century was not present in contemporary French writing in the same way, or to the same degree. In Britain, it seems almost as though the suppression of the fantastic by neo-classical norms led to its eruption later in the century, at first under cover of antiquarianism, then more and more openly. In France, even more classical in its orientation than Britain, that process didn’t happen; instead it seems another type of fantastic fiction came to prominence.

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Last week, I described the neo-classical attitudes of the Age of Reason, which dominated English literature through most of the 18th century. This week I want to take a look at how and when things changed.

In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry that some critics have pointed to as the start of Romanticism in English literature. In fact, you can fairly easily find precursors to one aspect or another of the phenomenon called Romanticism; Blake, for example, was publishing his illuminated prophecies in 1789. But there were a number of works preceding him, as well, and I’m going to look here at some of those texts that seem to pave the way for Romanticism, particularly in the thirty years from 1760 to 1790.

Since I’m interested in Romanticism as a form of fantasy, the texts I’ll look at have to do broadly with the impulse toward fantasy and away from realism. I think the fantastic is a key characteristic of the romantic, while the classical or neo-classical emphasis of the earlier eighteenth century effectively went hand-in-hand with realism. It has to be said that there are other ways to look at Romanticism; it’s certainly true that Wordsworth in particular emphasised the importance of doing away with Enlightenment conventions, and with an outdated poetic diction, in order to focus on life as it was really lived across all social classes. Romanticism is an amorphous term. Writers of the era did not call themselves Romantic, and did not group themselves together the way we group them now. As a result, strict definitions are useless. If you look too long at the vast territory often ascribed to ‘romanticism,’ sooner or later you find significant overlap with ‘the enlightenment.’

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By way of beginning a discussion about Romanticism and fantasy, I’d like to take a quick look at where the Romantics came from. If Romanticism was a revolt against Reason, what was Reason understood to be? If Romanticism, as I feel, is essentially fantastic, is Reason opposed to fantasy? To know Romanticism is to know the Enlightenment which it was reacting against, so in this post I’ll try to describe some characteristics of the 18th-century Enlightenment in England that seem relevant to the development of fantasy. I’ll go up to about 1760, and then in my next post point out some of the counter-currents and proto-Romantic elements that were developing at the time and after.

A few broad statements to start with: The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, started in the mid-seventeenth century, viewed by thinkers at the time as a reaction against the wars of religion that had rocked Europe up through the Thirty Years’ War (which ended in 1648). Reason was considered the fundamental human faculty, and human beings were thought to be fundamentally rational actors. Deism, particuarly prominent in England, was a religious philosophy which suggested that God had created the world and left it to develop according to its own laws, without the intervention of miracle and revelation. Free speech, freedom of thought, and humanism were natural, because rational: in a free market of ideas, reason would naturally turn to the true and shun the false. Human rights as we understand them today derive from Enlightenment virtues.

This wasn’t simply a philosophical movement. This was a change in habits of thought across Europe. The scientific method became broadly diffused and rational thinking became an ideal. Isaac Newton developed new theories of physics and optics; he and Gottfried Liebnitz simultaneously developed calculus. The Royal Society was born in the late seventeenth century, helping to systematically spur the development of science. Europeans discovered the secret of making porcelain; clockwork reached new levels of sophistication; mercury thermometers were introduced.

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Before continuing the series of posts on Romanticism that I talked about last week, I’d like to write about a couple of subjects I’ve had on my mind for a while. First up is Q.D. Leavis, and her book Fiction and the Reading Public.

In or slightly before 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a letter to literary ciritc Queenie Dorothy Leavis. Leavis was preparing her PhD thesis, a book that would be an overview of the development of the bestseller and the publishing industry; as part of her preparation, she sent a questionnaire to sixty writers of various kinds, asking them about various aspects of fiction and publishing. Burroughs returned his questionnaire with a letter, which Leavis reproduced at one point in her book:

In submitting to you, in accordance with your courteous letter, my answers to your questionnaire, I wish you to know that I am fully aware of the attitude of many scholars and self-imagined literati toward that particular brand of deathless literature of which I am guilty.

From past experience it is only natural that I should assume that you may, in some degree at least, share their views. It would seem rather remarkable to me if you did not.

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I’ve been thinking over the past few days about last week’s post on William Blake and fantasy. I’ve come to realise that post is actually just the start of a much larger project.

I mentioned last week that I agreed with John Clute’s argument that the mid-eighteenth century was the era when fantastika — sf, fantasy, and horror — came into being. I’ll go further. I think the era that followed, the Romantic era of English literature, represented the dawn of fantasy as we know it; and that the major writers of that time pioneered approaches to fantasy, and elements of fantasy fiction, that are still in use today. I’ve realised now that I want to write about this general subject: Romanticism as the start of modern fantasy. But the more I thought about it, the more different connections I found between fantasy and Romanticism. So many, in fact, that I’ve also realised that there’s no way I can cover them all in one post.

I therefore intend to explore those connections in a series of upcoming essays. It’ll be an irregular series, I expect, interspersed with posts about more contemporary elements of fantasy as well. I anticipate it being wide-ranging. There are a lot of different aspects to Romanticism, and it’s a topic and a time that’s endlessly fascinating to me.

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