Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography 9781442677333

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Chronology
Part One: Personal Themes
1. The Hard Fist of Hymen
2. The Fruits of a Single Error
3. The West Indian
4. The Magnet
Part Two: Political Variations
5. Horribly Bit by the Rage of Writing: 1775-1795
6. An Inundation of Ghosts: 1796-1812
7. Converse with the Departed: 1812-1817
8. The Isle of Devils: 1815-1818
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MONK LEWIS A Critical Biography

James Gillray, Tales of Wonder! This attempt to describe the effects of the Sublime & Wonderful is dedicated to M.G. Lewis Esqr. M.P.' (1802). Copyright © the British Museum.

MONK LEWIS A Critical Biography

D.L. MACDONALD

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4749-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Macdonald, David Lome, 1955Monk Lewis : a critical biography Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4749-1 1. Lewis, M.G. (Matthew Gregory), 1775-1818. 2. Authors, English 19th century- Biography. I. Title. PR4888.M32 2000

828'.709

COO-930195-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

PREFACE

Vll

CHRONOLOGY

xiii

Part One: Personal Themes 1. The Hard Fist of Hymen 2. The Fruits of a Single Error

3 14

3. The West Indian 33 4. The Magnet 59 Part Two: Political Variations 5. Horribly Bit by the Rage of Writing: 1775-1795 95 6. An Inundation of Ghosts: 1796-1812 129 7. Converse with the Departed: 1812-1817 186 8. The Isle of Devils: 1815-1818 198

NOTES

211

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

297

235

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Prefacee

Matthew Gregory Lewis will always be remembered primarily as the author of The Monkgd(1796). I agree with Coleridge thatshissafdsgfsdfsd West India Proprietor (1834) is a better book,1 but I do not remember when I first read it. I vividly remember staying up until three in the morning, in my grandmother's kitchen in Port Credit, to learn the fate of Ambrosio. Nevertheless, it is a fact of some historical interest that Lewis was a liberal slave-owner in the age of abolition; it is also one of the sources of the power of The Monk. It is of some interest that he was a homosexual during the most homophobic period in English history (Crompton 261), and this is another source of the power of The Monk, From a narrowly literary point of view, a writer who translated or adapted works by Goethe, Herder, Kleist, Kotzebue, and Schiller, and who can claim to have influenced or inspired Artaud, Charlotte Bronte, Byron, Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Dacre, Dickens, Dumas pere, Flaubert, Gounod, Hoffmann, Hugo, Keats, Kleist, Maturin, Merimee, Radcliffe, Sand, Scott, both Shelleys, Sheridan, and (possibly) Yeats, is a figure of considerable importance.2 And according to Louise Pound and Jose Joaquim Dias Marques, ballads clearly derived from 'Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine' were still part of the oral tradition of Nebraska in the 1940s and Portugal in the 1980s. The previous biography of Matthew Gregory Lewis, by Louis F. Peck, appeared in 1961. Peck (who is also responsible for the first critical edition of The Monk}^ worked on Lewis for about thirty years, and scholarship will always be indebted to him. My own debts will be evident on every page; in the course of a mere decade on this project, I have worn out two copies of his biography. From the perspective of 2000, however, Peck's book has serious short-

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comings. First and most simply, a substantial amount of manuscript material has become available since 1961, notably the records of the judicial separation of Lewis's parents, his letters to his friends Lord and Lady Holland, documents concerning his plantations in Jamaica, and a four-hundred-page volume of verse which ended up in the National Library of Jamaica. I have made extensive use of this material throughout this book. Second, and not surprisingly for someone writing in 1961, Peck was embarrassed by the likelihood (I would call it a near-certainty) that Lewis was gay. In 2000, it is possible to address that issue more dispassionately, and I have done so in chapter 4. Third, and astonishingly for someone who devoted so much time to Lewis, Peck did not take him seriously as a writer. Discussing Lewis's claim to have written The Monk in ten weeks, for example, Peck says: 'Speed of composition adds a kind of extrinsic value to literary work, and possibly a Gothic novel needs all the support it can get' (20). He opens his discussion of Lewis's plays on an even more depressing note: 'Though they do not make stimulating reading, summaries of these brainless stories are dutifully included in this chapter ...' (68). We have since learned to take more interest in sensational novels and popular entertainments. Fourth, Peck divides his book into chapters on 'The Monk,' 'Society,' 'Dramas,' 'Prose and Verse,' and so on, thus compartmentalizing Lewis. The organization of the present book is designed to bring out the connections between various facets of Lewis's life and work that Peck's organization obscures; making such connections is, in my view, the first essential task of critical biography. It is pleasant to recall that the idea for my own organization was suggested by the late Charles Peake, my MA supervisor. In James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist (1977), the book that first made me feel that criticism might be a job worth doing, he points out that 'The portrait of the artist involves the unchanging as well as the changing' (85): accordingly, his discussion of Joyce's first novel includes both a section on the changing ('integritas'), Stephen's development (69-85), and a section on the unchanging ('consonantia'), his 'constant traits' (85-95). Thisjoycean - indeed, Thomistic - aesthetic is in accord with the psychoanalytic definition of identity advanced by Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, as 'a theme embodying sameness plus variations embodying change' (280). 'Personal Themes,' the first part of this book, deals with Lewis's constant (if not quite unchanging) personal preoccupations: in my view, these stemmed from the failure of his parents' marriage, from his relationships with his mother and his father, and from his sexuality. The second part, 'Political

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Variations,' deals with his public life as part of the literary arid political history of his period. The first part, then, is analytical; the second part is narrative. The first tries to give a sense of the structure of a life; the second, of its texture. Naturally, there is a certain amount of overlap: the personal is political, of course, and the political is personal too (otherwise, there would be no need to discuss them both in the same book). The problem of slavery, to take the most obvious example, seems to have shaped every aspect of Lewis's personal life; consequently, it appears in every chapter in the first part of the book, as well as in the last chapter in the second part, which deals with his voyages to Jamaica. The second essential task of critical biography is to negotiate between two contrasting and complementary approaches to the biographical subject - approaches which Ashraf H.A. Rushdy (following Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris) calls 'etics' and 'emics': 'Etics ... is a description or analysis from an "alien" view, with criteria external to the system under analysis. Emics is a description from the internal view, with criteria chosen from within the system': Rushdy suggests wittily that the combination of these approaches be called 'an "emetics of interpretation"' (7). But he is serious, and in my view correct, in arguing that an emic approach to a foreign (e.g., past) culture is, to some extent, possible; that an etic approach is, to some extent, justifiable; and that the combination of these approaches is uniquely valuable. Thus, I do not share the attitude of Lewis's contemporaries towards homosexuality, and I do not hesitate to judge that attitude (etically); but first I try to understand it (emically). I do not share Lewis's own attitude towards slavery, and I do not hesitate to judge it; but first I try to understand it. The sections of the Bibliography devoted to Lewis's manuscript works, his letters, his published works (first editions and standard modern editions), and contemporary reviews and notices of them are as complete as I could make them; the rest is selective, listing those works which have helped to shape this book (whether or not they are cited in the course of it). It is pleasant to recall all the people and organizations who have helped me to research and write this book. I began it as a Canada Research Fellow, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Calgary; I finished it on a sabbatical fellowship supported by the University of Calgary. I would like to begin by thanking SSHRCC, HSSFC, and both universities for their support. Next I would

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like to thank the many librarians who have helped me, especially at the British Library; the London Metropolitan Archives, particularly N. Avery; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, particularly Cathy Henderson and Heather Moore; the Harvard Theatre Collection, particularly Annette Fern; the Houghton Library, Harvard University, particularly Jennie Rathbun; the Huntington Library, San Marino, particularly Kathy Schneberger; the National Library of Jamaica, particularly Eppie Edwards; the National Library of Scotland, particularly J.F. Russell; the Public Record Office; the University of British Columbia Library, particularly Inter-Library Loan; the University of Calgary Library, particularly Document Delivery Services; and the Moodie Medical Library, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, particularly Inter-Library Loan. I am also grateful to Christ Church College, Oxford, particularly J.F. A. Mason and Mark Curthoys; John Murray Ltd., particularly Virginia Murray; the Theatre Museum, London, particularly Julia Law; Westminster School, particularly John Field; and the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, particularly David C. Devenish, Gill Rayment, and Robert Bell. I am grateful to the British Library, for permission to quote from letters by Lewis, Matthew Lewis, Charles James Fox, and William Wilberforce; to the London Metropolitan Archives, for permission to quote from the records of Lewis's parents' separation; to the National Art Library, for permission to quote from the manuscript of The Effusions of Sensibility, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, © Victoria and Albert Museum; to the National Library of Jamaica, for permission to quote from Lewis's poems in MS 114; to the National Library of Scotland, for permission to quote from Lewis's letters to Scott; to Grove/Atlantic, for permission to quote from The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, edited by Louis F. Peck (1952); to Harvard University Press, for permission to quote Lewis's letters and other materials, reprinted by permission of the publishers from A Life of Matthew G. Lewis, by Louis F. Peck, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, copyright ©1961 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; to John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, for permission to quote from Byron's Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand (1973-82); to Oxford University Press, for permission to quote from The Complete Poetical Works of Byron, edited by Jerome J. McGann (1980-91), and from The Mysteries ofUdolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, edited by Bonamy Dobree (1980), by permission of Oxford University Press; and to Princeton University Press, for permission to quote from Conversations of Lord Byron, by Thomas Medwin, edited by Ernest J. Lov-

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ell (1966), copyright ©1966 by Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Earlier versions of various parts of this book were presented at the annual meetings of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the North-West Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, and published in English Studies in Canada, the Journal of Narrative Technique, Lumen, Romanticism and Colonialism, edited by Timothy Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge UP, 1998; reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press), and the Transactions of the North-West Society for EighteenthCentury Studies. I am grateful to all these venues for the opportunity to try out my ideas; to my auditors, editors, and readers for helping me to clarify them; and to my publishers for permission to reprint them. I am grateful for the personal help and encouragement of Paula Backscheider, Ron Bond, Elizabeth Anne Cater, Jim Clayson (record agent, London), Eleanor Cook, Christopher Densmore, Grant and Thompson (taxi drivers, Jamaica), B.W. Higman, Leslie and Priscilla Inverarity, Marie Loughlin, Sylvia Macdonald, Charles Mann, Jay Macpherson, Anne McWhir, Patricia Merivale, Catherine NelsonMcDermott, Bill New, Mervyn Nicholson, David Oakleaf, Eric Quayle, Vivienne Rundle, Eric Savoy, Judith Terry, Dan White, Judy Williams, and Paul Yachnin. I owe Roberta Jackson more than I can say. This book is for her.

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Chronology

1773: Marriage of Matthew Lewis'and Frances Maria Sewell (22 February) . 1775: Birth of MGL (9July). 1776: Birth of Fanny Maria Lewis (5 October). 1778: Birth of Barrington Lewis (29 March). 1780: Birth of Sophia Elizabeth Lewis (10 February). 1781: MGL enters Marylebone Seminary (?). Elopement of Mrs Lewis and Samuel Harrison (June/July). 1782: Birth of Fanny Lacey (3 July). 1783: Judicial separation of Mr and Mrs Lewis (27 February); rejection of Mr Lewis's petition for a parliamentary divorce (6 May); MGL enters Westminster School (19 June). 1787: Foundation of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 1789: Storming of the Bastille (14July). 1790: MGL enters Christ Church College, Oxford (April). 1791: MGL travels to Paris to learn French (September). Slave revolt and civil war in St Domingue. 1792: First reference to 'a Roma [nee] in the style of the Castle of Otranto' (March); MGL travels to Weimar to learn German (July), meets Goethe and Wieland. 1793: France declares war on Britain and Holland (1 February); MGL returns to Oxford (May), visits Bothwell Castle (December). 1794: MGL receives BA from Christ Church, Oxford; arrives at The Hague as attache to the British Embassy (15 May); finishes The Monk (23 September).

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1796: Publication of The Monk (12 March); of Village Virtues. Election to Parliament. 1797: MGL receives MA. Publication of The Minister; production of The Castle Spectre (Drury Lane, 14 December; published 1798). 1798: Publication of the expurgated fourth edition of The Monk. Meeting with Scott. 1799: Publication of The Love of Gain; of Rolla; production of The Twins (Drury Lane, 8 April); of The East Indian (Drury Lane, 22 April; published 1800). 1800: Death of Barrington Lewis (13January). 1801: MGL moves to Barnes. Meeting with Moore (March). Publication of Tales of Wonder; of Alfonso; of Adelmorn; production of Adelmorn (Drury Lane, 4 May). 1802: Production of Alfonso (Covent Garden, 15 January). MGL resigns his seat in Parliament; meeting with Isabella Kelly and her son William. 1803: Break with his father. Production of The Captive (Covent Garden, 22 March); of The Harper's Daughter (Covent Garden, 4 May). 1805: Publication of The Bravo of Venice; of Rugantino; production of Rugantino (Covent Garden, 18 October). 1806: Publication of Adelgitha; of Feudal Tyrants. 1807: Production of The WoodDaemon (Drury Lane, 1 April); of Adelgitha (Drury Lane, 30 April). Abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. 1808: Publication of He Loves and he Rides Away; of Twelve Ballads; of Romantic Tales; production of Venoni (Drury Lane, 1 December; published 1809). 1809: Recitation (Drury Lane, 14 February) and publication of Monody on the Death of SirJohn Moore; production of Temper (Drury Lane at Lyceum, 1 May). MGL takes quarters in the Albany (June). 1811: Production and publication of Timour the Tartar (Covent Garden, 29 April) and One O'Clock! (Lyceum, 1 August). 1812: Death of his father (17 May). Production of Rich and Poor (Lyceum, 22 July); publication of Poems. 1813: Meeting with Byron. 1814: Publication of Rich and Poor. 1815: Disgrace of William Kelly; departure for Jamaica (10 November). 1816: Arrival in Jamaica (1 January); departure from Jamaica (1 April); arrival at Gravesend (5June); trip to Geneva (August), Florence (October), Rome (December).

Chronology

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1817: Naples (January-March); return via Venice (July-August) and Paris (September); second departure for Jamaica (5 November). 1818: Arrival in Jamaica (24 January); departure on second return voyage (4 May); MGL dies at sea (16 May). 1822: Death of his mother. 1833: Emancipation of British West Indian slaves. 1834: Publication of Journal of a West India Proprietor. 1839: Publication of The Life and Correspondence ofM.G. Lewis, by Margaret Baron-Wilson.

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PART ONE Personal Themes

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One

The Hard Fist of Hymen

1 Matthew Lewis (1750-1812) and Frances Maria Sewell (d. 1822) were married on 22 February 1773, in the parish church of St Martin in the Fields. Their families both owned estates in Jamaica and had neighbouring estates in England (Peck 3); considered as a sort of merger, as marriages often were in their class at this time (Gillis 135, 141), or as the sort of dynastic marriage often promoted by the villains of Gothic novels (Ellis 46), it was a suitable match. Considered as the love-match sought by Gothic heroines (Ellis 50), it seems to have been less suitable. The Lewises had four children: the future novelist, Matthew Gregory, was born on 9 July 1775; Fanny Maria, on 5 October 1776; Barrington, on 29 March 1778; and Sophia Elizabeth, on 10 February 1780. Temperamentally, Mr and Mrs Lewis were unsuited to each other (Baron-Wilson 1:45). We know a little about their marriage from Margaret Baron-Wilson, their son's Victorian biographer (and apparently a friend of Mrs Lewis, who survived both her husband and her son); we know more from the efforts of Mr Lewis to obtain a judicial separation from his wife, which were successful, and from his later efforts to obtain a parliamentary divorce, which were not. In his 'libel' or petition for a judicial separation, Mr Lewis (or his lawyers) claimed that he and his wife had 'continued to live ... together happily' for about seven years, until late in 1779 or early in 1780, when 'many unhappy differences and disputes arose between them occasioned by the imprudence, misconduct and obstinate Temper of... Fanny Maria Sewell.' Even during this unhappy time, however, 'Matthew Lewis constantly behaved to and treated ... his Wife with the greatest Love Tenderness and Affection'

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('Lewis against Lewis' 296a-b). In her reply, Mrs Lewis (or her lawyers) argued that the couple 'were unhappy with each other and had talked of a Separation long before' 1780 (307b). Mr Lewis's servant Timothy Newland later testified 'that though they lived together in the same House, they slept in separate Beds from November 1778; [and] that Mr. Lewis always used to dress below Stairs,' though the birth of Sophia in 1780 suggests that this custom was not invariable (Journals of the House of Lords 36:670). According to her friend Mrs Baron-Wilson, although Mrs Lewis 'mingled freely' in 'fashionable life, ... she was perhaps induced to do so, more in accordance with her husband's wishes, than her own' (1:9-10). From Mr Lewis's point of view, the problem was not his wife's distaste for high life but her taste for low life; he objected to her 'making choice of one Samuel Harrison a Musician and other Persons for her Companions whom [he] thought improper Companions for his Wife' - he was, after all, deputy secretary at war and chief clerk of the War Office. He 'seriously and gently remonstrated with her on the impropriety of her Conduct' in keeping company with Harrison, 'a person much beneath her Situation in life,' and urged her to resume conjugal relations. She, however, 'refused to Sleep in the same Bed with him ... and insisted on being left to the Choice of her Companions' ('Lewis against Lewis' 296b). To a modern reader, Mrs Lewis's reply looks attractively assertive; but it can only have been included in a late-eighteenth-century legal document as damning proof of her imprudence, misconduct, and obstinate temper. The couple agreed on a private separation. The terms of the arrangement were unusually favourable to Mrs Lewis. Her husband gave her an annuity of six hundred pounds, allowed her to live in one of his two houses, granted her custody of all their children, and guaranteed her the right 'to live separate and apart from him, and to reside and be in such place and places and in such family and Families and with such Relations Friends or other Persons as she ... should think fit' ('Lewis against Lewis' 297b—8a). Even before the agreement had been signed, however, she took an irreversible step towards disaster. In June or July 1781, while Mr Lewis was absent on a visit to the Duke of Dorset, Mrs Lewis went to his house to collect her clothes. According to another servant, Ann Taylor, Harrison came to see her there and stayed until five in the morning. According to the libel, Harrison was with her still, or again, when Mr Lewis came home, 'very unexpectedly.' Mrs Lewis and her lover left the house 'immediately and precipitately,'

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and she never returned to it (Journals 36:669; 'Lewis against Lewis' 297a). According to Baron-Wilson, Matthew, though he was only six, tried to prevent her leaving (1:45). He would later recall - indeed, he would remind his mother - that it had caused his father a 'perfect phrenzy'of'anxiety' (Peck 202). Mrs Lewis first went to lodgings in London, where Harrison joined her; then they went together to her family home, Stanstead. Afterwards, she 'changed her Places of Abode several Times in order to avoid her Husband' (Journals 36:669); at one point, she took lodgings 'in a secret and Clandestine manner' in order to be near Harrison ('Lewis against Lewis' 300a). She also assumed a false name. Mrs Lewis had a convincing, if pathetic, answer to the charge that she had taken secret lodgings: she had not wanted them publicly known because they were 'not so genteel ... as she could have wished' ('Lewis against Lewis' 307b). Mrs Lewis did not, unfortunately, have a convincing answer to her husband's central charge, which was that, 'being unmindful of her Conjugal Vow, and moved and instigated by the Devil and her own wicked Lusts' - a strange anticipation of the temptation of Ambrosio, in The Monk - she 'did in the Months of March, April May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December 1781 and in January, February and March 1782 carry on a Lewd and Adulterous Correspondence with the beforementioned Samuel Harrison a Musician wholly unknown to and unsuspected by the said Matthew Lewis her Husband at the House of the said Matthew Lewis ... and at other places, and they the said Fanny Maria Lewis and Samuel Harrison have many times ... had Carnal use and knowledge of each others Bodies, and thereby she the said Fanny Maria Lewis committed the foul Crime of Adultery' ('Lewis against Lewis' 299a-b). There is a good deal of this sort of thing in the libel, which is a long and excoriating document, and which ends each of its twenty-four substantive articles with the same excoriating formula: 'And this was and is true publick and notorious, and so much the said Fanny Maria Lewis doth know in her Conscience and hath confessed to be true and the party proponent doth alledge and propound as before,' as if to expose her, over and over, to public humiliation. It is, of course, only a legal formula, but there is, of course, a sense in which divorce law was only a formalization of proprietary masculine vindictiveness. By late 1781 or early 1782, Mrs Lewis knew that she was pregnant. She incautiously told her companion, Catherine Heath,1 'that she was with Child by Harrison the Musick Masr' ('Lewis against Lewis' 300a). Soon afterwards, realizing her mistake, she took care to say to Heath:

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Personal Themes

'do you think that I should have been such a Fool as to have told you with whom it was I had been guilty [?]' ('Lewis against Lewis' 306a). This retraction seems to have saved Harrison from a lawsuit for criminal conversation, which could have been ruinous, especially for a man of modest means (Stone, Road 231-72): his name is deleted from the judgment granting her husband his separation ('Lewis against Lewis' 310a). One can only hope that Harrison (1760-1812) was grateful; at this point, he vanishes from the story.2 Meanwhile, Mrs Lewis herself still hoped to escape. Her usual nurse refused to attend her and she did not dare approach her usual manmidwife, but she found another nurse, Ann Madders, who not only agreed to attend her but also found her lodgings in Brompton, where she could be delivered of her child. In an elaborate attempt to conceal the birth, she first took lodgings in Clapham, 'under pretence of wanting the benefit of the Country Air'; then, 'under pretence of removing to Arundell in the County of Sussex for the benefit of Sea bathing,' she went to the lodgings Madders had found in Brompton ('Lewis against Lewis' 300b-la). Madders's husband even agreed to go regularly to Arundell, to send letters to Mr Lewis and receive his replies, to throw him off the trail. At around the same time, 'as the pains of Child Birth approached on her ... she was possessed of a Notion that she should not survive her Travail,' and she wrote a 'valedictory Penitential Letter,' eight pages long, addressed to her husband (302a). Despite all her precautions, Mr Lewis tracked his wife down and arrived at her lodgings on 3 July — by an unlucky coincidence, the day she gave birth.3 He told Mrs Madders that 'he knew every Thing that had passed, and seemed to be in great Trouble.' Heath, Mrs Lewis's companion, thought that 'he seemed to be in a great Rage'; Mrs Madders 'begged him on her Knees not to go into Mrs. Leiuis's Room as it might be attended with fatal Consequences.' He allowed himself to be persuaded, but 'insisted upon having Mrs. Lewis's Letters and Papers.' Heath brought them, including the 'valedictory Penitential Letter' (Journals 36:669): Pardon my fault, and let that very fault be some reason why from Justice alone, I could not allow myself once to reflect on returning to you ... You will now know that I have never been at Arundel, but have been in concealment, wading through ten thousand difficulties ... A sincere repentance has prevented my applying for any assistance to the Author of my Misfortune or even seeing him for the last three or four Months: If my infant

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7

lives, 'tis to you, as my best Friend, I trust, not to let it know want it cannot expect more than a decent existence, but it wd I own embitter my last moments, could I believe it wd become one of the Vulgar unprincipled rabble so detrimental to Society: Every thing of mine that can be disposed of for its benefit, I wish shd be sold but any such trifles as you think I particularly valued, I wd have remain either in / own possession or My Dear Boy Matthew's, particularly a little Shirt Lockett wch contains my Hair. The letter is largely a sort of will, in which Mrs Lewis distributes her few possessions - the locket for Matthew, some 'wearing apparel... for Maria & Sophy' - thanks the people who have helped her in her ordeal, and asks her husband to pay them for their services, or in some cases to repay them for loans.4 It also contains an uncanny anticipation of The Monk: I have so much of the weak Woman about me, that I own to you the Burial has more terrors in it than the possibility of my dissolution. I cannot reconcile my Mind to the gloom conveyd to the Hearts of those who loved me, by the Melancholy scenes wch follow the Event: neither do I feel easy at the thought of being either Naild up in any thing, or put low under ground, yet I dislike ridiculous particularities on your account, but could any thing like a Tomb be erected for me, large enough for you and my Children in future (& I pray to Heaven at a very distant period) to lay by me. Could White be substituted for Black for us all, and Could I think that none of us either you, them, or myself, wd be put under Ground or Naild down, my last moments wd I own be easier; & they will be so, because I think you will if possible attend to my request: I wd wish the possibility for light and Air to enter in this Tomb from the apprehension I have always had of being buried in a trance ... The live burial of Agnes de Medina, the most unforgettable event in her son's novel, is evidendy a reminiscence of his mother's terror.5 The letter ends with a few more bequests, and a plea: I could write most affectingly - who will Comfort my poor Mattw that dear Child must be told in a chearful way of it, or his Heart will burst: Never let him forget me; but let him think I am gone to be happy in Heaven & tell him that he will by and by come to me there (for he will die wth ye apprehension of an eternal seperation), Farewell My Dearest Matt I may now call you so - God Bless you & grant you the happiness I always thought you meritted!6

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What Mr Lewis made of this heartbreaking letter we can only imagine; but we know what his lawyers made of it. The libel goes over it in detail, pointing out that 'by the Words - "My Fault" ... she the said Fanny Maria Lewis meant and intended her Criminal Correspondence with the aforesaid Samuel Harrison, and ... by the Words - "My Infant" ... and ... "if my Child is a Boy" ... and ... "My Infant" ... she ... meant and intended the said Bastard or Base begotten Child begotten on her Body by the said Samuel Harrison' (302b). The Consistory Court of London awarded Mr Lewis his judicial separation, by reason of adultery, on 27 February 1783. As in the attempted private separation, Mr Lewis was unusually generous, by the standards of the day. Courts did not usually award alimony to adulterous wives (Stone, Road 193), and the judgment in 'Lewis against Lewis' says nothing about it; but Mr Lewis continued to support his wife for the rest of his life. His next step was to attempt to obtain a parliamentary divorce, which would allow him to remarry. This was a cumbersome and very expensive procedure; only a member of the elite, like Mr Lewis, would try it (Stone, Road 326-7). (It was, of course, only available to husbands.) He petitioned the House of Lords on 4 April, and the Lords debated the petition on 6 May. Mrs Lewis's frequent moves, and her husband's attempts to find her, proved that he had not agreed to her elopement with Harrison; his anger and distress when he finally did find her proved that he had not condoned her behaviour (see Horstman 7-8; Stone, Road 206-7, 208-9). His counsel, William Bearcroft, called ten witnesses, mostly servants, to establish the facts of the case. Bearcroft also offered to read Mrs Lewis's 'valedictory Penitential Letter.' But the Lords declined to hear it, and though Mrs Lewis did not present a defence, they refused her husband his divorce (Journals 36:670). This was one of only six occasions when a husband who had been granted a judicial separation was refused a parliamentary divorce (Stone, Road 324). Divorces were, however, becoming more and more frequent: there had only been forty-two in the hundred years between 1672, when Lord Roos was granted the first, and 1771; but there had been thirty-two between 1772 and 1782, and there would be three more, even without the Lewises', in 1783 (Horstman 16-17). The Lords may have wanted to discourage this dangerous trend (Horstman 15; McGregor 11; Trumbach, Rise 157-8); Edward Thurlow (1731-1806), the lord chancellor, was particularly opposed to it (Stone, Road 334). There may also have been a more specific reason for the failure of the petition: the Lords

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9

tended to discount adultery if a marriage had been unhappy even before it occurred (Stone, Road 323). The Lewises remained married until the husband's death in 1812. Their eldest son served as a kind of go-between for them: 'You have put me into the most distressing and embarrassing situation in the world,' he complained to his mother in 1793; 'you have made me almost an umpire between my Parents; I know not how to extricate myself from the difficulty; I can only believe neither of you to be in the wrong, but / am not to determine which is in the right' (Peck 202). 2

If, as Kate Ferguson Ellis argues, it is part of Lewis's ideological achievement that 'The middle-class dream of an inviolable home is violently exploded' in The Monk (149), this may be, in part, because of his upbringing in a broken home. Certainly Lewis (who never married himself) maintained a lifelong critical interest in the institution of marriage, which his works treat with a frequency, and a frankness, that are unusual. In The Monk (1796), Lorenzo de Medina (the brother of the unfortunate Agnes) asks Donna Elvira for the hand of her daughter, Antonia. The ailing Elvira is anxious to marry Antonia off before she dies, and she realizes that Lorenzo would be a good match, but she makes her consent conditional on that of his family. Lorenzo suggests that if necessary they can elope, but Elvira argues against this, from her own unhappy experience: Wherever we bent our course, a father's execration pursued Gonzalvo. Poverty overtook us, and no friend was near to relieve our wants. Still our mutual affection existed, but, alas! not without interruption. Accustomed to wealth and ease, ill could my husband support the transition to distress and indigence. He looked back with repining to the comforts which he once enjoyed. He regretted the situation which for my sake he had quitted; and, in moments when despair possessed his mind, has reproached me with having made him the companion of want and wretchedness. He has called me his bane! the source of his sorrows, the cause of his destruction! (216-17)

After her husband's death, Elvira finds among his papers a poem expressing his feelings more fully: 'Had I known sooner that he enter-

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tained such sentiments,' she tells Lorenzo, 'grief would have killed me' (218).7 This may recall, in reverse, the letter Mr Lewis was supposed to receive after his wife's death. In The East Indian (1799), the hero Beaumont has had the bad luck to marry a woman 'Jealous without love, profuse without generosity, negligent in her dress, violent in her temper, coarse in her manners, with no virtue but that one which she owed to constitution, not to principle': she is, unfortunately, too chaste to be divorced for adultery. After three years, he gives her the remains of his fortune and goes to India. His friend Walsingham is sympathetic: 'Lived with her three years? I wouldn't have lived with her three days - No! not to have buried her on the fourth' (3; 1.1). In India, Beaumont falls in love and elopes with Zorayda; he brings her back to England and arranges for her to stay with his cousin, Lady Clara Modish, whose marriage turns out to be little more cordial than his own. Unlike Beaumont, Lady Clara makes the best of it, finding that 'little matrimonial rubs are excellent for the vapours, and Modish is never so entertaining as when I've put him out of temper' (14; 1.2). Her husband is less positive. After one of their little rubs, he addresses the audience, or part of it: Bachelors! Bachelors! Tye yourselves up in the noose of hemp, rather than the noose of matrimony. The pain of the former is never felt after a few minutes; but the knot of the latter grows tighter every hour during years, and is at last only loosened by death or infamy! (20; 1.2) In Adelmorn, the Outlaw (1801), the hero is blessed with an ideal wife, who stands by him through the ordeal of his outlawry. In the epilogue, however, Dorothy Jordan - who played the faithfulflhwife8ffhhturnsl egh attention to the marriages of her audience. She starts with the inhabitants of the boxes: They squabble and sneer, contradict and torment, While their whole conversation's - 'You can!' and 'I can't,' And 'I will,' and 'I won't,' and 'you shall,' and 'I shan't' When my Lord tells my Lady, 'you must not,' she just Replies in the sweetest of accents - 'I must;' And when she assures him - 'You shall not,' he still Obligingly pops out his answer - 'I will.' Thus, like players at commerce, of both 'tis the aim To mar, if they can, the antagonist's game,

The Hard Fist of Hymen

11

Each content with bad cards, if the foe holds the worst, And the point in discussion, whose life shall go first. (100)9

The lower classes in the gallery fare no better: See Jack home returning: how greets him his mate? Oh! Jack is half drunk, and quite sulky is Kate. She tells him he's tipsy; he swears that he's not; Jack calls Kate gill-flirt; Kate calls Jack a sot: Jack curses the day Kate enticed him to wed; Kate consoles him by throwing a dish at Jack's head; Venus screams at the scuffle, the Graces all fly, And the hard fist of Hymen gives Love a black eye! (101) There is one apparent exception to the rule: the epilogue closes with a fulsome passage in praise of Frederica Charlotte, Duchess of York (1767-1820), one of Lewis's aristocratic friends, as the perfect wife. The irony is obvious: the duke and duchess had separated soon after their marriage in 1791, and the duchess had retired to her estate at Oatlands, where she consoled herself with a hundred pet dogs (DNS 20:234; Peck, 'New Poems' 190). For the rest of his career, Lewis's feelings about marriage found expression in personal letters, occasional verse, and publications like Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts of Carlsheim and Sargans (1806), a translation of Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg, oder Geschichte derFrauen in der Schweiz (1789), by Christiane Benedicte Eugenie Naubert (1756-1819) (Peck 134). Although a translation, this is still arguably a key to Lewis's own concerns; after all, he must have had reasons for translating it.10 The reviewer for Flowers of Literature found it so characteristic of Lewis as to doubt 'whether this romance be an alteration from the German; on the contrary, it contains so much of Mr. Lewis's peculiar manner, that we suppose it to be an original composition' (502). The work spans more than a hundred years (and fourteen hundred pages). It is largely a domestic narrative, as Naubert's original tide suggests; but until more than half-way through the third volume, it does not mention a single happy marriage. The marriage of Urania Venosta is representative. 'Never had Count Ethelbert felt for me one spark of real affection,' she reports (1:172). To Ethelbert, marriage is simply a 'legal claim to torture and insult' his wife, and he makes full use of it (1:248). Eventually, he locks her up in a crumbling Alpine castle (along with his first wife,

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Personal Themes

since he is also a bigamist), first taking care to ruin her reputation so thoroughly that her relatives are too disgusted to rescue her. Urania does not even describe his behaviour as unusual: 'In truth, I had fancied, that the happiness of marriage was somewhat different; but alas! what girl does not fancy the same, and find at length that she has been deceived?' (1:140). Marriage is a pervasive concern in Lewis's last work, the posthumous Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834). In 1815, on his first voyage to Jamaica, he passed the time, in part, by writing verse. One of his first shipboard poems is a revision of the myth of Pandora, in which Woman is not the culprit who opens the fatal box, but the evil that pops out of it. As in the original, Hope remains in the box, 'but still / All saw of what Miss Hope gave intimation; / Her right hand grasp'd an undertaker's bill, / Her left conceal'd a deed of separation' (Journal 12).11 Man's only hope, in other words, is that death or divorce will free him from Woman. On his plantation, Lewis noted numerous instances of conjugal discord among the slaves, recording them, tongue in cheek, as if they were society scandals. Psyche left her husband for one of her master's bookkeepers (77-8). John and Phillis separated, Phillis claiming that John spent all his money on the girls at Montego Bay, John that he had seen Phillis leaving a bookkeeper's bedroom - as if they were making claims and counter-claims at a divorce trial (143). A love triangle on Anchovy Bottom, a neighbouring estate, ended in murder (199). Marcia kept running away from the estate, but Lewis forgave her when he discovered that she was only trying to run away from her husband (109-10). On the other hand, Mackaroo has not only run away himself, but has carried his wife away with him. This is improving upon the profligacy of British manners with a vengeance. In England, a man only runs away with another person's wife: but to run away with his own - what depravity! (209)

Pickle and Edward had been rivals in love; now Pickle, who had been the successful suitor, accused Edward of placing a spell on him. He had a pain in his side, for one thing. 'And were these all his reasons?' I enquired. 'No; when he married, Edward was very angry at the loss of his mistress, and had said that they never would live well and happily together; and they never had lived happily and well together.' This last argument quite got the better of my gravity. By parity of reason-

The Hard Fist of Hymen

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ing, I thought that almost every married couple in Great Britain must be under the influence of Obeah! (134-5)

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft had complained that marriage turned wives into 'fond slaves' and husbands into 'surly suspicious tyrant[s]' (Vindication 249-50). Lewis is unlikely to have approved of her work (he seems to satirize it in Village Virtues [1796]), but he seems to have shared her suspicion that there was a parallel between marriage and slavery.12 To Wollstonecraft, the slavery of marriage is degrading to both parties (104). 'The Isle of Devils,' a long poem which Lewis wrote on his first voyage to Jamaica, turns on the motif of mutual (though hardly equal) bondage. The heroine, Irza, is shipwrecked on the Isle of Devils and rescued by their chief, who then does obeisance to her: 'Humbly, slowly crept he near, / Then kissed the earth, his club before her laid, / And of his neck her footstool would have made' (272). The gesture recalls that of Defoe's Friday, after Robinson Crusoe has rescued him (Defoe 207): that the rescuer in Lewis's text should behave like the rescued in Defoe's may hint at the other role reversals to come. Waving an orange bough, the devil leads Irza to his cave, where she can be safe from the isle's lesser devils. Reluctantly, she goes to live with him. In sooth, if credit outward show might crave, Than Irza, ne'er had nymph an humbler slave. He watched her every glance; her frown he fear'd; And if his pains to meet her wish appear'd, All pains seem'd far o'erpaid, all cares appeased, And so she found but pleasure, fowas pleased. (275)

Outward show turns out to be deceptive; the demon holds Irza prisoner in his cave: her quasi-marriage is a live burial, like those feared by Mrs Lewis and suffered by Agnes de Medina, Urania Venosta, and the first Mrs Ethelbert. At the end of nine months, she realizes that he has taken advantage of a swoon and raped her: she is 'Debased, deflower'd, and stamp'd a wretch for life, / A monster's mother, and a demon's wife' (277). A second rape, committed during a second swoon, produces a second child. When Irza is rescued, the devil kills himself and both their children in protest at the way she has broken the 'social bonds' between them (287). Irza spends the rest of her life in a convent ironically 'screen'd by orange groves and myrtle bowers' (287). Mrs Lewis lived quietly after her downfall, but not that quietly.

Two

The Fruits of a Single Error

i Lewis's first surviving letter to his mother dates from 1791, ten years after the separation. It begins on a note of guilt, as if the son had been accused of abandoning his mother, rather than the reverse: 'You gave me pain by saying that every body had forgot you.' The guilt is qualified by a note of resentment - 'I thought my constant attention would have exempted me at least from the accusation' - but also intensified by the contrast between their positions: Without money, without friends, sick, in a foreign country [France]. Oh my Mother! The remembrance of your being in pain and sorrow often clouds the pleasures I enjoy, and I hardly conceive myself justified in partaking amusements, when you perhaps may be in want of common comforts. (Peck 183)

Already, in this first communication, we can detect the 'intensely ambivalent behaviour' that John Bowlby considers characteristic of children separated from an attachment figure (2:246): 'it is common for a person to develop intensely anxious and possessive attachment behaviour simultaneously with bitter anger directed against the attachment figure, and often to combine both with much anxious concern about the safety of that figure' (2:256). The relationship between Lewis and his mother also resembles those cases Bowlby describes in which the 'parent demands, either overtly or covertly, that the child act as a caretaker to him (or her), thereby inverting the normal parent-child roles' (2:244, 265-71). Whether Mrs Lewis

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15

demanded it or not, her son soon decided to deny himself amusements to supply her with comforts - or to turn his amusements to her account. In March 1792, he wrote: The little presents I have occasionally made you have been merely what I have either spared from my pocket money or by fortunate success at play (which however I use but seldom) and have been enabled to dispose of in the manner which was most agreable to me ... had I a fixed income I should be happy to be considered merely as your Banker and would sacrifice to you not only what might be wanted for pleasure but what would be absolutely necessary but I own being obliged to apply so frequently to my Father is very painful to me ... (Peck 188)

It was also apparently somewhat irritating to his father, who was already giving his estranged wife an allowance. Lewis enjoyed the idea of sacrificing himself for his mother: of taking risks (in moderation) at play, of denying himself not only pleasures but necessities, even of defying his father. Late in 1793, he told her: 'My Father ... tells me, that "He has som[e] idea of ruining me by giving me an annual allowance. ["] ... for your sake I wish very much that my Father may execute his threat. I should have an opportunity of assisting you in any little exigency' (Peck 200). Eventually the father did execute his threat: he gave his son a thousand pounds a year, and the son passed half of it on to his mother. When the father discovered this, he cut the allowance in half (Baron-Wilson 1:309). When Mr Lewis died in 1812, Lewis assumed his role as provider to his mother, but he was careful to play it more generously. He gave her an allowance of a thousand pounds a year (Baron-Wilson 2:87); three years later, when he broke off relations with a worthless young protege named William Kelly, he not only allowed his mother to give Kelly an allowance, but increasedhers in proportion (Baron-Wilson 2:103, 105).l Sometimes Lewis preferred to make light of his gifts, perhaps to reassure his mother, perhaps to hide his resentment from himself. Writing from The Hague (his single diplomatic posting) in November 1794, he offered his mother a symbolic gift: Knowing your passion for animals, I have also procured for you an amazing fine large black cat. It is the gentlest beast in the world, never mews, nor has ever been known to scratch or bite. Perhaps you will already have discovered that the cat of which I speak is a fur tippet... I suppose you would

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like to have it sent to you immediately, as it may be no disagreeable companion in your country walks if this cold weather continues. (BaronWilson 1:139-40) Since he cannot himself be his mother's companion or keep her warm, the tippet (declawed and defanged as if to disarm his resentment) is his representative. As his mother's provider, Lewis acted as a kind of spouse or parent to her; a letter of 1805 painted a little conjugal scene, and even expressed a little conjugal jealousy: I assure you, it is a great source of satisfaction to me to think, that at least you have a comfortable House, where you are secure from vulgar intrusion, and vulgar occurrences; and I cannot but think it cheaper for you to have taken your House, than to be eternally changing your Lodgings, and be exposed to the impostions and various vices of ill-bred Landladies &c ... it is really a great comfort to me to be certain of a place, where I can find a kind reception and sympathy for my vexations, whenever compleat solitude becomes insupportable to me. (Peck 236) Eventually, Mrs Lewis did take a house, the White Cottage described in cloying detail by Baron-Wilson (2:107-18), who mentions Lewis's habit of spending quiet evenings there, or dropping by after rehearsals of his plays, to tell his mother how they were coming along (1:42-4, 182, 215). In a letter of 1810, Lewis assumed the pose of a parent preparing to remember her in his will. Even as a child, according to Baron-Wilson, he had imagined dying before her: '"Mamma," said the child one day, "if I were to die, wouldn't you be sorry? Wouldn't you cry, and say, Poor little Mat! he's gone - poor little boy! - he loved me!'" (1:27).2 By 1810, he was trying to use humour to keep the emotion at bay. He had just returned to London by sea. When I was going to embark, it occurred to me that I might be drowned by the way, and that I might as well have disposed of what little plate, furniture &c I possess, by will. I have now repaired that omission; and I now tell it [you, in order] that if by any accident I should make a sudden Exit (which I do not just now intend) you may take care to enquire for my Will; by which means you may find yourself Heiress to half a dozen Tea-spoons, three broken-legged Chairs, and

The Fruits of a Single Error - 'a copper skillet, Which runs as fast as you can fill it.'

17

(Peck 250-1)

When he did die at sea, in 1818, his will confirmed her thousand pounds a year; it was the first item in the will (Baron-Wilson 2:373). His Aunt Anna Blake (his father's sister), who was not given to immoderate expressions of approval, remarked: 'He has provided very liberally for his beloved Mother who mourns his loss beyond the expression of words. She really does suffer as one wou'd imagin, she who loved a Son as Mother never loved more fondly, wou'd do' (Peck 267). The resentment that is sometimes visible through Lewis's expressions of affection or guilt sometimes found an expression of its own, though at first such expressions tended to be indirect. On a visit to Weimar (to learn German, in 1792), his imagination was seized by a story about a guilty mother who had lost her son; Byron later reported that he told it so often he almost came to believe it. He used to hear the rustling of paper in his bedroom at night; when he asked about it, he was told that his lodgings were haunted: The house in which he lived had belonged to a widow, who had an only son. In order to prevent his marrying a poor but amiable girl, to whom he was attached, he was sent to sea. Years passed, and the mother heard no tidings of him, nor the ship in which he had sailed. It was supposed that the vessel had been wrecked, and that all on board had perished. The reproaches of the girl, the upbraidings of her own conscience, and the loss of her child, crazed the old lady's mind, and her only pursuit became to turn over the Gazettes for news. Hope at length left her: she did not live long, - and continued her old occupation after death. (Medwin 189)

This is the version recorded by the unreliable Thomas Medwin, who mistakenly set it in Mannheim. The equally unreliable Edward Trelawny, who at least got the city right, placed the blame not on the mother but on the son, who simply 'left her and went to sea' (224). Lewis himself, in telling and retelling the story, may even have been responsible for the variation between the two versions; the vacillation between resentment (in Medwin's version) and guilt (in Trelawny's) would certainly be characteristic. As Bowlby points out, these two aspects of the child's ambivalence form a vicious circle: 'just as hostility directed towards a loved figure can increase anxiety, so can being anxious, espe-

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Personal Themes

daily that an attachment figure may be inaccessible or unresponsive when wanted, increase hostility' (2:255). Back in England, in 1793, the eighteen-year-old Lewis had an occasion to express his resentment directly. His mother asked him to help her try to arrange a reconciliation with his father. He refused. He assured her of his regard for her, but reminded her that her conduct had caused his father 'pain and anxiety' and deprived his sisters of 'those little instructions and observations, so necessary to make young Women accomplished, and which are in the power of a Mother alone to point out to them with success.' Now, her presence could only do them harm: Can you openly confess that you wish your conduct to be followed by your Daughters? I will not [s]ay your conduct is to be condemn'd, but I cannot call it [cjommendable ... As to the two lights which you say I may regard you in, the light in which I do regard you is [cjomposed of both ... (Peck 201-2)

Despite this admission of ambivalence, Lewis admitted to no guilt. His mother evidently objected to this letter; he replied sternly: 'I am not conscious that my Letter contained any expressions which deserved to be treated with so much anger'; evidently hers had been less temperate. He had only been manly and realistic, not discourteous: You wish my letter had been a pathetic address; you might as well have desired it to have been a sentimental one; either would shine in a Novel, but would be perfectly ridiculous and out of its place when writing seriously and upon actual circumstances. Besides which it is not the nature of a Man to write Pathetics, but to express his sentiments as strongly and forcibly as possible.

He accused her of trying to exploit his ambivalence and fear of abandonment: 'you concluded by saying [t]hat if I did not beleive your conduct to be perfectly blameless [y]ou would throw away all affection for me, and never care [a]ny farther about me' (Peck 203-6). She appears, however, to have threatened him with the loss of her affection only because she believed that he had threatened her (with what is not clear - perhaps with the loss of his support); and his defiance of her threats appears to be copied from her defiance of his. Thus, at this moment of extreme alienation from each other, they behaved extremely

The Fruits of a Single Error

19

like each other. Perhaps Lewis was dimly aware of this; perhaps he reminded her that a man did not behave like a woman because he was trying to convince himself that he was not doing so.

2 The erring women in Lewis's works are unusually numerous and often sympathetic but always sternly disciplined; the frequency with which they recur suggests a preoccupation that Lewis was never able to work through. In The Monk, Agnes de Medina is self-confident and witty as well as beautiful and sensitive. She twice attempts to elope with her lover Raymond. After the first attempt, her guardians have her confined in a convent; after the second, the Prioress has her entombed alive - a punishment based, perhaps, on the fate that Mrs Lewis dreaded more than death. Alone in the tomb, Agnes gives birth to Raymond's child; since she ' [knows] not how to treat it, or by what means to preserve its existence' (393) - a detail that may again imply resentment of Mrs Lewis for inadequate mothering - she has to watch it die. She ends her story first by reminding Raymond, rather faintly, that he was partly responsible for all this, and then by assuring him, much more emphatically: 'the more culpable have been the errors of your mistress, the more exemplary shall be the conduct of your wife' (398). As a translator, Lewis was attracted towards works with similar themes, and of course there were plenty for him to be attracted to: his personal preoccupation matched a widespread cultural stereotype. In The Minister (1797), a translation of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1784), the Baroness Augusta (Schiller's Lady Milford) finds only misery as the mistress of the Duke. Elvira, in Rolla; or, The Peruvian Hero (1799), a translation of Kotzebue's Die Spanier in Peru (1797); Sister Agatha, a character Lewis added to 'Mistrust; or, Blanche and Osbright' (1808), his novelization of Kleist's Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803); and Zorayda, in The East Indian (1799), a dramatization of Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) (and an imitation of her son Richard's dramatization, The School for Scandal [1777]), are similarly erring, similarly sympathetic, and variously punished - Elvira and Agatha with death, Zorayda only with a remorse that recalls Lewis's early guilty anxiety about his mother: Oh! where is my father? Perhaps now stretched on the bed of sickness, calling on Zorayda for those offices which a daughter alone can perform; and

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woe is me! calling in vain! Perhaps , perhaps ere this cold in a foreign grave, where his heart has forgot at my name to burn with anger, or to glow with love, where Death has long since forbidden his lips to call on me, or curse me! (21-2; 2.1)

She rouses herself from her despair to urge her seducer, Beauchamp, to assist the impoverished Rivers, the East Indian of the title, who turns out to be her father in disguise. This act of charity, and the timely death of Beauchamp's wife, open the way for the final reconciliation; but Zorayda still ends the play with a long speech, reminiscent of Agnes's final speech, about how 'the gloom of self-reproach' will never leave her brow (84; 5.1).3 The title character of Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error (1806), Lewis's second original tragedy, is a paragon, except for her single error. Seduced and abandoned in her youth, she has been happily and faithfully married for twelve years. Unfortunately, the play's villain Michael Ducas learns her secret, and tries to blackmail her into eloping with him. She is driven to increasingly desperate expedients to fend him off, and finally stabs him. Michael Ducas richly deserves to die, and in any case, he leaves Adelgitha no choice; but she regards the act as the climax of her sins and goes half mad with remorse and despair. More distressing to the reader than her treatment of Michael Ducas is her treatment of her son, the most obvious fruit of her error: in order to maintain her cover, she allows him to be accused of attempting to rape her. When he is also accused of the murder, however, she confesses all. Her husband forgives her, so she stabs herself to reward him. In contrast to this group, and perhaps in compensation, Lewis's work features a smaller but equally striking group of exemplary, heroic mothers; if 'whore' seems too harsh a term for the first group (as sympathetically portrayed by Lewis), 'Madonna' seems entirely appropriate for the second. The Elvira of The Monk (not to be confused with the one in Rolla) is, in a sense, an erring woman, who has married above herself and then been forced to abandon her son - a son who has since grown up to be the villainous Ambrosio. But the novel gives more emphasis to her positive qualities. She is a devoted, if somewhat overprotective, mother (she has, after all, already lost one of her children). She is not unsympathetic to the love of Antonia and Lorenzo, but she warns Lorenzo about the dangers of elopement. She sees through Ambrosio and dies trying to save Antonia from him. The title character of The Castle Spectre (1798)

The Fruits of a Single Error

21

protects her daughter, Angela, even after death. She appears once at the end of act 4, to console Angela after an attempted rape; and again at the end of act 5, to distract the rapist so that Angela can stab him (an act for which she, unlike Adelgitha, feels no remorse). In Timour the Tartar (1811), Lewis's last original play, the young Prince Agib of Georgia has been taken prisoner by Timour. Agib's mother, Zorilda, disguises herself as Timour's intended bride and stages a daring rescue. Matilda, in The Monk, stands in a complex relationship to both these groups. She is not a Madonna: she is, if you believe the Devil, an imitation of the Madonna, 'a subordinate but crafty spirit' who has assumed the form of the icon Ambrosio adores (418); if you believe Matilda herself, she is the original of the Madonna - the model for that very icon (101). And she is not a whore: Ambrosio, smitten with the virginal charms of Antonia, denounces her as a 'prostitute!' (244), but the narrator hastens to emphasize how unfair this is. And when, in a mellower mood, Ambrosio turns to Matilda for the pleasures he cannot obtain from Antonia, Matilda tells him herself, 'I am no prostitute, Ambrosio' (364). Thus, to the ambivalence expressed in the opposition between Madonna and whore, she adds the tension between this ambivalence and the impulse to deny it by cancelling both poles. The embodiment of all Lewis's ambivalence about women, Matilda is the most intelligent, articulate, assertive, and indefatigably active character in all his work. If she is the most appalling, she is also the most interesting. When Lewis went to Jamaica in 1815, he took his concern for good motherhood with him. He was shocked when the parents on his plantation seemed 'heedless and inattentive' (Journal 97). One mother stayed so long at a dance that her baby died of starvation (123-4). Another dropped her baby on the head, and then, for fear of being blamed, refused to admit what had happened, so that the doctor was unable to treat the baby properly (326-7). Lewis was also careful to record striking examples of maternal virtue: one woman on a nearby plantation had been mistreated so badly by the overseer that she would have run away, but did not have the heart to leave her child (130). Another threatened to kill herself if she were sold without her child; Lewis managed to buy them both (399-400).4 He also did his best to promote maternal affection among his slaves. He designed a special honorific belt for women with living children, granted them special privileges (Journal 125-6), and instituted an annual holiday in their honour (191-2).

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This was not, of course, entirely a matter of disinterested benevolence - though Lewis was an unusually benevolent planter. He was anxious to offset a steady decline in the slave population (Journal 320-1), and because of the abolition of the slave trade he could only do so by promoting motherhood. He was perfectly aware of his motives; so were the slaves, who used to show him their children, saying: 'See massa, see! here nice new neger me bring for work for massa' (217; cf. 61, 78). It is not so clear that he was aware of the con tradic dons in his program of promoting what he regarded as a more humane attitude towards children whom he regarded, inhumanely, as chattels; this contradiction is part of the subject of chapter 3. 3

One reason for Lewis's anxiety and resentment may have been that, thanks to his mother's habit of eternally changing her lodgings, he often did not know where she was. His bafflement is particularly obvious in his early letters to her from abroad. Writing from Weimar in July 1792, he told her, 'Not being certain of the number of your Lodging I am obliged to put the Mistress's name upon it to avoid mistakes but I shall be obliged to you to mention what it is in your answer' (Peck 191). The next February, he complained that she had not given him 'the slightest informa[tion] [about her address] in [her] former Letters' (Peck 195). In November 1794, he had to ask where to send her fur tippet (Baron-Wilson 1:140). A tone of mystification is a general characteristic of their correspondence. Sometimes it is jocular, sometimes frankly anxious, and sometimes it shifts from one tone to the other. In August 1808, he acquitted her of a charge of deliberate mystification: It certainly was not very easy for you to tell me what you did not know yourself; and therefore you are most satisfactorily exculpated from the charge of having unnecessarily kept me in hot water. However, on any future occasion, pray remember ... [tha]t I prefer knowing the whole, or nothing; for I have an admirable talent at tormenting myself, and the truth can never be worse, tha[n] what I imagine when left to myself. (Peck 214)5

As an expression of Lewis's preferences, this is a little misleading unless one adds that he usually preferred knowing nothing to knowing the

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whole:6 he may occasionally have taxed his mother with mystification, but he regularly asked for it. In 1809, he reminded her: 'I sometimes go into the Country for a day, order no letters to be sent to me, and then stay on from day to day for a month - and also when I am going to any very pleasant place, I order my letters to be kept till my return, in order that I may not receive such as would put me out of humour' (Peck 246; cf. 226). Before leaving on his first voyage to Jamaica in 1815, he wrote to his mother that he would not be saying goodbye in person: 'The scene of taking leave would have been so very painful to myself, and probably to you, that I thought it infinitely better to spare each other the unnecessary agony' (Baron-Wilson 2:122). Before leaving on his second voyage, two years later, he repeated the excuse and added a warning: If you have any thing pleasant ever to tell me, send it to the Albany [his residence] , when an opportunity occurs, I shall order letters to be sent to me. But tell me nothing that can possibly agitate me, or you will be the death or the blindness of me ... When I return, if you will only allow me to visit you in the same quiet way, be in as good humour with me, and never trouble me on subjects which you know to be painful or agitating to me, I shall have great pleasure in cultivating your society.

At the same time, he wrote to John Ingall, asking him not to forward any bad news about his mother: 'It would affect me too heavily, and might kill me in such a climate' (Baron-Wilson 2:190-1). Lewis excused this tendency to shrink from harsh experiences or expressions as a reaction to an innate hypersensitivity: Memory is not quite so obedient, as to retain all the pleasant things, because we wish to retain them, and wipe out all the disagreable ones, the moment that we wish to lose them: as for myself, I am so constituted, that I beleive, I never felt a painful sensation, which I could afterwards efface from my memory, however strongly I may have wished to do so. (Peck 235)

And since 'the acuteness of pleasure in this world bears no proportion to the acuteness of pain,' he felt justified in avoiding both (Peck 222). He may have believed that this tendency was innate because he believed that his mother shared it; of course, his belief that she did share it may have been a projection. He once wrote to her:

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When other people annoy me, I make no scruple of telling them what I think of their conduct as strongly as I can. If I have truths to produce against them, out they come, however disagreeable they are; the less likely am I to be troubled with a fresh dispute. But with you, my dear mother, I am not only obliged to take pains to prove myself in the right, but not to do it by saying things which it would give you pain to hear. (Baron-Wilson 2:98) Lewis does seem to have been more forthright with other people; in fact, he seems to have been downright rude, perhaps to compensate for the restraint he felt he had to exercise towards his mother. Byron remembered him as 'contradictory to every thing and every body'; as a result, Lewis was 'a bore - a damned bore - one may say. - My only revenge or consolation used to be setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated Bores especially - Me. de Stael or Hobhouse for example' (Letters 9:18). Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, whether or not he knew he had been set up, obligingly found Lewis 'more fond of contradiction than any man I ever knew' (Broughton, Recollections 2:76). Lewis's college friend Lord Holland (1773-1840) thought that his 'conversation [was] disfigured by captious perverseness in controversy' (Further Memoirs 379); and Lady Holland (1770-1845) held him up to her son as an unhappy example: 'My friend Monk Lewis allowed the excellent qualities of his heart to be obscured for years, by affecting sharp sayings against all his acquaintances except just the reigning favourites' who may have inherited his mother's untouchability for the duration of their reign (Ilchester, Chronicles 119). His vacillation between inhibition and captious perverseness seems, in fact, to express the same ambivalence as his vacillation between guilt and resentment, and between idealized and erring mother-figures. Lewis's inhibition, innate or not, was clearly aggravated by his shame over his parents' separation. His mother, moreover, encouraged it. He wrote to her in 1792: As to what you say about my calling myself your Nephew do about it as you think proper. I remember once you desired me when in company to speak of my Father as my Uncle and you may wish me to call myself your Nephew for the same reason at present but for my own part it is immaterial to me. It was clearly not immaterial; he went on: 'When I do not say that I have a Mother living I do it to give the shortest answer and save myself from an explanation which must be very unpleasant to me' (Peck 190).

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Euphemism, the literary form of inhibition, is characteristic of the style of Lewis's published work, from his first book to his last, though his captious perverseness may have contributed more to their Gothic themes. In the seventh chapter of The Monk, Ambrosio penetrates into the innocent Antonia's bedroom in the hope of seducing her. He is shocked to find her reading the Bible, a book in which 'Many of the narratives can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast: every thing is called plainly and roundly by its name; and the annals of a brothel would scarcely furnish a greater choice of indecent expressions.' It turns out, however, that Elvira has given her daughter a special Bible, 'copied out with her own hand, [with] all improper passages either altered or omitted' (258). Ironically, none of the indecent expressions or improper passages in the novel provoked such outrage as this plea for euphemism and expurgation.8 Compounding the irony is the likelihood, argued by Ellis (134-6), that Elvira's expurgation of the Bible is part of her overprotective approach to bringing up her daughter9 - and that Ambrosio's approval of the practice illustrates the Protestant belief that the Catholic church discouraged the reading of the Bible. Lewis took no chances with his next original work, The Castle Spectre. As Baron-Wilson puts it: the author's sister [Maria], Lady Lushington, with the delicate tact of a correct judgment, and a pure and pious mind, struck out, with her own hand, all the passages from the play which she imagined might be construed into offences against religion, and it was not until she had performed this kindly office, that her brother submitted it to the public. (1:211-12)

(John Larpent, the official censor, collaborated with Maria in this kindly office.) With or without his sister's help (but certainly with that of the censor), Lewis employed the same strategy for the rest of his literary career. In the preface to The Bravo of Venice (1805), which Lewis adapted from the German of Heinrich Zschokke (1771-1848), he was careful to point out that 'several passages, which seemed to me too harsh for the taste of English readers, have been either left out entirely, or considerably softened down' (v-vi). The same tendency could affect the most trivial stylistic considerations and the most serious thematic ones. In a footnote on the first page of Feudal Tyrants (1806), Lewis explained that he had changed the central character's surname from Toggenburg to Torrenburg because

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the former 'would have sounded harsh in English ears' (l:ln). 10 In the preface to Venoni; or, The Novice of St. Mark's (1809), adapted from the French of Boutet de Monvel, Lewis claimed to have altered the character of a republican mayor, 'whose sentiments and conduct were by no means adapted to the present times or to the British taste' (v). The repeated references to English or British taste suggest that Lewis's personal reticence was well adapted to the political climate of the Napoleonic Wars. We should not be surprised, then, that he resorted to the same strategy again in the Journal of a West India Proprietor, when confronted by the problem of slavery. On his arrival in Jamaica, he was met by 'a remarkably clean-looking negro lad,' who helped him wash. Lewis 'concluded him to belong to the inn' (an ambiguous phrase, which could describe an employee as well as a chattel), but he introduced himself: 'Massa not know me; me your slave? This was too much for Lewis: really the sound made me feel a pang at the heart. The lad appeared all gaiety and good humour, and his whole countenance expressed anxiety to recommend himself to my notice; but the word 'slave' seemed to imply, that, although he did feel pleasure then in serving me, if he had detested me he must have served me still. I really felt quite humiliated at the moment, and was tempted to tell him, - 'Do not say that again; say that you are my negro, but do not call yourself my slave.' (62)

Just as in Hegel (114—15), the slave recognized the master but the master did not recognize the slave; and as in Hegel (116-17), the master found the slave's homage valueless, since it was not the homage of a free equal. That Lewis should feel humiliated was an irony that apparently escaped him, as did the greater irony of his desire to order the boy not to appear to be subject to his orders.11 He preferred to believe that since the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself was 'but another name for servitude'; Jamaican slaves were in some ways better off than British labourers (Journal 62). The quibble over terms was traditional. In 1773, Samuel Estwick, assistant agent for Barbados, had objected to 'slave' as an 'odious word'; the term he preferred was not 'servant' but 'commercial property' (Davis, Age of Revolution 480). In 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had argued that Turkish slavery was 'no worse than servitude all over the world' (Dykes 127). Lewis approached every aspect of his Jamaican experience with the same tendency to euphemism and objection to frankness. He enjoyed

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the local fish, but 'wished that their names equalled their flesh in taste; for it must be owned, that nothing can be less tempting than the sounds of Jew-fish, hog-fish, mud-fish, snappers, god-dammies, groupas, and grunts!' (Journall104)..12d Less obviously but more seriously, he persis tently favoured what might be called euphemistic interpretations of his experience (cf. Terry xxiv). Planters used to supplement their slaves' diet - in itself so inadequate as to impair their productivity - with salt fish, which was cheaper than fresh meat. Lewis accordingly noted that his slaves were 'passionately fond of salted provisions' (106); he did not, however, go so far as the planter who justified still further economies on the grounds that his slaves actually preferred their salt fish 'stinking, flyblown and rotten' (Craton, Sinews 191). Lewis often remarked on the laziness of his slaves, and especially on the amount of time they spent malingering in the plantation hospital (Journall122, 203-4, 346). He overlooked not only the extent to whichh their diet and living conditions, the backbreaking work in the canefields and the heat and fumes in the sugarmills, must really have led to disease (Craton, Sinews 192-4), but also the extent to which resentment and rebellion, conscious or unconscious, must have inspired malingering and low productivity (Eric Williams 202; Craton, Sinews 211, 234-5). He was almost suspiciously insistent that his slaves' low productivity could not be an expression of resentment: they are not ungrateful; they are only selfish: they love me very well, but they love themselves a great deal better; and, to do them justice, I verily believe that every negro on the estate is extremely anxious that all should do their full duty, except himself.13

He could account for it only by the feeble hypothesis that 'The negroes certainly are perverse beings' (Journal 231). Lewis illustrates Eric Williams's contention that slavery gives rise to racism, rather than the reverse (7). Since he was unwilling to attribute the perversity of his slaves to their being slaves, he had to attribute it to their being negroes. He thought their brains were probably physically different from white ones (Journall392). He even allowed his optimism to jeopardize the reforms which were a major purpose of his voyages to Jamaica. He had been incensed at the inaccurate reports given him by the managers of both his estates, Cornwall in the west and Hordley in the east; but after he had told his Hordley agent of his 'extreme anxiety for the abolition of the cart-whip,' he

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was satisfied to hear that it was hardly ever used; 'whenever I visit Hordley, I may depend upon its not being employed at all' (Journall162). Hisd humanity should not be underestimated, but it was partly a matter of his not wanting to have to witness the inhumane (cf. Terry xxiii). The use of euphemisms seems to have been endemic among both slaves and slave-owners, and Lewis's own preference for them did not prevent his commenting on their use by others. He noted a number of euphemisms for sexual relations in a slave society. One of his slaves 'was building a new house for a superannuated wife (for they have all so much decency as to call their sexual attachments by a conjugal name)' (Journal 111). Conversely, a free woman of mixed race referred to 'her husband,' an English merchant. And when Lewis asked his attorney about the status of 'a clever-looking brown woman, who seemed to have great authority in the house,' the embarrassed attorney replied: Tt is the custom, sir, in this country, for unmarried men to have housekeepers, and Nancy is mine' (169-70). But Lewis's frankness about these cases allowed him to overlook the situation behind the cases: that marriage as he understood it was more or less impossible for the slaves, who had no civil rights and were mostly not Christians; that it was difficult for them to maintain stable sexual relationships (or indeed stable relationships of any kind) when they could be sold or moved from one estate to another as it suited their masters; and that brown women, no matter how clever looking, were vulnerable to sexual exploitation by white attorneys (Craton, Sinews 213-14, 223-6). Even the most shocking passages in the Journal can be subtly evasive: I had mentioned to Mr. Shand my having found a woman at Hordley, who had been crippled for life, in consequence of her having been kicked in the womb by one of the book-keepers. He writes to me on this subject: - 'I trust that conduct so savage occurs rarely in any country. I can only say, that in my long experience nothing of the kind has ever fallen under my observation.' Mr. S. then ought to consider me as having been in high luck. I have not passed six months in Jamaica, and I have already found on one of my estates a woman who had been kicked in the womb by a white bookkeeper, by which she was crippled herself, and on another of my estates another woman who had been kicked in the womb by another white bookkeeper, by which he had crippled the child ... thus, as my two estates are at the two extremities of the island, I am entitled to say, from my own knowledge (i.e. speaking literally, observe), that 'white book-keepers kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to the other.' (388-9)

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There can be no doubt of Lewis's outrage at the brutality of the bookkeepers, or of his Contempt for Shand's reluctance to face the facts;14 but in writing up the anecdote he dissipated his outrage and contempt in a characteristically laboured joke (cf. Terry xxvi). 4

Lewis's relationship with his mother not only helped to determine the themes and style of his writing; it also helped to make him a writer. The childish anecdotes that Baron-Wilson records to show his precocious interest in the arts all bear on his mother. It was at one of her musical soirees that his 'shrill, tiny voice' complimented the performers on 'a very fine movement!' (1:12). It was her family's 'ancient mansion,' Stanstead Hall (where she would later flee with her lover), that allegedly first awakened his Gothic imagination. Baron-Wilson says that one wing had long been uninhabited, and, as a matter of course, was said to be haunted ... particularly one magnificent apartment, called the 'Cedar room,' into which, after dusk, no inducement could have led the domestics of the mansion to enter. In maturer years, Lewis has frequently been heard to declare, that at night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting to see the huge and strangely-carved folding-doors fly open, and disclose some of those fearful shapes that afterwards resolved themselves into the ghastly machinery of his works. To such juvenile feelings he ascribed some of the most striking scenes in 'The Castle Spectre;' ... (1:28-9) According to his sister Sophia, such juvenile feelings also inspired a striking scene in his most famous work: I have heard my Brother say that when a child he imbibed his first taste for romance, from the terrible stories of an old Nurse who used to gain much of his attention, when he was visiti [ng] at the house of a relative of our's, Stanstead Hall[,] a very fine old Mansion, the large Hall of which he has exactly described in the Monk under the name of the Hall in Lindenberg Castle, where The Bleeding Nun terrifies the assembled Domestics. (Peck 267-8) The attempted elopement of Raymond and Agnes, then, may recall the not much more successful elopement of Samuel Harrison and Mrs Lewis.

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The publication of The Monk gave Lewis a new identity, and even a new name, 'Monk,' which he was glad to assume, because he regarded his Christian names with 'horror' and 'abomination.' These were both Lewis family names - 'Matthew' was the name of his father, 'Gregory' the surname of his paternal grandmother (Peck 1) - but Lewis is said to have blamed his mother for them. According to Baron-Wilson, 'he delighted to indulge in a quizzing accusation' against her: "twas cruel in you to permit such a name. You have no idea of the impression caused by a name. One expressive of dignity or sentiment, noble or pastoral, had done wonders for me, by calling up, as it were, a corresponding figure in the mind's eye; but think ma'am, think of my two - two ugly names! Matthew! Gregory!' (2:362). His alleged delight in this accusation suggests that it was more than a joke. It implies that if she had given him another father, he would never have had to become Monk Lewis.15 To make a simpler and more easily substantiated point, Lewis first turned to writing as a way of adding to his income, and so to his ability to support his mother (Peck 189). He wrote to her from Paris (where he had gone to learn French) in September 1791: 'I am very happy to find that the Farce may perhaps be of some service to you, and I wish sincerely it was in my power to be of more' (Peck 184). Writing from Oxford in March 1792, planning to visit her in London, he mentioned this farce again and added: T shall also bring two or three other things for you to try your fortune with' (Peck 187); apparently she was to try to get them produced. Later that month, he assured her, T am more anxious than ever to get something upon the Stage for you since I shall receive a double satisfaction in thinking your satisfaction and ease was the effect of my industry.' He had also 'begun something which I hope and am indefed] certain will here-after produce you a little money ... It is a Roma[nce] in the style of the Castle of Otranto' (Peck 188-9). Even The Monk, then, was directly inspired by the need to help his mother (cf. Peck 10, 20). Lewis's mother was not just the intended beneficiary of his writing; she was virtually a collaborator. Referring to the farce, apparently a translation from French, which he had sent her from Paris, he told her, 'it was at your option to cut it as you pleased ... and I dare say you have altered it for the better' (Peck 185). Mrs Lewis did not collaborate on The East Indian; writing from Weimar in 1793, however, about his hopes that it would be produced, he told her, 'The best way for us is to wait patiently and se[e] how it will all turn out. There are a number of chances in our favour,' as if she were equally responsible for it (Peck 195).

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When he found himself as a writer, he came to think differently. In the letter from The Hague in which he announced that he had finished The Monk, he drew a sharp contrast between his writing habits and his mother's: They say, that practice makes perfect; If so, I shall one day be a perfect Author, for I practise most furiously ... I long to know, what it is that you are writing, or perhaps I should say, were writing, for as you are something inconstant in your paroxysms of Authorship, you may possibly have laid it aside by this time. (Peck 213)

After the publication of The Monk, and its stormy reception, his attitude changed again. He stopped patronizing his mother's literary efforts and began resolutely to oppose them. A rumour that she had actually written the scandalous novel may have contributed to this feeling (Peck 221). In about 1802 (the letter is undated), he wrote: I do most earnestly and urgently supplicate you, whatever may be its merits, not to publish your novel. It would be useless to say that it should be published without your name. Every thing is known in time, and it would be the bookseller's interest to have your name known, in order that people may read it from curiosity. He would not fail to insert in the newspapers that 'it is whispered, that such a novel is written by Mrs. Lewis,' and then would follow paragraph after paragraph, with all our family affairs ripped up, till every one of us would be ready to go mad with vexation.

He conceded that he had once felt differently; 'But I was young then, and have now seen enough of the world to judge better of the opinions it is likely to form' (Baron-Wilson 1:276-7). Mrs Lewis, who was entirely dependent on her husband and son, agreed immediately to suppress her book (Peck 220); but her son continued harping on it through 1803. He referred repeatedly to the family shame and dissension it would cause, and added a further reason: 'I hold, that a Woman has no business to be a public character, and that in the proportion that She acquires notoriety, She loses delicacy: I always consider a female Author as a sort of half-Man' (Peck 220). This is in striking contrast to his earlier association of the novel with feminine pathetics. Lewis never got over this prejudice. In 1811 or later, the literary aspirations of his acquaintance Susan Ferrier (later the author of Marriage [1818]) provoked him to complain to his friend Lady Charlotte Camp-

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bell: 'I have an aversion, a pity and contempt, for all female scribblers. The needle, not the pen, is the instrument they should handle and the only one they ever use dextrously' (Bury 2:328; Ferrier 136 and nl). His feelings about female actors were equally conflictual, probably for similar reasons, but they developed in the opposite direction. His halfsister, Fanny Lacey, went on the stage; in 1804, Lewis felt compelled to give his mother a warning to pass on to her - a warning which could hardly help reminding Mrs Lewis of her own past: She will find the Theatre a very dangerous place for a young Person; Many of the Women with whom She must associate are of the worst principles and conduct; and many of the Men are insolent and depraved to an excess ... A Theatre is in fact a place, in which no woman of delicacy ought to set her foot (behind the scenes, I mean) unless protected by the presence of an Husband ... For a Man the case is very different. (Peck 231) Despite his misgivings, Lewis continued to give his half-sister practical help. The dramatis personae of The Wood Daemon (1807) include a 'Miss Lacy' in the (very small) role of a 'Protecting Spirit' (4). By 1808, she had had some success 'in the Country' and showed some prospects of being able to support herself if 'anything were to happen' to her mother. Moreover, she appeared to be 'happy and satisfied' with her work, so Lewis, though he was still hardly enthusiastic about it, now advised that she should continue with it (Peck 215).16 Lacey's theatrical success did not last. After Lewis's death, his mother was still trying to advance her daughter's career. She even managed to get her an engagement at the Haymarket, only to find that 'she was so dissatisfied with the Company ... that she paid no attention to her appearance, and even left out half her part.' Mrs Lewis, disgusted, declared her 'not fit for the profession (Peck 271-2). When Mrs Lewis died in 1822, Anna Blake announced that she had left Lacey 'ail she had' (Peck 271-2). This was an exaggeration; Mrs Lewis actually left a third of her property to John Ingall, 'in consideration of many kind attentions.' Everything else, however, went to 'a young Lady I have brought up from Infancy known by the name of Fanny Lacey.' The bequest included not only money but also Mrs Lewis's clothes, her pianoforte, and 'a Gold ring set round with Brilliants given to [her] by the Will of [her] late Son.'17 Lacey gratefully took her mother's money and vanished from theatrical history.

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i Baron-Wilson describes Matthew Lewis senior as 'firm in his friendships, ... yet stern in his purposes, and implacable in his resentments' (1:45). She attributes his implacability to his sense of himself as a self-made man: 'his first rise in the world was entirely the result of his own exertions; and this circumstance, no doubt, much contributed to steel, as it were, his character, and to add a degree of sternness to its natural inflexibility' (2:84). In fact, as Peck points out (1-2), he was appointed chief clerk of the War Office in 1772 and deputy-secretary at war in 1775 through the patronage of William Wildman, Viscount Barrington (1717-93), the secretary at war (after whom he gratefully named his second son); after 1775, he was never promoted again. Mr Lewis's character may have been steeled, instead, by his unhappiness in his job: in 1782, asking his superior for a favour, he based his claim on 'the sacrifice of the Ten best Years of my Life in an occupation not very congenial to my natural turn of mind.'1 In 1795, asking whether his son might be given a post in the Office to assist in 'the French Branch of Business,' he argued: 'My pretentions to such a favour rest solely on the consideration which you may think due to a service of 23 years in a laborious Department, and to which I seem doomed to confine my views for the remainder of my Lifegg. Mr Lewis did become the friend of the most distinguished of his superiors, Charles Jenkinson (1727-1808), later the first Earl of Liverpool. The main satisfaction he seems to have derived from his job, however, was financial. In both his posts, he was paid fees for services rendered. In 1772, his total fees as first clerk were £610/19/6. In 1776, because of

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the American war, they rose to £1,303/8/7; in addition, he received £387/7/5 for his services as deputy secretary, for a total of £1,690/16/0. His income continued to rise during the war. It dropped after the peace of 1783, but by the end of the decade, as relations with France grew worse and worse, Mr Lewis did better and better. In 1791, he was able to buy a new house in Devonshire Place: 'a very good house,' as his son described it, 'and fitted up very elegantly; the preparations for war paid entirely for the expence of it' (Peck 184). The war with France paid off handsomely: in 1792, the last year of peace, Mr Lewis's fees totalled £2,511/15/4; in 1793, theyjumped to £7,030/12/0. War was bad for trade, of course, so it cut into his income from his Jamaican plantations, but 'the French Branch of Business' seems to have made up for the Jamaican branch: 'You will be sorry to hear that my father's West India estates have failed this year almost totally,' his son wrote in 1794. 'However ... the war doubles his salary from government, and as he expressed himself to me, he is not going backward in the world' (Baron-Wilson 1:149). By 1796, three years into the war, Mr Lewis was making £17,599/6/3 in fees.3 Startled by this amount, the Committee of Finance suggested that he be placed on a fixed salary instead. His reply to the committee vividly expresses his distaste for his work, the emotional importance money had for him in the absence of other satisfactions, and his sheer doggedness: the Sums here stated are, from the year 1775, the united Income of two Distinct Offices, held always by separate Persons, with only one exception before Mr Lewis's time - it has therefore been the Pay of double Duty, of double responsibility, and of far more unremitting personal attendance than if the Offices had continued in separate hands ... between the beginning of November 1792 and the end of July 1796, nearly four years, He never missed a single day's attendance at the War Office, unless confined to his House by serious indisposition; nor has he dined or slept out of London more than three times in any one of those years Upon a review of the circumstances of Mr Lewis's situation, what is the result? after devoting 25 years to publick Business, his Rank in Life is at this moment exactly the same as at his out-set: He has met with little to gratify his ambition, to keep alive the natural hope of advancement, or even to shew that his Services in the War Office have been approved; He has merely been permitted to hold the prescriptive Emoluments of his official appointments ...4

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The committee was not convinced; he was placed on a fixed salary. As a result, he later calculated, he lost £30,000 in the seven years between 1796 and his retirement.5 Mr Lewis suffered not only from professional disappointments but also, of course, from the failure of his marriage. He seems to have compensated for both in much the same way. M.G. Lewis's letters to his mother often mention his father's attitude towards money. (The topic may have kept coming up because the mother kept asking her son for money.) In 1791, Mrs Lewis was ill and applied to her son for help. He, in turn, applied to his father, who agreed: 'it affords me a fresh obligation to my Father,' the son told the mother. T shudder to think at what would have been your situation had he refused my request' (Peck 183). Fear was not the only emotion he endured. In 1792, he had to ask for twenty pounds for his mother. He got it, but told her: Tt is always a disagreable and humiliating task to ask for money but it is much more so when one is conscious of the Person to whom we apply having been most liberal and generous.' The son asked his father to give him an allowance: then, as he told his mother, T should be enabled to assist you without applying to him [a]nd if I was too extravagant my own necessity would give me the punishment I deserved.' The father refused this request, evidently preferring to have his son feel a sense of obligation, shuddering, and humiliation whenever he wanted to help his mother (Peck 188). In 1794, Mr Lewis obtained a diplomatic post for his son and had to begin giving him a regular allowance (of four hundred pounds a year) to enable him to maintain a household in The Hague (Peck 210). He did not give up the power of suddenly cutting the allowance, though it was eleven years before he exercised it. In 1803, Lewis wrote to Lord Holland of his father's intention to retire, adding: T am quite curious to know, how he will dispose of his time in future, for the change in his way of life must be total.'6 What MiLewis found to do, as it turned out, was to fall in love and quarrel bitterly with his son. The object of Mr Lewis's affections was Sophia Ricketts, the widow of George Poyntz Ricketts, an old friend. Mr Lewis and Mr Ricketts had both been born in Jamaica and may have known each other since boyhood (Peck 1; Poyer 608-9). Mr Lewis's behaviour towards Ricketts amply justifies Baron-Wilson's description of him as 'firm in his friendships.' Both men owned plantations in Jamaica, and both had suffered from

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the great earthquake and hurricane of 1779. Writing about it to Jenkinson, Mr Lewis was sanguine about his own losses (though he estimated that they came to at least £20,000) but feared that 'poor Ricketts's Property must have been destroyed.'8 The Rickettses, like Jenkinson, stood by Mr Lewis during his separation from his wife. A letter to Jenkinson expresses his gratitude towards them: My heart has been too full when I have lately spoken to you, to allow me to give expression to the half of what I feel from your most friendly & affectionate consideration of my family-embarrassments ... That I do not sink under them, I can with sincerity impute to your friendship and that of Mr & Mrs Ricketts, and none else.

Mr Lewis did not know how he could repay Jenkinson, and his only way of repaying the Rickettses was by placing himself under another obligation to Jenkinson by asking him to help them. A year later, Mr Lewis asked Jenkinson again: T wish my claims to be all transfer'd to my Friend - My very Heart bleeds for Ricketts - Your effecting any thing beneficial for Him w repay me in the way most pleasing, for every toil that I may have undergone.'10 Perhaps the Rickettses were still in difficulties as a consequence of the disaster of 1779. Jenkinson was afraid he would be unable to help, since there had been a change in administration and he was resigning as secretary at war.11 In 1786, Mr Lewis was still trying: he asked Jenkinson if he could arrange for an appointment for the Rickettses' son, Frederick.12 Whether or not because of his friend's exertions, Ricketts was made governor of Tobago in 1793, and of Barbados in 1794 (Peck 60; Poyer 608). Mrs Ricketts does not seem to have accompanied him; true to form, Mr Lewis tried (unsuccessfully) to get her a pension in 1796.13 Mr Ricketts may have had his reasons for not taking his wife to Barbados. A contemporary account intriguingly describes his personal secretary, Robert Wimberley, as 'the Piers Gavaston of Barbadoes' (Poyer 612-13).14 Wimberley's relations with his patron do not seem to have scandalized Barbadian society; if Ricketts's mistress, Betsey Goodwin, a 'sly insidious female' of mixed race, did cause a scandal, it was for political rather than for moral reasons: she was suspected of having used her influence over the governor to obtain the reprieve of a free man of mixed race who had been sentenced to death for shooting a white man (Poyer 639-40). The scandal clouded the second half of Ricketts's

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administration, but it seems to have blown over by 1800, when illness forced him to retire. The members of the colonial assembly voted him a bonus of a thousand pounds; since he died before the grant could be awarded, they transferred it to his executors (Poyer 651). Mr Lewis and Mrs Ricketts had a long history of friendship in difficult times; to us, it may seem touching that they should get together, twentytwo years after he had been abandoned and three years after she had been bereaved. Even to their contemporaries, it seems to have been acceptable: 'whatever was the nature of the intercourse which subsisted between the parties,' Baron-Wilson reports, 'it does not seem to have been such as to have compromised the lady in the eyes of the world' (1:285). To Mr Lewis's son, it seemed monstrous. In discussing the quarrel that ensued, it is difficult to be fair to Mr Lewis, since the surviving letters about it were all written by his highly incensed son; they were all, moreover, addressed to his mother, to whom the son might be expected to depict his father's lover in the worst possible light. Many of the letters are undated, and since they keep returning obsessionally to the same topics, it is difficult to order them. It does, however, seem possible to distinguish three phases of the quarrel: how the son offended his father; how the father expressed his displeasure; and how the son tried to bring about a reconciliation (if the father tried to do so, the son did not have much to say about it). Lewis tried to present his objections to Mrs Ricketts as primarily ethical: 'the whole extent of my offense is, that I think ill of a Woman, to whom He is attached, with whom I ought to have nothing to do.' The emphasis on 'ought' seems to imply that he simply disapproved of the impropriety of the relationship; later in the same letter, however, he became more personal: T never can entertain any other real sentiments of Mrs R's character, than the most profound contempt and aversion' (Peck 227-8). He claimed that he was not the only person to feel this way: 'You may as well look for a white Crow, as for an Individual of our Family who does not view Mrs Ricketts in the most contemptible light, or who would accept of "her partiality," Wm Sewell excepted' (Peck 229). The categorical statement expresses the strength of his feelings; the rather feeble qualification tacked onto the end of it expresses the scrupulous adherence to the truth which was an important part of his sense of himself. He was the only member of the family who felt strongly enough, or who insisted on expressing himself truthfully enough, to break with his father over the affair. Lewis had several reasons for feeling strongly about Mrs Ricketts. He

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stated repeatedly that she hated him as much as he hated her (Peck 229, 234-5). As his father's only surviving son, he seems to have been jealous of the favour his father showed to Mrs Ricketts's son, Frederick. One of the first signs of the quarrel was that Mr Lewis took Frederick, rather than his own son, to visit relatives in Portsmouth (Peck 225). Above all, Lewis resented Mrs Ricketts's resentment of his mother's continuing existence. He came back repeatedly to a remark she had made, that Mr Lewis was only waiting for the death of his wife 'to give her the greatest proof of his regard' (Peck 232; cf. 233-4). Lewis considered that the remark 'comprized in it a wish for [his] Mother's death, and that her making it had placed a barrier between her and the Son of that Mother' (Peck 238). In the beginning, Mr Lewis seems to have asked his son simply to treat Mrs Ricketts as a common acquaintance, 'not out of duty, but out of affection to him' (Peck 225). When his son refused, not surprisingly he took it personally. He wrote to his daughter Maria: 'Your Brother is still ... pursuing the same steady conduct as before; His indifference as to the pain He has occasioned me, and continues to give, is brutal; and must operate to convince me, that He wants not only the proper feelings of a Son, but the generosity of a Man' (Peck 227). Accordingly, he told his other daughter, Sophia, that he would try to become indifferent to his son; the son suspected that the task would not be hard (Peck 225). Later, Mr Lewis told both his daughters that he did not think he would ever again feel any affection for his son, even if they were reconciled (Peck 229, 232). On his son's twenty-ninth birthday, 9 July 1804, he met him on the stairs, 'said - "So; you are there, Sir!" and past on': he dined early and went to a cricket match, leaving Lewis to dine alone with his aunt (Peck 227). Mr Lewis also showed his displeasure in concrete ways. He refused to allow his son wine from his cellars (Peck 225) or to keep horses for him, though the son liked the exercise and his doctors had advised it (Peck 233). When Mr Lewis went to Portsmouth with Frederick Ricketts, he left a note stating that 'He had ceased to consider me as part of his domestic establishment ... and desiring me to [move out] before his return' (Peck 225). Mr Lewis's most concrete and most characteristic way of expressing his displeasure was financial. For some time, he had given his son an allowance which the son had found inadequate (Peck 233); the son had supplemented it with the income from his writing. When the father told the son to move out of Devonshire Place, he also told him, 'in the most

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positive terms,' that his allowance would be a thousand pounds a year (Peck 236); but when he discovered, at the height of the quarrel, that the son was supporting his mother, he cut his allowance in half (BaronWilson 1:309). He held out 'a hope ... of restoring [the] income at some future period,' evidently to undercut his son's independence by making his finances depend once again on paternal favour. In return, the son wrote 'a most humble letter, acquiescing without a murmur in his arrangements, [and] thanking him' for the hope, but the irony must have been too obvious: Mr Lewis did not bother to answer the letter (Peck 236). Lewis was reduced to despair (Peck 238). He felt that he was being asked to change not only his behaviour towards Mrs Ricketts - which he was prepared, however reluctantly, to do - but also his opinion of her: Now a Man's sentiments are not in his own power; I cannot think that right, which I know (or at least think I know) to be wrong; and if I were to say that my sentiments are altered, when in fact they remain the same, I should tell a lye. (Peck 231-2) Lewis could be as inflexible as his father. Of course, he saw his own inflexibility from the inside, so that it looked like a faithful adherence to principle; he saw his father's from the outside, so that it looked like an irrational insistence on persecution. It also looked like hypocrisy: the wronged husband was now doing wrong himself, he was wronging his son, and trying to force his son to do wrong. At times, Lewis's sense of his father's hypocrisy became almost paranoid. In 1805, two years into the quarrel, he speculated that his father was interested in ending it only in order to find some other excuse for breaking with him: I shall not be surprized, if He first obtains as much for Mrs Ricketts from me as He can; endeavours to make it appears.*, if I was reconciled to her, ... and then by demanding that I should confess my principles to have been wrong (which thinking them right, I cannot do without telling a lye) to make that refusal the pretence of his continued displeasure, and thus have an excuse for saying that Mrs R. has nothing to do with the quarrel. He asked his mother to keep his letter as proof that he had seen through this devious plan (Peck 237). Lewis felt that he was trying hard for a reconciliation. He told his

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father that he was willing to do anything but lie, an offer which does not seem likely to have avoided offence (Peck 227); later, he actually offered to lie if his father wished it, an offer which, put so baldly, does not seem much better (Peck 232). More constructively, though he could not admit that he had been in the wrong, he could apologize for offending his father without meaning to (Peck 232); and when his father 'luckily mentioned a circumstance, ... which it was in [his] power to make an apology for,' he jumped at the chance (Peck 234). He agreed to meet Mrs Ricketts at his father's house (Peck 232). He was reluctant to countenance her by calling at her own house, but he was prepared to take his father's wish that he should do so as a command (Peck 237-8). Since he was sure that she would be as unwilling to receive his visit as he was to make it, he was even prepared to enter into an unlikely alliance with her: 'I shall have no objection to call on her, provided She will have the goodness to order, that I shall never be let in' (Peck 228). He seems almost to have enjoyed the absurdity of the standoff. Eventually, the father and son achieved a formal truce. Lewis approached his father through his uncle Robert Sewell; the father gave Sewell the message that he did not forbid his son's writing to him; the son wrote 'as kindly as [he] could'; and the father replied with 'a very gracious letter' in which he expressed his satisfaction with what his son had written, relinquished his displeasure (though he did not, his son noted, go so far as to speak of forgiveness), apologized for not being able to invite his son to live with him again, and assured him that he did not expect 'servility' any more than 'systematic opposition.' The terms express well the different views they took of what was at stake. 'Unfortunately,' the son concluded, 'I am persuaded that this reconciliation is only apparent, and that every spark of real affection for me is extinguished in his bosom' (Peck 239). He made the best of it. This chilly truce lasted for seven years. In November 1811, Mr Lewis fell ill with a 'Hectic' (Peck 256);13 by the next March, his condition was considered to be 'very precarious.' His son wrote a letter asking to see him and gave it to his sister Maria. When she asked her father if he was strong enough to read it, he asked her not to give it to him; but when she told him that his son was concerned over his illness, he added kindly, 'Ah! He's a foolish Boy' (Peck 254-5). Eight days later, he still had not asked to see the letter. The son asked the father's physician, Sir Walter Farquhar (1738-1819), to intercede for him. As he told his mother, he was not sure that he wanted Sir Walter

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to succeed. Characteristically, he shrank from the painful experiences a reconciliation might expose him to: The recital of his sufferings pains me cruelly; but at least his alienation from me has spared me the agony of witnessing his gradual decay day after day, which I really think would have been insupportable: Thus is every evil still attended with some good. At present, his illness makes me melancholy; His sufferings give me pain; I am sincerely anxious to hear of his being better. But it is now above nine years since I have had any intercourse with him, that carried with it any kindness; His loss will alter none of the habits of my life; I shall have but few remembrances of his affection; I shall not miss his place at the table, nor the morning welcome, nor the affectionate goodnight. Often and often in my early days, when I quite doated upon him, I have thought, that my heart would break, if I were ever obliged to attend him on a death-bed. Nine years of constant harshness or indifference on his part have now made us Strangers to each other; But still I dread so much the thoughts of witnessing his sufferings, that I scarsely know, whether for my own happiness I ought to wish for a reconciliation now. - To have been on such terms with him while He -lived, as would have given me opportunities of contributing to make him happy, would have been worth any price; But I have done no wrong, and need not his forgiveness; In a mercenary view a reconciliation may be desireable for me; but in what other? (Peck 256-7) In the whole voluminous correspondence about the quarrel, this is Lewis's first surviving reference to the possibility that his father might disinherit him. Sir Walter did not succeed in persuading Mr Lewis to see his son. Cyril Jackson, dean of Christ Church, eventually did succeed, but not until Mr Lewis was so ill that he could do no more than repeat 'God bless you.' The son was not allowed to speak at all but 'made it up in cryinggdgdgdg 257). The father died a few days later, on 17 May 1812.

In a mercenary view, Lewis did very well out of his father's death. The will named only two major beneficiaries, Lewis and Mrs Ricketts. She was left five hundred pounds, and her debts to Mr Lewis were forgiven; everything else went to his son. He did not leave his daughters 'so much as a token of remembrance' or ask his son to take care of them; he had, of course, already provided for them when they were married. According to Lewis, 'the general terms of my Father's bequest to "His beloved Son" has fortified my feelings beyond any sum that He could have left

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me' (Peck 257-8). Lewis was obviously anxious to read as much reconciliation into the bequest as he could. Lewis's quarrel with his father naturally affected his relations with the rest of his family. From the beginning, Sir Henry Lushington tried to mediate between the father and son - even though, according to the son, Mrs Ricketts had tried to prevent Lushington's marriage to Maria Lewis (Peck 234). Lewis compared his friendly efforts unfavourably with the attitude of his other brother-in-law, John Shedden, who forbade Sophia to visit Mrs Ricketts and insisted that when she came to London she should stay with his brother, not with her father, 'to avoid the necessity of being much with that Lady' (Peck 225). By 1805, Lewis was taking a darker view of Lushington's activities: 'Lushington's letter (whether intentionally or not) was exactly calculated to make me refuse to do what was desired of me.' In other words, Lushington was only pretending to be a peacemaker while actually sowing strife (this remark occurs in the same letter which lays bare his father's plan to resolve the quarrel in order to resume it without reference to Mrs Ricketts). Soon Lewis viewed Lushington as 'Mrs R's professed Supporter' (Peck 239). By March 1806, he had to tell Lord Holland that he would be unable to give Lady Holland a letter of introduction to Sir Henry: 'He has played such a part between my Father and Myself, that I have given up all intercourse with Him, and do not even see him, when I call upon my Sister at her own House.'16 Lewis carried on this subsidiary quarrel for the rest of his life. Lushington carried it on even longer. In 1833, he told Charles Fulke Greville (1794—1865) that he was opposed to a biography of Lewis because he thought 'a true account of his life and character would not do him credit'; to prove his point, he sent him a character sketch, which Greville found 'not flattering' (Journal 2:170-1). In 1838, twenty years after Lewis had died, Lushington suddenly forbade the publication of Lewis's journal of his Italian journey, which Greville had already sold to the publisher Richard Bentley (Memoirs 145-6; 'Memorandum of an Agreement'). Unfortunately, the manuscript has since disappeared; presumably it alluded to their quarrel.17 2

The father-figures in Lewis's writings can be divided into two groups, like the mother-figures. Corresponding to the erring women (though

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the individual figures are not always paired in this way) are good husbands and fathers; corresponding to the heroic mothers are evil fathers. The father-figures, however, are usually treated less sympathetically than the mother-figures. The good fathers tend to be marked by a frigid selfrighteousness; the evil fathers tend to be completely despicable. Lewis made his translation of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe in 1793 (though it was not published as The Minister until 1797 and not produced as The Harper's Daughter until 1803), so it may be a source for all his published work (Peck 200). The two titles he gave the play point to its two fathers. Munster the harper (Schiller's Miller) is the good father, but he is an abusive husband (his favourite term for his wife is 'Serpent!' [9, 11; 1.1]), and he is distressingly ready to suspect his daughter of unchastity (2-3; 1.1). Eventually, he drives her to ask, 'Oh! Father, Father! Can affection then torture a wretch more cruelly than tyrannic violence?' (177-8; 5.1). Count Rosenberg, the Minister (Schiller's President von Walter), is a tyrannical and violent father. He is, however, in his way, a devoted one. He has committed murder in order to attain a position of power that he can pass on to his son (34; 1.8), and in order to consolidate his son's position he arranges for him to marry the Prince's mistress, Baroness Augusta (26-7; 1.5). In the end, however, his machinations bring about the deaths of both his son and the harper's daughter. In The Castle Spectre, the good fathers are distanced by death or imprisonment. The father of Percy, the hero, does seem to have been of the Munster type: Percy's faithful retainer refers to him as 'your good grumbling father.' But unlike Munster or Count Rosenberg, he cannot interfere with his child's marital plans, since he is dead: 'God grant him that peace in heaven, which he suffered nobody to enjoy on earth!' the retainer prays (8; 1.1). The father of Angela, the heroine, is not quite so safely out of the way. For most of the play, she believes he is dead, but she eventually discovers that he has only been confined to a dungeon for sixteen years. When, at a particularly thrilling moment, the father and daughter are reunited, and they are trapped by the villain, she offers to marry him in order to save her father, but the father manages to summon up some of the inflexibility characteristic of his group: 'God of Nature, to Thee I call! - If e'er on Osmond's bosom a child of mine rests - if e'er she calls him husband who pierced her hapless mother's heart, that moment shall a wound, by my own hand inflicted - ' (97; 5.3). She gives in to him in time to interrupt this fearful oath. Bad fathers are virtually absent from the play, as they are from Lewis's

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next play, The East Indian. (The good fathers in his work outnumber the bad ones, just as the erring women outnumber the heroic mothers.) The comedy does, however, include a particularly inflexible good father. Rivers, the East Indian of the title, has disowned his daughter Zorayda, and sworn never to forgive her, for being seduced by Beauchamp: 'Stretched in her coffin I might forgive her, else never!' (36; 3.1). The benevolent efforts of the other characters, and the sudden marriageability of Beauchamp, finally induce him to change his mind, but he continues to insist that his rigidity was part of his goodness: 'surely, had I loved you less, I had been appeased more easily' (83; 5.1).18 Lewis's first original tragedy, Alfonso, King of Castile (1801), pits two equally inflexible fathers against each other. Alfonso's 'proudest title is "His People's Father"' (69; 4.1). But he is quick to judge and slow to forgive. Deceived by falsified evidence, he has convicted his best friend, Orsino, of treason; even after he has realized his mistake (fourteen years later), he allows himself to be deceived again, by the same sort of false evidence, into convicting his own son on the same charge. His treatment of his daughter, Amelrosa, is almost as severe. Her offence is to have fallen in love without asking his permission; his response is to accuse her of treachery and parricide: Thou hast no cause for grief! The poisoned arrow Has pierced no heart, but mine! These eyes alone Need weep for what they've seen! Thou hast not felt What 'tis to lose all faith in man! to see Joy and hope die together; and to find, When all thy soul loved best hung on thy neck, Each kiss was false, and each sweet smile was hollow! Well! well! 'Tis past griefs curing! wondrous bitter, But must be borne! A few short months, and then The grave mends all. (51; 3.1)

He asks her if he has been too harsh a father - a question to which his preceding speeches suggest a pretty clear answer - assures her that he still dotes on her but can no longer trust her, gives her lover a dukedom, and tells her never to see him again. No wonder Amelrosa, like Julia Munster, complains of her father's 'so torturing love, so cruel kindness!' (54; 3.1). She does eventually persuade him to forgive her, but it takes five pages of pleading - even Rivers only holds out for about a page.19 Orsino, the play's other good father, is equally inflexible and has

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more chance to show it. Despite seven pages of pleading, he refuses to forgive Alfonso for imprisoning him unjustly; but when his son, Caesario, conspires to overthrow Alfonso in revenge, he refuses to join the conspiracy. He will not stoop to revenge, and he will not commit treason, even though he has already been punished for it. The last scene of the play is a battle between Caesario's forces and those loyal to Alfonso. Orsino leads Alfonso's troops. Caesario is victorious, and he is about to kill Alfonso, when Orsino conjures him 'by this blood, (a father's blood, the same / Which fills thy veins, and feeds thy life)' not to do it (108; 5.4). Caesario refuses to listen to his father, so the righteous father kills him, in order to save the king. Then he bullies the other rebels into submission by invoking the most righteous and inflexible Father of all: as I with him, So, traitors, shall your Father deal with ye, Your Father who frowns yonder. - [Thunder.] - mark! He speaks! The avenger speaks, and stretches from the clouds His red right-arm. - See, see! His javelins fly, And fly to strike you dead! (110; 5.4)20

When the tragedy was staged at Covent Garden, the catastrophe had to be toned down. In the staged version, Caesario killed his father without recognizing him during the battle and then killed himself when he realized what he had done (Peck 87). Evidently inadvertent parricide and remorseful suicide were more acceptable than Lewis's righteous filicide. Lewis wrote his second tragedy, Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error, in 1806, after the climax of his quarrel with his father. It includes the most loathsome of all his bad fathers and the most rigid of his good ones. Michael Ducas, Emperor of Byzantium, is such a tyrant that his people have overthrown him, and such an ingrate that when Robert Guiscard restores him to his throne, he plans to murder Guiscard and take Guiscard's wife, Adelgitha, back to Byzantium as his empress. His daughter, Imma, is terrified of him; and though (since it is her duty) she can manage to love him, she cannot esteem him (7; 1.1). Guiscard, Prince of Apulia, is not literally a father, and he is described as the son rather than as the father of his country (34—5; 2.2), but he is clearly another Alfonso. He is such a good ruler that even criminals love and serve him: 'e'en those robbers, / Whose blood, if seized, had streamed by Guiscard's justice, / Rejoic[e] to save [his] precious life' (14; 1.1): he resembles the punitive attachment figures Bowlby dis-

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cusses - figures whose very punitivity, paradoxically, elicits intense attachment (1:213, 215-16, 226-7). He has two rules: 'ne'er to sin himself, / And ne'er to pardon others, when they sin' (19; 1.1). His rigidity places Adelgitha in the power of Michael, who knows of her single error and uses it to blackmail her. When Guiscard learns all and is forced to tell her that (much as he despises himself for it) he still loves her, her suicide is as appropriate to his character as to her predicament (125; 5.2). In Timour the Tartar (1811), however, a good and forgiving father suffers from his bad and inflexible son. The play is not very serious, even by Lewis's standards, but it is virtually his only literary suggestion that his resentment of his father might have been tempered with guilt. Oglou is terrified of Timour, his son. 'I never think of you,' he tells him, 'without wondering, how I could ever have courage enough to beget such a Firebrand' (44; 1.1). He fears that Timour may actually have him beheaded (9-10; 1.1; 30; 1.2). Yet he loves and forgives him: 'Ah! when can a Father cease to love, and what guilt can exceed the measure of paternal patience? this Tyrant, this Regicide is still dear to me, dear as the air I breathe: His very vices chain me to him closer, and I feel that I love him the more, because being what He is, no one but myself can love him' (28-9; 1.2). The play was first produced in April 1811, a few months before Mr Lewis's final illness. If it was a gesture of reconciliation, Lewis must have been relieved that he had made it in time. 3

Like his wife, though apparently to a lesser extent, Mr Lewis took an interest in his son's writing. In 1793, he prodded his son into planning to publish a collection of poems: 'my Father insists upon my reciting verses of my own composition at the Oxford encenia,' the annual ceremony honouring founders and benefactors, when honorary degrees were granted, Lewis told his mother, 'and I may as well print thfem] as speak them' (Peck 196). A year later, Lewis was hoping that John Walter of Charing Cross, a bookseller, would publish a long poem, apparently a translation of Wieland's Oberon (1780): 'I think, He would from his obligations to my Father, do all in his power to promote the sale' (Peck 210). Nothing came of either plan.21 When Lewis did publish his first book, in 1796, his father could hardly avoid taking an interest in the scandal it created. Lewis wrote him a long letter apologizing for the book. He waited until 1798 to do so; perhaps

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he wanted to be able to point to the expurgated fourth edition as proof of the purity of his intentions and of his willingness to comply with moral recommendations. Nevertheless, the long delay suggests a certain distance between them, and the letter - the only surviving letter from Lewis to his father - is more formal than any of his letters to his mother: To express my sorrow for having given you pain, is my motive for now addressing you; and also to assure you that you shall not feel that pain a second time on my account. Having made you feel it at all, would be a sufficient reason, had I not others, to make me regret having published the first edition of 'The Monk;'... I perceive that I have put too much confidence in the accuracy of my own judgment... (Baron-Wilson 1:155)

Lewis seems to have associated his father with the authorities who had considered prosecuting him. The scandal (as well it might) had undermined his faith in his own judgment, much as his father's handling of his finances had undermined his independence in other ways. By then Lewis had published his melodrama The Castle Spectre as well as The Monk, and he was hoping soon to publish Tales of Wonder, his collection of supernatural ballads. Mr Lewis seems to have been concerned at the tendency of all this literary activity; Lady Holland describes him as 'anxious that [his son] should give a classical turn to his literary reputation, as he laments his ballad and green-room tastes' (Lady Holland, Journal 1:225). To reassure his father, Lewis published The Love of Gain, an imitation of the thirteenth satire of Juvenal. This exercise in a genre obsolete since the days of Johnson must have been respectable enough to please his father, but it did not please anybody else very much (Lady Holland found it too dull to finish), and Lewis never repeated the experiment. There is more evidence that his mother encouraged his writing than that his father did, but his literary ambitions did not survive his father's death. Timour the Tartar was his last original work, except for the travel journals which he kept at the end of his life, and which are largely about the plantations he had inherited from his father. 4

Lewis gave up literature for sugar. After his father's death, he devoted much of the rest of his life to managing his plantations, eventually buy-

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ing out the co-owner of one of them, so that he had sole ownership of, and sole responsibility for, between six and seven hundred slaves. Lewis remembered his father as a kindly slave-owner, indeed as (in this context) 'one of the most humane and generous persons that ever existed' (Journal 116). Mr Lewis's surviving letters, however, express an attitude that now seems chilly, though it cannot have been uncommon then. He thought of his slaves simply as property. Estimating his losses in 1779, he concluded: 'We have ... suffered less upon the whole than our Neighbours - have lost only eight Negroes, while others have lost the whole.'22 The next year, he commented on another disaster: 'our great apprehension is a Scarcity of Provisions that may be fatal to our Negroes, their Provision Grounds having now been twice destroyed in 10 months.'23 In his eyes, the deaths of slaves by drowning and starvation were financial setbacks for their owner, not human tragedies for the slaves themselves. Mr Lewis supported not only the institution of slavery but also the slave trade: he was an anti-abolitionist as well as an anti-emancipationist. In 1788, during the first parliamentary campaign for abolition, he forwarded to the Earl of Liverpool a letter from 'one of the most respectable and most opulent Gentlemen of Jamaica,' describing the campaign as 'the most consummate piece of Villany that ever was attempted' and threatening that the colonies would secede from Britain if it succeeded.24 The letter is completely banal and cannot have added much rhetorical ammunition to the anti-abolitionists' arsenal; in forwarding it, however, Mr Lewis demonstrated that he was anxious to give them whatever help he could. The Sewell side of the family was equally anti-abolitionist. Lewis's uncle Robert Sewell (1751-1828) was attorney-general of Jamaica until 1795, when he returned to England as Jamaica's agent. Elected to Parliament (as Lewis himself was) the next year, he consistently spoke for the planters' interests and against abolition. In a speech in May 1797, he argued that it would be economically impossible to abolish the slave trade until the colonies were fully cultivated; if Britain withdrew from the trade before then, Spain would simply take it over. In April and May 1798, he spoke against William Smith's motion to prevent overcrowding on small slave ships. When Smith proposed that each slave be allowed forty cubic feet (about three by three by four), Sewell responded that 'negroes preferred to be herded together' (Thorne 5:120). Byron liked to claim that Lewis himself was also an anti-abolitionist. In 1817, after Lewis had visited him in Switzerland, Byron wrote to Samuel

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Rogers that he had 'set him by the ears with Madame de Stael about the Slave trade' (Letters 5:206). He later told the same story to Thomas Medwin, in more detail: 'Madame de Stael and he used to have violent arguments about the Slave Trade, - which he advocated strongly, for most of his property was in negroes and plantations. Not being satisfied with three thousand a-year, he wanted to make it five' (Medwin 193). The anecdote does not prove that Lewis's greed made him a reactionary; it does prove that Byron, one of the age's most famous liberals, could be surprisingly careless about one of its most important political issues. He was confusing the slave trade and slavery, abolition and emancipation. Don Juan contains several passages in praise of Wilberforce, as the 'moral Washington of Africa,' who 'set free / The Negroes' (14.82-4, 12.20). Wilberforce, of course, had done nothing of the kind. He had led the campaign to abolish the slave trade, but the slaves already in the West Indies were no freer than they had been before 1807. They would not be emancipated until 1833, nine years after Byron's death.25 Lewis, as one would expect, was aware of the difference. Although he did not speak in favour of abolition (or of almost anything else) during his single term in Parliament, at least he did not speak against it as his uncle did. He rejoiced in the success of the abolition campaign, but while many abolitionists had hoped that it would make slavery unworkable, he believed that it had made the institution comparatively tolerable: the condition of his own slaves, he believed, was 'much more comfortable than that of the labourers of Great Britain ... now that no more negroes can be forcibly carried away from Africa, and subjected to the horrors of the voyage, and of the seasoning after their arrival' (Journal 62). Lewis's pro-abolitionist stance was not simply a matter of reconciling himself to the new state of affairs after 1807. Baron-Wilson's biography includes an anonymous account of a garden party given by Lewis for the Duchess of York. It is undated, but the slave trade was obviously still a live issue, though it obviously had been debated long enough to bore Baron-Wilson's reporter. After a discussion of Lewis's cat Minette, some one mentioned the slave trade and Mr. Wilberforce, which immediately called forth fresh sentiments of philanthropy and benevolence from her royal highness; and these were warmly responded to by Mat. But to tell you the truth, what with dogs, cats, animals, and instincts, and then the old story of Wilberforce and the slaves, ... I was heartily glad when they changed the subject to other matters. (1:345-6)

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The sentimental, all-purpose humanitarianism that inspired the abolitionism of Lewis and the duchess is not to modern taste (any more than it was to the taste of the reporter), but it played an important role in the change in attitudes that made abolition possible. Lewis's abolitionism was not simply a matter of party chat, either. It found expression in a number of his works. A character in The Minister criticizes the Prince of Brunswic for selling his own subjects into slavery as mercenaries (48-52; 2.2); the incident is a minor one, but the thought of Europeans enslaved and shipped overseas might provoke readers and spectators to consider how they would feel if they were subjected to the slave trade. In Rolla, when the humanitarian Las Casas protests the enslavement of the Peruvians (13; 1.4), the point may be similarly brought home to the English audience: whatever Kotzebue may have originally intended, in Lewis's translation Pizarro comes to stand for Napoleon and the Peruvians for the English threatened with invasion. (In Sheridan'sgPizarro, this allegorization is all but explicit.) These rather tentative attempts to construct an anti-Bonapartist abolitionism may be responses to the popular association of abolitionism with Jacobinism, which had stalled the abolitionist campaign since the beginning of the war with France in 1793 and would continue to do so for many years. As Wilberforce complained, 'It is certainly true ... and perfectly natural, that these Jacobins are all friendly to Abolition; and it is no less true and natural that this operates to the injury of our cause' (Blackburn 147). The Castle Spectre presents the anachronistic but striking figure of Hassan, an African who has been enslaved and brought to medieval Wales, and who laments his lot, not in the ludicrously ungrammatical dialect usually ascribed to stage slaves (Oldfield 10), but in long and eloquent speeches: I have been dragged from my native land, from a wife who was every thing to me, to whom I was every thing! Twenty years have elapsed since these Christians tore me away: they trampled upon my heart, mocked my despair, and, when in frantic terms I raved of Samba [his wife], laughed, and wondered how a negro's soul could feel! In that moment when the last point of Africa faded from my view, when as I stood on the vessel's deck I felt that all I loved was to me lost for ever, in that bitter moment did I banish humanity from my breast. I tore from my arm the bracelet of Samba's hair, I gave to the sea the precious token, and, while the high waves swift bore it from me, vowed aloud endless hatred to mankind. (13; 1.2)

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To keep his oath, he devotes himself enthusiastically to the nefarious schemes of his master, the villain Osmond. If, as J.R. Oldfield argues, the 'docility and tenderness' of African characters 'had become almost stereotypical' in English drama by this time (12), Hassan's passionate protest must have come as a shock. The political significance of Hassan was not lost either on the censor, John Larpent, who ordered some of his speeches (including this one) to be cut in performance (Cox, Dramas 161n36), or on the reviewers. The radical Analytical Review, though doubtful about the dramatic propriety of the character, was pleased with the sentiments, that Mr. L., with the opportunity of Hassan, discovers on the subject of that dreadful trade, which constitutes the shame and the guilt of Britain; which execrated by the just, and reprobated by the intelligent, is yet effectually supported by the short-sighted and the corrupt; and which our devoted country seems resolute to hold with it's last grasp ... (28 [1798]: 182)

The anti-abolitionist Monthly Visitor thought that Lewis had actually intended to defend, not just the abolition campaign, but even uprisings like the Haitian revolution: to 'justify the blacks, in their execution of black gratitude, and black vengeance' (3 [1798]: 108). After the scandal of The Monk, Lewis was sensitive to such attacks, and he tried to defuse them by printing the play with a postscript in which he claimed to have had only the most frivolous reasons for creating the character of Hassan: 'I thought it would give a pleasing variety to the characters and dresses, if I made my servants black; and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should .have made her' (101-2). This disclaimer has been taken too seriously (e.g., Evans 133-4; Peck 75), with the result that the play has not been taken seriously enough. Even if Lewis meant the disclaimer, by the time it appeared the play had already had its political impact. The Castle Spectre retained its reputation as a subversive play. Michael Kelly, who composed the music for it, included in his Reminiscences (1826) the ludicrous anecdote that Lewis had had it performed in Jamaica, for the entertainment of his slaves: 'they were delighted, but of all parts which struck them, that which delighted them most was the character of Hassan, the black.' According to Kelly, they expressed their black gratitude by poisoning their master (2:142).26 Lewis gave up his seat in Parliament in 1802, but he still played an

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indirect role in the last phase of the parliamentary campaign for abolition, as his father had done in the first phase - but on the opposite side. In 1806, he wrote to Lord Holland, one of the leaders of the Whigs, in the hope of averting a rearguard action by the opposition: I have been given to understand confidentially, that in the discussion on the Slave Trade your name is intended to be brought particularly forward. The Anti-Abolitionists, it seems, have some statement to make respecting large and recent purchases of Negroes for the use of Lady H's Jamaica Estates which (they think) they can place in such a light as may be very unfavourable to you ...27

Liberal slave-owners like the Hollands (and Lewis himself) occupied a position of moral ambiguity which was not simply hypocrisy - though (as Lewis realized) the resemblance was close enough to be a political risk. They were obviously sincere in their desire to abolish the slave trade - after all, they did abolish it - but they naturally wanted to be left in as advantageous a position as possible after it had been abolished. Lewis's attitude towards the institution of slavery itself was more ambiguous than towards the slave trade. He was not an emancipationist, largely because he thought that emancipation was impossible. In 1818, he reflected: Every man of humanity must wish that slavery, even in its best and most mitigated form, had never found a legal sanction, and must regret that its system is now so incorporated with the welfare of Great Britain as well as of Jamaica, as to make its extirpation an absolute impossibility, without the certainty of producing worse mischiefs than the one which we annihilate. (Journal 402)

These reflections were not quite as self-interested as they may seem; Lewis did consider freeing his own slaves, either immediately or after his death. In 1816, he visited Wilberforce to ask for his advice; T think he had an idea of emancipating them,' Wilberforce recalled, 'and wished to be assisted in forming a plan for their benefit. At all events he wished to have them instructed and their condition improved.'28 In October 1817, before his second voyage to Jamaica, Lewis wrote to Wilberforce. He was now 'convinced that it would be neither prudent nor kind to set them free at present,' but he still considered doing so at his death:

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Shall I leave all of them their liberty? Then they must have a provision made for them; and I could allot to them a certain portion of my land, giving them also their huts, provision grounds, and working implements ... As to my nephews [and heirs], the mere ties of blood can have no force in a question like this: whether ten white individuals shall be able to afford two courses at table instead of one, or 600 blacks and their descendants be secured against the possibility of future ill treatment, is not a question to discuss for two moments. But if I set them free, how can I be certain that the consequences may not be dangerous to the island and to its white inhabitants? (Wilberforce, Correspondence 2:383-4)

What Wilberforce advised is not known. Lewis improved conditions on his estates by banning the use of the cart-whip; by instituting a complete new disciplinary code, so that slaves could not be punished according to the whim of their overseers; and by granting them Saturdays as well as Sundays off, so that they would have one day a week to cultivate their provision grounds and one day to rest; but he did not, in the end, leave his slaves their freedom. Despite his misgivings, then, Lewis seems to have regarded the relationship between his slaves and their master as unbreakable. But he hesitated among three quite different models for this relationship perhaps because he was so uncomfortable with it. At times, Lewis thought of his slaves simply as his property, as his father had. Among the most distasteful passages in his Journal are his complaints about his slaves' dying faster than they reproduced, so that his work force steadily declined: 'This is the sixth death in the course of the first three months of the year, and we have not as yet a single birth for a set-off. Say what one will to the negroes, arid treat them as well as one can, obstinate devils, they will die!' (388; cf. 320-1).29 The uneasy humour suggests that on some level Lewis himself felt discomfort. Timour the Tartar includes a striking demonstration of the proprietary attitude towards slaves. When the heroic mother, Zorilda, arrives at Timour's court, 'She is mounted on a Courser richly caparisoned, and attended by four African Boys in golden Chains, and holding fans of painted feathers Two of them prostrate themselves; the others throw a tapestry over them; the Courser kneels, and She steps on the Slaves to dismount' (18; 1.1). Zorilda is trying to impress the tyrannical Timour; she may not treat her slaves like this at home. But she displays no discomfort at trampling on them, and nobody criticizes her for it. Zorilda's kneeling horse is itself a kind of slave; the play - which is

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essentially a vehicle for performing horses - exposes the proprietary implications of the sentimental association of slaves and animals that Lewis indulged in at his garden party. Some passages of the Journalgsuggest that Lewis thought of his own slaves as livestock (cf. Terry xxv). On his first arrival at his plantation, in January 1816, The works were instantly all abandoned; every thing that had life came flocking to the house from all quarters; and not only the men, and the women, and the children, but... the hogs, and the dogs, and the geese, and the fowls, and the turkeys, all came hurrying along by instinct... (60-1)

Wilberforce understood this attitude well: That [Lewis's] domestic Slaves might accost him with familiarity, appears to me perfectly natural and probable, - for it is the very effect of the consciousness, on both sides, of absolute power in a Master and Slave, to make the former permit familiarities which he can at any time repress. I well remember Sir William Young stating to me the familiarity with which his Slaves would come into his room & walk about there, & my asking him in reply whether his dogs did not do it with equal freedom.30

Lewis's second model for the relationship between master and slave was feudal. Wilberforce understood this model too. After discussing Young's dogs, he added: 'On the same principle it was that the Kings of France whose power was absolute were treated by their Nobility, Clergy, &c with far more freedom than that which prevailed in the King of Englands personal intercourse with his Nobles.'31 Lewis does his best to see this relationship from the point of view of the slaves - or rather, he does his best to see in them the feelings that would make such a relationship a success. Feudal loyalty may be the virtue celebrated most often in his works. Many of them, of course - The Monk, The Minister, The Castle Spectre, Adelmorn, Alfonso, Adelgitha, Feudal Tyrants, The Wood Daemon, some of the Romantic Tales, and Timour the Tartar — have literally feudal settings, and they are densely populated with faithful retainers. Some of these faithful retainers, as we have seen, are actually slaves. Hassan has special motives for his loyalty to Osmond, but the other slaves in The Castle Spectre are less complicated. At one point, the hero tries to bribe them to help him escape. They cheerfully take his money and then refuse to help him. He calls them rascals; one retorts: 'Earl

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Percy, we are none! - but we should have been, could your gold have bribed us to betray our master. We have but done our duty' (37; 2.3).32 Even in Lewis's works with contemporary settings, the servants display the same feudal virtue. In The East Indian, the widowed Mrs Ormond has to discharge her old servant Frank because she can no longer afford to pay him, but he refuses to go: I don't want to be paid! I don't want to be maintained! I ask but to see you every morning, and be assured you are in health; I ask but to see my young master grow up the image of his father; carry him in my arms while he's a child, and when he's a man to die in his presence! (25; 2.2) Luckily, the East Indian soon gives Mrs Ormond a fortune, so she can retain Frank as her servant. Lewis was pleased to see evidence of this kind of loyalty in his slaves; he was even more pleased to see it in former slaves, as if even manumission did not break the feudal bond. On his first arrival in Jamaica, he wrote: Numbers of old servants of my grandfather and uncle came to show themselves to me; and even a great many negroes, who had formerly belonged to my estate, and had obtained their freedom, came flocking from all parts of the country - for fear it should seem ungrateful if they did not come to see massa, because they were free. (Baron-Wilson 2:127; cf. Journal 89-90) 'Gratitude' was the name Lewis most often used for the feudal loyalty of his slaves. (The Monthly Visitor, in its review of The Castle Spectre, had referred sarcastically to the 'black gratitude' of the Haitian slaves.) The slaves' gratitude pleased Lewis most of all when they seemed to allow it to stand in the way of their interests. He promised to manumit one of his slaves (on condition that he was paid for him and could purchase a substitute, a process which abolition had made 'no easy matter'). The slave explained his feelings: 'It is not that I wish to go away, sir; it is only for the name and honour of being free: but I would always stay here and be your servant; and I had rather be an under-workman on Cornwall, than a head carpenter anywhere else.' Lewis suspected this speech was 'all palaver,' but he was still so pleased with it that he told the slave he 'sincerely wished him to get his liberty, and would receive the very lowest exchange for him that common prudence would authorize.' The slave was too tactful to point out the tension between his master's feudal

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and proprietary feelings; instead, 'the poor fellow seemed to think it impossible to find means strong enough to express his gratitude' (Journal 76-7). On 21 January 1816, as part of his policy to encourage procreation, Lewis personally christened all the children who had been born on his estate since his arrival at the new year. The first child to be presented was the son of Minerva and Captain, so Lewis had the bright idea of naming him Wellington, after 'the greatest Captain that the world could produce.' He told the parents: T hoped that he would grow up to serve me in Jamaica as well as the Duke of Wellington had served his massa, the King of England, in Europe.' He concluded the ceremony with a prayer sanctifying the feudal relationship: 'that God would bless the children, and make them live to be as good servants to me, as I prayed him to make me a kind massa to them' (Journalf123-4). Lewis did his best to be a kind master (or at least to see himself that way), and there is some evidence, though not directly from his slaves, that they saw him as one. On his second trip to Jamaica, his fellow passenger Mary-Ann Finlason reported: The joy of his negroes when they heard that Lewis had arrived, evinced itself in a thousand acts of wild extravagance. His philanthropic consideration of their wants had endeared him to this simple-hearted race; and they regarded him rather in the light of a deity come to give laws, and make regulations for their happiness, than as a master whose property they were.

Finlason herself seems to have favoured the proprietary over the feudal model. But she could draw the kind of feudal parallel that Lewis had explained to the parents of Wellington. Lewis had brought a generous supply of 'trinkets' to distribute among the slaves: I question if the order of the garter, when bestowed by the hand of majesty itself, ever conferred half the happiness on the wearer, as the Birmingham [i.e., enamelled] medals suspended from coloured strings did to these poor children of slavery, when presented by the hand of their 'good massa.' (Baron-Wilson 2:204-5)33

Lewis's third model for the relationship between the master and the children of slavery is paternal. If the first, proprietary model imitates his father's attitude, this one attempts to improve on it. The feudal model is

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already implicitly paternalistic, but the feudal relation can be mediated: the overlord can be represented by his vassal - as, of course, the planters usually were by their trustees, attorneys, and bookkeepers. The distinguishing mark of the paternal model is the importance it places on the presence of the master. Like the feudal model, it is often projected onto the slaves: Lewis says that they think of themselves as his children rather than that he thinks of himself as their father. In other words, as Judith Terry points out (xxix), he (quite conventionally) infantilizes them. (The proprietary model lends itself less well to projection: it is hard to see how the slaves could think of themselves as inanimate objects.) The happiness of his slaves at his first arrival made Lewis conclude that 'while Mr. Wilberforce is lamenting their hard fate in being subject to a master, their greatest fear is the not having a master whom they know' (Journal 68). At the christening ceremony, Lewis was pleased to note that one of the slaves wanted to call his son John Lewis, as if the master were a kind of father.34 It does not seem to have occurred to Lewis that this may have been a way of avoiding the more fanciful name that he had suggested, 'Navarre' (Journal 123) .3o When he left the estate to return to England, he was equally pleased to note: 'the women called me by every endearing name they could think of. "My son! my love! my husband! my father!" "You no my massa, you my tata!" said one old woman'ffJournalf 240). The incestuous jumble of endearments certainly suggests that the master-slave relationship was a familial one.36 The paternal model may have appealed emotionally to the childless Lewis. He also, however, had practical reasons for thinking that the personal presence of the master was important: 'unless a West-Indian proprietor occasionally visit his estates himself, it is utterly impossible for him to be certain that his deputed authority is not abused, however good may be his intentions, and however vigilant his anxiety' (Journal 11516). He believed that his father's trust had been abused by a negligent attorney. Lewis was determined not to let this happen to him. When he returned to Europe, he offered either to buy out the co-owner of his second estate or to divide the estate between them: T must have my own negroes under my own controul,' he declared. Tt is my duty to make them as happy as it is in my power' (Peck 262). Eventually he succeeded in buying the estate outright. He knew that as long as he lived he could be a good father to his slaves; this is why he told Wilberforce that he did not think they should be freed during his lifetime. But he was

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worried about what might happen to them after his death. He drafted a codicil for his will, requiring his heirs either to visit the estates once every three years or to send a family member in their stead; if they failed to do so, they would forfeit their inheritance. 'My whole object in writing this paper is to secure my negroes a visit from some person of my family who is interested in their welfare': to ensure that the paternal relationship between master and slave was preserved (Baron-Wilson 2:162). He signed this codicil in Geneva, in 1816; the witnesses were Percy Shelley, John William Polidori - and Byron, who was so amused by Lewis's quarrels with Madame de Stael 'about the Slave Trade.' When Lewis brought the codicil back to England, however, he was forced to acknowledge a problem, and it was this that he sought Wilberforce's advice about before returning to Jamaica. 'My attorney asked me "how I could be certain that the proprietor himself would not be their greatest tyrant?" and the objection was unanswerable' (Wilberforce, Correspondence 2:383). Even if the master were a father to his slaves, he still might prove to be a bad father. Lewis did not bother to add the codicil to his will.

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1 Lewis's sexuality has often been alluded to but never properly discussed. Some understanding of it, however, is helpful towards an understanding of the rich sexual pathology of The Monk-not, I believe, because Lewis's own sexuality was unusually pathological (despite George E. Haggerty's suggestion that it was 'deeply rooted in aberrant desire and guilt-ridden fear' ['Literature and Homosexuality' 349]), but because it gave him a vivid sense of the pathology of his society.1 Lewis never married, and he left no records of any sexual relationship.2 Baron-Wilson believed that the reason was his lifelong love for Lady Charlotte Campbell (1775-1861), the daughter of the fifth Duke of Argyll (1:187). Campbell printed a number of Lewis's letters to her in her Memoirs of a Lady-in-Waiting;dthey are not love letters, and she does not describe him as in love with her.3 Montague Summers, in The Gothic Quest (1938), was the first scholar to state explicitly that Lewis was homosexual (Peck 103). His reasoning, as is usual with Summers, is a mixture of the sound, the speculative, and the completely fantastic. An anecdote he relates seems, at first sight, conclusive: In the green-room his amours with many a young Antinous of the theatre were freely discussed, and gave ample point to Jane Pope's bon-mot. When Adelmorn was being cast at Drury Lane, and Mrs. Jordan was named for the heroine: 'Dolly Jordan, indeed!' cried the lively Pope, 'Pray who is Mr. Lewis' male love this season?' A name was whispered with a laugh. 'Take my

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word for it, then,' quoth the lady, 'The Monk will desire him, and no other to play Innogen.' (263-4). Summers's (unacknowledged) source is Thomas Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron (1824) (Peck 302nl04), in which Byron remarks that Lewis 'was fond of the society of younger men than himself ... I remember Mrs. Hope once asking who was Lewis's male-love this season!' (192). Summers has changed Byron's acquaintance Louisa Hope (Medwin 193n447; Letters 9:29) into the actor Jane Pope (1742-1818), and simply made up the piquant green-room gossip about Lewis's addiction to the casting couch. (Dorothy Jordan, who was known as Dora, not Dolly, did play Innogen in Adelmorn, the Outlaw.} Even in its original form, the anecdote is suggestive enough. It is unwise to rely on Medwin's book without corroborating evidence, but there is some evidence that Byron was given to making ambiguous remarks about Lewis. The parodist James Smith (1775-1839) quotes him as expressing his determination never to accept another dinner invitation from Lewis: T never will dine with a middle-aged man who fills up his table with young ensigns, and has looking-glass panels to his book cases' (Lovell 133). Like other homophobes, Byron may have associated homosexuality with narcissism. The most striking part of Summers's account of Lewis's sexuality is his claim to have identified 'the absorbing passion of his life,' a passion which was 'his soul's tragedy' (263). The object of this tragic passion was William Martin Kelly, whom Lewis certainly patronized from 1802 until 1815, and whom he provided for generously in his will. Summers provides a highly coloured account of their relationship and concludes sentimentally: Tt has been necessary, but it has been painful indeed to tell the story of Lewis' love. Whatever his faults - and they were trifling may they be forgotten and forgiven, for Matthew Gregory Lewis loved much and suffered much' (267). Lewis's patronage of Kelly does reveal a good deal about him, though riot what Summers thinks it does. Kelly's mother, Isabella, was the widow of an army officer, who had left her destitute, so that she had to support her sons by writing novels (many of them imitations of Radcliffe [Norton 162]). In 1802, she asked for Lewis's help. Her father had also been an officer, but he had resigned his commission to become carver and cup-bearer to George HI (Peck 62). During his appointment at court, he had not drawn his half pay; Mrs Kelly thought that Lewis, with his connections at the War Office, might be able to get it for her. Lewis

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tried but found that it had just been paid into the office for unclaimed monies. To make up for the disappointment, he promised to pay for the education of her eldest son and use his influence to get him a place in the War Office (Baron-Wilson 1:272-4). Lewis must have been displeased by Mrs Kelly's profession. He was probably pleased by her attitude towards it, however: she assured him 'that if she could but procure for her children the common necessaries of life by hard labour, she would prefer it to the odious task of writing' (Baron-Wilson 1:277-8). He may have hoped that the more he helped her, the less she would write. Despite his prejudices, Lewis did at first encourage Mrs Kelly in her profession. He read some of her work, introduced her to his publisher (Baron-Wilson 1:275-6), and offered her 'the plan of a Novel,' which apparently she did not use (Peck 221) .4 She was appropriately grateful or rather, he felt, inappropriately grateful. She wanted to dedicate The Baron's Daughter (1802) to him, but he refused the compliment, so the novel had to enter the world 'unpatronized by greatness,' as she put it in an unctuous preface (1 :iii). In her next novel, A Modern Incident in Domestic Lifef(1803), a governess reads to her pupil the 'Midnight Hymn' fromf The Monk (252-4), as if to demonstrate the book's harmlessness. The pupil praises the verses as 'exquisitely beautiful' and asks who wrote them. Tn England,' the governess replies, 'he would not need a name, for he lives in the heart of secret sorrow, and he allows sorrow to repose on his secret virtues.' The narrator describes this as a 'deserved eulogium on one whose nature reflects honour on the human kind' (1:54—5); the embarrassed Lewis described it as 'a most flaming eulogium' (Peck 220). Later in 1803, some of the newspapers carried an advertisement claiming that Lewis and Mrs Kelly were collaborating on a novel. Though Mrs Kelly insisted she was not responsible, Lewis told her that he could never again read over her work before publication (BaronWilson 1:275). As he pointed out to his mother, after the eulogium in A Modern Incident 'the advertisement might have induced people to suppose that I had written my own praises' (Peck 220). Lewis continued to pay for William's education at least until 1805, when his father cut his allowance. As a result, T have been obliged to tell poor Mrs Kelly, that after this year I cannot pay for her little Boy's schooling: She has written me a very kind answer (rather too enthusiastic, indeed) but the step has given me very great pain' (Peck 236). He resumed his contributions to William's education as soon as he was able, and he did manage to get the young man a place in the War Office. In

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1813, after he had come into his inheritance, he added a codicil to his will, in which he assigned his protege five shares in Drury Lane (worth £100 each), £500 to be invested for the beneficiary by the executors, and £500 in cash (Baron-Wilson 2:384-5; Peck 65). In 1815, William began to go bad. It is not clear exactly what his first offences were, though it is clear that Lewis was not unduly distressed by them. He told his mother: 'to be particularly pleasedwith his conduct I do not see how I can be, till he does something to make me so.' He seems to have been irritated by William's sheer fecklessness: 'no idea whatever makes a durable impression on him' (Baron-Wilson 2:96-8). Soon, William's offences became more specific, and Lewis's tone hardened. William got into debt by telling tradesmen that Lewis was his patron so that they would give him credit; this was hardly a deception, but Lewis called it an 'unpardonable liberty' (Baron-Wilson 2:99). Then, annoyed at being reprimanded by his superiors at the War Office, William quit his job (Baron-Wilson 2:95). Lewis did not lose his sense of humour over the situation: 'Re-establish him in the [War] office! I could as soon get him into the moon' (Baron-Wilson 2:103). Finally- at least, it was the last straw for Lewis - William cashed a draft on his patron. Lewis called this act 'a most monstrous piece of ingratitude, for which I think drunkenness and debauchery no excuse'; by this time William must have added drunkenness and debauchery to his list of offences (Baron-Wilson 2:102).5 Summers quotes these last words, describing them as the cry of a 'heart-broken lover' (266); they sound more like the grumbling of a disappointed patron. Summers describes Lewis's supposed amours with the young Antinouses of the theatre as attempts to solace his broken heart (263). But William did not begin to misbehave until 1815, three years after Lewis had retired from the theatre. Lewis wrote William one last letter; Summers describes it as 'a letter of infinite sadness and pain' (267), which again doesn't quite seem right: I need not tell you that I have been equally surprised and grieved at the accounts which I have lately heard of your conduct... I can now only say, that penitence and good conduct may yet induce me to notice you. But I must have proofs before I can interfere further in your concerns ... (Baron-Wilson 2:99-101)

Then he cut the young man off, in his own way. He refused to support him, but he encouraged his mother to do so and increased her allow-

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ance accordingly (Baron-Wilson 2:103-4, 105). He changed his will, cancelling the legacy of £1,500 but replacing it with an annuity of £104, payable in weekly instalments: 'I have no other means of securing him from starving, through his own imprudence and misconduct of every kind' (Baron-Wilson 2:387). If the beginning of Lewis's relationship with the Kelly family seems to have been governed by his feelings about his mother's literary ambitions, the end seems to have been governed by his feelings about his father's manipulative use of money. The relationship does not, however, seem to imply anything about his sexuality, except perhaps that he regretted not having children. After his death, his sister Sophia Shedden was distressed by 'a most scurrilous attack' on his memory. She wrote to Sir Walter Scott to ask him to write a reply and gave him some pointers as to what it should include: 'I think that the most prominent of his good qualities was Mercy. This was the moral of his Monk, and He exemplified it himself in his conduct to that good for nothing young Man Kelly - whose whole story indee[d] would tend greatly to illustrate my dear Brother's character' (Peck 268). Evidently Mrs Shedden did not think there was anything sexual in her brother's conduct to that good-for-nothing young man. Louis F. Peck, Lewis's most recent biographer, demolishes the fantastications of Summers with the ferocity of a true scholar. He points out Summers's 'embroidering' of the anecdote from Medwin (302nl04) and describes Summers's account of the Kelly affair as 'fanciful' and full of factual errors (66). When he moves from the merits of Summers's argument to those of his thesis, he becomes less sure of himself. In a single sentence, he says both that 'the statement that Lewis was homosexual ... would require for confirmation more convincing evidence than has been presented' and that it is 'impossible to confirm or disprove.' He even finds it impossible to understand, since 'the term is popularly used to cover such a wide range of phenomena, from the mere enjoyment of the company of one's own sex to the most appalling abnormalities' (66). Writing in 1961, Peck seems to think of homosexuality as a crime of which Lewis must be acquitted unless the case against him were proven beyond reasonable doubt.6 In fact, the evidence is abundant enough to be cumulatively suggestive, even if it would not be quite conclusive in a court of law. Not surprisingly, most of it is oblique, and it becomes more oblique as Lewis grows older. The tendency to euphemism that seems initially to have been a response to his mother's scandalous behaviour must have been

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strengthened as he came to realize that he too had something to hide. He did riot, however, feel that he had to hide everything, at least not from his closest friends. The evidence suggests that he was attracted to men, but that he thought of these attachments as (in Louis Crompton's terms) romantic friendships rather than love affairs (72-6), or (in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's terms) as homosocial rather than homosexual. Nevertheless, he and his contemporaries seem to have thought of the two kinds of attachment as essentially continuous. A discussion of Lewis's sexuality may be criticized as anachronistic, and though such a criticism may seem like an updated version of Peck's misgivings, it deserves careful consideration. The word 'homosexual' is itself an obvious, if trivial, anachronism when applied to the eighteenth century, since the Oxford English Dictionary does not record its use as a noun before 1912. More subtly but more seriously, recent theorists have suggested that until surprisingly recently, homosexuality - or, to use the term they tend to favour, sodomy - was considered a matter of behaviour, not of identity. As Michel Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality: As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage ... (1:43)

Since there is no evidence that Lewis ever engaged in homosexual behaviour, the old category of sodomy would be simply irrelevant to him. The question is when the old category gave way to the modern one. Foucault's unfinished history does not discuss homosexuality in the eighteenth century in detail; it states that the modern category was in place by the nineteenth century but not when it was put in place. The findings of other historians, however, suggest that Foucault would have found it to be yet another of the dubious achievements of the classical age - and in a late interview, Foucault confirmed that this was the case (Eribon 316; Trumbach, Sex 19). In a recent survey of the historiography of the question, Randolph Trumbach (following writers like Mary Mclntosh and Alan Bray) concludes that the change took place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries ('Sodomitical Subcultures' 118; cf. Davenport-Hines 77). By Lewis's time, if Trumbach is right, homosexuals would have been firmly established as personages, with their own identity and even their own stereotype.

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The identity assigned to homosexuals in the eighteenth century, and the stereotypes applied to them, were not, of course, those current today. The medicalization of homosexuality took place in the late nineteenth century (Rousseau, 'The Pursuit of Homosexuality' 140-1); its politicization, in the late twentieth. As an unusually articulate subject, Lewis can help us understand how an eighteenth-century man who loved men saw himself; as a public figure, he can help us to understand how the eighteenth century saw such men. 2

Two contemporary accounts do (like Baron-Wilson) describe Lewis as hopelessly attracted to women. Neither, however, is conclusive, to put it mildly. An article on 'Modern Beaux,' published in the Satirist in 1808 under the pseudonym Susan Wilcock, satirizes Lewis's social pretensions as well as his erotic ones: M.G.L. (Esquire!) is a slim, skinny, finical fop, of modish address, with a very neatly-rounded pair of legs, and a very ugly face. His looks have nothing manly in them ... His eyes are small, and, in general, watery; but, at teatime, (particularly if the glass has been pushed about a little by papa after dinner,) they sparkle, roll, and twinkle away most merrily, at every woman round the table. His language, then, grows rude and impudent, and he tries to be particular with any one of us who may happen to sit near him; spouting forth glibly French, Italian, Spanish, and German fadaises [twaddle], in a lack-a-daisy kind of way, with an ill-breath; and 'grinning horribly a ghastly smile,' as if to shew us all his jagged and slovenly teeth. (348-9)7

Her complaint that Lewis's 'looks have nothing manly in them' probably refers primarily to his physique: Lewis was a very small man. She may, however, have been hinting that there was something unwholesome about being so boyish. Sedgwick has speculated that men of Lewis's class associated 'the erotic end of the homosocial spectrum' with childishness (Between 176-7; cf. Trumbach, 'London's Sodomites' 13). Byron may have had something similar in mind when he told Medwin that Lewis 'would always have remained a boy in spirits and manners - (unlike me!)' (192).8 Scott recorded a suggestive remark about a portrait of Lewis: 'It was a miniature I think by Saunders who had contrived to mufle Lewis's person in a cloak and placed some poniard or dark-

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lanthorn appurtenance (I think) in his hand so as to give the picture the cast of a Bravo. 'That like Matt Lewis" said Duke Henry to whom it had passd in turn. "Why that is like a MAN."' To Scott, the point of the anecdote was that Lewis 'lookd always like a school boy' (Journalf5)f. Even if that were all the Duke of Buccleuch (1746-1812) had in mind, it would still remind his listeners of the time of life when Englishmen were most likely to have homosexual experiences. William Cowper (17311800), who attended the same school as Lewis, Westminster, though about four decades earlier, warned against the consequences of such experiences in Tirocinium: or, A Review of Schools (1784): See womanhood despised, and manhood shamed With infamy too nauseous to be named, Fops at all corners lady-like in mien, Civetted fellows, smelt 'ere they are seen ... (lines 827-30; Cowper 336-7)

Conversely, behaviour that would be offensive in an adult was acceptable or even charming in a child. Thus Baron-Wilson reports that Mrs Lewis's maid would often enter her mistress's dressing room to find the young Matthew, like one of Cowper's fops, 'parading before the mirror, arrayed in a long train, and loaded with all the gauze and feathers that lay within his reach' (1:12). A postscript to Wilcock's article seems to reduce the whole issue to insignificance: 'M.G.L. (Esquire!) is deeply in love ....with himself}' (350). Like her emphasis on his foppishness, however, this may be a covert reference to homosexuality, which Wilcock, like Byron, may associate with narcissism. The sheer strength of Wilcock's revulsion, which is striking, tends to confirm this impression. Lewis was still behaving in the same way in 1814, even in the highest society, to judge from a letter from the Princess of Wales to Campbell, her lady-in-waiting. The princess began by regretting that Campbell had missed an amusing little party: Lewis did play de part of Cupidon, which will amuse us, as you will suppose. He is grown so embonpoint, he is more droll than ever in that character; but he tink himself charming, and look so happy when he makes les yeux doux to the pretty ladies, that it is cruel to tell him, 'You are in the paradise of the fools,' so me let him sigh on to My Lady Oxford, which do torment Lord Byron, who wanted to talk with her, and never could contrive it. (Melville 1:284)

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Despite her extraordinary English, it is clear that Princess Caroline, like Susan Wilcock, considered Lewis no threat to female virtue. She evidently regarded him more indulgently than Wilcock did, possibly because, unlike Wilcock, she understood that he was only playing a part. In a significant association of ideas, she went on to discuss the most famous same-sex couple of the age, 'Lady Eleanor Butler and Mile Ponsonby, who must be mad, I should tink, to choose to leave the world, and set up in a hermitage in Wales.' The relationship of Lady Eleanor Butler (1739P-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1735P-1831), who had eloped to Llangollen in 1778, was universally believed to be chaste and widely admired (Crompton 103-4). The princess did not share this admiration: 'My dear Lady Charlotte, I do dread being married to a lady friend. Men are tyrants, mats the women - heaven help us - they are vrais Neros over those they rule.' Even marriage to the Prince of Wales was preferable, she thought (Melville 1:284-5).9 Accounts of Lewis's attraction to men are more numerous. In four cases, we have Lewis's own account of his feelings. The first case is a poem of 1798, 'Elegy, On the approaching Departure of a Friend': the friend was Charles William Stewart (1778-1854), later the third Marquis of Londonderry. He was lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Irish Dragoons and was on his way to Ireland to suppress the rebellion. The poem is most notable for its insistence on repression. Lewis tells himself not to distress his friend by revealing his own distress at their parting: But let no vain regrets in plaintive diction Betray the anguish, that your Soul endures; Veil with assumed content your keen affliction, Nor wish his heart to feel a pang like yours: Let not one sigh declare, your soul is smarting Let not his Eye one tear in thine discern; Force a feint smile, wring hard his hand at parting, Then haste thee home and pray for his return! (MS 114, p. 89)

When Baron-Wilson published the poem in her biography (2:298-301), she omitted these two last stanzas. A later poem, To the Hon: Charles. W. Sfffffff(1801), returns to thhe theme of renunciation. While Charles enjoys Youth, Health, Fortune, Honour, and Pleasure, then Friendship must 'withdra[w] her humbler claim.' Should he lose those benefits, however,

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Or should some Syren drop her mask, Whose arts had made your soul her Slave, Oh! Then, my Charles be mine the task To ease the pain, which Others gave. Oh! then, my Charles, then think on Me; Then on my breast thy cares recline; It holds an heart which feels for thee, An heart that's not unworthy thine ... (MS 114, p. 268)

The published version of the poem omits the second stanza quoted (Poems 46); evidently its homosociality was less acceptable than the misogyny of the first. In the second case, we know how the object of Lewis's feelings responded to them. This was William Lamb (1779-1848), later the longsuffering husband of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), and still later, as Viscount Melbourne, the prime minister. Lamb described Lewis in a letter to his mother, Lady Melbourne, in 1800: he might be pleasant enough if he was not always upon the strain ... I hear he intends proposing to Emily Stratford ... She will make him shed more tears and look more doleful in assembly-rooms than ever I did. (Melbourne 16)

Lamb clearly thought of their friendship as somehow comparable to an engagement. His remark, like that of the Princess of Wales, suggests that although, according to Sedgwick, the visible 'continuum between homosocial and homosexual' is 'radically disrupted' by homophobia 'in our society' (Between 1-2), this was not yet the case in Lewis's. Lamb and the princess seem to have thought of the homosocial and the homosexual as essentially continuous (cf. Norton 148-9). A letter that Lewis himself wrote to Lady Melbourne in October 1802 gives some idea of the romantic quality of his friendship with Lamb and suggests why Lamb might have complained that Lewis was 'always upon the strain.' The two men were staying at Inveraray, the estate of the Duke of Argyll. Among the ways in which the guests amused themselves in the country were amateur theatricals. As a professional man of the theatre, Lewis took an active part in them, and he used them to hint at the physical side of his friendship for Lamb. Lamb objected to the hint.

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I have persuaded William to play the part of Leander, but He obstinately refuses to be drest as a Shepherd with a wreath of roses & a bunch of cherry-coloured ribbands ornamenting his hat, which I am clearly of opinion is the proper dress for the character - 10 As in Baron-Wilson's anecdote of Lewis as a boy, theatrical costume seems to be associated with cross-dressing. Lewis's culture seems to have associated homosexuality with cross-dressing and transsexuality even more insistently than ours does (Garber 130, 381; cf. Trumbach, 'London's Sodomites' 12-13, 17-18; Harvey 945). The third case concerns Charles Grey (1764-1845), Whig MP, and later, as Earl Grey, the prime minister responsible for the first Reform Act. During another country visit, to Howick, Grey's Northumberland home, Lewis whiled away the time and flattered his host by writing a ballad about a local superstition. In 1805, he sent Lord Holland a copy of the ballad, 'Sir Guy the Seeker,' along with an apology for its poor quality: You are to understand, that 'Sir Guy' was written pour les beaux yeux of Mr Grey, with whom I have past a good deal of my time during the last two years, and who is at present 'the God of my idolatry,' and his Wife the Goddess ... Now I would have you to know, that Charles Grey says 'this Ballad is a good ballad,' and that He read it last spring in London to several persons in his own beautiful voice, which induced other people to agree with him ...n If Lewis's admiration for Lamb seems to have had something to do with how Lamb would look in a shepherd's outfit, his idolatry of Charles Grey was certainly focused on Grey's beautiful eyes and beautiful voice (he was a famous orator). Lewis seems to have mentioned Mrs Grey only for the sake of discretion; he says nothing about her. The fourth case is the least definite. In a letter of July 1809, Lewis told Lady Holland that he had passed the spring in a state of manic excitement: I went on laughing, and eating, and getting drunk, and talking nonsense and making love, and making a noise; till one night (or rather one morning) as I was dancing at Lady Millbanke's after supper with such energetic exertions both of body and spirit as equally astonished and terrified my Partner and all the Spectators, on a sudden I gave such a great jump as almost demolished a glass Chandelier above me, and my left leg below me: For on my descent from the Cieling I heard a great noise like the report of

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a pistol, and felt the floor giving way with me. I thought, that there had been a fault in one of the boards, and that I had broken a hole in it; but on further examination, I discovered that the fault was in the last place where a Man ever expects to find it; in Myself; for I had ruptured some of the fibres of the Tendon Achilles, and though five weeks have elapsed since the accident, I am still unable to cross the room without the assistance of a stick.

Lewis did not say what brought on the mania that led to his accident, but it was clearly another infatuation - one which certainly interfered with his recovery: in truth, London possest at that time a Magnet 'of metal so attractive,' that though I remained all the morning quietly enough at home, I could not resist going to Balls Sec in the Evening - So as I would keep hobbling to assemblies and Operas in spite of my leg, my leg would keep itself lame in spite of Me...12

Lewis seems to have become more discreet as he grew older: he was no longer willing to tell the Hollands the name or even the gender of his magnet. The laboured humour about 'the fault ... in Myself,' however, suggests that Lewis felt there was something wrong with the attraction. In between these two letters, in November 1807, Lewis sent the Hollands a bundle of poems from Inveraray.13 Several of them touch, more or less lightly, on homosexual or homosocial themes. 'Charlotte to Olivia' playfully presents one of his fellow guests as an abandoned Lady Eleanor Butler or Sarah Ponsonby. The epigraph, misquoted from Twelfth Night (1.5.258-60), is a declaration of love addressed by one woman to another: "Til halloo your name to the reverberate Hills, / And make the babbling Gossip of the air / Cry out - 'Olivia!'"' It invokes cross-dressing as well as lesbianism, since in Shakespeare's play the speaker is a woman disguised as a man, and on his stage both women would have been played by boys: Lewis's published works revel in this kind of play with gender. (Since Echo is the main female character in the myth of Narcissus, Lewis may be appropriating Viola's invocation of 'the babbling Gossip of the air' in order to suggest the female equivalent of the narcissism associated with male homosexuality.) Charlotte complains that sorrow has made her unable to eat: My breakfast brought (Ah! brought in vain to Me!) How tough the toast, how bitter seemed the Tea!

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At that sad meal no word my lips could utter; I eat three slices less of bread and butter! At dinner too no morsel could I eat; Sugar seemed acid, Vinegar seemed sweet... '\e Stews, no savoury fumes my taste excite; 'My Aunt may swallow, but I cannot bite! 'In fond regrets the dinner-hours are wasted, 'And Fish! Fowls! Puddings! Pies! retire untasted!' -

'St. Anthony the Second' gives a fantasticated account of an unsuccessful practical joke. A preface explains the background: 'I happened one night at supper to praise a Pye very highly. In consequence the Ladies drest up a female figure [probably a dressmaker's forme] with the intention of placing both that and the Pye in my bed: But they were so long in making their preparations, that when they entered my room, they found me there already, and made a precipitate retreat.' The poem turns the ladies into temptresses, like Matilda in The Monk, and portrays Lewis as torn between two temptations: I listened .... looked .... and longed; By turns surveyed Now the Goose-pye, and now each white-robed Maid. Now hunger led me tow'rds the savoury Pye, But the fair Nymphs recalled me with a sigh: Now leaving That, I hastened towards Those; But then the Pasty caught me by the nose! Less strongly tempted Grandsire Adam fell; Eve bought him with a hard raw Non-pareil: More powerful bribes did Satan here produce; My Eves were three, and seasoned was the Goose.

The ladies' practical joke suggests (like Susan Wilcock and Princess Caroline) that Lewis was no threat to their virtue: he was evidently a man whose bedroom a lady could safely enter at night. (His nickname, 'Monk,' would have had connotations both of celibacy and of a kind of cross-dressing.) The poem begins by describing him in a feminine, volupte pose, and by ascribing to him a specifically female sexual response: Midnight was past, nor yet I sought niy bed: Stretched on my Couch, alone I lay, and read.

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Calista-like, 'loose, unattired, and warm,' My night-gown scarcely veiled my careless form. Nor less unguarded was my mind: A flood Of generous wine still bubbled in my blood, While the soft page, on which my fancy dwelt, Taught my whole soul in fond desire to melt.

In taking the initiative, entering his room and tempting him, the ladies play a masculine role - the role of Lothario to Lewis's Calista (the words in quotation marks are taken from the first scene of The Fair Penitent [1703] [Rowe 6].). Both poems combine their hints of cross-dressing with an infantile orality - Charlotte's long account of the breakfast and dinner that she cannot even eat, Lewis's temptation by a pie - which Lewis's culture seems also to have associated with homosexuality, either directly or through the common association with childishness. 'The Vindication' is the most sombre of the poems Lewis sent from Inveraray in 1807. Its speaker explains why he spends so much time with 'Laura': he is not in love with her, but she sympathizes with his hopeless love for 'Julia.' The poem's reference to a 'love, which Custom's laws forbid,' could mean simply that Julia is married, but Lewis himself seems to have thought the phrase ambiguous, since he changed custom's laws to 'Honour's laws' when he published the poem in 1812 (Poems 56). The poem's tone, moreover, suggests that the feminine names may be a disguise: Oh! I've with her past days alone, Nor bade her lips one kiss confer; And oft we've talked in tenderest tone Of love, but neer of love for her: Though sometimes, (when her gentle art To lull my cares some means hath found) So much her Friendship eased its smart, I've thought, her Love might cure my wound. But scarce my mind the wish could frame, Before I loathed the selfish thought, Which aimed to plunge her soul in shame, Who balm to mine had often brought. -

The eruption of self-loathing in the last stanza suggests that the speaker

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is not just in love with the wrong woman. Something is wrong with his love in itself, which could plunge both himself and his beloved into shame if it were expressed. The emotion anticipates some of the bleaker poems of Housman. The published version tones the loathing down to scorn (Poems 57). Two other poems contribute to the impression that the feminine names in 'The Vindication' are a disguise. The 'Elegy, On the approaching Departure of a Friend' (which ends with Lewis enjoining himself to hide his distress) thanks the friend for the kind of consolation Laura offers in the later poem: for I must still remember How my torn heart his friendship strove to cure; How in that heart where all was cold December, He promised Spring, and cheer'd me to endure.

(Baron-Wilson 2:300)

An unpublished poem of 1800, 'To Mrs Wggggg(Sent to her the dayg before her Masquerade[)],' which is addressed to a woman named Laura, begins with some ostentatious trepidation about its subject: 'Dares the Muse disclosingffffffff[?]' The reason for the poet's trepida-g tion is his discovery that his 'Friendship [for Laura] was really............. Love in Masquerade.' More remarkable than the masquerade metaphor (which might, after all, simply have been suggested by a social occasion) is the violent assault on a male Eros in the last stanza: 'Longer to be concealed He struggled vainly, / I seized his Mask, I rent his thin disguise' (MS 114, p. 211).14 In this case, the self-loathing of 'The Vindication' seems to have been directed outwards. Lewis first went to visit his plantations in Jamaica in 1815. Byron announced the event to Thomas Moore with a mock-sentimentality, and an orality, that recall 'Charlotte to Olivia': 'Poor fellow! he is really a good man - an excellent man - he left me his walking-stick and a pot of preserved ginger. I shall never eat the last without tears in my eyes, it is so hoC Byron himself had been prone to romantic friendships in his youth; he evidently wanted to ridicule the idea that he might have shared one with Lewis. He also hinted that he expected Lewis to take advantage of his trip, as he himself had taken advantage of his youthful trip to Greece, to indulge in exotic pleasures: 'Lewis is going to Jamaica to suck his sugar-canes' (Letters 4:330). There is no evidence that Lewis exploited his slaves sexually, though it would hardly have been unusual if he had. He became fond of them, find-

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ing their 'air of truth, and warmth, and enthusiasm' a refreshing contrast to 'the cold hearts and repulsive manners of England.' He enjoyed being kind to them: 'I find it quite impossible to resist the fascination of the conscious pleasure of pleasing; and my own heart, which I have so long been obliged to keep closed, seems to expand itself again in the sunshine of the kind looks and words which meet me at every turnggJournal^}.g This lifting of an emotional inhibition coincided with the lifting of an expressive inhibition: the Journal of a West India Proprietor, his last book, is by far his best book since The Monk, his first, twenty years before. Shortly after Lewis died in 1818, the Courier published a 'just estimate of [his] character.' This was the attack that distressed Sophia Shedden so much that she asked Scott to write a reply: his firs[t] novel of The Monk was the model of high-wrought language and seductive story to its tribe. But his first celebrity was his last ... He had devoted the first fruits of his mind to the propagation of evil, and the whole long harvest was burnt up ... There is a moral in the life of this man ... He was a reckless defiler of the public mind; a profligate, he cared not how many were to be undone when he drew back the curtain of his profligacy; he had infected his reason with the insolent belief that the power to corrupt made the right, and that conscience might be laughed, so long as he could evade law.dfThe Monk was an eloquent evil; but the man who compounded it knew in his soul that he was compounding poison for the multitude, and in that knowledge he sent it into the world ... Than this there can be no deeper crime, if the depth of crime is to be measured by its effects. The homicide is grasped by the law, and there his mischief ends. The author of a licentious book propagates evil as far in the present as vice can attract, as far in the future as man exists; his ability shoots out the death but with the greater force, he enlists our natural admiration of genius against our purity; ... the natural refreshment of the human spirit is turned into mortality; in our travel across the Great Desert the wells are poisoned. If Lewis's literary oblivion is looked on as a trivial punishment, let it be remembered that authorship was his ambition, that it was the labour of his life, and that his daily labour issued in his daily discomfiture. The man knows little of human morbidness, who will not believe that the deadliest blow might be given on this naked and diseased sensibility. He has now passed away, and it must be his happiest fate to be forgotten. (31 October 1818:4)

What is most striking is not the author's revulsion (far stronger than Susan Wilcock's), his annihilating rhetoric, or the vindictiveness with

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which he dwells (quite erroneously) on the agonizing labours and crushing disappointments of Lewis's literary career, but his vagueness. Clearly Lewis was an evil man as well as the author of an evil book; but precisely what the evil of either consisted of, the writer cannot quite say. Terms like 'seductive,' 'reckless defiler,' 'profligate,' and 'licentious' imply that the evil was a sexual one (rather than blasphemy); other terms, like 'infected,' 'morbidness,' and 'diseased sensibility,' seem to hint more specifically at sexual deviation. So do the complaint that a natural refreshment was turned into mortality and the argument that the offence was worse than murder (Crompton 50). The fire that burned up the whole long harvest may be the same that fell on Sodom. It is impossible to be sure: if the author did have homosexuality in mind, no doubt he, like Cowper, regarded it as too nauseous to be named. His discretion is almost as total as the oblivion he calls down on Lewis and all his works. In recalling the scandal of The Monk, however, the writer recalls what may have been the real reason that scandal frightened Lewis, condemning him, if not to a career of labours and disappointments, then to one largely of facile success, from the plagiarisms of Sheridan in The East Indian (1799) to the performing horses in Timour the Tartar (1811). The writer's attitude is the attitude which had surrounded Lewis throughout his life in England, which (judging from 'The Vindication') he had partly internalized, and which had obliged him to keep his heart, and his imagination, closed up in a cold December. If Lewis had allowed himself to open his heart fully, he would, of course, have had more than an attitude to worry about. His increasing discretion parallelled - perhaps not coincidentally - an increasing persecution of homosexuals. From about 1780 on, prosecutions for sodomy became more frequent (Trumbach, 'Sodomitical Subcultures' 113). They also became more successful in obtaining the full penalty called for by the law. In London and Middlesex, in the last half of the eighteenth century, about one man in a decade was hanged for sodomy; in the early years of the nineteenth, the average rose to about one a year (Harvey 939). Popular violence kept pace with this judicial violence. For the lesser offence of attempted sodomy, the sentence commonly included exposure in the pillory (Trumbach, 'London's Sodomites' 21); as Edmund Burke warned, the crowd often converted this into a death sentence and one, moreover, which was 'as much more severe than execution at Tyburn, as to die in torment, was more dreadful than momentary

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death.' Burke was commenting on the case of William Smith, a coachman, who was exposed along with his partner in crime in April 1780. One newspaper reported: 'A vast Concourse of People had assembled upon the Occasion, many by Seven o'clock in the Morning, who had collected dead Dogs, Cats, &c. in great Abundance, which were plentifully thrown at them; but some Person threw a Stone, and hit the Coachman on the Forehead, and he immediately dropped on his Knees, and was to all Appearance dead' (Crompton 31-2). By the early nineteenth century, the mob no longer seemed content to kill its victims. It seemed to insist on disfiguring them, as if to ensure that no one guilty of such an offence could be recognized as human. Joshua Viguers was exposed on 25 September 1810 and pelted so severely that 'The head of this wretch when he reached Newgate, was compared to a swallow's nest. It took three buckets of hot water to restore it to any thing like a human shape' (Crompton 163). The most famous such incident occurred two days later. Six men arrested at the White Swan tavern in Vere Street were taken from Newgate to a pillory in the Haymarket. The crowd was waiting, armed with offal, excrement, rotten vegetables, fruit, and fish, and dead dogs and cats. Before the caravan had proceeded very far, the prisoners resembled bears dipped in a stagnant pool... Before the cart reached Temple-bar, the wretches were so thickly covered with filth, that a vestige of the human figure was scarcely discernible ... Before any of them reached the place of punishment, their faces were completely disfigured by blows and mud; and before they mounted, their whole persons appeared one heap of filth. (Crompton 165-6)

The reporter is quite explicit about, and fully in sympathy with, the dehumanizing intentions of the crowd. Of course, if Lewis was only homosocial rather than openly homosexual, he was not directly threatened by this kind of violence. But quite apart from the possibility that it was precisely such a threat that made open homosexuality unthinkable for him, the power of the threat is not limited to homosexuals. As Sedgwick has argued, the very irrationality of the threat makes it impossible for any man - especially a man with pronounced homosocial feelings - to be sure that he is safe from it (Between 88-9). The Monk (as the Courier seems to have recognized) is Lewis's response to this threat.

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3

In the main plot of The Monk, the homosexual and homosocial themes are focused on the figure first introduced as Rosario, a young novice and the protege of Ambrosio, the monk of the title.15 Rosario is soon revealed to be Matilda, a sorcerer who has entered the convent in disguise out of love for Ambrosio. For a sorcerer, her cross-dressing is conventional. In many cultures, those who cross the boundary between the natural and the supernatural also cross the boundary between the genders. In the culture of Catholic Europe, Joan of Arc and her inquisitors both saw her cross-dressing as a sign of her special relationship with the supernatural world: Joan thought it had been commanded by God; the inquisitors thought it marked her as a witch (Dekker 43; cf. Garber 215-17) ,16 As a young man, Matilda is stereotypically feminine: the narrative stresses Rosario's air of 'mystery,' his 'profound melancholy,' his 'fearful [ness],' his 'sweetness,' his 'docility' (66-7), his 'exquisite sensibility' (78), his 'gentle[ness]' and 'submissive[ness]' (234). As a woman, Matilda paradoxically 'assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her manners and discourse'; Ambrosio 'grieved that Matilda preferred the virtues of his sex to those of her own' - those she had displayed while she appeared to belong to his (233-4; cf. Fierobe, 'Ordre et chaos' 170). Her increasing masculinity disgusts him; at the same time, 'as her passion grew ardent, Ambrosio's grew cold; the very marks of her fondness excited his disgust, and its excess served to extinguish the flame which already burned but feebly in his bosom' (237). The two sources of Ambrosio's disgust are closely related, since Lewis's culture thought of sexually aggressive women not just as masculine but as hermaphroditic: Byron referred to the Countess of Westmorland as 'the Sapphic Westmoreland' because of her interest in young men, not in women; her clitoris, he remarked, 'is supposed to be of the longest' (Letters 5:215). Ambrosio undergoes the opposite transformation. As a virgin, he is not only emphatically masculine but emphatically phallic, 'the sole uncorrupted pillar of the church' (65). The first description of him mentions his 'noble port' - that is, his erect posture - his 'lofty' stature, his aquiline nose, and his 'penetrating' eye and voice (45). Once he has been seduced by Matilda, he takes on such stereotypically feminine traits as hypocrisy (229, 262), curiosity (234; cf. 329), and timidity; Matilda comments on the change in him: 'That mind which I esteemed so great and valiant, proves to be feeble, puerile, and grovelling, a slave to vulgar errors, and weaker than a woman's' (266). By seducing him, she has unmanned him.

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In the seventeenth century, heterosexual debauchery as well as sodomy was believed to make a man effeminate (Bray 130-ln77). By Lewis's time, this belief had largely dissipated, and the general stereotype of the libertine had been divided into specific heterosexual and homosexual versions (Trumbach, 'Sodomitical Subcultures' 117-18). In reverting to the older belief, Lewis undercuts the new stereotype of the homosexual. Matilda leads Ambrosio around a circle of vices. He begins with the idolatrous worship of a picture of the Virgin;17 since his idolatry is charged with eroticism, and the Virgin is the Mother of God, his worship has overtones of incest. Matilda is able to seduce Ambrosio largely because of her resemblance to the picture (for which she was, she claims, the model [101]). Ambrosio's idolatry has overtones not only of incest but also, perhaps, of homosexuality. (It may anticipate Lewis's description of Charles Grey as the god of his idolatry.) The notorious verse in Leviticus that decreed the death penalty for sodomy (20.13) did so because ritual sodomy was part of the idolatrous cult of the Canaanites (Leviticus 20.23; Westermarck 2:487-8). Idolatry is associated with sodomy throughout the Old Testament (e.g., 1 Kings 14.23-4, 1 Kings 15.12). In the New Testament, Paul interpreted the sodomy of the Gentiles as a punishment for their idolatry: because they 'changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things,' God 'gave them up unto vile affections: ... the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another' (Romans 1.23-7; Westermarck 2:488-9). Protestant England associated Catholic idolatry with sodomy (Crompton 60-1; Trumbach, 'London's Sodomites' 11). In 'The Stage Defended' (1726), John Dennis (1657-1734) remarked of Italy: 'of all the Countries of the Christian World, that Country has been, is, and is like to be, the most famous for this execrable Vice, in which Idolatry has set up its Head Quarters' (2:315). The transformations of Ambrosio and Rosario-Matilda take place in a context which Lewis's readers would have seen not just as generally deplorable but as specifically perverse (Garber 218); Lewis makes it clear that Ambrosio's monastic education has prepared him well for his feminization by Matilda (237-8). One might almost say that Ambrosio's idolatry is punished with sodomy. His friendship with Rosario has strongly homosocial overtones, and it begins the feminization that his seduction completes:

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with [Rosario] alone did [Ambrosio] lay aside his habitual severity. When he spoke to him, he insensibly assumed a tone milder than was usual to him; and no voice sounded so sweet to him as did Rosario's ... Ambrosio was every day more charmed with the vivacity of his genius, the simplicity of his manners, and the rectitude of his heart: in short, he loved him with all the affection of a father. (67)

Since Ambrosio loves Rosario like a father, their romantic friendship inherits some of the incestuous overtones of his idolatry. And since incest and homosexuality are both conventionally considered narcissis18 tic, the transition from one to the other is smooth (cf. Andriano 33). Ambrosio's affair with Matilda has explicitly homosexual overtones, despite her sex, because of her masculine character. Finally, his rape of his sister Antonia brings him back not only to incest but also perhaps to idolatry, since Antonia is so emphatically a virgin. The subplot deals with the themes of male homophobia and paranoia, of repressed desire and persecution, which Sedgwick considers characteristic of the Gothic, but it disguises them - so thoroughly that she concludes they occur 'only rather sketchily' in novels by homosexual authors like Lewis (Between 92). It carries out, on the level of plot, something analogous to what the main plot presents, on the level of character, in the transformations of Ambrosio arid Matilda. The nuns of the convent of St Clare persecute Agnes de Medina as relentlessly as Ferdinando Falkland persecutes Caleb Williams. The official reason for their persecution is her indulgence in forbidden love, but it is a heterosexual love, for Don Raymond de las Cisternas. The real reason for the persecution is the Prioress's unacknowledged love for Ambrosio (72, 232, 394). This love, of course, is also heterosexual, though it has homosexual overtones, since the Prioress is even more masculine in character than Matilda. The subplot presents male homophobia in double drag, as female heterophobia. Haggerty finds the novel 'confused and inconsistent' ('Literature and Homosexuality' 348); I find it a virtuoso exercise in subversion. Its two plots add up to a reductio ad absurdum of the logic of sexual repression in Lewis's culture. Pressed hard enough, conventional conceptions of the masculine and the feminine, the heterosexual and the homosexual, the sexually active and the unsexed tend to turn into each other. The novel's subversiveness becomes more emphatic at the climax of the subplot, a scene of mob violence which closely parallels contemporary mob violence against homosexuals:

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The rioters heeded nothing but the gratification of their barbarous vengeance. They refused to listen to her: they shewed her every sort of insult, loaded her with mud and filth, and called her by the most opprobrious appellations. They tore her one from another, and each new tormentor was more savage than the former. They stifled with howls and execrations her shrill cries for mercy, and dragged her through the streets, spurning her, trampling her, and treating her with every species of cruelty which hate or vindictive fury could invent. At length a flint, aimed by some welldirecting hand, struck her full upon the temple. She sank upon the ground bathed in blood, and in a few minutes terminated her miserable existence. Yet though she no longer felt their insults, the rioters still exercised their impotent rage upon her lifeless body. They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting. (344) The stone aimed at her temple recalls the death of William Smith in 1780; the dehumanizing frenzy of the mob anticipates the pelting of Joshua Viguers and the men of Vere Street in 1810. In the novel, as is usual in the Gothic, the violence is displaced in time and space, from contemporary England to the Spain of the Counter-Reformation. Another of Lewis's displacements is more unusual. The victim of his mob is not a sexual deviant but the Prioress, the agent of a repressive sexual orthodoxy. The forces of repression have been turned against themselves. (This involution of repressive violence is given another turn of the screw when the rioters set fire to the convent and many of them perish in the flames.) Hidden beneath the conventional, if distasteful, anti-Catholicism of the novel, and the equally conventional alarm at Revolutionary violence, is something less conventional and more attractive: the revenge fantasy of a man whose sexuality put him at lifelong risk. None of Lewis's other works subjects sexual conventions to so radical a treatment. It may be, as Andre Parreaux suspects, that the scandal of The Monk frightened the author into conventionality (157-9). In Romantic Tales (1808), however, he included a translation and (in Genette's terms) a 'corrective continuation' (195, 198-200) of Les Quatre Facardins, a fragmentary Oriental tale by Anthony Hamilton; it provided the occasion for an elaborate treatment of gender issues. Hamilton (1645?1719), an Irish member of the courts of Louis XIV and the exiled James II, is best remembered as the ghost-writer of the Memoires de la vie du Comte de Gramont, his brother-in-law (1713). Les Quatre Facardins is best known to anglophone readers as an inspiration for Vathek (Lonsdale

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xxvi-xxvii). It is itself a corrective continuation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, recounted for the entertainment of Schahriar, Scherazade, and her sister Dinarzade, and involving two rival enchanters, three magic spinning-wheels, and four heroes all improbably named Facardin. It actually breaks off before introducing the fourth Facardin by name, but not before becoming too complicated to summarize, and apparently impossible to resolve; Lewis evidently undertook the continuation as a challenge in pure narration.19 Both Hamilton and Lewis take their model as the licence for a certain narrative extravagance, an indulgence in what Peter Brooks significantly calls the 'deviant arabesque' of plot (Reading 130). They also take its Oriental setting as the licence for a certain sexual extravagance (cf. Crompton 111-18).20 Hamilton's characters include the cuckolded Jinni, or Genius, from the prologue to the Arabian Nights, and his captive wife, Chrystallina the Curious, whose hundred infidelities confirm Schahriar's misogyny and inspire him to embark on his career of uxoricide (Burton 1:12-14). A degree of misogyny is characteristic of Hamilton himself, as well as of Schahriar. The curiosity of his Chrystallina is both a stereotypically feminine trait and a euphemism for sexual voracity: she turns out to have lost her virginity before the Genius abducted her, and to have cuckolded him (with the third Facardin) even before he began carrying her about in a crystal cabinet. When she meets her first man (who turns out, in Lewis's continuation, to be the fourth Facardin), he asks her where he can find a woman, 'that most dangerous of animals,' according to his foster-father, who has warned him 'that nothing can defend [him] against the poison, which it carries about it' (Hamilton 2:336; Lewis 2:231). Chrystallina's mother has also warned her that a man is 'a horrible monster, who would devour [her] the moment that [she] met his eyes' (Hamilton 2:334; Lewis 2:229), but the failure of symmetry is telling: a beast of prey is not as loathsome as a poisonous serpent. Other female characters include the Princess Sapinella of Jutland, who, 'not being able to get slippers to fit her, had gone mad in consequence, and persuaded her father to hang up all the coblers in the kingdom' (Hamilton 2:301; Lewis 2:184), thus neatly combining such feminine traits as delicacy, vanity, vindictiveness, insanity, and conspicuous consumption. Lewis's treatment of cross-dressing complicates this misogyny - without, perhaps, entirely subverting it - by disturbing the alignment of sex and gender. The motif is already present in Hamilton, but it leaves the gender hierarchy untouched. When the first Facardin travels to Chrystal Island, the home of the Genius, in order to rescue Chrystallina, who is

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about to be put to death for infidelity, he notices a number of 'men in female dresses, who being each provided with a spindle and distaff, were spinning with great application' (Hamilton 2:326; Lewis 2:216); he is informed that they are cowards who have chosen to spend the rest of their lives in this humiliating condition instead of attempting the task which he is about to attempt. In his continuation, however, Lewis complements this by sending the fourth Facardin to the Chrystal Island, disguised as a woman, to rescue his brother (the third Facardin), who is being held captive by Chrystallina just as she is by the Genius (and for the same reason). Lewis has already established the effeminacy of the fourth Facardin: he has run away from a lion, failed to string the bow of Ulysses,21 and complained that the latter task resulted in 'the skin being rubbed off both [his] hands (which naturally are rather of a delicate texture)' (3:61). Anticipating the psychoanalytical model of transvestism used by Madeleine Kahn (13, 26-7), his disguise actually confirms his masculinity: 'I had riot shaved for two days, and my beard being naturally rather black and bushy, it formed a very striking contrast with the snow-white muslin, in which my head was enveloped' (3:87). Once he is shaved, the Genius mistakes him for one of the three most beautiful princesses in the world, and the Princess Nour (the fourth most beautiful, another prisoner of the Genius) offers to embrace him as a sister in misfortune. He reveals his sex just in time: On finding that she had offered to embrace a man, the fair stranger endeavoured to blush: she did not succeed, but I gave her great credit for the attempt. She then launched out in praise of the propriety of my conduct; protested that she should have been shocked to death, had she kissed a male creature; and thanked me in very strong terms for having made my confession, though I saw, that in her heart she would have been quite as well pleased, if I had kept it to myself. (3:94-5)

The misogyny of this is obvious enough: most of the humour is at the expense of the Princess's shamelessness, hypocrisy, and lust. The rest of the humour, however, is less obvious and more subversive: the revelation of Facardin's maleness introduces a sudden element of sexuality into a scene of blameless female homosociality. And Facardin's femininity does not prevent him from accomplishing his heroic tasks. In Lewis's denouement, the first Facardin is revealed to be a woman, Princess Facardina, so that the men disguised as women - whether for reasons of cowardice or of bravery - are balanced with a woman dis-

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guised as a man. (To emphasize the symmetry, Lewis arranges for the first and fourth Facardins to fall in love.)22 This revelation imports into the tale's Oriental setting a native motif, the woman warrior, the subject of over a thousand ballads printed in Britain and North America between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries (Dugaw 2). As Dianne Dugaw has shown, these ballads, which celebrate the 'capability and independence' as well as the 'fearlessness and panache' of women, especially lower-class women (3), draw not only on women's widespread participation in warfare (7-9) and on the eighteenth century's pervasive fascination with masquerade (11-15), but also on a surprising number of true stories of women who saw military service disguised as men (9-10). Lewis's assimilation of this tradition may do something to offset the misogyny of his tale - or it may trivialize and exoticize the tradition, suggesting that it is unserious and unEnglish. Since Facardina is his heroine and most important narrator, the first alternative seems more likely. Moreover, the revelation of Facardina's sex transvalues a number of details in Hamilton's fragment, making Lewis's translation almost as revisionary as Pierre Menard's famous rewriting of Don Quixote. Facardina's pronounced disapproval of Schahriar's habit of beheading his wives (Hamilton 2:261-2; Lewis 2:126) turns out not to be masculine gallantry but sisterly solidarity. The task that the cross-dressers of the Chrystal Island have declined to perform is to rescue Chrystallina by making love to her a hundred times in twelve hours; when Chrystallina informs her of this, Facardina replies: My object is to fight your enemies, not to make love to yourself. Without vanity, I may say, that I should find it as easy to finish this adventure in another way, as by the force of arms: but... glory invites me to employ my sabre, and ... your beauty, all wonderful as it is, does not tempt me to display my prowess in any other manner ... (Hamilton 2:362-3; Lewis 2:276)

Coming from a male Facardin, in Hamilton's original, this can only be an example of the masculine vanity it explicitly disclaims; by turning Facardin into Facardina, Lewis has turned it into a humorous acknowledgment of - or an anxious male fantasy about - the superior sexual prowess of women. Since female sexual prowess posed no immediate threat to Lewis, the first alternative seems more likely. Chrystallina agrees to be rescued by force of arms, but asks Facardin (a) whether (s)he is not curious to discover 'whether gentle methods

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would or would not be more effectual.' Facardin(a) replies: 'my disposition is not quite so curious as yours' and proceeds to fight their way to safety. Schahriar expresses his approval of this behaviour: 'the more that women are curious, the more it behoves us Men to show, that we are exempt from such a weakness!' (Hamilton 2:364; Lewis 2:278-9). Hamilton's original simply endorses the Sultan's evaluation of sexual difference; Lewis's translation instead makes fun of him for not realizing that not all women are curious (or sexually voracious). Facardina's sex also explains why she has failed to fall in love with any of the beautiful maidens she has encountered on her travels: 'I soon grew tired,' she complains, 'of being always beloved without ever loving' (Hamilton 2:262; Lewis 2:127). Hamilton balances this predicament against that of the second Facardin, who is under a spell compelling him to fall in love with all the women he meets, only to inspire them all with disgust (Hamilton 2:265, 282-3, 289; Lewis 2:130, 155-6, 166); but he does not give any further significance to either predicament. In Lewis, Facardin becomes the perpetually unsatisfied masculine subject, and Facardina the unmoved (irreproachably feminine and heterosexual) object of desire. Hamilton does not even explain why women are disgusted with the love-struck Facardin. Lewis reveals that the influence of love makes his chin grow longer, like Pinocchio's nose, and exploits the phallic implications of this deformity in a scene strongly suggestive of exhibitionism, oral rape, and castration (3:186-9). Most of the characters have gathered in an attempt to accomplish the heroic task of inducing laughter in Princess Moussellina the Serious. Instead, Facardin declares his love for her. Also present is King Fortimbrass of Denmark, whose mouth is unnaturally large because of a wound inflicted by the Genius: no sooner did the kneeling [Facardin] commence his love-declaration than his chin began to lengthen, and before he had reached the end of his first sentence, its extent was truly wonderful and tremendous. At the same time an infinite number of little horns sprouted from every part of it, variegated with all the colours of the rainbow. Heedless of this circumstance, [Facardin] still continued to delare his passion, and still his chin continued to increase its dimensions; till stretching itself quite across the tent, it fairly lodged itself within the wideextended jaws of Fortimbrass, who unluckily stood opposite to him, gazing at this unaccountable phenomenon. No sooner did the King of Denmark find his mouth so unexpectedly invaded, than he hastily retreated, but in vain. The further that he retired, the longer the chin grew, nor could he fly

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half so fast, as his persecutor followed. By this time the tip of this preposterous feature had actually found its way into his throat; the horns tickled him terribly; and as it did not yet seem to have reached its full growth, he began to entertain serious apprehensions of being spitted upon his neighbour's chin like a woodcock ... Fortimbrass could endure his situation no longer ... he suddenly gnashed his teeth together, snapped off a great piece of the intruding chin, and then unclosing his monstrous jaws, he spit out at the least three yards and a quarter. (3:186-9)

The second Facardin suffers no lasting ill effects from this symbolic castration, which both makes Moussellina laugh and cures him of his erotomania, as well it might. Eventually he marries Sapinella, Fortimbrass's daughter. Among Facardina's admirers is Dinarzade, Scherazade's sister, who becomes increasingly frustrated at his/her failure to reciprocate. Near the beginning of Lewis's part of the tale, the mortified Dinarzade accuses Facardina of being strangely indifferent to women. '"By no means strangely," answered the Prince with a smile; "nothing can be more natural ..."' (3:14). At the end, the unmasked Facardina assures the blushing Dinarzade: 'what you so generously bestowed in love upon the Prince Facardin, shall be most amply returned in friendship by the Princess Facardina? (3:206-7). In a reversal of the scene between Princess Nour and the fourth Facardin, the heterosexual is transformed into the homosocial; as in the earlier scene, the moment of transformation flirts with the homosexual. The revelation of Facardina's sex reveals simultaneously that Lewis has been engaging in what Kahn calls 'narrative transvestism,' the 'use by a male author of a first-person female narrator' (2) to 'enable the creation of a structure within which self and other (author and character or author and reader) can safely merge temporarily in mutually defining opposition' (69).23 As in the authors Kahn studies, the author's narrative transvestism is matched by gender-transgression on the part of the central character: Defoe's Roxana 'pursu[es] man's power and privilege in the world' (87); Richardson's Clarissa 'wants to be a woman who writes like a man' (138, 142-3); and Lewis's Facardina actually dresses and fights like a man. Unlike the heterosexual Defoe and Richardson, however, Lewis does not seem to require the 'collapse' of the female narrator in the service of 'the creative and interpretive task of the male author' (80, 123, 142-3, 148). Far from collapsing, Facardina (along

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with her comrades) vanquishes the Genius; she marries the fourth Facardin; and she extends her friendship to Dinarzade, in a gesture whose condescension confirms her own superiority. Throughout Hamilton's fragment and Lewis's continuation, Dinarzade manifests two desires: for Facardin and for narrative closure, thus demonstrating what Brooks calls 'the conjunction of the narrative of desire and the desire of narrative' (Reading 48). Brooks has surprisingly little to say, however, about the desire of the narratee (304—5); he prefers to imagine listeners and readers (such as Freud and himself) as wise and dispassionate analysts. He devotes a whole chapter to narrative transference (216-37) but scarcely mentions narrative countertransference. In the Arabian Nights, as he points out, 'Shahrazad's storytelling takes a desire that has gone off the rails - the Sultan's desire, derailed by his wife's infidelity, become sadistic and discontinuous, so that the mistress of the night must have her head chopped off in the morning - and cures it by prolonging it, precisely by narrativizing it' (60), but this strategy would hardly have worked without Schahriar's desire for a story. Schahriar retains this desire throughout Hamilton's fragment and Lewis's continuation. When Dinarzade objects to the intrusion of Facardina's first meta-narrative - 'you are desired to relate your own adventures ... and instead of this you weary us with another person's' - he rebukes her: 'And what does it signify ... whose adventures he relates, so that they amuse me, and last out the night? What have I better to do, than to hear them?' (Hamilton 2:285; Lewis 2:159). The revelation of Facardina's sex means that the end of her story will not bring the heterosexual Dinarzade the satisfaction she desires. As for Schahriar, the desire for narrative, prolonged first by Scherazade and then by Facardina, seems to have obliterated all other desires. They have 'cure[d]' him by unmanning him, more permanently if less spectacularly than the second Facardin. This is one way of curing a serial wife-killer. The revenge on a repressive authority figure that occurs in the diegesis of The Monk (in the lynching of the Prioress) has been transferred to the narration; this version of the revenge fantasy is certainly less dramatic than that of The Monk, but it is one in which Lewis, as a storyteller, may have taken special satisfaction. In his last sentence, Lewis draws the moral: Tf you are a bachelor, make haste to get well-married; if you are already a husband, waste not your wife's time and your own at night in listening to childish stories like Schahriar' (3:215). Unlike Defoe and Richardson, he shows no need to withdraw from his heroine, but he is anxious for his male reader to withdraw from the likes of Schahriar.

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4

It is not surprising that most of Lewis's literary expressions of his sexuality are negative: they dwell on the dangers of sexual deviance and fantasize about revenge on figures of repressive sexual orthodoxy. To find more positive terms, Lewis, like many of his gay contemporaries (see Crompton 85-98), turned to the classics: through these works of high cultural capital, safely distanced in time and space, his love dared to speak its name. Lewis seems to have been particularly drawn to the sixty odes that were then attributed to Anacreon (c. 570-485 BC) but are now known to have been written by a series of anonymous imitators of Anacreon over a period of some six hundred years, from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine era (Rosenmeyer 3, 116, 125, 225). Lewis translated or parodied thirty of them: none was published in his lifetime; three were published by Baron-Wilson in 1839; the rest are preserved in MS 114, in the National Library of Jamaica. Thomas Moore (1779-1852) published a translation of the anacreontic odes in 1800, and it made him famous; in fact, he became known as 'Anacreon' Moore, just as Lewis was 'Monk' Lewis. Lewis met Moore in 1801, and he seems to have written most of his own translations at around this time, so perhaps he was inspired partly by Moore's success. He had written two of them, however, while he was still a schoolboy at Westminster, between 1783 and 1790.24 Patricia Rosenmeyer has characterized the anacreontic poems as basically variations on a theme, namely la dolce vita, the simple pleasures of life. All complications and potential problems are eliminated from the anacreontic sphere: money and power are rejected, death is merely a nonthreatening reminder to enjoy what is left of life, and old age never interferes with the erotic urge. Love itself is easy and available ... (2)

Poems like these were well suited to Lewis's poetic gifts, which were, for the most part, pretty facile. There also, however, seems something Utopian about his attraction to a poetic corpus that describes love as 'easy and available' - even as trivial. 'Worth noting,' according to Rosenmeyer, 'is the lack of differentiation between homo- and heterosexual love interests' (140): in these poems, nobody is hanged for his sexual orientation. Perhaps the most interesting of the anacreontic poems are a series of allegorical narratives about Eros, 'which may be divided into two dis-

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tinct classes: (a) those in which Eros is a victor - chasing, punishing, or otherwise abusing the narrator (13, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33); and (b) those in which Eros is the victim - wounded, enslaved, or somehow stripped of his usual powers (6, 11, 19, 32, 35)' (Rosenmeyer 140): in other words, masochistic poems about a sadistic Eros and (less frequently) sadistic poems about a masochistic Eros (like Lewis's 'To Mrs Wgggggggg'). Perhaps the most interesting of Lewis's translations is ogg the first group, ode 33. This poem, which, as Crompton summarizes it, 'give[s] a vivid description of a man falling in love with a boy' (96), seems to have been a favourite with gay and bisexual poets of the nineteenth century: Byron included a translation of his own in Hours of Idleness (1807); Whitman revised Moore's translation (and gave it a tide, 'The Midnight Visitor') for a public reading in 1879 (Golden 91). Here is Lewis's version: While rainy clouds obscured the sky, And sleep on every mortal eye Her midnight Poppies shed, A voice unknown, (now known too well!) Assailed the window of my Cell, And thus imploring said. - 'Ah! gentle Swain, in pity hear, Nor think an hostile Robber near; An helpless Boy am I, Who wandering o'er the desart plain Has borne the beating of the rain, No Friend, no Guardian nigh. 'Let no vain fears your heart alarm; Nor will, nor power have I to harm Then pitying grant my prayer; For heavy showers still fast descend, And stormy winds in fury rend My wildly-flowing hair. 'May you in every wish be blest, If in your Cot this night I rest; One night, -1 ask no more!' He ceased, His honied words mine ear Entranced, and made the Speaker dear; I straight unclosed the door.

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The Magnet A beauteous Stripling meets my view, Whose sparkling eyes of glossy blue Like purest Sapphires shine; A bow unstrung his fingers hold, And two bright wings of glittering gold Proclaim his race divine. I haste to light the extinguished flame, And warm his cold exhausted frame With tenderest zeal and care; With wine renew each faded grace, Then wipe the rain from off his face, And wring his streaming hair. But when the kindly warmth had spread His cheek of down with blushing red, His bow once more he strung; Then meditating treacherous wiles While his fair face He drest in smiles, Thus spoke his guileful tongue. - 'My gentle Host, I wish to know Whether the rain has hurt my bow, And fain its force would try; Suppose I prove its power on you?' And straight its chord the Urchin drew, And bade his arrow fly. With aim too just it pierced my heart (E'en now my bosom feels the smart!) And then with pinions spread With joyful shout He rose in air, Paused to enjoy my fond despair, And thus departing said. - 'Farewell, kind Host! the trial o'er, I leave your hospitable door, And with you leave my dart; Safe from the storm my bow is found, And that my arrow too is sound, You know it by your heart.'-25

89 [25]

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Moore ensured that his translation would be acceptable by expurgating the references to homosexuality (Crompton 93-4); in his introductory 'Remarks on Anacreon,' he is frank about this strategy: 'Whatever is repugnant to modesty and virtue is considered, in ethical science, by a supposition very favorable to humanity, as impossible; and this amiable persuasion should be much more strongly entertained where the transgression wars with nature as well as virtue' (Works 7). When we compare his translation of ode 33 (Works 32-3) with Lewis's, we notice three crucial differences. First, Moore exaggerates the age difference between the visitor and the narrator. The original poem (Rosenmeyer 252-3) does not specify the narrator's age, though the speakers of the anacreontic poems are often old men. Moore's visitor addresses his narrator as 'gentle sire' (line 11), and the narrator, more tellingly, describes the visitor as an 'infant' (5) and a 'baby' (17). Moore turns the eroticism of the original into the affection of father and child (thus making the child's final act of aggression an Oedipal one). Lewis's visitor addresses his narrator as 'gentle Swain' (line 7); the word does not specify age but has pastoral and erotic connotations. The visitor describes himself as a 'Boy' (9), but when the narrator opens the door, he sees a 'beauteous Stripling' (25) with a pubescent 'cheek of down' (38). It is worth pointing out that Lewis himself was a stripling, a schoolboy at Westminster, when he wrote the poem, and all his life he seems to have been attracted to men his own age, not to boys: the original poem may be pederastic, but Lewis's translation is not. Secondly, Lewis's narrator is awakened by 'A voice unknown' (4). He now knows the voice all too well, and as soon as he opens the door, the visitor's wings 'Proclaim his race divine' (30), but the narrator never explicitly recognizes the visitor as Eros. Moore's narrator recognizes him as soon as he sees him: "T was Love!' he exclaims, and adds emphatically: T knew him ... / I knew him ...' (21-4). This recognition foregrounds the poem's allegory, thus detracting from its physical immediacy: we know right away that it's not really about a midnight visit. The narrator of the original also recognizes the visitor - but as Eros, not as Love (6, 10). Moore seems anxious to separate Eros from love. In the original, the narrator asks, before opening the door, '"Who ... knocks loudly on my doors, / tearing my dreams apart?"' (8-9). In Moore, the narrator asks, "Vho art thou ... / That bid'st my blissful visions fly?"' (910), and Moore adds a footnote explaining: 'Anacreon appears to have been a voluptuary even in dreaming.' Far from being Eros, Moore's

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Love banishes the erotic. Lewis leaves the dreams out altogether, so his narrator has no object of desire except the visitor. Thirdly, although Lewis's and Moore's translations are both substantially longer and more detailed than the original, their imagery differs. As the first point of difference suggests, Lewis's is erotic where Moore's is pathetic; as the second point suggests, Lewis's is physical where Moore's is mental. Moore's visitor comes 'weeping' to the narrator's bower and wakes him with 'a piteous prayer' (6-7); Lewis's visitor 'Assail[s]' the narrator's window (5): the verb, like the visitor's climactic attack, has connotations of rape. Moore's narrator hears 'the baby's tale of woe' and 'the bitter night-winds'; 'And sighing for his piteous fate, / I trimmed my lamp and oped the gate' (17-20). Lewis's narrator, instead, is 'Entranced' by the visitor's 'honied words' (22-3). Like the original (19-22), Moore's account of the narrator's care for his visitor emphasizes the visitor's suffering: [I] Press from his dank and clinging hair The crystals of the freezing air, And in my hand and bosom hold His little fingers thrilling cold. (27-30)

In Lewis, even when the visitor's hair is wet, it is 'wildly-flowing' (18); and the emphasis is on the visitor's recovery: the renewed graces (34), the blush that comes to his downy cheek (38). Like the original (1-3), Moore's poem begins with a leisurely astronomical image (1-2) that betrays an indifference to the poem's physical setting: a rainy night. Lewis, instead, says that 'rainy clouds obscured the sky' (1). Moore's narrator recognizes his visitor by his allegorical insignia, 'his bow and dart,' and by his own emotional response, his 'fluttering heart' (23-4); Lewis's narrator sees a 'beauteous Stripling' with sparkling blue eyes and gold wings (25-30). In Moore, when the visitor shoots his arrow, it pierces the narrator's 'inmost spirit' (42); in Lewis, tritely but physically, it pierces the narrator's heart, and his bosom can still feel the pain (49-50). (In the original [28], it pierces the narrator's liver.) Sometimes Moore is closer than Lewis to the letter of the original, but he consistently suppresses, and Lewis consistently enhances, the original's erotic spirit. Lewis not only translated ode 33, he also included an imitation of it in The Monk (200-3); since the anacreontic poems themselves were imitations (of Anacreon), this too seems in the anacreontic spirit (Rosen-

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meyer 234). The character to whom Lewis ascribes the poem is Theodore, a beautiful boy whose sole business in the plot is to promote the love of Raymond and Agnes. Theodore is an Eros figure;26 he even has the sadism of the anacreontic Eros (which he exercises by tormenting Agnes's duenna, an enemy of love [163]). Theodore's poem is an explicitly ideological version of the anacreontic. The task of Cupid, as Theodore calls him, is not to seduce Anacreon but to win back his allegiance: Anacreon has 'grown morose and old' and given up on love (line 2). So Cupid reminds him of all the pleasures love has brought him in the past. (These, it must be admitted, seem to have consisted mostly of the pleasures of heterosexual rape [55-60].) He succeeds; Anacreon, inspired again, takes up his lyre and sings the 'praise of love' (90). The effect on the wintry landscape is remarkable: Soon as that name was heard, the woods Shook off their snows; the melting floods Broke their cold chains, and winter fled away. Once more the earth was decked with flowers; Mild zephyrs breathed through blooming bowers; High towered the glorious sun, and poured the blaze of day. Attracted by the harmonious sound, Sylvans and fauns the cot surround, And curious crowd the minstrel to behold: The wood-nymphs haste the spell to prove; Eager they run; they list, they love, And, while they hear the strain, forget the man is old.

(91-102)

On behalf of his creator, Theodore has imagined that the free expression of love might magically create a climate favourable to love, an 'air of truth, and warmth, and enthusiasm' (Journal 90); that it might win the unanimous approval of sylvans, fauns, and wood-nymphs - instead of a violent death at the hands of a London mob or the British state. This is the one Utopian moment in the grim world of The Monk.

PART TWO Political Variations

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Five

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1 Lewis first left home to attend the Marylebone Seminary run by the Rev. Dr John Fountaine, a family friend. He must have been very young; he was only seven when he went on to Westminster. He was desolate, as new boys at boarding schools often are; when he said his prayers on his first night in the dormitory, he added a codicil: 'God bless me now, in a strange place, among strange boys, away from mamma, with nobody to love me!' He cried himself to sleep (Baron-Wilson 1:40-1). George Colman the Younger (1762-1836), the playwright, who passed through Marylebone Seminary, Westminster School, and Christ Church College about a decade before Lewis, remembered Fountaine as 'a worthy good-natured Domine, in a bush wig,' who spoiled the children by sparing the rod. 'As a teacher of the ancient classicks, he did not overburden his pupils with Latin and Greek; and they had respect enough for the dead languages to disturb their repose as little as the Doctor's mild discipline would permit.' The curriculum also included writing, arithmetic, drawing, dancing, fencing, and French (1:33, 42-3). From Marylebone, Lewis went on to Westminster School, which his father had attended before him (Peck 1). He entered the school on 19 June 1783, about three weeks before his eighth birthday and a month after the failure of his father's attempt to obtain a divorce (Peck 290nl9). Presumably he underwent the uncanny initiation described by Robert Southey, who entered Westminster five years later: being placed 'for a week or ten days under the direction of one in the same remove [class], who is called his substance, the new comer being the shadow; and, during this sort of noviciate, the shadow neither takes

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nor loses place by his own deserts, but follows the substance' (Southey 1:136). Lewis may have been initiated into homosexuality at Westminster. He was certainly exposed to the violence that is one of the most remarkable characteristics of his most famous work.1 Brutality was taken for granted at the public schools of the eighteenth century. Samuel Smith, who was headmaster of Westminster when Lewis arrived, seems to have been comparatively easy-going (Tanner 31-2; Carleton 33-4), but the undermaster, William Vincent (1739-1815), who replaced Smith as head in 1788, was a notorious flogger. A contemporary caricature of him bears the Latin caption: 'Sanguineos oculos volvit, virgamque requirit [He rolls his bloodshot eyes and demands his rod]' (Tanner 34) .2 Even Colman thought he went too far: 'he lost his temper, and struck and pinch'd the boys, in sudden bursts of anger, which was unwarrantable: a pedagogue is privileged to make his pupil red, in the proper place, with birch, but he has no right to squeeze him black and blue with his fingers' (1:68). Vincent is said to have mellowed somewhat as head; but in 1792, he would expel Robert Southey for a satire on the excessive use of corporal punishment, published in a school paper which Southey had founded and called, appropriately, the Flagellant (Southey 1:161-2). The boys, naturally, became as brutal as the masters. In fact, the older boys were expected to discipline the younger ones by kicking them; while being kicked, the victims 'had to adopt a regulation posture with one foot in a washbasin' (Chandos 325). The younger boys, who also had to serve their elders as fags, were traditionally known as 'slaves'; one survivor thought the term was appropriate, since the treatment of the fags was 'As hard, and as barbarous as the treatment of the negroes in Virginia' (Chandos 87, 89; cf. Colman 1:75). Informal violence was equally pervasive. One of Southey's room-mates used to pour water into his ear when he was asleep and throw porter-pots and pokers at him; once, he tried to dangle the smaller boy out of the window by his leg (Sou they 1:137). Thanks to a traditional practical joke, Westminster must sometimes have seemed literally haunted. After his first night at school in January 1776, the eleven-year-old Frederic Reynolds had written to his mother: Tf you don't let me come home, I die - I am all over ink, and my fine clothes have been spoilt - I have been tost in a blanket, and seen a ghost' (Carleton 30) .3 Southey applied to be put in a new room, to escape his tormentor; but 'Thither he followed me; and, at a very late hour one night, came in wrapt in a sheet, and thinking to frighten me

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by personating a ghost, in which character he threw himself upon the bed, and rolled upon me.' Sou they grabbed him by the throat and yelled for help (Southey 1:138). In these unpromising circumstances, the boys learned (according to Vincent) 'to explain the sentiment of Sophocles by the text of St Paul, and contrast the eternal unwritten law of the Gentiles with the law engraven on the heart1 (Bill, Education 3). Lewis began his association with the theatre at Westminster, by taking part in the annual Town Boys' Play. This extracurricular activity was evidently important to him: even after he had gone up to Oxford, he returned to the school to take the part of Falconbridge in Shakespeare's King John, at Christmas 1790 (Baron-Wilson 1:42; Peck 290n20). He was still at Westminster when he began writing The East Indian (Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 281). The prologue that he wrote when the play was finally performed gives a portrait of the author as a very young man: Ere sixteen years had wing'd their wanton flight, While yet his head was young, and heart was light, Our author plann'd these scenes; and while he drew, How bright each colour seem'd, each line how true. Gods! with what rapture every speech he spoke! Gods! how he chuckled as he penn'd each joke! And when at length his ravish'd eyes survey That wondrous work complete - a Five Act Play, His youthful heart how self-applauses swell! - 'It isn't perfect, but its vastly well!' - (5) Lewis went up to Christ Church College, Oxford, like his father before him, in April 1790 (Peck 8). The college had a traditional affiliation with the school; every year it set aside a number of 'Studentships' (scholarships) for boys from Westminster (Bill, Education 91-4). Lewis did not win one of these; instead, he was given one of the Canoneer Studentships that were at the disposal of the dean and canons of the college (Bill, Education 129-30). Unlike the Westminster Studentships, which were awarded on the basis of examinations, the Canoneers were often given as patronage, and the dean, Cyril Jackson (1746-1819), was an old family friend, who had attended the wedding of Lewis's parents,4 and who would later negotiate the reconciliation between Lewis and his dying father. Lewis's formal studies at Oxford would have consisted largely of read-

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ing under the supervision of his tutor, George Illingworth (Bill, Notes 86). His surviving references to them suggest that he took them seriously, but that he felt he was not taking them seriously enough; the tension seems characteristic of a good student. In April 1791, he warned his mother: 'I have resolved to write you a very short letter, for I have at present so much to do (as this is the time when we are examined) that I have not a moment unemployed'; the letter turned out to be longer than he had resolved, and he ended: 'here have I run on to you, whilst I ought to have been crossing the Hellespont with Xerxes, or attending to the pleadings of Cicero' (Peck 183-4). The examination Lewis was referring to was the Collections held by the college once a term, when each undergraduate had to present the notes he had made on his reading and answer questions about them. Jackson attended Collections himself and was considered a highly critical examiner (Bill, Education 221-3). The Christ Church Collections Books accordingly preserve a valuable (though probably incomplete) record of the students' reading.5 As Lewis's references imply, it was largely classical. In April 1791, Lewis should indeed have been crossing the Hellespont with Xerxes, since he was to be examined on Herodotus. (There is, however, no record of his ever being examined on Cicero.) Jackson was primarily responsible for restoring Greek to the curriculum after a period of comparative neglect - both at Christ Church and at Westminster. In 1775, he had warned one Westminster boy: the course of your lessons at Westminster is not at present such a one as tends to improve the imagination so much as it ought and that you want a little addition in that point - Homer and the Greek Tragedies will assist you and so will our own great poet Shakespeare. I need not add that the imagination I speak of is not Ovidean or puerile but the result of the judicium probe subactum [properly cultivated judgment]. (Bill, Education 287)

Lewis is recorded as reading no Ovid, only a little Horace (two books of the Odes in his first year), arid no other Latin poetry. This left him time to read not only Herodotus, but also Homer's Iliad in his first year and the Odyssey in his second. Among Latin authors, the stern moralist Juvenal was a particular favourite of Jackson's (Bill, Education 292-3); though Lewis is not on record as having studied Juvenal, he would later publish an imitation of the thirteenth satire. For an undergraduate intended for public life, as Lewis was, the classical historians were particularly important. Edward Copleston (1776-

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1849), writing in defence of the classical curriculum in 1810, recommended especially Thucydides and Xenophon: From no study can an Englishman acquire a better insight into the mechanism and temper of civil government: from none can he draw more instructive lessons, both of the danger of turbulent faction, and of corrupt oligarchy: from none can he better learn how to play skilfully upon, and how to keep in order, that finely-toned instrument, a free people. (Bill, Education 275)

In 1791, Lewis read all of Thucydides, Xenophon's Anabasis and Cyropaedia, and two books of his Hellenica, in addition to Herodotus. A verse epistle to his sister Maria, dated 1791, reports on his historical studies, by way of explaining why he hasn't written to her: Why, Child, I thought, you must know better! Could you from Me expect a letter? From Me, who deep-engaged in History, Can solve each doubt, and clear each mystery; Decide, if right or wrong the date is, When Cyrus stopt up the Euphrates; Can tell if Caesar wore a wig, or Killed people, you do'nt care a fig for: From Volumes old by worms half eaten Can prove, who conquered, who was beaten In battles fought by Carthaginians, Arabians, Greeks, and Abyssinians, Besides a thousand Nations more Of whom you never heard before? From dawn to night, from night to dawn To yawn and read, and read and yawn, Shall I this dear delight fore-go, Because a Sister wills it so[?] h

In 1792 and 1793, Lewis's reading list included five books of the Greek history of Diodorus Siculus and most of Livy's Roman history. The education offered at Christ Church was not entirely classical; each student's Collections lasted for only about a quarter of an hour but could cover a wide range of topics. According to Jackson, logic and literary studies were essentially interdependent (Bill, Education 267). Mathe-

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matics was important if only as an ancillary to logic; Lewis studied a little algebra in 1791. Christ Church even offered lectures in anatomy, not as specialized scientific training but as a part of a liberal education. The Anatomy School, or 'Skeleton Corner,' as it was known, was a popular and rather Gothic - feature of the college (Bill, Education 317-18). Because of his delicate family situation, Lewis was uncomfortable at Oxford. Nevertheless, he was comfortable enough to make a number of lifelong friends, among them Lord Holland, later one of the leaders of the Whig party. Holland himself seems to have been uncomfortable at Oxford; soon after leaving it, he said he could not conceive of 'a worse place for the education of a gentleman. There is pedantry without science, insolence without learning, and intolerance without firmness' (Feiling 110). The fundamental reason for his dissatisfaction was political. Jackson, he thought, had some general knowledge, was a good scholar, and by some little artifices of manner, as well as by many real acts of benevolence, contrived to excite in the young men much respect for the institutions of the University and great notions of his dignity, abilities, and virtues ... He taught, however, and, I believe, felt, so indiscriminate a veneration for all received opinions because they were received, that he became, without meanness, a worshipper of rank, and ... a favourer of mediocrity. (Further Memoirs 322-3) Lewis, however, came to share Jackson's worship of rank.

One of the most remarkable things about Lewis's career at Oxford is how little time he spent there. He made at least two extended trips abroad, to study modern languages in preparation for a diplomatic career. Early in September 1791, he was in Paris. The Revolution was going through a relatively quiet phase, and Lewis makes no reference to it in his only surviving letter home, but there is some indirect evidence that he took an interest in it. He seems at least to have been interested enough to read an issue of Jean-Paul Marat's inflammatory daily pamphlet L'Ami du peuple. Marat had given his pamphlet a motto from Juvenal, 'Vitam impendere vero [to dedicate life to the truth]' (4.91; Highet 219). The issue for 27 August argues that the society that hopes to restore the virtues of the Roman Republic is actually corrupted by the vices of the Roman Empire (cf. H.M.Jones 127-8, 342-6). To show how perfectly the French resemble the Romans 'under the despots who oppressed them after the fall of the Republic,' Marat refers again to Juvenal:

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it is in Satire XIII that Parisians can recognize themselves, in the picture he has given of the avarice, the rapacity, the fraud, the cheating, the perfidy, the brigandage, and the crimes of every sort that soiled Rome. (1-2; my trans.)

Such a tirade may well have caught the eye of an undergraduate from Jackson's Christ Church; at any rate, it was Juvenal's thirteenth satire that Lewis chose to imitate eight years later, as The Love of Gain. In 1791, however, Lewis seems to have been less interested in politics than in going to the theatre - which, after all, would have improved his French. He would later assure his mother that he knew of 'at least twenty French Operas' that could be successfully staged in London. One of these, Camille ou le Souterrain, by Joseph Marsollier, seems to have been a source for the entombment of Agnes in The Monk: 'a Woman is hid in a cavern in her jealous Husband's house and afterwards by accident her Child is shut up there also without food and are not released till they are perishing with hunger' (Peck 187). Another, Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel's Les Victimes dottrees, was certainly a source for The Monk; Lewis also adapted it for the London stage as Venoni; or, The Novice of St. Mark's (1809). Live burial was a favourite motif in the Revolutionary theatre, no doubt as a symbol for the Bastille (Cox, Dramas 13). Above all, Lewis was interested in his mother's writing and his own. He had sent her a farce, The Epistolary Intrigue, which he hoped might be produced at Drury Lane, with Dorothy Jordan as the female lead; he was working on a satirical novel, The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honorina Harrowheart to Miss Sophonisba Simper: a Pathetic Novel in the Modern Taste, being the first literary attempt of a Young Lady of tender feelings. He expected to finish the novel before leaving Paris, despite unluckily having lost the first volume (Peck 185). Drury Lane did not accept The Epistolary Intrigue, and it has been lost. Lewis did not finish The Effusions of Sensibility; the surviving fragment is interesting chiefly for its early treatment of Lewis's homosocial theme. In her first letter, Honorina declares: To thee, also, I bid farewell, my lively Sophonisba, whose amiable vivacity has so often cheered my despondent heart, and confined with gentle bandages of softest affection, the wounds of my torn, bleeding bosom!7 The fragment even associates homosociality with an infantile orality when Sophonisba in turn reminisces fondly about the time she has

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spent with her friend: 'think, oh think, how in the afternoon we used to drink syllabub warm from the cow!' (Baron-Wilson 2:267). The next year, Lewis spent six months in Weimar, studying German. He arrived on 27 July, and three days later, he was at work: 'I am now knocking my brains against German as hard as ever I can: I take a lesson every morning; and as I apply very seriously, am flattered with the promises that I shall soon speak very fluently in my throat, and that I already distort my mouth with extremely tolerable facility' (Peck 190). The increasingly dangerous international situation forced Lewis to pay more attention to the Revolution than he had the previous September. His first impression of Weimar was that it was 'rather dull,' because so many of the notables were 'with the Duke and his army at Coblentz' (Peck 190). In December he was worrying about the impending war between France and Britain; he had written to his father to ask for permission to abandon his studies and return home immediately if it broke out (Peck 193). France declared war on Britain and Holland on 1 February 1793; Lewis was still in Weimar on 8 February, but he was safely back in Oxford by May. He missed the patriotic demonstration of January, when the citizens of Oxford burnt Thomas Paine in effigy, with 'the Rights of Man in his Left Hand and a Pair of Stays under his Right Arm' to indicate his former profession (Mallet 3:159). No doubt, however, Lewis noticed the increasingly anti-Revolutionary mood of the city, which he shared. Perhaps in response to the republican threat, Lewis developed a pronounced taste for aristocratic society while he was in Weimar. In September 1792, he reported: 'Nothing can be more polite than the people belonging to the Court; the two Duchesses are extremely affable, and condescending; and we have nothing but Balls, Suppers[,] and Concerts. Thank God! I weary myself to death; but it is always some comfort to think, I am weaned with the best Company' (Peck 192). By December, he had discovered that high rank did not guarantee good manners any more than it guaranteed interesting conversation, but he continued to be grateful for its company: 'There are some things to be sure which are not quite so elegant and well ordered as in England; for instance the Knives and Forks are never changed, even at the Duke's table, and the Ladies hawk and spit about the rooms, in a manner the most disgusting: but as the Duchesses are very affable, and everybody is extremely obliging, I put up with every thing else, and upon the whole amuse myself tolerably well.' He visited Berlin, where he 'was at some Court or other to Supper every night' (Peck 194). He remained a snob for the rest of his

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life; Scott would recall him as 'fonder of great people than he ought to have been, either as a man of talent or a man of fortune. He had always dukes and duchesses in his mouth' (Prothero 2:3l7n). Some of Lewis's Weimar acquaintances were distinguished for more than their social rank. Soon after arriving, he wrote to his mother: 'I have been introduced ... [to] Mr de Goethe, the celebrated author of Werter: so that you must not be [sjurprized if I should shoot myself one of these fine mornings' (Peck 190). He made a translation of Goethe's 'Erlkonig,' which he presented to the author (Scott, Some English Correspondents 1). He also met Christoph Martin Wieland, began a translation of Wieland's Oberon, and completed one of 'Harm und Gulpenhe,' which was published posthumously as 'The Tailor's Wife' (Guthke, 'C.M. Wieland and M.G. Lewis' 232; Baron-Wilson 2:325-38). By February 1793, he had almost completed a volume of poems, 'partly of originals p[ar]tly of Translations most of which are admired Poems in German and my translations of them have been applauded by the Authors themselves, which is no slight proof of their being tolerable' (Peck 196). His career as a translator of German had begun. Lewis also found time for what he called 'my own Nonsense' (Peck 190). He was still hoping that his mother would be able to arrange for the production of The Epistolary Intrigue (Peck 192). He had finished The East Indian, which he was also hoping to see Jordan perform at Drury Lane (Peck 195); seven years later, when he was the famous author of The Monk and The Castle Spectre, she would actually do it. Peck believes that Lewis also wrote yet another play, Village Virtues, at around this time, because its satirical mode has more in common with that of The Effusions of Sensibility and The East Indian than with the Gothic vein he was working by the time it was published in 1796 (1011). Its satire also echoes the concern about 'the present disposition of the English Populace' expressed in his letters of 1792 (Peck 194). One of the characters, Farmer Sturdy, is a member of 'a certain club held at the Green Dragon,' where two farmers, the blacksmith, the butcher, and the grocer 'have a little chat together every Saturday evening, just by way of settling the affairs of the nation, and correcting the Minister's faults.' When the hero, Sir David Downright, hears about this scheme, he tells Sturdy that 'equality is a mere bubble, the fantastic creadon of some absurd or wicked brain - an ideal phantom, which never did, or can exist' (9). Sir David's equally downright dismissal of sexual equality suggests that the play may have been written during the debate over Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

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Sir David's sister Lady Mount-Level complains, precisely as Wollstonecraft does: 'The mode in which we are brought up naturally enervates our minds, and contracts our information.' Lady Mount-Level seems to be thinking of Wollstonecraft herself when she asks rhetorically: 'Have there not been women who both in their actions and writings have given convincing proofs of their superior minds? Nay, are there not at this moment existing many of our sex who have placed themselves on a level with yours?' 'I must confess,' Sir David replies, 'that some of you are manly enough in all conscience!' (25), thus turning back on Wollstonecraft one of her own jokes: 'from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry' (110). When Lady Mount-Level actually expresses a hope that women may one day sit in Parliament (Wollstonecraft does not go further than suggesting that they be given the vote [285]), Sir David tells her that they would do better to imitate the domestic virtues of the queen (26). By the time of The Monk, Lewis had learned to express his politics in a more displaced way. By the time of his sojourn in Weimar, however, Lewis was already groping towards the mode of The Monk. Ever since his return to Oxford from Paris, he had been working on 'a Roma [nee] in the style of the Castle of Otrarito'; but, as he told his mother in March 1792, 'it will be some time before it is compleated from the length of it and the frequent interruption and necessity of concealment I am obliged to use in writing it' (Peck 189). Why Lewis should have felt compelled to conceal his writing is not clear; that he did is further evidence of his discomfort with Oxford. In his haunted rooms at Weimar, there were no more such external obstacles, but the fluency that marks all his juvenile works seems to have deserted him: I write, and write, and yet do not find I have got a bit further in my original plan than I was when I saw you last. I have got hold of an infernal dying Man who plagues my very heart out; He has talked for half a volume already, seems likely to talk for half a volume more, and I cannot manage to kill him out of the way for the life of me. (Peck 190-1)

The humour does not hide the frustration of a writer who for the first time - and somewhat to his own surprise - is taking his material seriously. Despite his frustration, Lewis persevered; six weeks later, he could

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report: 'I have nearly finished my second volu[me] and have written over half the first; But I found such faults upon faults, that I have actually almost made it all ov[er again] but I find the [stjyle grows better as I get farther on' (Peck 192). He was finding himself as a writer. No doubt he was also finding inspiration in the Schauerromane ('shudder-novels') and other works of the Sturm und Drang school Faust, ein Fragment (1790), by Goethe, 'Die Entfuhrung' ('The Elopement') from Volksmarchen derDeutschen (1782-6), byjohann Carl August Musaus, Der Geisterseher (The Ghostseer, 1788), by Schiller, 'Der ewige Jude' ('The Wandering Jew,' 1783), by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, and 'Die Teufelsbeschworung' ('Evocation of the Devil'), from Sagen der Vorzeit (1787-98), by Veil Weber - which (though, strangely, he does not mention them) he must have begun reading at this time, and on which he would draw in The Monk. The idea for 'a Roma [nee] in the style of the Castle of Otranto' had, however, preceded his trip to Weimar and his exposure to the Schauerromane. Lewis seems to have felt that he had to put his romance aside again on his return to Oxford; his next surviving reference to it was sent from The Hague in 1794. Instead, he turned to political writing in the mode of Village Virtues. In May 1793, he sent his mother a satirical poem, asking her to try to get it published in a newspaper. It was inspired by speeches that Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) and Charles James Fox (1749-1806) had made in the House of Commons a month before, after Catherine the Great had annexed part of Poland. It begins with a reference to the most famous passage in Burke's Re/lections on the Revolution in France (Writings 8:126—7): Well may the angry Edmund roar 'The age of Chivalry's no more,' Since Sheridan's detected In railing at that royal Dame, Of warlike and of amorous fame, Till late by Whigs respected. Would none defend the Spoiler's cause, And give her lawless deeds applause? Didst thou, too, F[ox,] abuse her? Could not thy artful brain produce, To serve thy Friend, some lame excuse And baffle her Accuser? (Peck 197-8)

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There is no evidence that Mrs Lewis had better connections with the press than her son did; his sending her the poem rather than trying to get it published himself suggests that it may have been indended primarily for her, that the empress's crimes were intended unconsciously to represent the mother's. A note of guilt shows through the resentment or more than a note, since the remaining seven stanzas of the poem are devoted to suggesting that the accusers hang themselves. Mrs Lewis did not, apparently, succeed in getting the poem published. Before taking his degree in the spring of 1794,9 Lewis paid the first of his many recorded visits to the country estates of the British aristocracy. In December 1793, he wrote to his mother from Bothwell Castle, the seat of Lord and Lady Douglas (the sister of the Duke of Buccleuch), where he was keeping up with his German by working on his translation of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe. He had already spent a week at Wood-Hall and met the family of the sixth Duke of Argyll (1766-1839), Lady Charlotte Campbell's brother; he was planning to go on to Dalkeith, the seat of the Duke of Buccleuch; and he had been invited to spend Christmas with Lord Valentia at Arley (Peck 199-200). Lewis joined the British Embassy in The Hague as an attache in the spring of 1794; he arrived in the middle of May and soon found what he described to his mother as 'very tolerable Lodgings' (Peck 208). This favourable first impression soon wore off. Lewis was now established in the world, and his father expected him to manage his own affairs, an exercise which the nineteen-year-old found challenging: 'The Hague is the most expensive place possible; My Father allows me £400 a year, and out of this I am actually obliged to Keep House; I stare sometimes to see in the Bills what an immense sum is run up every week for trifles, such as Oil, vinegar &c, and find it very difficult to live within my income' (Peck 210). The exact nature of Lewis's duties is unclear,10 but they do not seem to have been onerous: T have nothing in the world to do,' he complained, 'and I am certain that the Devil Ennui has made the Hague his favourite abode ... I have need of all my patience and fortitude to keep myself from falling into low spirits' (Peck 210-11). To give his mother an idea of how much he was suffering, he reported a recent accident: An unfortunate Irishman known by the name of Lord Kerry, being the other night at one of the Dutch Assemblies, and quite overcome with its stupidity, yawned so terribly that He fairly dislocated his jaw: It was immediately set again; But He has suffered much from the accident, and is still confined by it to his bed. (Peck 212)

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This was Francis Thomas, third Earl of Kerry (1740-1818); Horace Waipole had described him as 'A simple young Irish peer, who ... had wasted a vast estate in the idlest ostentation.' He later unwisely tried to recoup his losses by investing in the French Revolutionary assignats (Cokayne 7:215). He would recover from his accident and outlive Lewis by several months. Lewis's boredom was compounded by anxiety. He had nothing to do, and nobody else was doing anything about the threat from the south. In the early summer of 1794, the Terror was at its height and the Armee du Nord was advancing steadily across Belgium. On 1 July, the French entered Bruges; on the 10th, they entered Brussels (Phipps 1:318). On the 22nd, Lewis wrote gamely to his mother: 'You may perhaps be a little alarmed for me, when you hear of the progress of the French; I shall assure you therefore that at the Hague there is no possible danger of our being visited by the Carmagnols. Every body here is in perfect security upon their own accounts; But of course their faces are very gloomy from the bad success of the combined Armies' (Peck 211).u On the 27th - 9 Thermidor - the French entered Antwerp (Phipps 1:320-1). The fall of Robespierre did not halt the advance of the Armee du Nord, and by September Lewis was reassuring his mother in rather different terms: 'You need not be under any alarm about me at the Hague, with respect to the visits of the Carmagnols: You may dep[en]d up [on] it, that I shall not wait for their arrival' (Peck 213). On 8 November, the Armee du Nord reached the Rhine and took Nijmegen (Phipps 1:326). Diplomatic business had brought Lewis to the allied headquarters at Arnhem, about ten miles to the north, and he took the opportunity to visit an English battery, near the front lines, which was being bombarded by the French. I saw two cannon balls pass through the roof of a house about ten yards distant, one after another, and at length a ball passed through the house under the shelter of whose roof I was standing, and knocked all the tiles about my ears: so that you see my campaign has not been totally unattended with danger. As I was coming away from the village, I was much shocked at seeing a countryman whose leg had been shot away at that moment, as he was sitting at his cottage-door, and the same ball carried off the arm of his child, an infant of three years old, which he held upon his knee. (Baron-Wilson 1:141-2)

Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary violence combined with the

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violence that Lewis must have remembered from Westminster and the violence that threatened him as a homosexual to inspire the violence that pervades The Monk. The Dutch resented the British not only for current atrocities but also for having helped to crush the Patriot movement and restore the regime of William V in the late 1780s. The majority did not support the war; a large minority was forming Jacobin clubs in the major cities and looking forward with enthusiasm to the arrival of the French (Palmer 2:180-4). No doubt it was partly for political reasons that Lewis failed to find their society amusing. The society he did find amusing was that of the French emigres - the Baron de Breteuil, the Vicomte de Bouille, the Marquise de Bebrance, the Due de Polignac, the Princesse de Montmorenci, 'and in short the very best society of Paris' - who were frittering away their time in style while under imminent danger of death.12 The Armee du Nord was under orders to execute them in any city it took; it had already followed these orders in Nieuport and Fort 1'Ecluse Moreau (Phipps 1:322). In The Hague, 'Every body is at their ease. Some play at Tric-trac; others work; others "font la belle conversation", and so well, with such wit and 1H novelty of thought, that I am much entertained by it.' Even when the emigres were boring, they were entertaining: 'There is a Duchesse de la Force here, a sort of Ideot, whom I wish you could see; She would entertain you much. Her conversation is composed of the same set of phrases, which She vents upon all occasions. One of them is, "Et les details?" ... When they told her that the Queen of France was dead, She asked for the "details'" (Peck 212). Marie Antoinette had been guillotined on 16 October 1793. Lewis himself had dwelt on the details of her imprisonment, if not of her death, in an unpublished poem, 'France and England in 1793': Amidst these glooms profound, these frowning Towers, Sad Antoinette consumes the fearful hours, And mourns the day, She left the Austrian climes, To hear her thoughtless errors taxed as crimes. Scorned as a Sovereign, Slandered as a Wife, Almost debarred the coarse support of life, Wasted with agony, with sickness weak, On her fair hand She rests her faded cheek, While her stern Jailors gaze with eyes of stone, And taunting mock the tear, or chide the groan.

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Tis thus, sad victim of inveterate Foes, She waits, yet shudders at, her final close; And oft when steps approaching fright her ear, Trembling She starts, and thinks the Murderer near. Yet still unchanged, in grief still fond and mild, Doating She hangs oer either lovely Child, And murmurs, while her tears their cheeks bedew, - 'Dear Babes, my bitterest fears are felt for You!' (MS 114 p. 386)

The queen, as portrayed by Lewis, reminds us of the many captives, male and female, in his melodramas.14 No doubt she reminded him of his mother. Lewis characteristically thought that the Duchesse de la Force 'would make an excellent character in a comedy.' Literature was his main distraction from the depressing details of life during wartime; as he told his mother, T am horribly bit by the rage of writing' (Peck 210). He had finished his translation of Schiller; he had written another farce, an adaptation from the French, to be called The Twins; he was trying to arrange for the production of The East Indian and for the publication of a long poem. Above all, T have again taken up my Romance, and perhaps by this time Ten years I may make shift to finish it fit for throwing into the fire': he was evidently still finding it frustrating work. T was induced to go on with it by reading "the Mysteries of Udolpho,["] which is in my opinion one of the most interesting Books that ever have been published' (Peck 208). Lewis kept up with the new publications: he had read Radcliffe's most famous novel within ten days of its publication (Norton 93). In September, he would advise his mother to read Godwin's Caleb Williams, also published in 1794: Tt is in a new style, and well written: Unluckily the Author is half a Democrate,' and Lewis was in no mood even for partial democracy (Peck 213). He found The Mysteries of Udolphogmore congenial, partly for the curious reason that he was struck by a resemblance between his own character and that of Montoni, 'the Villain of the Tale': his soul was little susceptible of light pleasures. He delighted in the energies of the passions; the difficulties and tempests of life, which wreck the happiness of others, roused and strengthened all the powers of his mind, and afforded him the highest enjoyments, of which his nature was capable ... he still preserved a decisive and haughty air, which, while it imposed submission on weak and timid minds, roused the fierce hatred of

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strong ones. He had, of course, many and bitter enemies; but the rancour of their hatred proved the degree of his power; and, as power was his chief aim, he gloried more in such hatred, than it was possible he could in being esteemed. (Radcliffe 182)

This does not look much like the Lewis who was spending his evenings playing tric-trac and making beautiful conversation with the very best society of Paris; it may, however, portray an emotional response - which he did not otherwise allow himself to express - to the difficulties and tempests of life under the threat of invasion. Soon Lewis would be renamed after the villain of his own tale, The Monk. The reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho and Caleb Williams bracketed the writing of The Monk. The letter recommending Radcliffe announced that she had inspired Lewis to go on with his romance; the one recommending Godwin asked: 'What do you think of my having written in the space of ten weeks, a Romance of between three and four hundred Pages Octavo? I have even written out half of it fair. It is called 'The Monk", and I am myself so much pleased with it, that if the Booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself (Peck 213). 2

Peck argues that these two letters contradict each other: if The Monk was the romance begun at Oxford in 1792, continued in Weimar, and taken up again at The Hague, then it was not really written in ten weeks (20). But Lewis seems to have made a new beginning under the influence of Radcliffe. The vague hints he had previously given of the plot of his romance are not much like anything in The Monk as we have it, and the interruptions, frustrations, and delays of which he had repeatedly complained are not at all like the rage of writing in which he finished the novel. The Mysteries of Udolpho - rather than the Schauerromane - inspired Lewis to finish The Monk, but it inspired him to answer it, not simply to imitate it, just as The Monk itself inspired Radcliffe to answer it with The Italian (1797).15 The two authors were immediately recognized as the most sharply differentiated exponents of the two alternative modes of Gothic fiction: the explained and the unexplained supernatural, or in Tzvetan Todorov's terms, the uncanny and the marvellous (Todorov 41— 2). The two authors were also recognized as demonstrating both the sig-

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nificance and the problems of the Gothic with unusual clarity. As the Marquis de Sade put it, in Idee sur les romans (1800): This genre was the inevitable product of the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded. For those who were acquainted with all the ills that are brought upon men by the wicked, the romantic novel was becoming somewhat difficult to write, and merely monotonous to read: there was nobody left who had not experienced more misfortunes in four or five years than could be depicted in a century by literature's most famous novelists: it was necessary to call upon hell for aid in order to arouse interest, and to find in the land of fantasies what was common knowledge from historical observation of man in this iron age. But this way of writing presented so many inconveniencies! The author of [The Monk] failed to avoid them no less than did Mrs Radcliffe; either of these two alternatives was unavoidable; either to explain away [developper] all the magic elements, and from then on to be interesting no longer, or never raise the curtain [lever le rideau], and there you are in the most horrible unreality. (Fairclough 14)16

As Sade explains, the two modes present apparently opposite but equally difficult challenges in narrative design. Radcliffe's uncanny or explained supernatural tends to be bathetic; it is focused on the ending of the story, where the mysteries of Udolpho are solved, but the solutions are inevitably less interesting than the mysteries themselves. The marvellous or unexplained supernatural, by contrast, focuses on the middle of the story, where the marvels unfold, but provides no way of organizing them. As Coleridge complains (in his review of The Monk), 'All events are levelled into one common mass, and become almost equally probable, where the order of nature may be changed whenever the author's purposes demand it. No address is requisite to the accomplishment of any design; and no pleasure therefore can be received from the perception of difficulty surmounted' (194—5). The challenge of the marvellous, then, is to create a challenge, to find a principle of development to which the events must conform, to provide a pleasurable sense of difficulty surmounted. Despite Sade's misgivings, both Radcliffe and Lewis rise to the occasion. Mary Poovey has argued that the bathos in Radcliffe's novel exposes the contradictions in her ideology (328). I would argue instead that it is designed to enforce her ideology. Radcliffe uses bathos for didactic or satiric effect, much as Austen does in Northanger Abbey (cf.

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Paulson 225). The novel even foregrounds its own bathetic structure: its explanations are accompanied by acknowledgments of their bathos. One of the first mysteries of the novel, and one of the most quickly explained, is an apparition in St Aubert's study after his death; it turns out to be the family dog (95-6). No explicit acknowledgment of the bathos seems necessary here. Later, summing up her experiences at Udolpho, Emily St Aubert smiles ironically and says: 'I perceive ... that all old mansions are haunted; I am lately come from a place of wonders; but unluckily, since I left it, I have heard almost all of them explained' (491). At this point, the mysteries of Chateau-le-Blanc have not yet been explained; when they are, 'Emily could not forbear smiling at this explanation of the deception, which had given her so much superstitious terror' (635). It is 'a state of sensibility,' the narrator says, which renders the mind liable to the influence of superstition (562), and St Aubert's deathbed speech to his daughter is above all a warning against 'the dangers of sensibility' (79-80). As David Durant and Mary Poovey point out, Emily's experiences simply confirm her father's advice - so conclusively, and the household that she and her beloved Valancourt finally establish reconstitutes her father's household so completely, that the novel is circular (Durant 525-6; Poovey 327).17 Emily has engaged in the sort of investigation recommended by Burke's Reflections:. 'Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them' (Writings 8:138). She has spent the novel rediscovering her father's wisdom. Perhaps the novel's central mystery is that of the black veil. Unlike most of the other mysteries, this one is not even speciously supernatural; nevertheless, it dominates and sums up the effects of all the others. The lifting of the veil becomes a symbol of Radcliffe's explanations (Sade accordingly uses the terms developper and lever le rideau). It also forms part of a series. At Udolpho, Emily is intrigued by a mysterious picture behind a black veil. She lifts the veil, sees 'that what it had concealed was no picture,' and faints (248-9). Over four hundred pages later, the reader will discover, and Emily herself will understand, that what she has seen is a hideous waxwork of a corpse (662). Later, searching for her aunt Madame Montoni, she finds herself in a disused torture chamber where 'a dark curtain, ... descending from the ceiling to the floor, was drawn along the whole side of the chamber.' It reminds her of 'the terrible spectacle her daring hand had formerly unveiled,' but she draws the curtain anyway, and this time discovers a real corpse. She faints again (348). Later still, she enters the room where her aunt has been impris-

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oned, draws the bed curtains, and discovers Madame Montoni, pale, emaciated as a skeleton, and on the point of death. Later still, in the bedroom of her other aunt, the Marchioness, at Chateau-le-Blanc, she sees the black bedspread 'violently agitated,' and a face appears above it (536). She flees in terror. In each case she intrudes into a forbidden room and draws a curtain to look at a bed. The mystery of the veils is the most obvious aspect of what Mary Laughlin Fawcett has called ldUdolpho's Primal Mystery': Emily is like the Freudian child, who stumbles on the primal scene and mistakes it for a scene of violence (Freud 17:45 and n; Holland and Sherman 282) - except that Emily is not mistaken; she really does see scenes of violence and death. Leslie Fiedler sees the substitution of death for sex as the defining characteristic of the Gothic (Fiedler 134; Fawcett 482). It is certainly characteristic of Radcliffe's Gothic, which Fiedler sees as expressing the psychic drive that performs the substitution, the 'compulsive repetitiveness [of] a self-duplicating nightmare from which it is impossible to wake' (127). Radcliffe's psychology is closely linked to her ideology (cf. Holland and Sherman 286). Unveiling or undressing is an important motif in Burke's Reflections (Kramnick 152-3), where it is as often bathetic as it is terrible. In lamenting the end of the age of chivalry, Burke says: 'All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion' (Writings 8:128). In defending prejudices, he argues that men of speculation 'think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason' (138). The notorious image of Marie Antoinette fleeing 'almost naked' from the attack on Versailles belongs to the same sequence (121-2). That it should be Emily to whom Radcliffe assigns this Revolutionary act suggests how displaced her treatment of contemporary history is (Poovey 317). But it allows the readers to share sympathetically in the experience of unveiling, and so to feel all the more vividly the futility of unveiling. When, at the end of the novel, back in the ancien-regime security of La Vallee, Emily smiles at her own foolishness, the readers are to smile at the foolishness of sympathy for the French. The means with which Lewis meets his formal challenge are (at least superficially) the opposites of Radcliffe's means, just as their challenges

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are (superficially) opposites. When Lewis recommended The Mysteries of Udolphofto his mother, he particularly recommended the incident ofg Emily and the dog (Peck 209), and his novel does include at least one incident in Radcliffe's uncanny mode. After Ambrosio has murdered Elvira, he agrees to spend the night in her room, ostensibly to assuage the fears of her landlady, but really to observe the effects of a potion he has administered to Antonia, who is sleeping in the next room. The curtains of the murdered woman's bed begin to shake, and a ghostly figure in white glides across the room. This turns out to be the maid, who has resolved to stand guard over Antonia, but whose feminine curiosity has induced her to leave her charge and spy on Ambrosio (327-9).18 The novel also includes more numerous and more important examples of what might be called the anti-uncanny, events that appear to be natural but turn out to be supernatural after all (cf. Arnaud, Maitre et serviteur 143).19 The first of these is also the first supernatural event in the novel, the episode of the Bleeding Nun (Brooks, 'Virtue' 254—5). In order to elope with her lover Raymond, Agnes disguises herself as a local ghost, so that her guardians will be too terrified to stop her. Unfortunately, she is late for their rendezvous, and Raymond inadvertently elopes with the real Bleeding Nun, who is on time. In this incident, Jack G. Voller argues, Lewis 'deploy[s] superstition against a smug rationalism' (26); yet the rationalism most obviously at issue hardly seems smug. Raymond sees Agnes's drawing of the Bleeding Nun and asks her whether she believes in the spectre. 'How can you ask such a question?' she replies. T have too much reason to lament supersition's influence to be its victim myself (154): her mother's superstitious vow has doomed her, since before her birth, to a conventual career for which she has no vocation (144). That this chastened and sober rationalism should deliver Raymond into the power of the Bleeding Nun, and Agnes into the power of the sadistic Prioress, is an epistemological scandal equal to the moral scandal of the main plot, in which Antonia is 'abducted, poisoned, raped, and murdered as a savage indication of the inadequacy of [her] faith' in 'other people's goodness' (Punter, Literature of Terror 74). The main plot, including the fate of Antonia, depends on a much more complex and elaborate employment of the anti-uncanny, in the characterization of Matilda, who becomes steadily more and more marvellous over the course of the book. She is first introduced as Rosario, a young novice at Ambrosio's abbey. Soon she reveals that she is a woman, and that she has entered the abbey because of her love for the abbot.

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After he has tired of her as a lover, she reveals that she is a sorcerer - a partly supernatural being - and offers to use her supernatural powers to assist him in his pursuit of Antonia. Finally, the Devil tells him that she is really wholly supernatural, 'a subordinate but crafty spirit' whom he has employed to engineer the monk's damnation (418). Critics have been disturbed by the inconsistency between the Devil's account of Matilda and her earlier account of herself (Grudin 137). Peter Grudin argues that the Devil's account actually resolves the inconsistencies in the earlier portrayal (Grudin 140), but it does so at the cost of introducing new inconsistencies, which have to do with the passages focalized through Matilda (cf. Peck 39). For example: 'Matilda with every succeeding day grew more attached to the friar. Since he had obtained her favours, he was become dearer to her than ever, and she felt grateful to him for the pleasures in which they had equally been sharers' (237), and later: 'she taxed him not with ingratitude; but her eyes filled with involuntary tears' (257). A demon simply engaged in engineering Ambrosio's damnation would not feel grateful to him and would cry only voluntary tears. Byron later told Medwin that The Monk 'only wanted one thing ... to have rendered it perfect. He should have made the daemon really in love with Ambrosio: this would have given it a human interest' (Medwin 188).20 Perhaps this final touch was really part of Lewis's design: at one point, his narrator even exclaims, 'Unfortunate Matilda! her paramour forgot, that for his sake alone she had forfeited her claim to virtue; and his only reason for despising her was, that she had loved him much too well' (244). If she is a demon, the first subordinate clause must mean that she has forfeited her counterfeit claim to virtue as a human being; the second might mean that she loves him much too well to perform without distress her duties as an infernal spirit. The last passage from her point of view cannot, however, be explained in this way: after their arrest by the Inquisition, Ambrosio is tortured. 'Matilda was next ordered to the torture; but, terrified by the sight of the friar's sufferings, her courage totally deserted her' (404): it is inconceivable that a demon would be afraid of physical tortures. It seems most likely that the Devil is simply lying when he tells Ambrosio that Matilda is a devil. He is almost certainly lying about the Inquisition's intent to pardon Ambrosio (Reno, Gothic Visions 112-13), and he is almost certainly telling the truth about Ambrosio's relationship with Antonia and Elvira; as for his revelation about Matilda, all one can say is that it reduces the novel to incoherence, unlike her own account of herself, which makes sense - though such strange sense that many readers

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have preferred the Devil's version.21 Lewis has come close to making Matilda's nature perfectly ambiguous: 'the very heart of the fantastic,' according to Todorov, is neither a woman nor a devil but, precisely, a 'woman who may be the devil' (25). This ambiguity seems well suited to the ambivalences she embodies. Whatever one makes of Matilda's nature, her transformations function as part of the narrative design of the novel. Accordingly, it emphasizes them. Ambrosio feels 'Astonishment' when Matilda reveals that she is a woman (81); 'Amazement' when she reveals her desire for him (108); and 'surprise' as well as displeasure at her increasing 'courage and manliness' (233). Matilda's status as a (partly or wholly) supernatural being may explain her inconsistency as a character, but it does not in itself provide an answer to Coleridge's charge, which is precisely that the supernatural offers too easy an explanation for any kind of inconsistency. Matilda's purpose, however - or the Devil's purpose for her - is consistent: the damnation of Ambrosio. Each of the offences she leads him into is greater than the last: first he allows her to stay in the abbey; then he breaks his vow of chastity with her; then he murders Elvira, his mother; then he rapes and murders Antonia, his sister; finally he signs a pact with the Devil. Matilda's metamorphoses are timed to facilitate his progress. Before his seduction, she is attractively timid and innocent; after it, her sexual expertise and aggressiveness both inflame his appetites and disgust him with her, so that he seeks a new object of desire, Antonia. Before his Faustian pact, Matilda appears to him as the beneficiary of such a pact, to tempt him to follow her example; after it, she can be identified (truly or falsely) as a spirit, to add to his sufferings the humiliation of being tricked (Grudin 141). As Ambrosio's sins become graver, his sense of remorse becomes more acute (e.g., 89, 226, 368), but it never draws him back into virtue, like repentance; instead, it drives him deeper into sin. Remorse for the murder of Elvira 'served but to strengthen his resolution to destroy Antonia's honour' (364). After his arrest, 'he recollected that he deserved not Heaven's protection, and believed his crimes so monstrous as to exceed even God's infinite goodness. For every other sinner he thought there might be hope, but for him there could be none' (402). This despair tempts him into his last and worst crime: the pact with the Devil, Matilda argues, will at least put off his death and damnation (409). Ambrosio's steady progress makes Lewis's main plot linear or climac-

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tic, just as the pattern of mystery and solution makes Radcliffe's plot circular. Each event in The Monk is more marvellous, and more monstrous, than the last, and it always leads inevitably to the next, which is still more marvellous and monstrous. The constant crescendo is matched by a constant accelerando: Lewis's first volume contains only three chapters, averaging (in Peck's edition) 36 pages; the second contains four, averaging 33.5; the third contains five, averaging only 28.8 (cf. Arnaud, Maitre et serviteur 148). Todorov argues that the marvellous is essential to such a linear plot: 'A fixed law, an established rule: that is what immobilizes narrative. For the transgression of the law to provoke a rapid modification, supernatural forces must intervene' (165). This is an exaggeration. The main plot of The Monk is largely a sinner's progress, and sinners do often manage to progress without supernatural aid. Thomas Button, who disapproved of Lewis's invocation of the supernatural, admired much else about his novel, especially his depiction of the sinner's progress: 'he has ... shown by striking precedents, how the first aberrations from virtue lead by gradual process to the perpetration [of] the blackest and most heinous crimes' (76). 'A Friend to Genius,' the author of 'An Apology for the Monk' (1797), also understood the novel's formal principle: 'We learn that when once a man ventures into the pool of vice, that he plunges deeper and deeper till he is completely overwhelmed' (211). In the naturalistic form that Button preferred, the progress was a favourite narrative structure of Lewis's (Peck 98). The Love of Gain (1799) includes an extended account (almost twice as long as Juvenal's) of a sinner's progress: This first sin Crown'd with success, ere long his feet shall win To loftier heights of vice, and urge his fate From bad to worse, from little crimes to great... (441-4) The heroine of Adelgitha (1806) is forced to commit one crime after another, and eventually to murder the villain Michael Bucas, who has been blackmailing her. She sees a prospect of ever greater crimes opening before her: Hence with remorse! I'll rush from crime to crime In mad career; till grown with guilt familiar, I shrink no longer at the monster's sight! (101; 5.1)

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She forecloses this prospect by commiting suicide, but first she confesses, summing up the moral (and the structure) of the tragedy: "Tis in man's choice, never to sin at all; / But sinning once, to stop exceeds his power' (122; 5.2). In 'Mistrust; or, Blanche and Osbright,' the novelization of Kleist that Lewis included in Romantic Tales (1808), the progress takes the form of an escalating feud between two related families. Gustavus, the head of one of them, explains the story's structure in a futile warning against mistrust: Words are misconstrued; looks are interpreted! thoughts are guest at and acted upon, as if thoughts were facts; the supposed fault is retaliated by a real one; that one gives birth to more; injury succeeds injury, and crime treads upon the heels of crime, till the web of mischief and misery is complete ... (1:57)

As in The Monk, remorse only leads to new crimes. After ordering a murder, Rudiger, the head of the other family, reflects: 'He was guilty, he was the most execrable of mortals, he was odious in his own eyes; and what punishment could be inflicted too severe on the man, who had made him so?' (1:208). The implausibility of these later works, which can scarcely be suggested by mere summaries, does provide evidence for a weak version of Todorov's argument. The supernatural may not be necessary to advance a plot, but a certain degree of freedom from natural constraints is helpful if the plot's internal logic is to work itself out. In fact, although the supernatural is literally excluded from Adelgitha and 'Mistrust,' it enters metaphorically in the characterization of the villains - who, like Matilda, keep the plots moving. Thus Michael Ducas is called a fiend (66; 3.1), and Rudiger is compared to a demon (1:170). The linear plot may have been suggested to Lewis by Caleb Williams. Godwin carefully planned his novel backwards, from final effect to first cause, and then wrote it forwards, from cause to effect, in order to give it a rigorously linear construction (xxv-xxvii), or what Caleb calls 'connection and progress' (123). Its plot dovetails four climactic sequences of events: first, Barnabas Tyrrel's increasing resentment of the superiority of Ferdinando Falkland; then the increasing outrageousness of Tyrrel's behaviour, which drives Falkland to murder him; then the obsessed Caleb's persecution of Falkland, which forces Falkland to confess his secret; then the vengeful Falkland's persecution of Caleb, which leads to the final confrontation between them.

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Godwin's plot is not as rigorously or as simply linear as Lewis's main plot; it is varied by a number of startling reversals - or, as Caleb calls them, revolutions (362, 363) - and in its third volume it even approaches Radcliffe's repetitiousness, as Caleb tries repeatedly to make a new life for himself, and Falkland's agents repeatedly frustrate him. Caleb, however, sees this repeated persecution as progressive - as getting worse and worse (262, 318-19, 351) - and the novel's overwhelming effect is one of irresistible progress. In recounting the quarrel between Falkland and Tyrrel, Caleb remarks: 'all that remains is rapid and tremendous. The death-dealing mischief advances with an accelerated motion, appearing to defy human wisdom and strength to obstruct its operation' (42). Godwin's mouthpiece Mr Clare, like Lewis's Gustavus, issues a futile warning against this narrative avalanche, telling Falkland that 'Petty causes may produce great mischiefs' (39). Godwin's rationalism makes him reluctant to invoke the supernatural literally, but he invokes it metaphorically, as Lewis does in Adelgitha and 'Mistrust,' to characterize the passions which give the narrative its momentum (Graham 111-12). To Falkland, Tyrrel's brutality 'seemed to realise all that had been told of the passions of fiends' (75). Caleb describes his fatal curiosity as 'the demon that possessed me' (137). Since the agnostic Godwin is more even-handed in his approach to the supernatural than Lewis or Radcliffe, he can compare Falkland both to a devil (138, 200, 318) and to an angry God (166, 279, 354). Godwin is as explicit as Radcliffe, and more so than Lewis, about the politics of his plotting. Radcliffe's circular plot is conservative: it returns things to their original condition, and confirms readers in their conventional beliefs. Far from wanting to confirm readerly prejudices, Godwin promised himself: T will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before' (xxvii; cf. Voller 22). The famous narrative drive of Caleb Williams is a direct expression of Godwin's politics: its plot corresponds to the linear principle of perfectibility, which Mr Clare calls 'the prospect of human improvement' (38). Godwin is a less naive optimist than Mr Clare, however: to him, the prospect of improvement is certain, but the way to it is not entirely straightforward, hence the room for 'revolutions' in his plot. As he puts it in Political Justice. 'From the savage state to the highest degree of civilization, the passage is long and arduous; and, if we aspire to the final result, we must submit to that portion of misery and vice which necessarily fills the space between' (667).22

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The formal problem with the purely linear principle of development is that it does not provide a plot with any obviously inevitable ending, any more than history has an inevitable ending. 'Mistrust' has to end when all the combatants in the feud are dead; but there seems to be no reason why Lewis should not have continued The Monk forever, or at least for as long as his nineteen-year-old imagination could have kept on coming up with more and more lurid sins for Ambrosio. Lewis resorts to a number of non-linear techniques to make his ending inevitable. He includes at least two mysteries to be solved by the conclusion, both of them subtler than most of Radcliffe's. The first is that of Ambrosio's identity: the novel does not insist that we wonder who he is, but it does tell us that he was an abandoned child (43—4, 238, 251), and that Elvira had to abandon her child (40). The other mystery, that of Matilda's identity, may even be too subtle. More obviously, Lewis deploys a variety of foreshadowings: from Lorenzo's warning that Ambrosio's virtue may not survive the temptations of the world (47-8), through his dream of Antonia murdered by a monster with 'Pride! Lust! Inhumanity!' emblazoned on its forehead (52-4) ,23 and the sinister fortune the Gipsy tells for Antonia (62-3), to the curse Agnes places on Ambrosio when he decides to tell the Prioress of her plans to elope with Raymond (72, 89, 296). But the novel achieves closure mainly through the intersection of its main plot and subplot, when Lorenzo, who has just rescued Agnes from the crypt, arrives just too late to rescue Antonia from Ambrosio. Thus the relation between the two plots is not only thematic (Grudin 137, 142-3), but formal (since the co-presence of the two plots creates a kind of formal mystery - the mystery of what they have to do with each other - which the crypt scene solves), and even practical (since Lorenzo and his friends are not too late to arrest Ambrosio). Although essential to the organization of the whole novel, Lewis's subplot is not itself as closely organized as his main plot. The core of it, however - the incarceration of Agnes - is linear and progressive: Agnes is first boarded with her aunt and uncle, then confined to her room, then forced to enter a convent, and finally entombed alive in the crypt. The increasing constriction of Agnes's confinement matches the increasing enormity of Ambrosio's sins; her progress in punishment matches his progress in crime.24 As Ambrosio progresses, he does not have the excuse that he does not know what he is doing. Not only does he have to feel remorse after each offence, he also has to realize its gravity beforehand (e.g., 85, 244); the only exception to this rule is the murder of Elvira, which he is surprised

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into. He is finally compelled to admit: 'He had not been deceived into error: ignorance could furnish him with no excuse. He had seen vice in her true colours. Before he committed his crimes, he had computed every scruple of their weight, and yet he had committed them' (406). Naturally, these reflections only add to his fatal remorse. Ambrosio's most elaborate computations, and his most prolonged hesitations, occur before he allows Matilda to use magic to aid his pursuit of Antonia (265-6), and before he uses it himself to escape from the Inquisition. In prison, despite his despair, he argues for ten pages, first with Matilda and then with the Devil, before he signs the pact (407-16). Lewis's use of the marvellous, instead of precluding a sense of difficulty surmounted (as Coleridge argues), actually enhances this sense. The sense of difficulty surmounted is the common factor in the varying definitions of the sublime current in the eighteenth century (Weiskel 17). The source of Coleridge's phrase is probably Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), which describes the experience of the sublime as 'a surmounting of difficulties.' Such an experience is beneficial because 'Labour is not only requisite to preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their functions, but it is equally necessary to these finer and more delicate organs, on which, and by which, the imagination, and perhaps the other mental powers act' (135; 4.6). In Kant and Schiller, the sublime involves not just the surmounting of difficulties but the transcending of impossibilities: 'We gladly permit the imagination to meet its master in the realm of appearances because ... nature in her entire boundlessness cannot impinge upon the absolute greatness within ourselves' (Schiller, Naive 199). Schiller's sublime is supernatural by definition: 'We must then reject any natural explanation, we must abandon completely the derivation of behavior from circumstances and locate the reason for the behavior not in the physical world-order, but in quite another,' the world of moral freedom (201). Schiller is thinking primarily of supernatural virtue, but what he calls 'daemonic freedom' (203) clearly includes the freedom to do evil (206). By emphasizing that Ambrosio knows the demonic evil of what he is doing, Lewis emphasizes his freedom. Unlike Schiller, the other theorists do not insist that the sublime must be supernatural, but they do agree that the supernatural can be sublime. Addison argues that the supernatural produces 'a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader' (3:571; Spectator 419); Burke, though he is not much interested in the supernatural (Voller 15-16), does note that 'notions of ghosts and goblins' add to the terrors of dark-

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ness (Philosophical Enquiry 59; 2.3). If the uncanny in Radcliffe is bathetic, the marvellous in Lewis is sublime. The linear plot is itself sublime. The theorists of the sublime are not explicitly concerned with plot, but the plot of Lewis's novel clearly follows principles which they recommend in other contexts. In rhetoric, Longinus recommends the scheme of amplification, in which 'the great Incidents, heaped one upon another, ascend by a continued Gradation to a Summit of Grandeur' (31; 1.11). In architecture, Burke recommends what he calls succession, 'that the parts may be continued so long, and in such a direction, as by their frequent impulses on the sense to impress the imagination with an idea of their progress beyond their actual limits' (74; 2.9). This is a fair analogy for Lewis's fictional architecture; its effect, which Burke calls 'the artificial infinite,' even suggests the open-ended quality of the linear plot.23 Despite Ambrosio's surmounting of his moral difficulties, the sublime in The Monk unquestionably lacks the dignity to which this rhetorical mode aspires. At times it even turns into its opposite. At the end of the novel, the Devil dramatizes the sudden transformation of the sublime into the bathetic, of rise into fall: he takes Ambrosio to the brink of the steepest precipice in the Sierra Morena and drops him off it (419-20). Byron, perhaps our greatest virtuoso of bathos, knows that the accumulation of marvels is likely to produce it: he describes his own drama Manfred (1817) as all in the Alps & the other world - and as mad as Bedlam - I do not know that it is even fit for publication - the persons are all magicians - ghosts - & the evil principle - with a mixed mythology of my own - which you may suppose is somewhat of the strangest. (Letters 5:194-5)

The original ending of Manfred, in which a hypocritical abbot is carried away by a devil, is clearly based on The Monk - though Byron's devil, unlike Lewis's, is given to singing bawdy songs (Works 4:468-9). Lewis has not left a similar statement about The Monk, but his use of the marvellous shows a similar exuberance; Robert Kiely describes him as 'taken by the absurdity' of his own creation (105). Lewis's progressive and marvellous sublime is especially close to the technique of bathos known as the reductio ad absurdum. In The Italian, her response to The Monk, Radcliffe suggests that an ethical sublime like Schiller's can reduce itself to absurdity. Her villain tells his accomplice that 'virtue never trembles; it is her glory, and sublimest attribute to be

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superior to danger'; the narrator comments, 'A philosopher might, perhaps, have been surprized to hear two persons seriously defining the limits of virtue, at the very moment in which they meditated the most atrocious crime' (173). Soon afterwards, the heroine reflects uneasily: 'Her very virtues, now that they were carried to excess, seemed to her to border upon vices' (181). Thomas Weiskel describes the Gothic as only the 'bastard scion' of the sublime (112), but the family resemblance is embarrassingly close. The sublime itself is always in danger of losing its dignity: Longinus warns that 'Hyperboles equally serve to two Purposes; they enlarge, and they lessen' (91; 4.38); Weiskel himself warns that 'Only irony, not any alternative semiotic, separates bathos and the true sublime' (20). The sense of difficulty surmounted that Burke considers the essence of the sublime corresponds closely to the 'overcoming of external obstacles' or 'internal inhibitions and repressions' that Freud considers the essence of the comic (8:134). Freud's mechanistic language, in fact, is strikingly reminiscent of Burke's: 'What is sublime is something large in the figurative, psychical sense; and ... like what is somatically large, it is represented by an increased expenditure' of energy. The excess energy goes into maintaining 'a solemn restraint' or inhibition. As soon as this inhibition is overcome, 'the difference in expenditure ... can be discharged by laughter' (8:200-1). What is interesting is not just that Freud is the heir of Burke, but that the terms of the inheritance are so easily inverted (Kaufman 2183). In 1805, Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) reduced Burke's psychologistic aesthetics to absurdity by arguing that if the author of the Philosophical Enquiry had walked up St. James's street without his breeches, it would have occasioned great and universal astonishment; and if he had, at the same time, carried a loaded blunderbuss in his hands, the astonishment would have been mixed with no small portion of terror: but I do not believe that the united effects of these two powerful passions would have produced any sentiment or sensation approaching to sublime ... (377) Knight, like Schiller, defined the sublime as essentially ethical: he thought that Burke had attained it in his attempt to save the inhabitants of India from the depredations of the governor-general, Warren Hastings. Knight's joke draws attention to Burke's tendency to associate the sublime with the masculine, and to use phallic language to describe it

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(Kramnick 94-5; Paulson 69): the minds of the spectators at a 'sublime and affecting tragedy ... are erect with expectation' (47; 1.15); the sublime passion of ambition 'produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind' (50; 1.17); the bull is a sublime animal, but the castrated ox is not (65; 2.5). Vulnerability to the reductio is not, however, unique to Burke; it is a general characteristic of the sublime. In particular, the image of a man stalking the streets of the capital, in a state of obscene undress and armed with a phallic weapon, is an apt symbol for the bastard sublime of Lewis, in whose novel, as Ruth Perry puts it, 'The sexuality is terrifyingly omnipresent' (272; cf. Fogle 39-40, Paulson 221). The main plot is driven by the desire of Ambrosio, first for Matilda and then for Antonia, and complicated by Lorenzo's desire for Antonia. The subplot is driven by the mutual desire of Raymond and Agnes (which, almost uniquely in Gothic fiction, is presented sympathetically, if a little shamefacedly); it is complicated by the illicit desire of Agnes's aunt for Raymond, which drives her to have Agnes sent to the convent, and by the unacknowledged desire of the Prioress for Ambrosio, which drives her to have Agnes buried alive (72, 394). Even minor characters, like Marguerite the bandit's wife and the Bleeding Nun, are driven to their fates by their desires (cf. W.Jones 130). Lewis's linear novel is a pretty straightforward expression of eros, just as the repetitious Mysteries of Udolpho is an expression of the repetition compulsion, or death drive. Radcliffe, in fact, provides a brief sketch of the linear plot - the road not taken, as it were - in a warning against eros. Sister Agnes, the mad nun, says to Emily: 'Sister! beware of the first indulgence of the passions; beware of the first! Their course, if not checked then, is rapid - their force is uncontroulable - they lead us we know not whither - they lead us perhaps to the commission of crimes, for which whole years of prayer and penitence cannot atone!' (646; cf. Conger, Matthew G. Lewis 107). This thematic contrast between the two Gothic modes corresponds to the contrast between their politics and to what Todorov sees as a contrast between their temporalities. The uncanny conservatively 'refer[s] the inexplicable to known facts, to a previous experience, and thereby to the past' (42), just as the death drive seeks to restore 'an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed,' the condition of inanimate matter (Freud 18:38). The marvellous, however, is progressive: it 'corresponds to an unknown phenomenon, never seen as yet, still to come - hence to a future' (Todorov

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42), just as eros, in a phrase Freud quotes from Faust, 'Presses ever forward unsubdued' in search of gratification (18:42n.; cf. W. Jones 134). Burke believes that the age of the supernatural is no more, but he would agree with Todorov that the marvellous corresponds to phenomena never seen as yet; he might even agree that it is essentially erotic, since he associates it with the morals of Rousseau: That acute, though eccentric, observer had perceived, that to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology had long since lost its effect; that giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance which succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity which belonged to their age; that now nothing was left to a writer but that species of the marvellous, which might still be produced, and with as great an effect as ever, though in another way; that is, the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals. (Wirings 8:219)

Todorov argues further that sex, 'an experience incomparable, in its intensity, to any other,' has a special affinity for the supernatural (127). Sex is certainly prominent in Lewis's other linear works. Adelgitha's single error was sexual, and her tragedy is driven by Michael Ducas's desire for her. The feud in 'Mistrust' is aggravated by desire and jealousy, and it is ironically brought to its tragic climax by the efforts of Blanche and Osbright, the Juliet and Romeo of the story, to unite the feuding families in marriage. The eroticism of The Monk is so pervasive that it subsumes the novel's plotting and rhetoric; that is, the novel thematizes in terms of the erotic all the other features I have been discussing. For example, it thematizes the principle of linear progression in the image of the striptease, Lewis's counterpart to Radcliffe's unveiling (cf. Fierobe, 'Ordre et chaos' 164— 5; Grudin 138-9; Hennelly, '"Putting My Eye to the Keyhole"'). Matilda seduces Ambrosio by showing him first a few vague glimpses of her 'features' (66), then her breast (87-8), and finally her face, which she saves for last because it resembles his favourite portrait of the Madonna (98101). Later, she inflames his desire for Antonia by using a magic mirror to show him the innocent young woman undressing for a bath (268-9). To make this second striptease more erotic than the first, Antonia is already almost naked when Ambrosio begins spying on her. The compulsive unfaithfulness that drives Ambrosio from Matilda to

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Antonia is encouraged by Matilda, whether out of demonic malignity, the jealousy of a scorned lover who understands that his new attraction will destroy him, or simply fatigue with this 'feeble, puerile, and grovelling ... slave to vulgar errors' (266). But it is in any case endemic among Gothic heroes - as it is, Freud believes, among men in our society. (Psychoanalysis is the heir of the Gothic as well as of the sublime [Day 179].) This unfaithfulness is a consequence of the fear of incest, which makes men find the objects of their desires both threatening - that is, too similar to the forbidden original object of desire - and unsatisfying - that is, not similar enough (Freud 11:169; cf. W.Jones 134). But Ambrosio's attempt to avoid incest leads him (like Oedipus) to commit it. As soon as he wants a replacement for Matilda, he notices Antonia; she fills him with entirely new emotions (243-4). These correspond to the new emotions Antonia has felt on hearing him preach (45); they have unconsciously recognized each other. His desire for her brings him back to the bosom of his family. Ambrosio's progress turns into a regress: the linear plot becomes circular after all, just as the sublime becomes bathetic (and as, on the political level, the progress of democracy in France would collapse into the despotism of Napoleon). Ambrosio's progress in crime is both a progress in perversion and a progress towards death. His desire for Matilda is already somewhat sadistic: what arouses him is not just the sight of her breast, but her threat to pierce it with a dagger. His desire for Antonia is more actively sadistic; at this point, the novel thematizes the sublime pleasure of surmounting difficulties as the pleasure of rape. As Ambrosio looks forward to his rendezvous with Antonia, 'the resistance which he expected from her, seemed to give a fresh edge to his fierce and unbridled desires' (365; cf. 364, 367-8). This is one aspect of the sublime that Burke is willing to associate with the Revolution. In An Appeal from the New to ttie Old Wliigs (1791), he imagines the new Whigs as worrying about how to respond to the Jacobin threat: 'Let the lady [the British Constitution] be passive, lest the ravisher should be driven to force. Resistance will only increase his desires' (200; Kramnick 156). The reason for the apparent anomaly is that for Burke, rape is not essentially a masculine act - or, as he would put it, not a manly one (cf. Writings 8:57). The violation of Marie Antoinette's bedroom, the most astonishing and terrifying moment in the Reflections,,is urged on by 'the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, andg frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women' (Writings 8:122), just as Ambrosio's rape of Antonia is urged on

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by Matilda - who is either a fury of hell in the abused shape of a woman, or a woman in the service of hell. As Antonia flees from Ambrosio and Matilda towards Lorenzo, dressed only in her shroud, she recalls Burke's Marie Antoinette, fleeing 'almost naked' from the Revolutionaries to her husband.26 According to Freud, Ambrosio's progress is also a regress. In the mature male, sadism is not supposed to go beyond rape 'for the purposes of reproduction': a limitation which may still seem fairly indulgent. It is only at a much earlier stage of development that 'the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with that object's destruction' (18:54). Whereas The Mysteries of Udolpho retreats from the erotic to the deathly, in The Monk the erotic itself becomes deathly: the third pair of opposites collapses like the first two (cf. Fierobe, 'Ordre et chaos' 166). (As a homosexual in Georgian England, Lewis would have had good reason to think of desire as deadly.) Even for the sympathetic characters in his subplot, desire breeds only death. The lovingly detailed decomposition of Agnes's baby is certainly the most striking image of linear progress (or regress) in the book (3936), and no happy ending could possibly erase it. In fact, the happiest ending Lewis can concoct is a kind of living death: 'The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune's quiver. Those which remained, appeared blunt in comparison' (400).27 Ultimately, then, Lewis's Gothic mode is like a bleaker and more complex version of Radcliffe's (cf. Arnaud, Maitre et serviteur 146). In this regard, his aesthetic achievement is to give Gothic expression to a conservative politics without provoking the disappointment of the explained supernatural (at least, none of his readers seems to have expressed this particular dissatisfaction with his novel). The final trick the Devil plays on Ambrosio thematizes the trick the explained supernatural plays on the reader, thus displacing the disappointment of the explained supernatural from the reader onto Ambrosio himself. The fates of Agnes and Antonia suggest the pessimistic view of human existence that is usually considered more consistent with conservatism than the fundamental optimism of Radcliffe (Reno, Gothic Visions 151-3, 157-8, 205). In the anti-uncanny scandal of their fates, however, as in the treatment of sexuality (as discussed in chapter 4), and (perhaps) in the aporetic characterization of Matilda (Reno, Gothic Visions 123), the novel remains radical in Voller's sense, 'insisting] on the inadequacy or even failure of received knowledge' (22).

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3 Meanwhile, the progress of the Armee du Nord was as inexorable as that of Ambrosio. The Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the allied forces, returned to England on 2 December 1794, believing there would be no further action during the winter. The Armee du Nord entered Amsterdam on 20 January 1795 (Phipps 1:327-8). The undersecretary at war, having a better grasp than the duke of the military situation, had called his son home in November (Baron-Wilson 1:138). Lewis, who had finished The Monk on 23 September, brought the manuscript home with him and published it at the end of the next year. The verse preface curiously compares publication to death ('Go then, and pass that dangerous bourne / Whence never book can back return'; cf. Hamlet 3.1.81-2) and nervously predicts that the novel will be 'condemned, despised, / Neglected, blamed, and criticised.' It ends, however, on a note of enthusiasm: Now, then, you[r] venturous course pursue. Go, my delight! dear book, adieu! (33-4)

Six

An Inundation of Ghosts. 1796-1812

i The Monk was published anonymously on 12 March 1796, at the price of ten shillings and sixpence (Parreaux 53).l The early reviews were mostly favourable. The Monthly Mirror for June 1796 described the novel as 'masterly and impressive.' In the Analytical Review for October 1796, Mary Wollstonecraft was especially impressed by Matilda's seduction of Ambrosio: 'the whole temptation is so artfully contrived, that a man, it should seem, were he made as other men are, would deserve to be d—ned who could resist even devilish spells, conducted with such address, and assuming such a heavenly form' (403). She had begun her affair with Godwin in August. Her only reservation was that 'the language and manners of the personages are not sufficiently gothic in their colouring, to agree with the superstitious scenery, borrowed from those times' (404).2 The European Magazine, however, denounced the novel as 'an oblique attack on venerable establishments': 'the presses of the Continent teemed with compositions of this character while the Revolution was preparing in France; yet what have the infidels who produced it substituted in the place of the religion they have banished?' (114-15). In July 1796, Lewis came of age. By the time the second edition of The Monk appeared, he had been elected for the pocket borough of Hindon ('elected' is something of a euphemism: the seat cost his father more than £2,600 [Thome 4:433]). When he took his seat, Fox crossed the House to congratulate him on his novel (Peck 43). No doubt pleased, he signed the second edition: 'By M.G. Lewis, Esq. M.P.' Coleridge's review of the second edition, in the Critical Review for February 1797, is long, thoughtful, and not entirely unappreciative.

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Coleridge concludes, however - unlike Wollstonecraft - that the 'libidinous minuteness' with which the 'temptations of Ambrosio are described' is 'a fault for which no literary excellence can atone, - a fault which all other excellence does but aggravate, as adding subtlety to a poison by the elegance of its preparation' (196-7; cf. Monthly Review ns 23 [1797]: 451 and Southey, New Letters 1:119). Coleridge's most damning point (anticipated by a reviewer writing under the name 'Aurelius' in an obscure Irish periodical, the Flapper [Parreaux 92]) concerned Ambrosio's reflections on the 'indecent expressions' and 'improper passages' in the Bible (258). As Coleridge put it: The impiety of this falsehood can be equalled only by its impudence ... If it be possible that the author of these blasphemies is a Christian, should he not have reflected that the only passage in the scriptures [a footnote refers the curious reader to Ezekiel 23], which could give a shadow of plausibility to the weakest of these expressions, is represented as being spoken by the Almighty himself? But if he be an infidel, he has acted consistently enough with that character, in his endeavours first to inflame the fleshly appetites, and then to pour contempt on the only book which would be adequate to the task of recalming them. We believe it not absolutely impossible that a mind may be so deeply depraved by the habit of reading lewd and voluptuous tales, as to use even the Bible in conjuring up the spirit of uncleanness. The most innocent expressions might become the first link in the chain of association, when a man's soul had been so poisoned; and we believe it not absolutely impossible that he might extract pollution from the word of purity, and, in a literal sense, turn the grace of God into wantonness Qude4]. (198)

In his peroration, Coleridge added: 'Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. - Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! - We stare and tremble' (198).3 Hindon had formerly been represented by William Beckford, another Jamaican landowner, the author of Vathek (1786), and the victim of a homosexual scandal which had forced him first into exile and then into seclusion at his Gothic mansion, Fonthill Abbey. Lewis was not the only legislator to fail to meet Coleridge's standards - or, to put the point as it may have occurred to Lewis, not even legislators were safe from persecution. 'A Friend to Genius' answered Coleridge in 'An Apology for the Monk,' which appeared in the Monthly Mirror for April 1797. He argued that the 'lessons of virtue' conveyed by the fate of Ambrosio were 'strik-

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ing and impressive' (211) arid ingeniously turned against Coleridge his own argument about extracting pollution from the word of purity: 'The mind that could draw food for vicious appetites from this work, must have made no little progress in the paths of profligacy and debauchery' (212). He handled the passage about the Bible with particular care. First, he pointed out that in quoting Ambrosio's critique of the Bible, Coleridge left out 'the eulogiums which the author has passed on the morality of the sacred writings.' Then he argued that Ezekiel 23 is far from the only passage in the Bible that might not be suitable reading matter for young women: The indiscriminate perusal of such passages as occur, in which every thing is called by its vulgar name, in which the most luxuriant images are described, as in Solomon's Song, must certainly be improper for young females. So fully aware were the Jews of this truth, that they prohibited the reading of Solomon's Song, till a certain age, when the passions are in subjection ... The author, so far from deserving to be stigmatized as an enemy to Christianity, appears to me to be acting as one of its best friends, when he endeavours to prevent the mischief which may ensue from mixing what may be improper for young minds, with the rest of a work so generally excellent... (214) Lewis wrote to the editors of the Monthly Mirror, asking them to thank his anonymous apologist (Peck 28). Thomas James Mathias (1754P-1835) took up the attack in the fourth part of The Pursuits of Literature (19 July 1797), a satirical poem. After denouncing Richard Payne Knight's Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786), he went on to compare The Monk to Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749): But though that Garden-God [Priapus] forsaken dies; Another Cleland see in Lewis rise. Why sleep the ministers of truth and law? Has the state no controul, no decent awe, While each with each in madd'ning orgies vie Pandars to lust and licens'd blasphemy? Can senates hear without a kindred rage? Oh may a poet's lightning blast the page, Nor with the bolt of Nemesis in vain Supply the laws, that wake not to restrain! (4.315-24)

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Mathias's copious notes add nothing of substance to Coleridge's critique, but they certainly heighten his rhetoric. Coleridge's expression of shock that a legislator could have written the book becomes: A legislator in our own parliament, a member of the House of Commons of Great Britain, an elected guardian and defender of the laws, the religion, and the good manners of the country, has neither scrupled nor blushed to depict and to publish to the world the arts of lewd and systematic seduction, and to thrust upon the nation the most open and unqualified blasphemy against the very code and volume of our religion, (ii) More significandy, Mathias set out to wake 'the ministers of truth and law' by making explicit what Coleridge had implied in referring to Lewis's 'blasphemies': that the book might be 'actionable at Common Law' (iii). He cited a number of previous prosecutions, adding with relish that in one case, 'The punishment was uncommonly severe' (iv). Mathias was answered by The Literary Census (1798), another satirical poem with copious notes, by Thomas Button, and by the anonymous Impartial Strictures on the Poem Called 'The Pursuits of Literature:' And Particularly a Vindication of the Romance of 'The Monk'g(1798). Both essentially expanded on the arguments of A Friend to Genius, as Mathias had expanded on those of Coleridge. By then, however, the ministers of truth and law seem to have taken up Mathias's suggestion. In November 1796, William Wilberforce (1759-1833) confided to his journal: 'Dined Lord Chancellor's ... talk rather loose. I fear I not guarded and grave enough. Much talk about 'The Monk," a novel by Lewis's son' (Life 2:183-4). Wilberforce was in a position to do something about his guilty conscience. In 1787, he had taken part in the foundation of two political organizations. One was the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, for which he is chiefly remembered. The other was the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty's Proclamation against Vice and Immorality. To Wilberforce, they were equally important: 'God Almighty has set before me two great objects,' he believed, 'the suppression of the Slave Trade and the reformation of manners' (Furneaux 56-7). The reformation of manners was important to Wilberforce because it would lead to a decrease in crime and hence to a decrease in capital punishment: 'The barbarous custom of hanging has been tried too long, and with the success which might have been expected from it. The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller, and by endeavouring to repress that general

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spirit of licentiousness, which is the parent of every species of vice' (Furneaux 54). It was customary for monarchs to issue a proclamation against vice on ascending to the throne, and George III had done so in 1760. In collaboration with Beilby Porteus (1731-1808), the Bishop of London, Wilberforce lobbied to have the king reissue his proclamation on 1 June 1787; meanwhile, he and Porteus set up the society for carrying it into effect. Porteus, who became the society's president in 1793, described its purpose as: 'to enforce the execution of the laws against drunkenness, lewdness and indecent prints and indecent publications, disorderly public houses, and the various profanities of the Lord's Day; to give support, and activity to the magistrates in the prosecution and punishment of offenders against good manners and public decency': in short, to rouse the ministers of truth and law, as Mathias wished. The proclamation itself urged the officers of justice to suppress 'all loose and licentious prints, books and publications dispersing poison to the minds of the young and unwary and to punish the publishers and vendors thereof (Pollock 60-1). In 1797, the Proclamation Society scored a notable victory in its war against poisonous publications. In 1796, a bookseller named Thomas Williams had published a cheap edition of Thomas Paine's attack on revealed religion, The Age of Reason (1793), which Porteus denounced as 'rendering irreligion easy to the meanest capacity' (DNBf46:196).ff Among other offences, Paine criticizes the Bible in terms similar to Lewis's: 'Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God' (60) .4 The Society had Williams charged with seditious and blasphemous libel and retained Thomas Erskine as prosecuting attorney. Erskine (1750-1823) was associated with the radicals, and in cases like this one, he was more likely to appear for the defence; he had defended Paine (unsuccessfully) in 1792, after the publication of The Rights of Man, and Thomas Hardy (1752-1832), the radical bootmaker (successfully), in the Treason Trial of 1794. Williams was convicted on 24 June 1797 and remanded in custody. When the case came up for sentencing in April 1798, Erskine tried to persuade the Society to accept the ten months Williams had already spent in Newgate as sufficient punishment. It refused to do so, and Williams was sentenced to another year. Erskine quit in protest (Furneaux 158-9; Pollock 164-5). Even such a

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high-profile case was only a detail in the massive apparatus of repression in wartime Britain, an apparatus which also encompassed the surveillance of obscure intellectuals like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the arrest of large numbers of working men unfortunate enough to take a pint too many and shout 'God damn the King!' in a pub.5 Unlike Williams, Lewis and his publisher, Joseph Bell, did not face a criminal prosecution for blasphemy. Instead, according to BaronWilson, the Proclamation Society instructed the attorney-general, Sir John Scott, to move for an injunction to restrain [the] sale [of the novel]. To use the language of the law, a rule nisi was obtained, and the young author did not think proper to show cause against it. The rule, however, was never made absolute, and the prosecution was dropped. (1:153-4)6

So far as I know, there were no formal proceedings to obtain an injunction. Perhaps, as Parreaux suggests, the attorney-general was reluctant to press a case against the son of an important government official (119). Perhaps, as the Gentleman's Magazine suggested in its obituary, the mere threat of an injunction was enough to force a deal: 'on a pledge to recall the copies, and to recast the Work in another edition, legal proceedings were stopped' (183). Whatever the pressure, Lewis certainly did recast his work for the fourth edition, which he renamed Ambrosio; or, The Monk (1798). He not only softened down 'ravisher' to 'intruder,' 'incontinence' to 'weakness,' 'lust' to 'desire,' and 'desires' to 'emotions,' but entirely left out several passages, including the one on the Bible (Parreaux 120-1; Peck 35).8 Lewis's staunch defender, the Monthly Mirror, welcomed most of these changes: 'The clamour that has been raised against this novel on account of the warmth of colouring which the author had given to some of his descriptions, has induced Mr. Lewis either to omit or to soften the objectionable passages, and, by various judicious corrections and additions, to render it still more deserving of the very extraordinary favour it has received from the public' (5 [1798]: 157). The controversy over the novel did not hurt its sales: the expurgated edition was the fourth in only two years. As Peck puts it, readers 'had been told that the book was horrible, blasphemous, and lewd, and they rushed to put their morality to the test' (28). Bell shrewdly exploited both sides of the controversy; an advertisement for the fourth edition reads: 'In this edition the Author has paid particular attention to some

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passages that have been objected to. - A few remaining copies of the original edition may be had by applying to the Publisher.'9 In recognition of the enhanced value of an unexpurgated edition, he doubled the price, to a guinea (Todd 20). In addition to the legitimate editions, numerous pirated chapbook versions (some of them attributed to Lewis himself) circulated among people who could not afford to buy, or would not venture to read, a fulllength novel. The story was also popular on stage: Alonzo and Imogen; or, The Bridal Spectre, by Thomas John Dibdin (1771-1841), appeared at Sadler's Wells as early as August 1796.10 Raymond and Agnes; or, The Castle of Lindenberg, by Charles Farley (1771-1859), appeared at Covent Garden in March 1797.11 Lewis saw this ballet-pantomime, in which the Bleeding Nun is not a vicious distant relative of Raymond but the virtuous mother of Agnes. At the end of the play, she 'ascend [s] to heaven with great applause in a sort of postchaise made of paste-board' (Adelmorn v). Lewis liked this maternal ghost so much that he included one in The Castle Spectre. A dramatization of the novel by James Boaden (1762-1839) opened at Drury Lane on 29 December 1798. Boaden had managed to interest John Philip Kemble (who by then had already starred in The Castle Spectre) in his script, and Kemble managed to persuade Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the manager of Drury Lane, both to accept the play and to help Boaden revise it. Kemble's sister, Sarah Siddons, agreed to play the female lead. Boaden took care to remove from the story anything that might give offence. Since the censor would not allow the performance of a play named after Lewis's scandalous novel, Boaden changed the title to Aurelio and Miranda. He removed all the supernatural elements of the plot. His Miranda (Matilda) is not a devil, but the sister of Don Christoval, who enters the monastery in disguise out of a pure love for Aurelio (Ambrosio). Eventually, Aurelio is released from his vows, and they are united: 'There's the very Devil's own invention for you!' Lewis complained.12 Lorenzo is united to Antonia; Raymond is reunited to Agnes and their child, neither of whom is much the worse for their brief incarceration; Aurelio is re-united with his sister Antonia; and Miranda is reunited with her brother Christoval. Boaden blamed the failure of the play on 'a storm of indignation ... that so immoral a work as the Monk should be resorted to for the purposes of an exhibition, however moral in its tendency'; but he admitted that the play was also 'weak in its structure' and added: 'There were not wanting an accident or two to help on the work of prejudice' (Memoirs 2:229). The most spectacular of these

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accidents occurred on the first night, in the scene where Miranda arrives in the crypt to rescue Agnes and her child: when Mrs. Siddons took the child from Mrs. Powell, there happened to be some hissing - Mrs. Siddons, not liking this, made her exit more rapidly than usual - in her hurry she struck the wooden child so violently against the door she was going through, that the head came tumbling down on the stage - Mrs. Powell had to say immediately- 'Immortal power, preserve my child.' (Peck 31; Boaden, Aurelio 62)

The play closed after seven performances. (In Paris, dramatizations of the novel had more success, thus repaying Lewis's debt to Boutet de Monvel [Baldensperger 204-5, 207, 212-15].) 2

Meanwhile, Lewis kept bringing out his own works. He had a substantial stock to draw on. Village Virtues appeared anonymously on 21 June 1796. The Analytical Review, which praised The Monk, described this 'dramatic satire' as 'drawn up with vivacity, wit, and drollery' (67). It objected, however, to Lewis's politics: 'If our Village Virtues be indeed such as are here represented, it should not be forgotten, that our villagers have learned them of their betters' (68); the reviewer seems not to have realized that the characters in Lewis's play are not real villagers but impersonations performed by their betters. The Monthly Review, similarly, conceded the play 'some degree of humour, though of the farcical kind,' but objected to the 'political purpose.' The Critical Review, which might have been expected to like the political purpose, was openly contemptuous: 'Mercy on us! this thing is written, "that every British heart may be firm in supporting our country and our constitution!!"'13 In 1797, Lewis published The Minister, the translation of Schiller's Kabale und Liebe that he had made at Bothwell four years earlier. On 14 December of the same year, his most important play, The Castle Spectre, opened at Drury Lane, starring John Philip Kemble (1757-1823) as Percy, Dorothy Jordan as Angela, and Jane Powell (d. 1831) as the Spectre. It was a spectacular success: by the end of the season, the following June, it had been performed forty-seven times and had made over fifteen thousand pounds (Adolphus 2:11; Reno, 'James Boaden's FontainvilleForest' 101). It was also performed over twelve times the next season,

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and the next; by 1803, Bell had sold eleven editions of the printed text (Peck 77). Lewis's triumph inspired a popular joke. The earliest surviving version is Lady Holland's: in May 1798, Sheridan and Lewis got into a dispute, which the latter would have decided by a wager, and said, 'I lay you the profits of my play (which, by-the-bye, Sheridan, you have not paid me).' 'I do not like high wagers,' replied S., 'but I'll lay you a small one, the worth of it.' The little author became as mute as a fish from the rebuff. (Journassss:184; cf. Adolphus 2:11; Byronsdfsdfs 9:17; Medwin 192)

Despite Sheridan's contempt for the play that had saved his season,14 it remained popular for decades.15 Ghosts were unusual on the legitimate stage (though not in pantomimes like Raymond and Agnes). Boaden, however, had introduced one in Fontainville Forest (1794), his dramatization of Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791). Boaden's play was not particularly successful (and Radcliffe must have been shocked at this irruption of the unexplained supernatural into her work), and Lewis met resistance when he proposed another ghost: The Friends to whom I read my Drama, the Managers to whom I presented it, the Actors who were to perform in it - all combined to persecute my Spectre, and requested me to confine my Ghost to the Green-Room ... I persisted in retaining her. The event justified my obstinacy: The Spectre was as well treated before the curtain as she had been ill-used behind it ... (Castle Spectre 102-3)

Boaden agreed (not without some self-congratulation) that the spectre was a success on stage: The precedent given by myself was followed with beautiful effect, and I yet bring before me, with delight, the waving form of Mrs. Powell, advancing from the suddenly illuminated chapel, and bending over Angela (Mrs. Jordan) in maternal benediction; during which slow and solemn action, the band played a few bars, or rather the full subject at all events, of Jomelli's Chaconne, in his celebrated overture in three flats. (Memoirs 2:206)16

All the contemporary critics agreed that the spectre was the most important thing about the play, and that it was important for its contribution

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to the spectacle, rather than to the plot. 'The whole,' declared the Monthly Review, 'depends for success on the effect of the Castle Spectre.' Robert P. Reno has recently argued that the significance of stage ghosts like Lewis's (and Boaden's) is primarily psychological, suggesting the state of mind of the characters to whom they appear ('James Boaden's Fontainville Forest' 96); Jeffrey N. Cox, that it is primarily political, challenging the spiritual monopoly of the established church (Dramas 34-8). None of the contemporary critics made any reference to either interpretation, though the vehemence of their objections suggests that there may be something to Cox's. Even the Analytical Review, which had approved of Lewis's handling of the supernatural in The Monk, disapproved of it in The Castle Spectre. It conceded that ghosts did have a place in legitimate drama: if there was something to be done which was beyond mortal powers, then 'a ghost may be confidently raised by the magic pen of genius.' On her first appearance, however, the castle spectre does not reveal anything that Angela does not already know; on the second, although she intervenes decisively in the plot, she does not do anything that might not have been accomplished by 'a less insubstantial agent.' The reviewer conceded: the murdered Evelina has unquestionably been favourably received; and we have heard it observed of her, with as much severity perhaps, as truth, that the most interesting character in the piece is the one that says nothing ... Evelina, we are persuaded, must have experienced disgrace, had she been left wholly to the conduct and talents of the dramatist; but she was fortunate in more powerful support; and, with the united efforts of the actress and the scene-painter, the property-man and the fidler, she has made her way to the public approbation. (184-5)17 The question of the ghost was related to the larger - ultimately, political - question of whether the play was mere spectacle or real literature, whether it appealed only to a mass audience or also to the educated elite: in these critical comments, we can see early signs of the emergence of what Jon P. Klancher has called the 'battle lines' of Victorian culture: 'high culture and mass culture, bourgeoisie and working class' (13). The Monthly Mirror, the faithful defender of The Monk, argued that The Castle Spectre was 'not merely recommended to the town by expensive scenery, machinery, dresses, and decorations' (109), but even it had to admit that the play succeeded despite its lack of literary originality: 'even those scenes with which we have been the most familiar in the closet, have frequently the effect of novelty now that they appear in a dramatic shape'

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(106). Coleridge, whose tragedy Osorio had recently been rejected by Drury Lane, made the point more bluntly, in a letter to Wordsworth. After a long and withering critique of Lewis's language, characters, and treatment of passion and sentiment, he concluded: This Play proves how accurately you conjectured concerning theatric merit ... The whole plot, machinery, & incident are borrowed - the play is a mere patchwork of plagiarisms - but they are very well worked up, & for stage effect make an excellent whole. (Letters 1:225-6)18

The Castle Spectre was not, however, entirely devoid of appeal to an educated audience. Lady Holland, like everybody else, thought that 'The most fascinating part of the new play is perhaps the acting, and the agency of a most graceful female spirit,' but she added that 'the two last acts [the ones featuring appearances by the Spectre] may boast of intellectual interest.' Lady Holland first met Lewis, her husband's old college friend, at about this time. She was pleasantly, if mildly, surprised: 'He is little in person, rather ugly and shortsighted; upon the whole not engaging, though better than I expected' (Journalj1:167). Thanks to Lewis's surviving correspondence with the Hollands and others, and to some occasional verse, we know more about his personal life from this time on. We know that he was at Inveraray (the estate of the Duke of Argyll) in the summer of 1797, because the guests engaged (of course) in amateur theatricals,1handfhefwrotef an epilogue for Barbarossa (1754), a tragedy by John Brown (1715-66), to be spoken by his friend Lady Charlotte Campbell. Since the audience was restricted to the few house guests who had not been conscripted into performing, Lewis's epilogue gratifies the performers' desire for fame by imagining what a reviewer might have to say about the production; at the same time, it suggests the attitude of his aristocratic friends towards the pastime that was becoming his profession: Capt" Campbell gave Othmanwith strength & Effect, Mr Traffordwas graceful, Lord John was correct; And Lord Lome's easy air, when he got in a passion, Proved, a Tyrant must needs be a Person of fashion. He seemed much at home through the whole of the Play; He died in a Style, that was quite degage, And his orders for murder declared by their tone, Twas the same, if He gave them, or let them alone.20

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The imaginary reviewer's highest praise is reserved for Campbell herself ('When she once got her prancing theatrical Poney on, / Her voice, air, and action how truly Siddonian'), and Campbell assures her audience that she deserves it, for she was entirely responsible for the success of the production: I made up the dresses, I painted the scenes, For constructing the Play-House suggested Machines, And made all the Actors rehearse, which I swear, Was without great exertion no easy affair. For when to repeat the fifth Act I was wishing, I was told Barbarossa was just gone out fishing ... However, I scolded, and bustled, and stormed, Till the parts were all got, and the Play was performed ...21

The fashionably degage attitude of her fellow actors evidently had its disadvantages. On 4 July 1798, Lewis wrote to Lady Holland explaining his plans for another trip to Scotland, where he seems to have gone almost every summer. He would be visiting Inveraray again, and spending two months with Lord Kinnaird at-Drimmy, near Perth, where he hoped that they might meet. While she was in Edinburgh, Lewis assumed, she would want to meet Dugald Stewart (1753—1828), the Professor of Moral Philosophy; she would find him delightful.22 It was on this trip to Scodand that Lewis met Walter Scott, apparently through Scott's friend William Erskine (1769-1822). On this trip or a later one, Scott recalled, they went hiking, an unlikely activity for Lewis: We were to go up one side of the river and come down the other. In the return he was dead tired, and, like the Israelites, he murmured against his guide for leading him into the wilderness [Numbers 14.1-3]. I was then as strong as a poney, and took him on my back, dressed as he was in his shooting array of a close sky-bluejacket, and the brightest red pantaloons I ever saw on a human breech. He also had a kind of feather in his cap. At last I could not help laughing at the ridiculous figure we must both have made, at which my rider waxed wroth. It was an ill-chosen hour and place, for I could have ... thrown him down and twisted his head off. We returned to the cottage weary wights, and it cost more than one glass of Noyau, which he liked in a decent way, to get Mat's temper on its legs again.

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Lewis irritated many people, but only Scott is on record as having contemplated murder. Nevertheless, he remembered Lewis as 'one of the kindest and best creatures that ever lived' (Prothero 2:317-18n). He certainly had reason to be personally grateful. Erskine had already shown Lewis two of Scott's translations from Burger, and Lewis had immediately asked for permission to include them in an anthology which he later described to Scott as follows: 'The Plan, which I propose to myself, is to collect all the marvellous Ballads, that I can lay my hands upon, and publish them under the title of "Tales of Terror."'23 The book would finally appear in 1801, as Tales of Wonder. Meanwhile, Lewis offered various other kinds of help and encouragement to Scott, who, though four years older, was only beginning his career as a writer, and who naturally found the attentions of the author of The Monk and The Castle Spectre 'highly flattering' (Peck 117). Lewis encouraged his own publisher to bring out Scott's translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen. He asked for more poems for his collection. And he sent the novice author copious criticisms of the poems that had already arrived. His comments on 'Frederic and Alice' are characteristic: I do not despair of convincing you in time, that a bad rhyme is in fact no rhyme at all. You desired me to point out my objections, leaving you at liberty to make use of them, or not, and so have at Frederic & Alice - Stanza 1 s t ' hies' 8c 'joys' are not rhymes: the 1st stanza ends with 'joys'; the 2nd begins with 'joying.' In the 4th there is too sudden a change of tenses 'flows' 8c 'rose - 6. 7. & 8 I like much - 9 - does not 'ring his ears' sound ludicrous in yours? the first idea that presents itself is, that his ears were pulled, but even the ringing of the ears does not please me. 12. - 'Shower' 8c 'roar; not rhymes; - 'Toil,' Be 'Aisle' in the 13th are not much better, but 'head' and 'descried' are execrable. In the 14th 'Bar and 'Stair are Ditto, Sc 'groping' is a nasty word V: Johnson 'Hegropes his breeches with a monarch's air.' In the 15th you change your metre, which has always an unpleasant effect, and 'safe' and 'receive' rhyme just about as well as Scott and Lewis would ...24

Scott described Lewis as 'a martinet... in the accuracy of rhymes and of numbers' (Poetical Works 685), but he accepted most of this advice (Peck 123) and later declared that the poem 'owes any little merit it may possess to my friend Mr. Lewis, to whom it was sent in an extremely rude state' (Poetical Works 653). As time went on, and Scott became more confident as a poet, he accepted less of Lewis's advice (Peck 123); nevertheless, he would recall gratefully: 'I was much indebted to him, as forcing

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upon the notice of a young and careless author hints which the said author's vanity made him unwilling to attend to, but which were absolutely necessary to any hope of his ultimate success' (Minstrelsy 4:53-4). Lewis, he declared, 'had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I ever heard - finer than Byron's' (Journal 5; cf. Letters 8:409; Coleridge, Letters 1:379; Melbourne 18). As well as criticizing his poetry, Lewis sent Scott word of the progress of his own career, with its attendant burdens - impossible plays sent to him for his opinion;25 fatuous fan-mail.ff On 24 January 1799, he wrote apologetically: 'It has not been in my power to answer your Letter before, and I must now do it in as few words as possible, having been, and being still, very busy with a sort of Paraphrase of the 13th Satire of Juvenal.'2gThisgwas The Love of Gain, which Lewis had written to pleasef his father. It was published by February 1799, and dedicated to the Whig leader Charles James Fox, who at this time was refusing to attend Parliament, having despaired of mounting an effective opposition to Pitt. Juvenal was evidently something of a favourite among the Whigs; Lewis's friend William Lamb, a rising Whig star, contributed twenty-eight lines to his imitation; and that summer, Lord Holland would publish Succession, an imitation of the third satire (the inspiration of Johnson's London), and The Yeoman, an imitation of the sixteenth (both anonymous). Fox, in fact, is the hero of Succession, which compares his boycott of Parliament to the withdrawal of Juvenal's Umbricius from Rome (Kupersmith48-9). Lewis evidently did not yet know Fox well; he had to ask Lady Holland if she thought Fox would appreciate the dedication. She did, and she was right; on 17 February, Fox wrote to thank Lewis for his 'very handsome Dedication.' Fox also liked the poem: 'The whole of it appear to me to be excellent but as even in the best poems some parts must be better than others, allow me to say, that I think the lines following V. 293 are some of the most beautyfull in that style I ever saw.'28 These lines make the point that Sophia Shedden would later insist was the moral of The Monk: Cease, wild enthusiast! end thy angry tale, O'er human frailties drop compassion's veil; View them with grief, not rage, nor dare to scan With censure too severe thy fellow-man! Think, had no parent watch'd thy pliant youth, Curb'd thy wild passions, turn'd thy steps to Truth,

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And taught thee by her radiant light to know That bliss is virtue, and that guilt is woe, Spurning restraint, and scorn'd each sacred vow, Haply thyself had been what these are now ... (294-303) The lines do not correspond to anything in Juvenal; coming from the son of the disgraced and mosdy absent Fanny Maria Lewis, they have an added pathos. As an exercise in the dignified genre of classical imitation, the poem was widely reviewed, but the reviews were mixed. The Analytical Review complained that the poem was 'sometimes as faulty in grammar, as it is feeble in versification' (524). It singled out for praise only a passage about the nightmares of the guilty, reminiscent of the conclusion of The Monk (Kupersmith 47-8; Peck 115-16): Swift at thy summons rush with hideous yell Their prey to seize the Denizens of hell! Headlong they hurl him on some ice-rock's point, Mangle each limb, and dislocate each joint; Or plunge him deep in blue sulphureous lakes; Or lash his quivering flesh with twisted snakes; Or in his brain their burning talons dart; Or from his bosom rend his panting heart To bathe their fiery lips in guilty gore! Then starts he from his couch, while dews of horror pour Down his dank forehead - wrings his hands, and prays to sleep no more. (389-99; cf. Macbeth 2.2.33, 39-41) The Monthly Review objected to 'the puerile machinery of ghosts and daemons' in this passage (24) but singled out another as 'spirited and judicious' (23), presumably for political reasons. Juvenal presents his villain as talking himself into crime by arguing that punishment is not certain: one man ('ille') gets a cross for his crimes; another ('hie') gets a crown (105). In Lewis, this becomes: Here see with honours crown'd, there 'whelm'd with grief, The Indian spoiler, and the English thief; And mark, what varying fates their plunders stop Who robb'd a nation, and who robb'd a shop. Rascals alike, by Fortune's wayward sport

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One goes to Tyburn, t'other goes to Court; And while this rogue is doom'd in air to swing, That for a peerage kneels to thank the King. (186-93)29

The Indian spoiler is Warren Hastings (1732-1818), first governorgeneral of Bengal (Kupersmith 47). Largely through the efforts of Edmund Burke, he had been charged in 1786 with twenty-two counts of oppression and corruption. He tried to retain Thomas Erskine as his attorney; Erskine, as a Whig, had to decline (Lovat-Fraser 30-9; Marshall 59, 187). The trial before the House of Lords began in 1788; seven years later, Hastings was acquitted, as Burke had expected all along (Marshall 34) .30 Burke had hoped that the impeachment would awaken public concern about Britain's imperial responsibilities; unfortunately, the interminable proceedings left the public hostile to the prosecution and bored with the whole business (Marshall 188-9; Derry 253). The Tory Critical Review singled out the passage as an example of 'the talent of Mr. Lewis at wire-drawing,' since it is four times as long as the original.31 Lewis's literary correspondence with Fox continued through the coming months. He sent the politician one of his poems, 'Address to Youth.' Fox, a cultivated man who would soon engage Wordsworth in a friendly debate over the metre of 'Michael' (Wordsworth, Letters 1:312-15), commented: 'I do not recollect that I ever before saw that regular intermixture of single and double rhymes which seems to me to have a wonderful good effect,' and sent Lewis in return an Italian translation of the poet's 'Pleasure and Desire.'32 When Lewis ventured to criticize Fox's translation, Fox conceded that he was right33 but soon afterwards retaliated by changing his mind about the metre of 'Address to Youth': But shall I own a truth, which perhaps an indication of a bad taste or a bad ear - I do not much like that ten syllable alternate rhymed stanza at all ... There is almost always in it a sort of languor, which is tiresome to my ear at least...34

This letter, dated 5 June, is the last that survives from him to Lewis. Fox's literary vanity may have been piqued; or Lewis may simply have worn him out, as in the caricature later described by Scott: 'Fox, in his latter days, suffering the fatigue of an attack from Lewis. The great statesman was become bulky and lethargic, and lay like a fat ox which for some time endures the persecution of a buzzing fly, rather than rise to get rid of it; and then at last he got up, and heavily plodded his way to the other side of the room' (Prothero 2:317n).

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Meanwhile, Lewis continued writing. In December 1798, he had assured Scott that his publisher would bring out Scott's translation of Goethe as fast as it can, in order that it may not clash with another German work, which is coming out at Drury Lane, and on which a great many cooks are employed; so many, that it will be high luck, if the Broth be not spoiled - It is Kozebue's 'Spaniards in Peru - I am to furnish the literal translation, and the Epilogue; Sheridan undertakes the adapting it to the Stage, making a new Catastrophe, and giving a Song or two; the Opera-House is to supply very splendid dresses; and the present idea is to have the two Heroines played by Mrs Siddons and Mrs Jordan. Drury Lane needs something as strong as this union, for at present they are playing to Empty Benches.3:)

Lewis may have had forebodings because his professional relationship with Sheridan had been bad for some time - from the beginning, if the joke about The Castle Spectre is anything to go on. In any case, the forebodings came true. On 6 January 1799, he complained to Scott: 'As to the German Play, Sheridan is so vexatious and uncertain that I want to give up the bargain, and have nothing to do with it.'' 1 ' Lewis published his translation as Rolla; or, The Peruvian Hero: A Tragedy; the Monthly Mirror reliably praised it as 'an elegant and animated performance' (112). Meanwhile, Sheridan's Pizarro, based on a translation by a Miss Phillips, opened at Drury Lane on 24 May 1799, with Kemble as Rolla, Siddons as Elvira, and Jordan as Cora; it saved the season, as The Castle Spectre had saved the season before. The incident may have contributed to the breakup of the relationship between Lewis and Sheridan, which happened soon afterwards; Byron allegedly told Medwin that '"Pizarro" was a sore subject with [Lewis]' (Medwin 191). He certainly said that 'Lewis, though a kind man - hated Sheridan' (Letters 9:17). In 1799, however, Lewis was too busy to be bitter. As he told Scott: Bannister and I are very busy in cooking up a Farce for his Benefit, which I wrote many years ago, and which He thinks he can do great things with: However I only mean it at any rate to be played for one night this season It is a sort of thing which must either take extremely, or be damned entirely. 3 '

Lewis may have felt that he owed the comedian John Bannister (17601836) a favour for appearing as the fool in The Castle Spectre; the part, as he confessed in his postscript to the play, was 'a dull, flat, good sort of

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plain matter of fact fellow, as in the course of the performance Mr. Bannister discovered to his great sorrow' (101). He had written the farce in The Hague in 1794, intending it for Bannister from the beginning (Peck 210). It was called The Twins; or, Is It He, or HishBrother1?, a title which reveals all one needs to know about its plot. It is based loosely on Les Menechmes, ou Les Jumeaux (1705), by Jean-Francois Regnard (1655-1709), which Lewis may have encountered in Paris, or (more probably) on Die Zwillingsbruder (1782), an adaptation of Regnard by Friedrich Ludwig Schroder (1744—1816), which was performed twice while he was in Weimar (Guthke, 'F.L. Schroder' 79; Peck 79, 305ri45). It appeared on 8 April 1799 and seems to have had a mixed reception. The European Magazine found it 'whimsical and pleasant' (258), but another reviewer (who must not have seen The Comedy of Errors) complained that it was too difficult.' It was performed only once and remained unpublished until 1961. In a letter to Scott on 5 March, Lewis declared that he was giving up writing — a declaration he would repeat often over the next decade: I never mean to write another line, as soon as I shall have finished the alteration of a Comedy, which I gave Mrs Jordan several years ago, & which she claims my promise of having acted for her Benefit the greatest part of it was written at Westminster School, so you will readily beleive, that it cannot be a performance to do me any credit; However it will certainly bring her a good House, and I do not intend, even should it escape the damnation which I expect it to meet with, to have it played except for her Benefit. 39

This was The East Indian, which Lewis had sent to Jordan late in 1792 or early in 1793 (Peck 195). Now that he was the author of The Monk and The Castle Spectre rather than an unknown, Jordan had written to ask him for 'the happiness of presenting the public the Comedy of the East Indian.' She backed up her plea by reminding him of her part in his recent triumph: 'don't let poor Angela plead in vain' (Jerrold 223). The comedy opened at Drury Lane on 22 April 1799, starring Kemble as the East Indian, Powell as the virtuous Mrs Ormond, and Bannister as her faithful servant Frank, in addition to Jordan as Zorayda (Adolphus 2:402). According to Boaden's Memoirs, Kemble did a good job of bringing out Lewis's preoccupation with paternal rectitude: 'he touched the parental character with such powerful truth, as to bear the play triumphant through the moral assault which it had provoked' (2:251). The production may have aggravated Lewis's quarrel with Sheridan, who

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had already based The School for Scandal on his mother's novel. At any rate, Lewis told Scott that Sheridan had 'behaved just as ill [about the play], as on former occasions.'40 Contrary to Lewis's intention, the play was performed not only for the benefit of Jordan, but also for that of Powell (who also had a claim on his gratitude, having played the Castle Spectre herself). Lewis reported the sequel in his preface to the play: It was again received with applause, for which I thank the Public: the succeeding representations did not prove attractive, for which I here make my acknowledgments to Mr. Sheridan, who blocked up my road, mounted on his great tragic war-horse Pizarro, and trampled my humble pad-nag of a Comedy under foot without the least compunction. (3-4)

The reviews were largely unfavourable. The Monthly Review objected to the implausibility and immorality of the plot (258). The British Critic allowed that 'The faults and deficiencies of this Comedy may perhaps be fairly excused, on the plea that it was written before sixteen years of age' but added that, 'as it had lain by so long, it might, in some fortunate hours, have received rather more improvement' and concluded that its pre-emption by Pizarro was 'no great loss to the stage.' The New London Revierv called the play 'one of the most contemptible productions that have, for many years found their way to the stage'; the Monthly Magazine added that 'the public has had sense enough to despise it.' In 1812, however, the play was revived as Rich and Poor, a 'comic opera'; that is, a musical, with Frances Maria Kelly, instead of Jordan, as Zorayda.41 The Scourge, or Monthly Expositor condemned it as a 'sanctioner of female viciousness': moral condemnation had followed Lewis right through his writing career, from the publication of his first novel to this, the production of his last play, sixteen years later - indeed, the Scourge declared the play 'worthy only of the author of the Monk' (170). When W. Oxberry published Rich and Poor in 1823, he had to agree regretfully that 'The author's opinions upon the subject of female frailty, appear to have increased in laxity as he advanced in years,' since the long remorseful speech by Zorayda that closed the original version was cut in the revival (vii). Oxberry insisted, however: 'We never witnessed more intense interest or more powerful emotion awakened by any picture of misery in the higher walks of the Drama, than we have seen called forth by this simple picture of domestic distress' (iii), and even the Scourge conceded of the reconciliation scene: 'He who can see the acting of Fawcett [as

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Rivers] and Miss Kelly, and not dissolve into tears, is totally unacquainted with that exquisite sensation, the susceptibility of the human heart' (302). Because of this emotional appeal, Rich and Poor was performed twenty-seven times (Peck 107). Writing, or rewriting, plays did not take up all of Lewis's time in the spring of 1799. He was still seeing Scott's translation through the press; on 5 March, he assured him that it would be out in a week, and added an anecdote that cannot have inspired unmixed gratitude in the author: 'It met with an accident while preparing for the Press, for a gust of wind run away with some part of the M.S. & one leaf was lost irrecoverably — However, I managed to procure the German, & translated the passages, which had made their exit by the window.' He was reading as well as writing: I am at present retired 'from the world and all its mackeries,' for the express purpose of studying 'Steivart's Philosophy,' which I found is impossible to do in the bustle of London. William Lamb has accompanied me, and here we are in a wee bit Cottage secluded from every other earthly Being, living tete-a-tete like Ronald and Moy. As yet we have seen no Green Women, or indeed of any colour; But I much fear, that the Lady Flora of Glengyle, were She to pay us a visit would not find either of us disposed to play the part of Moy - Vl

Presumably in order to assure Scott that this Platonic retreat was not as homosocial as it sounded, Lewis alludes to Scott's 'Gleiifinlas,' one of the ballads he later included in Tales of Wonder. The heroes, Ronald and Moy, find themselves in a 'solitary cabin' after a hunt (1:125). The ghastly Green Woman, disguised as Ronald's beloved, lures him to his death; but when she returns for Moy, disguised as Lady Flora, he drives her away by reciting prayers. Lamb and Lewis would not be so inhospitable. Lewis planned to spend Easter at Brocket, Lamb's country home, enjoying 'a variety of Theatrical and other gay projects'; in the summer, he hoped to bring Lamb to Scotland to meet Scott.4^ The theatricals at Brocket included The Metamorphoses, a farce written by Lamb's younger brother George.44 In a prologue Lewis wrote for the occasion, the young author asks Lewis for his opinion. As long as others are present, Lewis temporizes: I must say, that your Plot (which I greatly commend,) Wants a kind of a sort of a ... You comprehend!

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And I think, that the part, which for me you have planned, Wants a sort of a kind of a ... You understand. George does not understand; so, when the others leave to change into their costumes, Lewis speaks more frankly: ... I gently must hint, (for I wouldn't be rough) That your Farce, my dear George, is in fact wretched stuff. Faith! how in the Piece any merit should be, I cannot conceive! — Its not written by Me, So I think, it had better be laid on the shelf, For nobody writes a good line, but myself.45 By now, he had the confidence of an established professional author enough confidence, even, to mock himself. William Lamb may not have enjoyed his philosophical holiday with Lewis, whom he described to his mother as enough to drive even a 'person of strong nerves and in sound health' to distraction (Melbourne 7). Lamb seems to have been thinking not only of whatever emotional demands Lewis made of him, but also of his sense of humour: 'Lewis's way of laughing people out of [their foibles] ... only confirms them, and makes the person ridiculed hate you into the bargain' (Melbourne 27). Lady Holland recorded an example of Lewis's sense of humour in January 1800. Edward Adolphus, the Duke of Somerset (1775-1855), told her that he was trying to persuade Lewis to write a treatise on moral philosophy; he was sure it would be entertaining: 'For,' says he, 'he calls virtues what the world holds in abhorrence as great vices, and these paradoxes he maintains so strangely that I cannot illustrate them stronger than by telling you that he confesses himself surprised that Wilberforce should have published his book after The Monk. He thinks it great want of taste to give a system of morality in a dry, forbidding form, whereas "mineh given in a popular, pleasing manner, which diverts whilst it instructs, and is adapted to every capacity."' (Journal 2:45-6) The duke was obviously teasing Lewis about the scandal over The Monk, but Lewis was obviously capable of entering into the joke. The Monk is certainly written in a more 'popular, pleasing manner' than Wilberforce's A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (1797).

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Lewis was not always so good-humoured. On 22 March 1800, Lady Holland noted that 'The little Monk Lewis has behaved like a great fool, and made himself highly ridiculous.' His offence was writing to ask the Duke of Somerset to 'wait upon him the next day at 1 o'clock.' When the Duke 'obeyed the summons,' Lewis told him: 'I understand, D. of Somerset, that you have exposed me to the contempt of being again blackballed by the New Club. I think the part you have acted by so doing unbecoming the character of a friend; thus I desire our acquaintance may drop here.' He rung the bell, and bid the servant open the door for the D., and thus dismissed him.

Why the club should have blackballed Lewis is not clear,46 but he was moving in circles that were above him, and he knew it — hence Lady Holland's amusement at his presuming to asking a duke to 'wait upon him.' '[P]oor little man,' she concluded, 'he is very irritable and quarrelsome, and will shortly be left not only friendless, but without many acquaintances' (Journal 2:60). Lewis's bad temper may have been a consequence of his distress at the death of his brother, Barrington, on 13 January 1800. Barrington was only twenty-one; he had been an invalid all his life, apparently because of an early injury to his spine. Lewis refers to his death, in a letter to Scott, as having made him 'too much distrest ... to write.'47 His distress may have been compounded by guilt: Medwin reports Byron as saying that 'Lewis had been, or thought he had been, unkind to a brother whom he lost young; and when any thing disagreeable was about to happen to him the vision of his brother appeared: he came as a sort of monitor' (192-3). There is no independent evidence of Lewis's belief in his brother's ghost, but there is some evidence that Lewis felt that he had been unkind, or at least neglectful. In his first surviving letter to his mother, in 1791, he told her: it is long very long since I saw him ['my poor Barrington'] last: indeed I am so selfish as now hardly to wish it, and for his own sake as much as my own; since to see him in pain would distress me, and my melancholy would only contribute to make him uneasy. (Peck 183)

This excuse, though characteristic, may have failed to convince Lewis himself. By 30 May 1800, Lewis had recovered his spirits sufficiently to be

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'upon the eve of making himself a great fool' again, this time in the way that so disgusted Susan Wilcock and amused the Princess of Wales. The object of his attentions was Lady Georgina Cavendish, the eldest daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. Lady Holland acidly remarked: 'as he is not seduisant in person or manner, [he] will not gain her heart, and a bundle of sonnets in lieu of title deeds will not operate in his favour with the elders of ye family' (Journahhlg2:87-8 Meanwhile, Lewis was working on Tales of Wonder, though without making his usual rapid progress. On 5 March 1799, he had to tell Scott: 'Do not be impatient for the publication of the Tales of Terror, for they are not one jot nearer publication, than they were when I saw you last.'g By 1799, however, Scott was impatient enough to allow his friend James Ballantyne to publish (in an edition limited to twelve copies) a volume containing nine ballads (by Lewis, Scott, Southey, and John Aikiii) intended for Lewis's collection and pointedly entitled An Apology for Tales of Terror (Bishop 989; Peck 122). Either Lewis did riot know about this project, or he was relieved that it was only a private printing, for at the very end of the year he wrote thanking Scott for 'the trouble which [he had] taken in stopping the intended publication of Ballads.' In the same letter, he assured him: T have desired Bell to advertise the Tales immediately, and to warn all Persons against publishing any Poetry of mine in any shape whatever.' In May 1800, however, he had to confess: T am afraid, that our publication cannot appear till next season.'00 Barrington's death had set Lewis back. Moreover, he kept changing his plans for the book. Some time in 1799 he decided to include a series of poems about the elemental spirits he had mentioned briefly in The Monk (283—4). The novel already includes one such poem, 'The WaterKing,' and Lewis had translated Goethe's 'Erlkoiiig,' which he took to be about an earth-spirit. But, he wrote to Scott on 31 December, T am in terrible want of a Cloud-King, [and] a Fire-King... to compleat my collection. If you will not help me yourself, can you not prevail on some of your acquaintance?' ol Scott did both: I sat down one day after dinner, and wrote the 'Fire King,' as it was published in the Tales of Wonder... Dr. Leyden, now no more, and another gentleman [Heber] who still survives, were sitting at my side while I wrote it; nor did my occupation prevent the circulation of the bottle.ffffffffffffffffff 4:57; cf. Letters 8:409)

Perhaps under the same inspiration, John Leyden (1775-1811) wrote a

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cloud-king ballad.3'2 On 3 February 1800, Lewis wrote to thank Scott for the ballads, and of course to criticize them. 'The Fire-King' was acceptable, although Scott had failed to conform to the specifications given in The Monk, but Lewis found Leyden's contribution more problematic: 'the Spirit being a wicked one must not have such delicate wings as pale blue ones: He has nothing to do with heaven except to deface it with Storms, & therefore in "the Monk," I have fitted him with a pair of sable pinions, to which I must request your Friend to adapt his Stanza.'0'gIn the end, Lewis included Leyden's poem as 'The Elfin-King' and wrote a cloud-king ballad himself.04 This letter ends, unusually for Lewis: 'I am obliged to go to the House of Commons.' On 3 February, Fox made one of his rare appearances in the House, to denounce the failure of negotiations for peace with France: 'Where then, sir, is this war, which on every side is pregnant with such horrors, to be carried? Where is it to stop? ... What! Must the bowels of Great Britain be torn out - her best blood to be spilt - her treasure wasted ... ?' (Derry 389). His intervention was, as usual, futile. At around the same time, Lewis wrote to Lady Holland: T should like very much to pass a few days at Holland House, but at present Fate & the House of Commons forbid it - However, I will dine with you on Sunday, if convenient, & stay the Evening & Monday also, if M1 Sheridan's motion should be deferred.' 00 On 10 February 1800, Sheridan proposed a parliamentary inquiry into the failure of the invasion of Holland the previous autumn; Lewis may have had a special interest in the issue because of his former residence there, or because Charles Stewart had been wounded in the campaign. Sheridan preferred sarcasm to the rhetoric of outrage favoured by Fox: 'never did the object of a secret expedition obtain such universal notoriety. The only thing secret in the expedition was the favourable disposition of the Dutch people to our cause; a secret so well kept to be sure, that to this hour it has never been discovered' (Speeches 3:336). Sheridan's intervention was no more successful than Fox's. Tales of Wonder was finally published at the end of 1800; the official publication date was 1801 (Peck 124, 311-12n25; Peck, 'On the Date' 26-7). It contained nine original poems and eight translations by Lewis himself, eight poems by Southey, five by Scott, and thirty others, old and new. Scott feared that a collection of sixty ghostly poems would 'overstock the market' (Letters 12:158). He was right; the Critical Revieiu, for example, complained that the volume contained 'nothing but fiends and ghosts - all is hideous - all is disgusting' (112). Scott's contribu-

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tions, however, were singled out for praise in the otherwise mostly negative reviews. The Antijacobin Review declared him 'the best of the new species of horror-breeding Bards' (323), and the British Critic and the Poetical Register agreed.56 By this time, Lewis was used to the critics' objections to his Gothic tastes. A second accusation must have been more hurtful. Because about two-thirds of the poems in the book had been previously published, and because Bell had seen fit to publish the book in two octavo volumes at the high price of a guinea, the British Critic described it as 'a very daring imposition on the public' and suggested that it bore 'more reference to The Love of Gain than to any other work of the editor.' Scott later insisted that the love of gain was the publisher's, not the editor's; but he conceded that the book became popularly known as 'Tales of Plunder' (Poetical Works 685).57 Early in 1801, Lewis leased Hermitage Cottage, at Barnes, a few miles out of town; he would live there for eight years. In 1860, his neighbours still remembered 'his customary walk on the edge of the common under the paling of a gentleman's enclosure, where he would go backwards and forwards for a couple of hours at a time' ('Monk Lewis'). In March 1801, Lewis met Thomas Moore, who wrote proudly to his mother: 'You cannot think how much my songs are liked here. Monk Lewis was "in the greatest agonies" the other night at Lady Donegal's, at having come in after my songs: "Ton his honour, he had come for the express purpose of hearing me"' (Letters 1:27). Moore, a novice and a provincial like Scott, was flattered like Scott by the notice of a metropolitan literary star. Early in 1801, Lewis offered Drury Lane his first original tragedy, Alfonso, King of Castile, but Sheridan chose instead Adelmorn, the Outlaw, a melodrama Lewis had written before the production of The Castle Spectre, to which it is very similar (the European Magazine suggested that a more suitable title would have been More Ghosts [359]). Sheridan was evidently hoping to repeat the success of the earlier melodrama. Adelmorn opened on 4 May. Once again, Michael Kelly wrote the music; Jordan starred as Innogen, and Bannister as the humorous servant Lodowick. (The hero was not, however, played by John Philip Kemble, but by his younger brother Charles.) Sheridan's hopes were disappointed. As Lewis points out in his preface, the play was too long for a melodrama, and much of its effect was lost when it was cut to performance length (iii). The same process may also have made it difficult to follow. Near the beginning of the third act, the hero, outlawed for a

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murder he did not commit, has a vision foretelling the end of his troubles: the real murderer, Ulric, is stabbed to death by the ghost of his victim and dragged down to hell by demons.58 This vision, Lewis reports, 'was unluckily mistaken by the audience for reality; and when, after seeing Ulric stabbed and carried off by daemons in one scene, the spectators beheld him, in the next, walk in as quietly as if nothing had happened, it puzzled them extremely' (i-ii). Worse was to come. A scene between Lodowick and a dying man, in which Lewis attempted to combine humour and pathos, 'was hissed from the first speech to the last.' In the last scene, just as Adelmorn was about to be executed, the ghost appeared again, with a blazing dagger, to terrify Ulric into confessing. Lewis reported: the catastrophe was near taking a turn at once very novel and very serious; for [the ghost's] drapery, being blown into the flame of his poignard, caught fire, and the public was within an ace of being treated with a roasted spectre ... the spirit's alarm and evident exertions to extinguish the fire, excited the mirth of the audience ... (ii)

Lewis was a professional; before the second performance, he revised the third act, taking out Lodowick's jokes and confining the ghost to the vision. After the third performance, an advertisement appeared in the Morning Herald, informing the public that the vision was only a vision (Peck 84). The play ran for nine performances (two more than Aurelio and Miranda), but the machinery for the vision must have been expensive, and soon Sheridan was grumbling that his 'Treasury [had been] so drain'd by the Failure of this Monk Lewis's damn'd Play' (Letters 2:152). It was the end of their collaboration; Lewis's next play would be produced at Covent Garden. The critics, as usual, were disapproving. The Times complained about 'this corruption and degradation, with which [the stage] is threatened by the sickliness of this foul and vitiated appetite for supernatural agency, which is the more reprehensible as it is paltry and unnecessary.' The British Critic agreed: Lewis had resorted to 'his old expedient of a ghost; but his ghosts are become to the public, what he seems to consider them himself, rather ludicrous than terrible.' For once, Lewis allowed himself to answer his critics. To their complaints about the supernatural, he replied gamely, warning them that it was 'still in [his] power to deluge the town with such an inundation of Ghosts and Magicians, as would satisfy the thirst of the most insatiable

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swallowers of wonders' (ix). More seriously, he denied that the play was Jacobinical, that Adelmorn's vision was blasphemous, and especially, that anything written by the author of The Monk must be immoral: I have nearly served a seven years apprenticeship to patience, under the attacks of the most uncandid criticism, unmitigated censure, and exaggerating misrepresentation; nor have I ever written a line to right myself, or blame those who magnified a single act of imprudence into charges equally discordant with my principles, and insulting to my understanding. Hitherto I have only listened with contempt to censure inflicted without justice; for once, and for once only I will alter my conduct, and address a few words on this head to those who may feel any interest respecting me.

Unfortunately, after this impressive introduction the best he could do was to 'solemnly declare' that 'if [he] was wrong, the error proceeded from [his] judgment, not from [his] intention,' and that in particular, he 'had not the most distant intention to bring the sacred Writings into contempt' (v-vi). In August 1801, Lewis visited Charles Stewart in Guildford; the visit inspired another sentimental poem.59 He wrote from Guildford to Lady Holland, asking her to tell her husband that the week before he had seen 'his Uncle [Fox] to all appearance in good spirits, & certainly in full flesh'; evidently Lewis and Fox had patched up their literary differences. Considering Southey's recent contributions to Tales of Wonder, the postscript to this letter seems ungrateful: 'Have you read Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer"? It is a very pretty story, with some good lines; but it is anything but a Poem.'60 Fox was in a placable mood because of the impending Peace of Amiens. Negotiations had opened on 21 February, and the preliminaries were concluded on 1 October. Three days later, Lewis wrote his antiwar poem 'War, Victory, and Peace.'61 Towards the end of 1801, Lewis was preparing for the publication and production of Alfonso. He had decided to publish it first because of his recent experiences with the critics, who had committed 'so many wilful misrepresentations' between the performance and publication of Adelmorn that he was 'resolved in future to take this method of depriving [his] censurers of the plea of involuntary mistaking' (Alfonso iii). This prior publication must have threatened the box office - the Morning Chronicle sarcastically commended Lewis for ensuring that his audience

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was not 'overcome with an excess of unexpected pleasure.' Thomas Harris (d. 1820), the manager and proprietor of Covent Garden, made no objection. He did, however, suggest that the ending, in which a father killed his son, was 'unfit for public representation,' and Lewis agreed (v). In fact, the play underwent so many cautious revisions between publication and production that it reminded one critic of 'a Friend, who having a pair of worsted stockings darned them so often with silk, that they at last become all silK (Peck 88) ,62 The play was published in December 1801. Lewis's preface shows how far his 'apprenticeship to patience' had brought him from the cheerful self-confidence with which he had sent The Monkginto the world: 'I now give it to the public, not as a good Play, but as the best that I can produce: Very possibly nobody could write a worse Tragedy; but it is a melancholy truth, that /cannot write a better' (iv). Alfonsofopened at Covent Garden on 15 January 1802, with Charlesf Murray (1754-1821) as Alfonso, George Frederick Cooke (1756-1811) as Orsino, Henry Johnston (1777-1830?), the 'Scottish Roscius,' as Caesario, Mrs Johnston (b. 1782) as Amelrosa, and Harriet Litchfield (1777-1854) as Ottilia. Writing to Lady Holland a week after the opening, Lewis described himself as 'delighted' with the production.63 Not all of the actors returned the compliment. Cooke conceded that 'There is certainly some good writing in Alfonso' but complained: both fable and construction are miserably bad. It abounds with so many improbabilities, and even impossibilities, that to point them out would be an endless task. It is a sanguinary tale, for the four principal characters die violent deaths. One lady poisons another, and is stabbed by her lover, who, after mortally wounding his father in battle by mistake, stabs himself, and leaves a halfdead king behind to mourn the catastrophe. The Author, resolving to be singular in every respect, published his play, with a conceited, impertinent preface, before it was acted; and the last act materially different from the license manuscript. It struggled through nine [sic] nights to tolerable audiences, partly procured through the interest of the author, and went to rest for the remainder of the season. I hope for ever, at least as long as I remain in the theatre. (Wilmeth 174-5)

The Morning Chronicle complained about the play as 'a literary production' but conceded that it worked in the theatre: 'The piece is most admirably got up. The dresses and decorations are superb, and the characters are very strongly cast. The performers exerted themselves to the

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utmost, and we have scarcely ever seen them to greater advantage than in their respective parts.' Anna Seward, who found the play 'grand, interesting, and original,' was also impressed primarily by its theatrical merits, especially by its plot, which was 'busy, animated, and involved, without perplexity. We listen with breathless interest to the progress of the scenes, and cannot pretend to guess at the denouement' (Letters 6:57-8). It actually ran for ten performances - one more than the melodrama Sheridan had chosen over it, as Lewis pointed out in his preface to the second edition (Peck 89). No doubt to Cooke's disgust, it was revived in December 1805, with an afterpiece entitled Nelson's Glory, to celebrate the victory at Trafalgar (Wilmeth 216). Lewis was by now so automatically associated with the staging of the supernatural that its absence from Alfonsofcalled for comment. Theg Annual Review declared its satisfaction that 'Mr. Lewis has now discovered ... that a ghost can be dispensed with' (688). The Critical Review concluded: 'It appears as if the author were laying great violence on his inclinations in keeping the ghosts off the stage in the fourth and fifth acts [when the Castle Spectre had appeared], for he cannot forbear making them visible to Ottilia and Amelrosa [as they are dying]. We beg leave to congratulate him on this victory over his prejudices.' The Morning Chronicle evidently felt that the melodramatic climax Lewis did include was not much of an improvement: 'There is not a ghost in the whole, but several see supernatural sights in their dying moments. The explosion of the mine by no means makes up for our old friends, and we think Mr. L. judges wrong to desert the use of such faithful allies.' In a letter to Lady Holland, in February 1802, Lewis mentioned his parliamentary duties for the first recorded time in two years: 'Tomorrow I suppose the House of Commons will prevent my coming to you; But on Friday I hope to get a sight of you, Deo volente.'64 The tension between his social and parliamentary lives was more than a matter of scheduling: Lewis dined with the Whigs but tended to vote with the Tories (Holland, Further Memoirs 379). The ambivalence seems characteristic; one should add that he rarely bothered to vote at all. On Monday 8 February, he delivered his only recorded parliamentary speech, in support of a motion to introduce a bill that would make it easier for imprisoned debtors to obtain an allowance to live on in prison: 'Mr. Lewis ... said, the severity with which many debtors were treated was a disgrace to civilization' (Thorne 4:433).65 The motion passed. This climax to Lewis's Parliamentary career occurred suitably near its end; he did not seek to retain his seat in the 1802 election.

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Wordsworth's contempt for The Castle Spectre did not prevent him from sending Lewis a presentation copy of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. In March 1802, Lewis wrote to express his appreciation. He enclosed a comic poem; Wordsworth's brother John declared it was the funniest he had ever read, adding: 'they ought to have made a parson of him instead of a M.P.' (Moorman 1:507). At Inveraray, that August, Lewis would write an imitation lyrical ballad with the Wordsworthian tide 'The Highland Boy. an anecdote.'66 Lewis left for Scotland in June. He went first to visit the Duke of Athol; there he met the Comte de Beaujolois, the younger brother of Louis-Philippe, the Due d'Orleans (and later the King of France). Together, Lewis and Beaujolois travelled to Inveraray; and there, as Lewis told Moore, 'we contrived to keep up such a continual riot, that I changed the name of Inverary to that of Confusion Castle, with universal approbation. We had plays, music, billiards, gaming (but in moderation), with a thousand other nondescript amusements' (Moore, Memoirs 8:44-5). He was still (or once again) at Inveraray in October, when he reported to Lady Melbourne: Our theatricals are in a flourishing condition; We played 'the Rivals' last Monday, and though I say it, that should not say it, it was really very well acted ... my Sister [Sophia] made a very good Mrs Malaprop, only her wig not being properly fastened, the strongest interest which the audience seemed to take in the performance, while She was on the stage, seemed to rest upon the single doubt, whether her perruque would fall off, or not. Among other dramatic schemes it was attempted to get up ... a walking Ballet, and a machine was actually made in which my Sister was to fly up into the clouds in the character of the Queen of the Fairies. Unluckily the want of an Orchestra put a stop to this daring attempt, to the great mortification of the Authoress ...67

This was the occasion on which Lamb objected to Lewis's dressing him up for his part in The Mock-Doctor (1733), Fielding's adaptation of Moliere. Soon afterwards, Lewis and Beaujolois went on to the Duke of Hamilton's, for 'a week's racing and dancing. We there separated; he to pay his devoirs to Monsieur [Louis-Philippe], and I to pay mine to Lady Charlotte Campbell at her villa' in Woodburn. After another visit to the

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Duke of Buccleuch's at Dalkeith, and yet another to Campbell at Woodburn, he was on his way back to London in November (Moore, Memoirs 8:45). Despite all these frivolities, Lewis had time for good works: his first letters to Isabella Kelly, about his attempt to obtain her husband's arrears of half-pay and his offer to pay for the education of her son William, are dated August 1802, and so must have been written in Scotland (BaronWilson 1:272-4). He also had time for some serious reading: 'since I came to Scotland,' he told Moore, 'I have got through three tremendous volumes of Gibbon, and the whole of Voltaire's Universal History; of all which I do not remember one syllable' (Moore, Memoirs 8:46). On 13 January 1803, Lewis wrote to his mother to tell her that Harris was so pleased with the success of Alfonso (which had been revived) that he had declared: 'Anything that you chuse to be brought forward ... shall be produced immediately.' What Lewis chose to have brought forward was The Captive, a monodrama to be spoken by Litchfield 'between the Play & Farce' (Peck 219). It is based, as the Monthly Mz'rror noticed (267), on Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), by Mary Wollstonecraft: this heritage has led Jeffrey N. Cox to describe it as a lost 'piece of feminist theater' (Dramas 45). Lewis's Captive, like Wollstonecraft's Maria, has been imprisoned in a private madhouse by a 'tyrant Husband' (Poems 90). Unlike Maria, however, Lewis's nameless Captive is essentially a passive victim. Her monologue begins with a plea to a man, her Gaoler - not to release her, but to tell her father of her plight. Her plea is futile; the Gaoler leaves her, and she devotes the rest of the monologue to the present sufferings and terrors, and the memories of past pleasures, which together drive her mad. Unlike Maria, she succumbs to her predicament; and at the end of the play, she is rescued by the benevolent side of the patriarchy, as represented by her father and brothers, and restored to reason by the sight of her infant son. From our point of view, these factors undermine the play's feminist message; in its own time, it had, to put it mildly, considerable impact. The Friday before the monodrama opened, although Lewis had not been to a single rehearsal, he predicted: 'It cannot possibly succeed' (Peck 221). It opened on Tuesday 22 March, and though it was only sixty-four lines long, it was, Lewis said, 'so uniformly distressing to the feelings, that at last I felt my own a little painful; & as to Mrs Litchfield, She almost fainted away' (Peck 222). Although presented at Covent Garden, The Captive makes use of the full range of melodramatic effects associated with the minor theatres (Cox, Dramas 43). Alone among

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Lewis's serious plays, it is not distanced in space or time: it is set in contemporary England. Its monodramatic form, Cox argues, also decreases its distance from the audience, because it 'present[s] the character without any mediating pattern of judgement embodied in plot. The character's emotions ... are allowed to engage the audience directly with the play providing nothing else to distance us from our sympathy for this single, central figure' (43). These factors gave the monodrama a scandalous power. As Lewis told Lady Holland on 19 April: It was performed by Mrs Litchfield ... with scenery & musical accompaniments, to the extreme surprize, confusion, &: terror of a numerous & brilliant audience: for when it was about half over a Man fell into convulsions in the Boxes; Presently after a Woman fainted away in the Pit; and when the curtain dropped, two or three more of the spectators went into hysterics, and there was such a screaming & squalling, that really you could hardly hear the hissing. When the Piece was given out again, there was a good deal of applause, but more hissing; and as it really is not my wish (whatever others may think) to throw half London into convulsions nightly, I immediately sent on a Performer to say, that I had withdrawn the Piece.68

That Harris should have immediately announced a second performance suggests he was not as squeamish as Lewis about throwing his paying customers into convulsions. Litchfield revived the monodrama in Bath in May 1810; and it seems to have had an afterlife as a salon piece: at a party in 1819, Moore reported hearing 'Mrs. Cunliffe [sing] a song of Lewis's "I am not mad, I am not mad" without accompaniment The energy with which she gives these songs,' he commented, 'is something rather painful - but they have great effect' (Journafdddddddd Harris's enthusiasm for Lewis's work remained unabated; on 4 May 1803, he produced The Harper's Daughter, an abridgment of The Minister, as a benefit for Mr and Mrs Johnston. Lewis looked forward to this production with more nonchalance than to The Captive, he told Lady Holland: 'They may damn it if they please, for there is not a syllable of my own in it from beginning to end; I have not even given myself the trouble of writing a prologue or epilogue.'69 It was a success, even though Cooke was (as he frequently was) too drunk to perform, so that Mr H. Siddons had to read his part from the script. Lewis wrote to Lady Holland that although 'there was a strong opposition during the two first acts,' in the last three, 'not a murmur was heard, and the curtain fell with very loud plaudits.' °

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Pleased with his success, Lewis wrote to Lord Holland in August: 'Every body are giving up their boxes at Drury Lane, and begging and praying with all their might and main for ever so small a share of one at the other House, where there certainly is collected an uncommon number of good Performers.' Ever since Kemble and Siddons had bought a share in Covent Garden, Lewis added, Drury Lane's 'Performers taken altogether [were] a miserable set.'f] The touch of malice seems excusable. Lewis was writing to Lord Holland from Bowood; he had been on his summer travels for a month. He must have gone on to Inveraray almost immediately; in November, he wrote to Moore: 'I have been at the Duke of Argyle's between two or three months; we have been tranquillity personified. Very few inmates, no visitors.' Lord John Campbell, he added, had 'just arrived (having effected his escape from the horrors of a French prison by assuming the dress of a woman)' (Moore, Memoirs 8:47-8). After the brief Peace of Amiens, the war had broken out again, evidently with enough intensity to dampen the festivities at Inveraray, if not to disrupt its tranquillity. Lewis had time to finish Gibbon. Even the prospect of an invasion did not disrupt Lewis's tranquillity, if his letter to Moore is to be believed: 'my visits must depend entirely upon Buonaparte's; for if he comes to Scotland immediately ... the roads about Edinburgh are to be broken up, and then I shall be obliged to return home by a different way' (8:49). The veteran of the invasion of Holland was indifferent to the threat of another invasion, and the retired legislator was indifferent to politics; in April, he had written to Lady Holland: 'Of Politics I shall tell you nothing, except that 7am not prime Minister, and that I do not care who is; unless you can find one, who will make his speeches in rhyme.'72 Lewis seems to have spent most of 1804 quarrelling with his father. He went to Scotland as usual in August, but his letters from there to his mother are devoted almost exclusively to the quarrel (Peck 224-31). At the end of January 1805, he was at Brocket, perhaps on his way home from Scotland. Perhaps because of his quarrel, he was too 'lazy and out of humour' to attend 'a grand Ball' given by the Melbournes' protege Thomas Brand (1774-1851) 'for the purpose of canvassing the County,' but he still managed to report to Lady Holland that the coloured Lamps made the rooms hot and stinking, that Lady Salisbury danced with Brand; that there was a very fine supper with fifty brace of Partridges, and plenty of red cinnamon soups and green peaches and nectarines; and that a famous Venus by Guido was banished from the

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Ball-room to the Garret at the particular request of the Dowager Lady Dacre - 73

Brand (Lady Dacre's nephew) failed to win the Hertfordshire by-election of 1805, but he was elected in 1807 and spent the next twelve years as a constant (and constantly frustrated) advocate of parliamentary reform and other radical causes (Thorne 3:248-51). By the middle of February 1805, Lewis was back home at Barnes. A letter of mostly literary news that he wrote to Lord Holland on the 18th illustrates how he tended to associate gender and genre: he recommended both 'a volume of little Poems, trifling to be sure, but in [his] opinion very pleasing,' by Amelia Opie, and Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 'which He read to me, and which (as well as I could judge from only hearing it read hastily) I should think you would be pleased with, and very much pleased too. The costume and manners are extremely well preserved, and some of the verses are very beautiful.' But he suggested that Lord Holland 'tell Lady Hfffffffhat if She has not read it already, and has any inclination to cry her eyes out, She ought to read a little Novel of Mrs Opie's, called "the Father and Daughter."' Even though Lewis thought of a female novelist as a sort of half-man, and even though he was himself most famous as a novelist, he thought of Opie's novel as of interest primarily to women; a book of poems, even one by the same author (or by the author who would become the most famous novelist of his age) was of more interest to a man. The same letter expresses Lewis's gratitude for 'one of those romances which Lady Holland was so good as to bring [him] from Germany.' This was Abdllino der Grosse Bandit (1794) by Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke, which Lewis had just translated and published as The Bravo of Venice. It proved to be one of his most popular works, both with the public (which called for numerous editions) and with the critics.75 Even the Critical Review praised it, though it remained dubious about the whole genre in which Lewis was writing: the writers of the German school have introduced a new class, which may be called the electric. Every chapter contains a shock; and the reader not only stares, but starts, at the close of every paragraph; so that we cannot think the wit of a brother-critic far-fetched, when he compared that shelf in his library, on which the Tales of Wonder, the Venetian Bravo, and other similar productions were piled, to a galvanic battery. (255)

Soon this electricity would be lighting up the stage of Covent Garden.

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Meanwhile, Lewis's quarrel with his father continued well into 1805, until they reached their uneasy truce. The stress it placed him under may account for one of the most dramatic events of his social career. At a masquerade at Lady Cork's, at about this time, a Captain Percy, who was drunk '(at least every one says that he was drunk)' was 'personally rude' to Lewis, who felt 'obliged to call him to account.' He chose Lamb as his second. Lewis gives no hint of how Percy had insulted him, but the provocation must have been severe: the diminutive and short-sighted Lewis would have had little chance of success with swords or pistols. Luckily, Percy was 'well advised'; he sent Lewis an apology, with the permission to make it public, 'except that it was not to be inserted in the newspapers,' and the affair blew over (Baron-Wilson 1:357, 358-9). In the same mood of irritation, perhaps - certainly in an uncharacteristically defiant one - Lewis wrote to his mother: I care nothing about rank in life, nothing about what other people may think or may say; and have always, both in my public writings and private life, shown (what Mr. Pitt was pleased to call) a pleasure in spitting in the face of public opinion. I live as much with actors, and musicians, and painters, as with princes and politicians, and am as well satisfied, and better indeed, with the society of the first, as with that of the latter. (BaronWilson 1:362)

To Lord Holland, too, Lewis had expressed his preference for the company of artists, and for their work, over high society: 'I never go to Town now, except when there is the attraction of the first night of a new Play, 7fi which I cannot resist.' Lewis's own new play, Rugantino, a dramatization of The Bravo of Venice,77 opened on 18 October, with Johnston in the title role, Murray as the Duke of Venice, and Mrs Gibbs (fl. 1783-1844) as Rosabella, the female lead - Mrs Johnston had been prevented by illness from taking the part. In the Advertisement to the published play, Lewis modestly gave most of the credit for its success to 'the able exertions of the several Performers, and to the Scenery and Decorations, than which perhaps more splendid have seldom been witnessed on an English Stage' (vi-vii). The Critical Review concurred, devoting most of its review to the masque in the last scene: 'WALK in, ladies and gentlemen! Here are masks, coloured lamps, musicians, conchs, cupids, and cockle-shells, Pan, satyrs, and hamadryades, Neptune and Amphitrite, nereides, tritons, artificial zephyrs, Pluto, Proserpine, and the Lord knows what.' The other reviews lavished praise on the sets and machinery, though the

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Morning Chronicle thought that Mrs Gibbs 'seemed desperately frightened in ascending the clouds in her car.' Lady Harriet Cavendish, who saw the play (along with The Fair Penitent) on 23 October, complained to a friend that Rugantino depended entirely on its special effects: 'The Dialogue is flippant and tiresome and one's attention only kept up by claps of thunder and Pistols firing. My head aches so much from this that I can scarcely see to write' (123). The play triumphed over such expressions of scorn, running for thirty performances (Peck 19), and inspiring more chapbooks than any other of Lewis's works except The Monk, in another example of the contrast between elite and popular responses. Early in 1806, after the death of Pitt, the Whigs came into power at last. Lewis sent his congratulations to Lady Holland: I need not tell you, that I sincerely rejoice at the prospect of an administration which must give Holland so much satisfaction: You see, I look upon the National Benefit as quite a secondary consideration - I am afraid, my heart is not quite wide enough for Patriotism, and I console myself with thinking, that as I contrive to cram a great number of Individuals into it, it cannot be a very narrow one neither.78

Lewis was not entirely indifferent to national issues; the arrival of a Whig government meant that the abolition of the slave trade was now possible, and in March he sent Lord Holland his warning about the manoeuvrings of the anti-abolitionists.79 In October, recalling his single parliamentary speech, he 'sent Lord Holland a paper respecting the Debtor Laws.'80 October also saw the funeral of Fox, who had not long outlived his old opponent. In his 'Lines Written on Returning from the Funeral of the Right Hon. CJ. Fox,' Lewis expressed what must have been a common fear, that the two causes most identified with Fox would not survive the loss of their leader. He depicts Peace as grieving over Fox's bier, because of his efforts to end the war with France And FREEDOM there, distracted and forlorn, With heart all bleeding, and with locks all torn, Weeps for his loss, nor weeps HIS loss alone; She feels, that Fox's fate involves her own. E'en now She hears from AFRIC'S shores again The moan of sorrow and the shriek of pain,

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And sees, round sable limbs that chains are wound, Limbs, had HE lived, which never had been bound. (Poems 34) The end of the slave trade (1807) was actually in sight; but peace with France would not come for another nine years. Lewis was more interested, however, in his own writings than in world politics. In October 1806, he wrote to Lady Holland: 'I am sorry to hear, that you are reading my new Romance, for I am certain beforehand, that you will not like it.' He was sure she would be polite; but 'I am so wearied by people thinking it necessary to say something to me about my publications (which is always a disagreable subject) that henceforth I mean to swear boldly - "that I never wrote a line in my life, and never mean to write one."fffThe romance in question was Feudal Tyrants, his translation of Naubert.82 It is not known whether or not Lady Holland liked it. The critics were divided. The Flowers of Literature (which found it so characteristic as to doubt that it was a translation) thought that Lewis had 'considerably increased his reputation by producing it' (502). The Literary Journal thought that it had only a 'negative merit': 'the other works of Mr. Lewis may contain something more brilliant and striking; but we believe few or none of them are so free from objection' (485). Lewis's old enemy the Critical Review had congratulated him (somewhat sarcastically) for excluding spectres from Alfonso; now it felt compelled to warn its 'fair readers' not to hope for any in Feudal Tyrants. Like Lewis's own comments on Opie, the review's comments on his novel reveal something about the gendering of fiction (especially Gothic fiction) in the period: Tt is the labour of the mountain, and Monk Lewis has produced his mouse neither larger nor finer than has issued from the pen of many a teeming maiden in the sanctuaries of the Minerva press' (274).83 If Lewis thought of a female author as half-man, the Critical Review thought of him as half-woman. The year 1806 also saw the publication of a more serious and successful work, Lewis's second original tragedy, Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error. As with Alfonso, and presumably for the same reason, Lewis arranged for it to be published before it was produced. Its production was further delayed by a dispute over the casting: Lewis wanted Henry Johnston, who had pleased him as Caesario in Alfonso, to play Lothair, Adelgitha's son; Harris preferred Charles Kernble, who had starred in the unsuccessful Adelmorn. Lewis withdrew the play. It finally opened at Drury Lane on 30 April 1807, as a benefit for Powell (the original Castle Spectre), who played the title role. Robert Elliston (1774-1831) played

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her son Lothair. The Turkish ambassador, perhaps amused by the idea of the Emperor of Byzantium as a villain, attended the premiere (Sun 30 April 1807). Both the publication and the production were well received. The Monthly Mirror congratulated Powell on her 'taste and good sense' in choosing the play for her benefit night and found her performance 'suprisingly great ... Mr. Lewis might wish for another Lothair, but he could not desire a better Adelgitha' (353-5). The Times considered it the most successful performance of the season. Even the Critical Review agreed that Lewis deserved the 'very great applause' the play had received.84 The playbill for the premiere of Adelgitha reports that The Wood Daemon 'continues to be received with unprecedented marks of applause' and promises that it will be performed on the next two nights.85 This Faustian melodrama, which had opened on 1 April, is one of Lewis's most purely spectacular works: the playbill includes credits for the music (by Kelly, as for Adelgitha and The Castle Spectre); for the 'Action, dances, & processions'; for the scenery; for the 'Machinery, Dresses, & Decoradons'; and for the 'Female Dresses.' According to the European Magazine, Lewis treated the script with his customary professionalism, cutting 'some very puerile dialogue' between the first and second nights, and 'thereby greatly improv[ing]' the play, so that it met with 'universal approbation' (292). He did not, however, bother to publish it.86 This was the production in which 'Miss Lacy' played a protecting spirit. The play was even more successful than Rugantino: it was performed thirtyfour times that season and five the next (Peck 96), and it was revived, in an even more spectacular form, as One O'Clock! or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon, on 1 August 1811. The roles were all filled by the same actors, except for 'Miss Lacy,' who did not reappear. The British Critic found the dialogue 'by long established prescription, very nonsensical; the conclusion all show, and German abruptness. But,' it conceded, 'some of the songs are pretty' (639). The Poetical Register, however, found it 'something better than a mere spectacle': it had 'a plot highly interesting and well conducted, neat and spirited dialogue, and poetical songs. We know nothing of its kind that is superior to it.' It had a successful run of twenty-five performances (Peck 107). By 14 August 1807, Lewis was back at Inveraray. His host went on to the Western Islands; but Lewis (at least, since his expedition with Scott) 'neither fish[ed] nor sh[o]t, and [was] always sea-sick,' so he stayed alone at Inveraray instead (Peck 242). His solitude was broken by the

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return of the Duke of Argyll, and the arrival of some three dozen guests, to celebrate the duke's birthday on 22 September, a festivity Lewis did not enjoy: all the blackgaurd children of the Town are hallooing round the Castle, firing squibs and crackers, and making such a diabolical noise, that we cannot hear each other speak, when the Duke came into the breakfast room just now, instead of wishing him 'many happy returns of this day,' I could not help telling him, [']that I wished to the Lord, that He had never been born at all.'

He was afraid that the pace was affecting his health: 'I eat and drink too much, and dining at eight, supping at two, and going to bed at four in the morning, cannot possibly tend to strengthen my nerves, my eyes, or my stomach.' He hastened to assure his mother that, compared to the other guests, he was 'very regular in [his] mode of life': they were often to be found still playing billiards at six (Peck 243). By the end of the month, everyone had left but the duke, Tom Sheridan (1775-1817, the playwright's son, with whom Lewis was on much better terms than with his father), his wife, the novelist Caroline Henrietta Callander Sheridan (1779-1851), and Lewis himself. Lewis amused himself by listening to Sheridan argue with the duke, and by following the trial of a soldier who had murdered his wife, of which he sent Lady Holland a particularly Gothic account: ... what was still more singular was one of the means employed to identify the body. It was not found till three months after the murder; It was then buried; and some time after the interment, it was taken up again, and opened, in order to ascertain, whether there were potatoes in the stomach, as the Woman in question had supped on that vegetable - 87

On 2 October, Lewis wrote to Scott, expressing his regret that they would not be able to meet (since he would be returning to England with the duke, by the western route), and his desire to read Marmion (which William Erskine, a recent visitor to Inveraray, had praised highly): I am afraid though, that however great may be its merits, I shall still prefer 'the Last Minstrel,' for Erskine tells me, that there is nothing of the wonderful employed in it, and Ghosts, Fairies, and Sorcerers (as you will know)

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are with me a sine qua non. Moreover 'a Tale of Flodden Field' makes me expect a great deal about war and fighting, and I have not one spark of affection for military glory in my whole composition ... 88

When he read Marmion, he must have found it more congenial than he expected: as contemporary critics complained (Robertson 53), the character of Constance (a nun who cross-dresses in order to break her vow of chastity) owes something to that of Matilda, and her fate (live burial) owes something to that of Agnes (canto 2, 'The Convent'). Guests came and went, and Lewis stayed at Inveraray until at least the end of November, when he wrote again to Lady Holland, trying to persuade her of the merit of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ('a Work, which had it nothing else to recommend it, I should not fail to reverence extremely, as being the production of a Bishop!')89 and sending her copies of 'Charlotte to Olivia,' 'St. Anthony the Second,' and 'The Vindication.' In April 1808, back home at Barnes, Lewis wrote to Lady Holland to ask for Lord Holland's help in revising 'Oberon's Henchman,' a sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream, in heroic couplets.90 The poem appeared in Romantic Tales, a four-volume collection of prose and verse. Most of its contents are translations or adaptations, like 'Mistrust' and 'The Four Facardins'; in his preface, Lewis modestly suggested that his readers should 'ascribe whatever pleases them to the Authors of the original Tales, and to lay all the faults at [his] door' (l:viii). A number of the reviewers followed this suggestion. The Satirist accused Lewis of absurdity, immorality, and obscenity. The British Critic, on the strength of five passing allusions to the Bible in four volumes, declared that 'a strain of disrespect for the scriptures pervades most parts of this work' and did its best to revive the eleven-year-old scandal of The Monk: 'when he mingles his own feverish dreams with the sacred truths of scripture, the profanation must not pass without the severest animadversion' (253). However, the Critical Review was not scandalized but 'a good deal entertained' (355), and the Gentleman's Magazine-was equally pleased (143-4). Lewis was a composer as well as a writer; at least two of his songs, if their tide-pages are to be believed, met with 'unbounded applause,' and another, 'He Loves and he Rides Away,' which Lewis had written for his sister Sophia (Baron-Wilson 1:246), was popular enough to have been pirated, in an inaccurate version. Lewis rushed a corrected version into print on 22 May 1808; shortly afterwards, it was republished as one of Twelve Ballads. Reviewing Baron-Wilson's Life and Correspondence in 1839,

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the Athenaeum would recall Lewis not only as the author of The Monk, but also as 'the song-writer who made all England musical with the woes of "Crazy Jane" and the perfidy of the Knight "Who loves, and rides away"' (271). In the summer of 1808, Lewis travelled, as usual, though not, as usual, with the Duke of Argyll, who was plagued with bad health and financial troubles. By 6 August, he was staying at Stoke Farm, the estate of Lady Charlotte Campbell (to whom he had dedicatedfRomantic Tales).fOn thed way there, he had spent four days at Woburn, the estate of the sixth Duke of Bedford (d. 1834), whom he praised for 'a style of magnificence truly princely: We had Turtle, venison, burgundy and Champagne in profusion every day; and ... at breakfast every person had a silver teapot appropriated to his own use' (Peck 245). While at Stoke Farm, Lewis had the opportunity to express the other side of his snobbery (and to give us, in the process, a vivid picture of early nineteenth-century social life): on 19 August, he wrote to Lady Holland, complaining about having been dragged to a kind of Fete Champetre given about six miles off by Mr and M rs Bruce; two of the most compleatly vulgar people, that ever returned with full purses from the East. The Husband, it seems, was in Parliament; and to give us an idea of the great loss, which the House of Commons had sustained in his being out of it, He favoured us after dinner with some specimens of Oratory, which put his ability quite out of doubt. It must not, however, be denied, that Bacchus had as great a share in promoting the flow of his eloquence, as Apollo, and it may be questioned to which He was under the greatest obligations, his wit or his wine. One of his speeches was as follows - 'Gentlemen and Ladies, I am informed, that we have treated his Majesty with great disrespect in drinking him without being on our legs; and as we can't do a good thing too often, we'll drink him again' - By the time dinner was over, He was quite beastly; He is remarkably ugly, with a small wen on his cheek, and a large one on his throat, to conceal which He is obliged to tye his neck-cloth over his mouth; and being this bewitching figure, He chose to exhibit himself in a dance with Lady Charlotte Campbell, clapping his hands, snapping his fingers, roaring like the Town Bull, singing the tune with the Fidlers, and every now and then pushing the other Dancers to the right and to the left with all his might and main, at the same time bawling - 'Stand further down, my dear Friends! For the love of God, now, do stand further down! Indeed, you'll see us the better!' - Indeed, this part of the entertainment was as truly absurd as any Farce; but it was the

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only part that was entertaining; and though we arrived there at two in the day, we were detained at this diabolical Fete till one the next morning! They shall never catch me at another, till I am as drunk before dinner, as Mr Bruce was after it - 9I Patrick Craufurd Bruce (1748-1820) had vacated his seat in Parliament at the end of June (Thorne 3:288-9). As a rich commoner (though his wealth came from the East rather than the West Indies) and a former MP, he is apparently a kind of double for Lewis; writing to an aristocratic friend, Lewis tries to put as much distance as possible between himself and this appalling spectre. A more gratifying excursion was to Oatlands, the estate of the Duchess of York, where, according to the banker-poet Samuel Rogers (17631855), he was 'a great favourite,' if also, apparently, something of a target for the other guests: One day after dinner, as the Duchess was leaving the room, she whispered something into Lewis's ear. He was much affected, his eyes filling with tears. We asked what was the matter. 'Oh,' replied Lewis, 'the Duchess spoke so very kindly to me!' - 'My dear fellow,' said Colonel Armstrong, 'pray don't cry; I daresay she didn't mean it.' (163; cf. Byron, Letters 9:18) During his visit there in the summer of 1808, he went to the Egham Races, where he met another royal duke. As he told Lady Holland, The Duke of Clarence (whom I never was presented to, nor with whom till then I had never exchanged a syllable) came to me on the Egham Raceground, told me that He should ask the Spanish Deputies and Ld Holland to dinner, and that He should ask Me to meet them, 'as I was a Man of Romance and Sentiment!' - I am quite glad to find, that Romance and Sentiment can once in his life get a Man a dinner: I'm sure, I've lost many things by them, and never got anything before - 92 The duke was the lover of Dorothy Jordan, who had starred in The Castle Spectre, The East Indian, and Adelmorn, the Outlaw, and who may have suggested the invitation. Lewis was back home by October, after an uncharacteristically short vacation. He may have needed to prepare for the opening of Venoni; or, The Novice of St. Mark's, which took place on 1 December, with Elliston as Venoni, Harriet Siddons as the heroine Josepha,93 and 'Miss Lacy' as an

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attendant nun. This was his adaptation of Les Victimes Cloitrees, by Boutet de Monvel, which he had seen in Paris in 1791, arid which had helped to inspire the live burial of Agnes in The Monk. The motif proved more difficult to manage in the theatre. As Lewis reported to Lady Holland: the grand Scene in the Third Act (which was the Last) failed compleatly, though in Paris it had been the favourite Scene of the whole. It represented a double Dungeon, and the People said, the Hero & Heroine, who were confined in it, looked like two Lions in their Dens at the Tower, and they called Elliston Old Hector, and Mrs H. Siddons Miss Fanny Howe ...94

After three performances, Lewis felt that something had to be done: I felt, that I must either abandon the Piece entirely, or write a compleat new Last Act. At Eleven o'clock I left the theatre without having the most distant idea, how this alteration was to be effected; I went to bed at One, and slept till ten the next morning; I then went down to Barnes with so violent a head-ach, that I thought my head was going to split every moment; and as the clock struck ten that evening I wrote the last speech of my new Act. Now let the said Act be ever so indifferent, I do really give myself more credit for writing any act at all in this manner, than for any other literary attempt that I ever made; especially as I was obliged to adapt my plot to such Scenery as I knew to be in existence, and as I was further hampered by the circumstance of my Heroine's not having appeared at all, and consequently by the necessity of making her the prominent person whenever She did appear. Lewis also moderated the play's anti-Catholicism - 'By desire,' the Monthly Mirror supposed, 'of Mr. Sheridan, the tolerant' (379). Well! when I brought my new Act to the theatre, every body scouted it, and said, that it would not do, I verily beleive, influenced by the prepossession that nothing invented in such a hurry could be good for anything: But when it came on the Stage [on 12 December], the Audience were of a different opinion, for the Last Act was more successful than the two former ones, and from beginning to end every situation was applauded quite with enthusiasm. The Play now goes on with much applause; but still the story is so gloomy and so deficient in comic releif, and the nature of the interest excited by it is so deep and distressing, that it does not draw full Houses, and (I suppose) will not have a very long run.9r>

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The Poetical Register agreed with Lewis's misgivings, saying that the play 'excites an interest so strong as to be painful'; nevertheless, it was performed eighteen times, and its run was only interrupted by the fire that destroyed Drury Lane on 24 February 1809 (Peck 101). When Lewis published Venoni, he included both versions of the third act, so readers could compare them. He also took the occasion to declare, yet again, his intention of giving up writing: 'This will probably be the last of my dramatic attempts. The act of composing has ceased to amuse me; I feel, that I am not likely to write better, than I have done already; and though the Public have received my plays certainly with an indulgence quite equal to their merits, those merits even to myself appear so trifling, that it cannot be worth my while to make any further efforts' (vi). The desponding tone is at odds with the heroic effort Lewis had put into revising Venoni, and the pleasure he had taken in its success. The Monthly Panorama suspected that the declaration (which certainly proved to be premature) was mere affectation; it compared Lewis to 'a petted little girl, who wants to be courted to do that, which she is all in a fidget to do of her own accord' (126). Lewis spent the Christmas of 1808 at Oatlands. Among the guests was Thomas Erskine, once the defender of Paine and Hardy and the prosecutor of Williams, more recently (in the short-lived Ministry of All the Talents) lord chancellor, and now Lord Erskine. He made a misogyrlistic remark to which another guest, Lady Anne Smith, took exception. The exchange touched an old nerve, and Lewis wrote an epigram: Lord Erskine, at Women presuming to rail, Calls a Wife, 'a Tin Cannister Tyed to one's tail;' And fair Lady Anne, while the subject He carries on, Feels hurt at his Lordship's degrading comparison. Yet wherefore degrading? - Consider'd aright, A Tin Cannister's useful, and polished, and bright; And should dirt its original purity hide, That's the fault of the Puppy, to whom it was tyed.96

Twenty-five years after his parents' separation, Lewis seems simply to have accepted Erskine's insinuation that marriage inevitably hobbles arid humiliates the husband, and batters and befouls the wife. Meanwhile, the Peninsular War was going badly. Napoleon had entered Madrid at the beginning of December; when Sir John Moore, commander of the British forces in Spain, learned this unwelcome news

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on 23 December, he began the 250-mile retreat to Corunna, where the army could be evacuated. The army reached Corunna on 13 January 1809, just ahead of the French; on 16 January, while it was being embarked, Moore was killed by grapeshot. He was buried quickly in the citadel, and the army completed its embarkation. He was a friend of the Lewis family, so Lewis was 'extremely shocked and grieved at his death so unexpected, and I wrote a Monody in praise of Him, which was recited at Drury Lane Theatre by Mrs Powell with great applause.'97 Napoleon himself had allegedly conceded that Moore's 'talents and firmness alone saved the British army ... from destruction' (DNB 13:818); Lewis's Monody accordingly turns Moore into a Christ-figure: Oh! in yon martial bands, with gashes seam'd, Saved by thy prudence, with thy blood redeem'd, Behold a monument of prouder praise Than head can fancy, or than hand can raise! (53-6)

In his last moments, Moore had expressed the hope that his country would regard him as having done his duty (as Lewis put it, 'And couldst thou, Moore! ere fled thy soul away, / Doubt Britain to thy worth would honours pay?' [49-50]). In fact, the first official reaction was to make him a scapegoat for the setback, and Lewis's Monody, though 'much applauded' by the audience, was not well received by the government. As Lewis told Lady Holland: on the morning, when [Powell] was to speak it for the third Time, down came an order from the Ld Chamberlain to forbid its repetition! On enquiring the reason, I was told, 'that the Chamberlain was not obliged to give any reason at all' - ... However, by pumping the Licenser [John Larpent], I at length extorted from him, the confession, that the Chamberlain's reason was, that He did not think the Subject of the Poem a proper one for public recitation - Now as Lord Nelson was actually brought on the Stage in Effigy and as 'the Death of Abercrombie' is frequently advertised in the Play-Bills, without any objection being made, it is quite clear, that what was thought improper was not, the praising publicly a deceased General but that particular General, Sr John Moore; and that some person in authority was unwilling to have Moore's conduct sanctified by the applause publicly bestowed on the verses in his praise - 98

On 9 May, George Tierney raised the question of the suppression of the

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Monody in the House of Commons, pointing out that the author was a former member of Parliament and suggesting that the government's 'disposition to keep the merits of Sir John Moore from the public view' was an attempt to cover up the real responsibility for the defeat; he went on to suggest that Castlereagh 'was not to be trusted with the management even of a corporal's guard' (Baron-Wilson 1:376-7; cf. Peck 247). Lewis, pleased, had fifty copies of the Monodygprinted." Tierney's question was not the only parliamentary business in which Lewis took an interest in 1809. The Duke of York, the commander-inchief of the armed forces, was accused of selling commissions through his mistress, Mary Anne Clarke (1776-1852). There was a parliamentary inquiry. Since the duke had asserted his innocence 'on his honour and on the word of a Prince,' Lewis was sure he was innocent, but he enjoyed the scandal. On 24 February, he told Lady Holland that Wilberforce, after some of his questions to Mrs Clarke had been ruled out of order, 'was overheard muttering to himself, as He sat down - "Well! I should like to examine the Jade closely!"' The House burst into 'a great laugh.'100 No doubt Lewis was gratified to see the co-founder of the Proclamation Society caught in a double entendre. A select committee found that the duke had been culpably careless in his dealings with Clarke but could not prove that he had received money himself. The House acquitted him of corruption by a vote of 278 to 196 (DNB 20:234-5). He resigned his command but got it back two years later. In April, the Princess of Wales, who had ignored Lewis for five years 'sans rime ou raison,' suddenly became 'extremely good-humoured and attentive' (Peck 246); when Scott visited London later in the year, he found that Lewis was at 'all her parties' (Letters 2:240). Lewis also invited Scott to his home at Barnes, so his sister Maria could meet him (Peck 247). It was during this round of social activity that Lewis met his Magnet and hurt his leg at a dance. He also met his friend William's wife: T must not forget to mention,' he told Lady Holland, 'that Lady Caroline Lamb behaved to me with such kindness and attention during my illness, as quite delighted me, and can never be forgotten: She really is an excellent little woman.'101 (He spent the last week in August at Oatlands, and then went to Inveraray for six weeks.) After the fire at Drury Lane, the company went on performing at the Lyceum. To help it recoup after the disaster, Lewis gave it Temper; or, the Domestic Tyrant, which opened on 1 May. This was based on Le Grandeur (1691), by David-Augustin Brueys (1640-1723) and Jean Palaprat (1650-1721), which had been translated as The Grumbler (1702) by Sir

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Charles Sedley and radically truncated by Oliver Goldsmith in 1773. If Lewis translated it in 1809 and not, as Peck suspects, seventeen years earlier (102), it may have appealed to him because of his ongoing quarrel with his father: the title character is a tyrannical father. Lewis shortened the original with some skill, reducing the number of characters and simplifying the plot, turning Brueys and Palaprat's comedy into a farce. It was not well received, however, and it ran for only eight performances (Peck 101). In June, Lewis bought an apartment in the Albany, the famous residence in Piccadilly.102 Around the same time, he fired both his cook, Betty, and his manservant, Carder, who had gone into town from his house at Barnes, heartlessly leaving his dog, Jessy, 'locked up in the cold for above thirty hours.' Betty gave him her 'solemn oath' that it would never happen again, and he forgave her,103 but Carder had offended him before, so he asked his mother to help him find a new manservant: 'the wages, 30 Guineas: Board-wages, fourteen Shillings, and a Guinea, when travelling, only. He must be able to shave and keep accounts, not mind living always in the Country, nor walking a good deal, nor sitting up late.' With or without his mother's help, he eventually acquired a new servant, who was 'very stupid, and very forgetful; and ... awkward,' but also 'very humble and attentive,' and apparently very cheap (Peck 248-9). The celebrations of feudal loyalty in Lewis's writings form a wishful contrast to these real-life servant problems, which Lewis did not solve until he travelled to Italy in 1816-17, where he hired Giovanni Battista (Tita') Falcieri (1798-1874). After Lewis's death, Tita would enter Byron's service; P.B. Shelley would describe him as 'a fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most good-natured looking fellow I ever saw' (Works 10:305). Lewis's intimacy with Princess Caroline continued through 1810 and into 1811, despite Lady Charlotte Campbell's condescending judgment that 'the author of 'The Monk," was not ... a very suitable attendant upon royalty' (Bury 1:21). The princess herself seems to have enjoyed the company of an author of ghost stories. At the beginning of May, Lewis was at one of her parties, 'and we had nothing but ghost stories the whole evening.' Princess Caroline told one founded 'upon fact,' about a woman visited so regularly by the ghost of her husband that she 'laid aside all terror, and indulged herself in the affection which she had felt for him while living.' At a ball one evening, unfortunately, she 'permitted her thoughts to be alienated by the attentions of a Florentine gentleman'; the ghost of her husband appeared reproachfully in a mirror in

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the ballroom, and she died of fright (P.B. Shelley, Works 6:147-8). Lewis put the story into verse; but, the princess complained, 'he embellished it in such a manner that I do not know my own story' (Melville 1:192-3). She does seem to have regarded him mainly as a source of entertainment: one evening at the theatre, 'Little Lewis came into the box; he affected to be sentimental; dat is always laughable in him, and I quizzed him. I do not think he enjoyed the fun' (Melville 1:183). He told Campbell, however, that the princess was 'extremely good-humoured and obliging, and ... very much attached to the persons in whose favour she conceives a prepossession.' Ever sensitive to marital unhappiness, he added: 'She seems grateful for the slightest indication of good-will (probably, poor soul! the ill-treatment which she has at times received since her arrival in this country have made such doubly acceptable to her)' (Melville 1:170). He especially admired her lack of vindictiveness: 'I have always considered it a noble contrast in the Princess's character, the liberal manner in which she always forgives her acquaintances and friends for paying court to "The Great Mahomet," as she calls him' (Melville 1:177).104 Presumably, the character to which Princess Caroline's formed such a noble contrast was that of Prince George; but Lewis also seems to have been thinking of his own father, from whom he was still estranged. The royal separation reminded him of that of his parents. (His mother was another member of Princess Caroline's entourage.) Lewis's allegiance to the princess was confirmed in November 1811 when he forwarded to the shocked Campbell a 'very witty, although very abominable' poem from Leigh Hunt's Examiner, describing the corpulent Prince George as 'the Prince of Whales' (Bury 1:75—7). Such questions of personal allegiance were part of the political crisis caused by the returning insanity of George III, which made a Regency seem increasingly likely. 'Sometimes,' Lewis told Campbell, 'he is said to be so much better that Parliament is to be immediately prorogued; then he is considerably worse, and the Prince is to be appointed Regent, with full powers, the next day.' There was even talk of vesting the Regency in Queen Charlotte, the option Lewis claimed to favour (Bury 1:6-7). The question was important to Princess Caroline because, as Lewis told Campbell in November 1811, 'the Prince has announced that the first exertion of his power will be to decide the fate of the Princess' (Bury 1:82). George III became permanently insane in November 1810, and Prince George was appointed Regent in 1811. He did not attempt to put his threat into effect, however, until his father died and he came to the throne in 1820.

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Lewis's travels in 1810 took him to Lord Grey's, in Northumberland, from whence he returned to London, at the beginning of October, by sea, a dangerous means of transportation ('there are storms, Privateers, drunken Pilots, and careless Captains; and more-over ... numerous quicksand[s]') but a gratifyingly cheap one ('at the expense of three Guineas, which by land would have been thirty') (Peck 250). Later he passed 'ten very pleasant days' at Brocket, with William and Lady Caroline Lamb. By 9 December, he was back in London again; as he told Campbell: 'I have been teased into promising to put together some showy spectacle for Covent Garden; and the Princess insists on its not being produced before Easter Monday, as she says that, till then, she has no hopes of being allowed to visit the theatre' (Bury 1:6-7). Lewis's last original play, Timour the Tartar, did not open until 29 April 1811, so we may hope that the princess was able to attend it. It was directed by Charles Farley, the author of the Raymond and Agnes Lewis had seen at Covent Garden in 1797; he also played the title role. It was certainly showy: it featured performing horses, which Harris had procured from Philip Astley's circus (Macready, Reminiscences 38). Professional as always, Lewis was willing to try the experiment but tried to ensure that the play could go on without it: 'having myself great doubts of the success of these New Performers, I constructed the Drama in such a manner, that by substituting a combat on foot for one on horseback, the Cavalry might be omitted without injury to the Plot' (Timour 5). But the horses proved to be up to the demands placed on them. 'The white horse which carried the heroine (Mrs. H. Johnston) plays admirably,' reported the European Magazine. 'He kneels, leaps, tumbles, dances, fights, dashes into water and up precipices, in a very superior style of acting, and completely astonished the audience' (378). The play was a success, for which, Lewis thought, 'it was clearly indebted to the magnificence of the Scenery and Dresses, to the exertions of the Performers, and above all to the favour with which the Horses were received by the Public' (Timour 5). It was performed a spectacular fortyfour times (Peck 105) and inspired a series of imitations that Macready described as an 'equestrian mania' (Reminiscences 38). This was widely regarded, among the cultural elite, as a degradation of the legitimate theatre in response to degraded popular taste.105 Lewis himself joked to Lady Holland: 'I am going to write a blank verse Tragedy for the Covent Garden Horses on the subject of the Newmarket Poisoning - It is to be called "Pirouette and Dandy; or the Mysterious Trough" - I expect it to have a great Gallop!'106 When One O'Clock! opened at the rival Lyceum

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on 1 August, the playbill also advertised 'The New Heroic, Tragic, Operatic Drama of QUADRUPEDS; or, the MANAGER'S LAST Kicid'107 The Satirist indulged in an elaborate fantasy about an upcoming 'equestrian, porcine, taurobolian drama' which would employ not only horses but also oxen and pigs (480): 'the poetry is chiefly from the pen of Monk Lewis, Esq. who has also undertaken to perfect the pigs in their respective parts' (486). Undeterred, Harris introduced an elephant to the Covent Garden stage in December (Peck 105).108 Lewis's socializing continued. In July, he met Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, in Cambridge (Broughton, Recollections 1:35). At the beginning of September, he was in Brighton, where he affected to mistake a mutilated statue of the Prince of Wales for 'a singular sort of compliment to Lord Nelson ... erected there to represent him without the arm he had lost' (Glenbervie,/0Mrna& 139): this may have been another joke at the expense of the adulterous prince. By 13 September, he was staying at Holland House, where he quarrelled with his hostess. 'It came to such high words,' the Countess of Bessborough reported, 'that he told her common decency should prevent her using such language to Ld. Holland's guests ... She replied that when people forc'd themselves into a House against the will of its owners, they must take the consequence. He said he would remain no longer: she, the sooner he went the better (it was after supper about one).' Lord Holland and the other guests persuaded her to send 'a peace Messenger to his room,' but by this time 'The little man had pack'd up his night things arid trudg'd to London.' Numerous notes had to be exchanged before things were patched up. One of the guests who had helped to pacify Lady Holland was Lewis's old enemy Sydney Smith, who 'insisted upon it that Mr. Lewis tried people as an experiment in Natural philosophy,' to determine 'the various effects of ennui on different people': he put Ld. Donoughmore to sleep, made Ly. Holland grow red and furious, me [Lady Bessborough] pale and cry: 'She never told her grief, But let Monk Lewis, like a worm in the leaf, Prey on her sinking Spirits.'109

Since the Hollands were the oldest and closest of Lewis's aristocratic friends, the incident shows how tenuous his entree to high society was. But in October, he went to Oatlands; in November, he canvassed Camp-

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bell and James St Aubyn in the attempt to get Lord Aberdeen elected president of the Antiquarian Society (Bury 1:75; Peck 254). For much of the first half of 1812, Lewis was preoccupied with his father's illness, their reconciliation, and his father's death (described in chapter 3). His father's will made him a rich man: as his aunt Anna Blake wrote to his friend St Aubyn in May, 'Matt Lewis, is now a man of business having a vast sight of family Matters on his hands. I trust, & hope, he will have no time to write another TimourGod forbid!' (Peck 258-9). Her prayer was answered. Lewis had published a collection of Poems in May; it seems to have attracted little notice. Rich and Poor, the opera based on The East Indian, would open on 22 July (Blake would like it [Peck 259]), but Lewis would write nothing new until his Journal of a West India Proprietor.

4 At the climax of The Castle Spectre, Angela is trying to escape from her wicked uncle's castle through a secret passage when she loses her way and finds herself in the 'gloomy subterraneous Dungeon where her father, Reginald, the villain's older brother, has been imprisoned for sixteen years (88). There the villainous Osmond finds them. He threatens to murder Reginald unless Angela agrees to marry him; but, just as he is about to put his threat into effect, he is distracted by the apparition of the Castle Spectre, the ghost of Angela's mother, whom he murdered sixteen years before. Angela seizes the opportunity to stab him with the dagger with which he committed this crime, and which she has found, still bloodstained, earlier in the play. Then the hero arrives - too late to be of much help, as is usual in Gothic melodrama - and the curtain falls. The epilogue was spoken by Dorothy Jordan, who played Angela. It is devoted to a justification of the unladylike act Angela has just been forced to commit: No terrors awe my bosom, I'll assure ye; Just is my cause, and English is my jury! Besides, it must appear, on explanation, How very ticklish was my situation, And all perforce, his crimes when I relate, Must own that Osmond well deserved his fate.

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He heeded not papa's pathetic pleading; He stabbed mama - which was extreme ill-breeding; And at his feet for mercy when /sued, The odious wretch, I vow, was downright rude. Twice his bold hands my person dared to touch! Twice in one day! - 'Twas really once too much! And therefore justly filled with virtuous ire, To save my honour, and protect my sire, I drew my knife, and in his bosom stuck it; He fell, you clapped - and then he kicked the bucket! (v-vi)

At the climax of Adelgitha, the heroine meets the villain, Michael Ducas, in a Gothic cavern. He has learned of her single error, and he has been attempting to use the secret to blackmail her into abandoning her husband and eloping with him. She has arranged the meeting in the hope of persuading him to spare her; he has agreed in order to lure her to a secluded spot from which he can abduct her without fear of interruption. When he refuses to spare her, she stabs him. As he sinks to the earth, he calls her a murderess. Her reaction is less nonchalant than Angela's: Murderess1?- Right! right! - 'tis now my fittest name! Rise, daemons, rise! 'Tis Adelgitha calls you; Her hand has signed in blood the infernal bond, Which makes her yours for ever! (94)

Eventually, she confesses everything to her husband. He forgives her, arid she kills herself in gratitude. Angela's and Adelgitha's very different responses to their very similar acts suggest some of the differences between the two dramatic genres to which Lewis devoted most of his creative energy. Counting translations, adaptations, and readaptations, he wrote seven melodramas and five tragedies. His most famous work, though not a play, draws on both genres. The main plot of The Monk is tragic; indeed, Adelgitha's hysterical declaration that she 'has signed ... [an] infernal bond' recalls the tragic climax of the novel, in which Ambrosio signs a pact with the Devil. The subplot is melodramatic; indeed, it is partly borrowed from Les Victimes doitrees, which has been described as the first melodrama (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination 50). The contrast between these two plots, like the contrast between the fates of Angela and Adelgitha, suggests

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that Gothic melodrama might be seen as generally revolutionary and Romantic tragedy as generally counter-revolutionary in tendency (cf. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination 14-15).110 The tragic main plot of The Monk ends with the damnation of the overreacher Ambrosio; the melodramatic subplot ends with the destruction of an oppressive institution, the convent of St Clare, and the liberation of a captive, Agnes.111 Lewis's contemporaries certainly saw the two genres in these terms. Looking back in 1841, Charles Nodier (1780-1844) thought that melodrama had been essentially a revolutionary phenomenon: This much is certain, that given the circumstances within which it appeared, the melodrama was necessary. The entire populace had enacted in the streets and public squares the greatest drama in history. Everyone had been an actor in this bloody play, everyone had been a soldier, or a revolutionary, or an exile. These solemn spectators, who had inhaled the scent of powder and blood, needed emotions analogous to those from which the return of order had severed them. They needed conspiracies, dungeons, scaffolds, battlefields, powder and blood; the unmerited misfortunes of the great and famous, the insidious maneuvers of the traitors, the perilous self-sacrifice of good men. (qtd in Cox, Shadows 47)

In Britain, although audiences - especially lower-class audiences enjoyed Gothic melodrama (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination xii, 89), the elite, including the critics, tended to see it as subversive, as posing a threat to the legitimate drama in its form and to legitimate political institutions in its content (Cox, Dramas 11). Coleridge denounced it as the 'modern Jacobinical drama' (Biographia Literaria 2:221 ddddddddddd popularity of Gothic melodrama seemed to have something Jacobinical about it. Coleridge complained: With the commencement of a PUBLIC commences the degradation of the GOOD £ the BEAUTIFUL - both fade or retire before the accidentally AGREEABLE -. OTHELLO becomes a hollow Lip-worship, & the CASTLE SPECTRE, or any more recent Thing of Froth, Noise, & Impermanence, that may have overbillowed it on the restless Sea of Curiosity, is the true Prayer of Praise & Admiration. (Letters 3:522-3)

Wordsworth, who saw The Castle Spectreerin Bristol in June 1798 (and who, like Coleridge, had recently had a play rejected), remarked contemptuously that 'it fitted the taste of the audience like a glove' (Hazlitt

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17:118). Southey, much later, would declare: 'Matthew Lewis ... was not more bent upon pleasing the public by stage effect ... than I was upon following my own sense of propriety, and thereby obtaining the approbation of that fit audience, which, being contented that it should be few, I was sure to find' (Works 5:xiii). Formally, the critics saw - and objected to - melodrama as an illegitimate mixing of genres rather than as a new genre in its own right. In 1791, the Critical Review described Francis North's The Kentish Barons as a '"Play"' (in quotation marks) and imagined the author as saying to himself: 'I would have it both tragedy and comedy; and if it were a little farcical, so much the better: above all, if you could add a spice of the opera' (473). In 1802, the same journal dismissed Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mysteryfas 'a mixture of farce and pantomime' (477).f Lewis's melodramas met with much the same reception. The Morning Herald called The Castle Spectre 'a melange of Opera, Comedy, and Tragedy' (15 December 1797:4); the Monthly Magazine called it a 'tragedypantomime' (515). Related objections were made to a scene requiring Kemble to escape from the castle by jumping out a window: the Morning Herald (16 December 1797:3) and The Times (15 January 1798) complained that it made a harlequin out of him (Cox, Dramas 24, 180n), and his biographer later sniffed: Tt is only in a barn that the CATO of a company should be allowed to risk his neck' (Boaden, Memoirs 2:207). A metropolitan star should not be required to perform like a provincial acrobat. Lewis's later melodramas drew similar objections. Reviewing Adelmorn, the Outlaw, the British Critic declared: 'we should be pleased to see this writer apply his talents to some more legitimate species of the drama' (545); the Critical Review wished 'he would attend half so much to classical study and chaste drama as he has unfortunately done to German absurdity' (232). The plot of The Castle Spectre was as disturbing as its mixture of genres: it ends with an escape from a Bastille-like dungeon, and with the overthrow of the established authority figure, Osmond (Cox, Dramas 18-19). Moreover, it attacks the slave trade and lampoons the Church in the person of Father Philip, a gluttonous and lecherous, if basically goodnatured, monk. Critics variously found it indecent, irreligious, or subversive. The Monthly Visitor, for example, thought that its purpose was 'to ridicule the clerical profession, exasperate the common people against nobility,' and defend the Haitian revolution (108). Tragedy, by contrast, was in Lewis's hands a frankly counter-revolutionary genre (cf. Cox, Dramas 46-9). Both of his original tragedies, and

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one of his translations, contain obvious if pathetically unconvincing portraits of the 'patriot-king' George III, ideal rulers who preside over the tragic action without being directly involved in it. The most extreme example is Adelgitha's husband Robert Guiscard, Prince of Apulia, the 'patriot prince' (81), Who seeks no empire but his people's love; Who fears no danger but his people's hate; Who draws himself no glory from a throne, But makes a throne seem glorious by his virtues. (37)

Each of these ideal rulers faces a revolutionary force. In Rolla, the upstart conquistador Pizarro invades Peru, much as the upstart Napoleon threatened to invade Britain. (In Pizarro, Sheridan's version of the same play, the parallel is made even more obvious.) In Alfonso, the villain Caesario leads an uprising to avenge his father, whom Alfonso has unjustly imprisoned for treason; but the wronged father refuses to join it: 'What are my wrongs against a monarch's rights?' he asks: 'What is my curse against a nation's blessings?' (62). Caesario's uprising, like Pizarro's invasion, is defeated. Robert Guiscard is evidently too well beloved a ruler ever to have to face a rebellion among his own subjects; instead, he puts down a rebellion against Michael Ducas, the Emperor of Byzantium. Michael has clearly been a tyrant, but his tyranny is clearly no excuse for his subjects' rising against him, any more than his subsequent treachery, ingratitude, and lust are an excuse for Adelgitha's murdering him. A member of Guiscard's court asks rhetorically: 'Wronged were the Greeks?' and then answers herself conclusively: 'still Michael was their king' (3). Jeffrey Cox has pointed out the parallels between Apulia's suppression of a revolution across the Adriatic and Britain's ongoing attempts to suppress the Revolution across the Channel (Dramas 49-50). The critical response to Lewis's tragedies was accordingly less hostile than to his melodramas. The Critical Review had remarked that The Castle Spectre 'cannot obtain the approbation of the critic; but it has secured, what Mr. Lewis perhaps values more, the applause of the multitude' (476); it congratulated him on Alfonsofand assured him that 'true fameg consists in the approbation of the discerning few, not in the shouts of the vulgar' (355). In the Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith declared himself 'highly delighted' with the 'symptoms of returning, or perhaps nascent purity in the mind of Mr. Lewis' (314). The Poetical Register

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praised both the form and the content of Adelgitha: 'The interest which it excites is powerful, and is sustained to the very last scene; the characters are forcibly drawn, and both the language and versification are highly poetical. The moral, likewise, is unexceptionable' (527). When, in the preface to Venoni, Lewis announced his intention of retiring as a dramatist, the Monthly Panorama drew an explicit contrast between his tragedies and his melodramas: 'The loss of the author of Alphonso, and of Adelgitha, we might regret, but we could very well spare the author of Venoni' (126). Of course, the two authors were the same man, with the same social position and the same opinions; it would be a mistake to exaggerate the difference between them. In fact, he shared the conservative suspicion of Gothic politics. Recommending Godwin's Caleb Williams to his mother, he added regretfully that the author was 'half a Democrate' (Peck 213). His own melodramas might be described as only half-democratic. As a result, though they were attacked by the critics, they made it past the censor and found a place on the stages of theatres protected by a royal monopoly, even in the reactionary climate of wartime Britain. They were successful with the public, but not always more so than the tragedies. In any case, the public's mood was patriotic, not revolutionary. The reason why Lewis's Angela can rely on an English jury is simple: her cause, by English standards, really is just. The revolutionary content of Lewis's melodramas is only apparent - only the top half is democratic. Cox argues that the genre 'finally is a conservative, even reactionary form, seeking the restitution of conventional order in the face of revolutionary change' (Dramas 41). Brooks is more explicit: the melodramatic plot ends with the restoration of an old society, not with the formation of a new one (Melodramatic Imagination 32). Although Lewis's melodramas almost all end with the overthrow of established authority figures, the figures overthrown are always usurpers, and they are never overthrown by a popular uprising. The real earl in The Castle Spectre is not Osmond, but his older brother Reginald, the captive. The hero, Percy, turns out to be the Earl of Northumberland, who has disguised himself as a peasant in order to win the love of Angela, the heroine, who has been raised as a peasant but turns out to be the daughter of Reginald: it is as though an aristocratic Revolution had overthrown Napoleon and released Louis XVI from the Bastille. (In 'France and England in 1793,' Lewis had described Marie Antoinette as just such a Gothic captive.) In The Castle Spectre, Osmond is what Ronald Paulson calls a villain of 'the Due d'Orleans type (Philippe Egalite), the cadet who wants

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power himself and therefore topples the rightful older brother' (223-4; cf. Ellis 43). His real, subordinate status is revealed by what the epilogue calls the 'downright rude [ness]' and 'extreme ill-breeding' of his villainous behaviour. The authentic peasants in the play are all comic characters, and they are all passionately loyal to their superiors: unlike Osmond, they know their place. The play finally endorses the values that the Revolution tried to abolish. The relation between the revolutionary appearance and the reactionary reality of Lewis's melodramas may be illustrated by the only one in which, as in his tragedies, the revolution is crushed: Rugantino, which is based on The Bravo of Venice, Lewis's translation of the Swiss counter-revolutionary propagandist Zschokke. The central character is a super-bandit, a master of disguise, who defies all the efforts of the Venetian authorities to identify or apprehend him. To make matters worse, he joins a conspiracy against the state - a conspiracy underwritten by a sinister foreigner identified only as 'The Emperor' (3).113 In the end, however, he turns out to have joined the conspiracy only in order to expose it; he is really the Prince of Milan, who has decided to save Venice partly out of princely good-neighbourliness and partly out of love for the Duke's daughter, Rosabella. His disguises enable him not only to infiltrate the conspiracy but also to test Rosabella's constancy: 'The perfidy of one ungrateful woman,' he explains, 'had made me distrust the whole sex; and I swore never to unite my fate but to her who would be constant to me under every circumstance,' and every change of appearance (54). The apparently subversive trickster is really a sexually reactionary figure (who would clearly be more comfortable with the punishment of Adelgitha than with the triumph of Angela) as well as a politically counterrevolutionary one. Terence Hoagwood has recently suggested that 'the political use of disguise' that is so frequent in dramas of the Romantic period would certainly have reminded English audiences of the government's use of disguised agents provocateurs during such episodes as the 'Church and King' riots (Hoagwood 55-6). One might also argue, more generally, that Lewis's melodrama itself, like Rugantino, puts on a revolutionary disguise for a counter-revolutionary purpose (and the critics who denounced it were all part of the disguise): it appropriates for the cause of legitimacy the thrill of the illegitimate.

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1 Coming into his inheritance seems to have affected Lewis's manners. Now that he was a great landowner, he seems to have expected his aristocratic friends to regard him as an equal, not as a tame poet. As Lord Holland put it: 'contrary to the usual course of things, the peculiarities and egotism which had been in some degree pardoned to his genius and youth, when poor became quite intolerable, and were, in fact, not tolerated in society when he succeeded to a large property in Jamaica' (Further Memoirs 379-80). Complaints about his behaviour certainly became more frequent. In June 1812, at a dinner at Kensington Palace, 'Lewis gave out a thousand betises upon the subject of poetry, pretending that he found Homer and Virgil wearisome'; in response, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), a better-behaved writer, read the first of the lectures on poetry that he had delivered at the Royal Institution and published in the Neta Monthly Magazine, thus 'expos[ing] the inaptitude of these heterodox opinions. Poor Lewis was in a very bad humour, and did not know where to hide his head during the reading, so he pretended to be sleeping' (Berry 2:502). In September, at Holland House, he met Richard Payne Knight, whose Account of the Remains of the Worship ofPriapus had been attacked by Mathias, along with The Monk, in 1797; Knight found Lewis a 'most flash & tiresome Retailer of exploded Paradoxes & stale Narrations.'1 People had been saying such things about Lewis, if less frequently, for years. What is really unusual - and what, perhaps, Lord Holland really found intolerable - is that Lewis began to return the compliment. In August, while staying with the Duchess of York, he complained to the

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antiquarian and artist Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781P-1851): 'I cannot say that the society at present at Oatlands is by any means to my taste; there is a damned deal too much slang and jockeyship' (Sharpe 2:11). In October, after Lady Holland had complained about his habit of reading at dinner, he replied: I beg, that you will neither say, nor think, that there is any occasion for 'my liking my Friends better than I do' - I like themselves quite well enough; but I only think, that I very seldom hear either my Friends or any body else say anything that is worth the trouble of listening to; nor did I ever yet meet with any people so entertaining, as to furnish me with as much amusement as a Novel, or a Play, or a piece of Italian Music - that is all, and I hope, that is not 'Misanthropy' - 2 These are the words of a man who has been alternately tolerated as an amusement, and ridiculed as a bore, for longer than he liked. Late in 1813, Lewis met Byron (1788-1824). In 1809, Byron had mocked Tales of Wonder in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: Oh! wonder-working LEWIS! Monk, or Bard, Who fain would'st make Parnassus a church-yard! Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow, Thy Muse a Sprite, Apollo's sexton thou! Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand, By gibb'ring spectres hailed, thy kindred band; Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, To please the females of our modest age, All hail, M.P.! from whose infernal brain . Thin sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train; At whose command, 'grim women' throng in crouds, And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds, With 'small grey men,' - 'wild yagers,' and what-not, To crown with honour, thee, and WALTER SCOTT ... (265-82)3 When they met, according to Mary Shelley, Lewis asked Byron abruptly, '"Why did you call me Apollo's sexton?" The noble Poet found it difficult to reply to this categorical species of reproof (P.B. Shelley, Works 6:147n; cf. Trelawny 224). Lewis evidently objected to the low-class, rather than the funereal, connotations of the metaphor.4 Byron noticed the new mood to which Lady Holland and others had

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objected: in November 1813, he noted that Lewis 'seems out of humour with every thing. What can be the matter? he is not married - has he lost his own mistress, or any other person's wife?' (Letters 3:205-6). Unlike the Hollands, however, and like the other really distinguished person who knew Lewis well, Walter Scott, Byron not only was amused (and sometimes irritated) by him, but genuinely liked and respected him: It is a good and good-humoured man, but pestilently prolix and paradoxical and personal If he would but talk half, and reduce his visits to an hour, he would add to his popularity. As an author he is very good, and his vanity is ouverte, like Erskine's, and yet not offending. (Letters 3:227)°

Byron soon felt intimate enough with Lewis to show him Lord Sligo's account of how he had rescued a woman from being drowned for some sexual misdemeanour (possibly committed with Byron himself) in Athens. Lewis was 'horrified,'' but he evidently retained a professional author's attitude towards potential material: 'L. wondered I did not introduce the situation into "the Giaour."' This was too cool for Byron: 'He may wonder; - he might wonder more at that production's being written at all. But to describe the feelings of that situation were impossible - it is icy even to recollect them' (Letters 3:230). On 4 December, Lewis invited Byron to dine at the Albany. The experience, after Byron's 'long abstinence' (that is, his obsessive dieting and abuse of purgatives), left him 'half dead' (Letters 3:230). The next day, in a dyspeptic mood, he read The Monk - apparently in an unexpurgated edition: I looked ... at the worst parts of the Monk. These descriptions ought to have been written by Tiberius at Caprea - they are forced - the philtred ideas of a jaded voluptuary. It is to me inconceivable how they could have been composed by a man of only twenty ... They have no nature - all the sour cream of cantharides. I should have suspected Buffon of writing them on the deathbed of his detestable dotage.6

He thought, however, that the book 'could do no harm, except' - and here, tantalizingly, his editor Thomas Moore chose to expurgate his journal (Letters 3:234). In January 1814, Lady Melbourne reported to Byron that Lewis had met Madame de Stael (1766—1817) at Oatlands, quarrelled with her, and then, when 'she was in a passion,' laughed at her. In revenge, she

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told him that his laugh proved he was 'inferieur'; no doubt the word has a class connotation. As Lady Melbourne reported to Byron: 'she talk'd loud, so did he, & the Singers at the other end of the room could not hear one another & were obliged to Stop' (Gross 161; cf. Bury 1:98). Lewis also told Byron about the quarrel, claiming that it was about 'himself, Clarissa Harlowe, Mackintosh, and [Byron],' and adding that 'She bored [him] with praises of himself till he sickened': he seems to have been less ready to tell his new friend Byron than his old friend Melbourne that de Stael found him inferior. 'I should like, of all things,' Byron concluded, 'to have heard the Amabaean eclogue between her and Lewis - both obstinate, clever, odd, garrulous, and shrill. In fact, one could have heard nothing else' (Letters 3:240-1, 4:33) .7 At the end of January, Lewis himself wrote to Lady Melbourne: 'I am living the life of a Dormouse: I sleep sixteen hours out of the four and twenty, never get up till dinner-time, and have made a vow not to stir out of the Albany till it thaws: So I see nobody, and hear nothing.'8 His reclusiveness seems to be a result of his increasing estrangement from his aristocratic friends. In January 1815, he told Lady Holland: 'I find the shackles of society grow more and more intolerable, and live more by myself than ever; consequently I see hardly anybody, and am contented to know no more than the Newspapers are condescending enough to tell me.' He was planning a trip to Paris, Switzerland, and Italy (a plan that had to be cancelled after Napoleon's return from Elba), but, he sternly told her: 'my object in going abroad is to see Statues, Pictures, Ruins, Cataracts, and Volcanoes, things, in short; not Men, Women, and Children.' He claimed to envy King George, who had found in madness the perfect retreat: He enjoys perfect health, an excellent appetite, fancies that He has resuscitated the Princess Amelia, and passes his time in receiving the visits of People, who have been buried these twenty years. So that He sees no persons but those whom he likes, hears nothing but what He is inclined to hear, and enjoys at once the amusement of society and security of solitude. - 9

Even Lewis's family found him reclusive. In January 1815, his Aunt Blake complained to St Aubyn: 'So, Mother Goos'es Son has become scarce! Every body makes the same complaint even to his own Brother in Law. He is only at home, when he professes to be at home' (Peck 260) .10 Characteristically, Lewis did ask Lady Holland for introductions to the foreign courts he hoped to visit on his journey. He was also keeping up

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his royal acquaintances at home, as his January visit to Oatlands demonstrates. In May 1814, he visited Kensington Palace, where he amused the Princess of Wales, and prevented Byron from talking to Lady Oxford, by playing the Cupid (Melville 1:284). Before leaving for Jamaica the next year, he told Campbell that 'her Royal Highness's hospitality, and the delightful assemblage of persons she had the good taste to congregate around her,' would always provide 'the most agreeable reminiscences in [his] life' (Bury 2:335). Lewis also kept in touch with his literary friends. In August 1814, he wrote to Scott to sound him out on the rumour that he was the author of Waverley: 'I am now told it is not yours, but William Erskine's. If this is so, pray tell him from me that I think it excellent in every respect, and that I believe every word of it' (Lockhart 4:400). We know that he remained in touch with Thomas Moore, and evidently still involved in the theatre, from a letter that Moore wrote in November 1814, to Edward T. Dal ton, who was 'writing for the horses,' advising him to consult Lewis, because of his 'knowledge of stage effect' (Letters 1:341). Lewis's most interesting comments on the theatre occur in his January 1815 letter to Lady Holland. He compared Eliza O'Neil (17911872), who had had her debut at Covent Garden, as Juliet, on 6 October 1814, to Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), the most famous woman actor of his own generation; and he found in O'Neil's acting a naturalness, originality, organic wholeness, and sympathetic identification with her characters, that we would now call quin lessen dally Romantic: Mrs Siddons was frequently more sublime in particular passages, but to me never half so pleasing, so interesting through the whole of a character as Miss O'Neil; on whom there is not a single drawback. She will only be one and twenty next month; Face, figure, voice, intelligence, grace, originality, nothing is wanting She has played as yet but four characters; but in those I have not yet heard her repeat a single line, in which She appeared to me to mistake the Author's meaning - One of them was Mrs Siddons's first part 'Isabella [in Garrick's Isabella (1757), an adaptation of Southerne's The Fatal Marriage (1694)];' and if I were to describe the impression made upon me during the two performances, I should say, that I had received great pleasure from seeing Mrs Siddons in Isabella, and Isabella in Miss O'Neil - She is by far the most natural Actress, that I ever saw; Study is not to be traced in her performance, and yet she is always right; and though there are frequently little touches in her acting that are perfectly new, they are never far-fetched. One is obliged to recollect, that nobody used them

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before, in order to beleive, that the part could ever be played well without them ... The only fault which has been laid to her charge is a deficiency of expression in her countenance; but I greatly suspect this to arise from our having been so long accustomed to her Predecessor, that we have her still before our eyes, and cannot help requiring something like her. The features of Mrs Siddons were so strongly marked, that at the moment of her appearing on the Stage, before she had uttered a word, or betrayed any passion either of grief or anger, everybody said — 'what an expressive countenance' - Now I confess, that the consequence of this was to me, that when it was necessary for her to add the expression of the passion, there was so much expression before, that the addition made her features appear to me almost grotesque and exagerated; particularly about her mouth - On the contrary, when Miss O'Neil appears, the only expression is that of beauty and delicacy; It is necessary to be near the Stage, in order to perceive the changes produced on her countenance by the passion which She has to express; but if you are near enough, I am persuaded, that the Spectator must be convinced, that the more moderate expression does not proceed from less feeling than Mrs Siddons; and that if Belvidera's beauty [in Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682)] was of the feminine class instead of the masculine, She would in that situation have exprest just so much as Miss O'Neil, and no more -

About Edmund Kean (1787-1833), who had first appeared at Drury Lane (as Shylock) in 1814, and who is usually regarded as the quintessential Romantic actor, Lewis had reservations: I have now seen Kean in all his parts, except Hamlet (in which from nature He must fail) and Romeo, which (they tell me) as He plays it, you would not know from Richard the 3d - Certainly He has great merit; but I have no scruple in saying, that instead of being (as I was led to expect) the most natural of Actors, He is the most artificial; and though his merit is not a trick, He is himself a great Trickster— the perpetual humbug of a pause and then a drop of the voice is quite an insult to the audience; It must be found out at last even by the bigotted Pit and stupid Galleries; and when it is found out, I am greatly afraid for the sake of Drury Lane, that the tide will run as strongly against him from resentment, as it now runs in his favour. Massinger's 'Luke [in Riches, an adaptation of The City Madam (1632)] appears to me his best part, and indeed is excellent throughout: Much of Richard too is good (always excepting the humbug) and more of Othello. But then his figure! But then his voice! - As to Macbeth, I thought it abom-

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inable - and one would really think, He had studied Shakspeare in Warburton's commentary - What think you (instead of 'Murder alarumetf) of 'Murder alarmed by his Sentinel, the Wolf? - ' Murder must have been timid indeed to be alarmed by his own sentinel - and then 'Duncan's gory blood' for golden! That is, 'bloody blood!' Oh! dear! dear!11 If Lewis's comments on O'Neil suggest an appreciation of the Romantic aesthetic, those on Kean reveal the eye and ear of a theatrical professional, as well as a box-holder's snobbish desire to distinguish himself from the inhabitants of the pit and the galleries - and perhaps from Kean, the illegitimate son of a strolling player. In the summer of 1815, Lewis was preoccupied with the misbehaviour of his protege, William Kelly (discussed in chapter 4); in the fall, with the preparations for the first of his voyages to Jamaica (to be discussed in chapter 8). His withdrawal from society seems to have evolved into a determination to leave England altogether, and to stay away from it as long as possible (Baron-Wilson 2:123). He agreed to take some locust trees to Jamaica for Lord Holland.12 He left Byron his walking stick and a pot of preserved ginger. He left London for Gravesend on 8 November, without saying goodbye to his mother: he thought it would be too painful for both of them (Baron-Wilson 2:122). He boarded the Sir Godfrey Webster on the 10th. 2

Lewis returned from Jamaica at the beginning of June 1816, 'so much dmmproved,' according to his Aunt Blake, 'that, his friends in general wish He were among his Black Slaves again as being the only Creatures fit to bear with his Nonsense and Vanity' (Peck 264). One of the first things he did was to consult with Wilberforce about his slaves. Wilberforce both invited him to dinner at his home in Clapham and visited him in London (Wilberforce, Life 4:292). Lewis did not stay in England long. He revived the continental trip he had had to cancel the year before, and on 14 August, he arrived in Geneva to visit Byron. He was too late to take part in the famous ghoststory project that inspired Frankenstein (1818), The Vampyre (1819), and Ernestus Berchtold (1819),13 but he certainly entertained Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys with ghost stories: he recited the ghost poem he had written for the Princess of Wales and 'told four other stories - all grim,'

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according to P.B. Shelley, who recorded them all (Works 6:147-50).14 They also discussed the existence of ghosts, with results unsatisfactory to the Gothic atheist P.B. Shelley: 'Neither Lord Byron nor M.G.L. seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without believing in God' (Works 6:147). This seems to contradict Medwin's story about 'the vision of his brother' haunting Lewis 'as a sort of monitor' (192-3; cf. 55); but Lewis was so notoriously argumentative that he may have claimed not to believe in ghosts simply because Shelley did. Most important, he 'translated most of Goethe's Faust for Byron, 'vive voce,' and Byron 'was naturally much struck with it' (Letters 7:113; cf. 5:268). This reading, perhaps in conjuction with the discussion of Goethe in de Stael's De I'Alkmagne (1810), presumably helped to inspire Manfred, Byron's real contribution to the summer's ghost-story project.15 On 1 October, he wrote to his mother from Florence: I have crost the Alps and the Apennines without breaking down; have seen the Cathedral of Milan, the Chartreuse-Church of Pavia, and the Gulph of Genoa; Have talked for half an hour to Maria Louisa, and have made a low bow to the Venus of Medicis and wished her joy of her safe arrival from Paris.16

The journey had not been an entire success: Lombardy was flat and ugly; the weather was abominable; the fruit was inedible; 'and the Singers at the Opera bawl in a manner, that would get them hissed off the Stage in England.' The pictures and statues, however, 'exceed all praise!' (Peck 261). Except for his visit to Maria Louisa, whom he seems to have regarded as a sort of tourist attraction, Lewis (who had been sociable enough in the literary milieu of Geneva) resumed his reclusive habits. By 16 December, he was in Rome, but the Duchess of Devonshire complained that he had only appeared in society once: 'Here, as at Florence, he shuts himself up to hold converse only with the departed' (Foster 425). He was still in Rome on 1 January 1817, when he wrote to his mother to wish her a happy new year. His eyes were bothering him (as they did throughout his life); otherwise, 'I am still greatly amused with Italy, and wonderfully so with Rome. But the People are insupportable, and I shun them like wildfire.' Now that he had 'Kissed the Pope's hand (not his Toe),' he felt he had done Rome; he went on to Naples to visit his sister Maria, whose husband, Sir Henry Lushing-

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ton, was consul-general there from 1815 to 1832. She was expecting a child in March (Peck 264). Lewis had quarrelled with Sir Henry over his father's relationship with Sophia Ricketts. Now (according to Fulke Greville), in order to visit his sister and brother-in-law, he wrote beforehand to [Lushington], to say that their quarrel had better be suspended, and he went and lived with him and his sister ... in perfect cordiality during his stay. When he departed he wrote to Lushington to say that now they should resume their quarrel ... and accordingly he did resume it, with rather more acharnement [relentlessness] than before. (Journal 3:2)

In fact, their cordiality seems to have been less than perfect. According to Mary-Ann Finlason, whom he later met on board the Sir Godfrey Webster, Lewis had sent Maria a portrait of himself the previous year. When he arrived in Naples, it still had not been framed: 'he was so angry at seeing the little value set on his present, ... that he went into the room where the unframed canvass was standing, and, taking a pen-knife from his pocket, cut out its eyes, and otherwise mutilated the features of his inoffensive second-self (Baron-Wilson 2:202). He stayed for nine weeks, but he left on 15 March without waiting for Maria to have her baby. Nevertheless, he told his mother that he had 'never thought it possible ... to be so much delighted with any place out of England. The climate is delicious, and the beauty of the Scenery beggars all description.' His health had also improved. He considered settling in Naples - 'if Jamaica should fail, or anything happen to make England odious to me' (Peck 265). If Stendhal is to be believed, he gave a delightful ball during his stay. Stendhal does not mention meeting Lewis himself; a faithful Bonapartist, he seems to have spent the evening pontificating about the inevitable decline of Britain as a world power (385-6). His account is a little undercut by being dated 22 March, a week after Lewis's departure. Lewis had considered visiting Greece, but he seems to have decided against it; he told his mother that Naples was 'the extreme point of [his] travels' (Peck 264-5). By 1 July, his return journey had taken him to Venice. Byron, who was living at La Mira, went to visit him there, and together with Hobhouse, they went to see 'the circumcision of a sucking Shylock,' a ceremony Byron found 'very moving' (Letters 5:255). They went riding, an activity that amused Byron as much as hiking with Lewis had amused Scott:

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Being short-sighted - when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in Summer [Lewis] made me go before to pilot him - I am absent at times - especially towards evening - and the consequence of this T led him into a ditch - over which I had passed as usual forgetting to warn my Convoy - once I led him nearly into the river instead of on the moveable bridge which incommodes passengers - and twice did we both run against the diligence [stagecoach] which being heavy and slow did communicate less damage than it received in its leaders who were terrasse'd [laid low] by the charge. - Thrice did I lose him in the gray of the Gloaming and was obliged to bring to to his distant signals of distance and distress. - All the time he went on talking without interruption for he was a man of many words. (Letters 9:18).

Byron entrusted Lewis with a statement about his separation, asking him to circulate it among his friends - somewhat to the disapproval of Hobhouse, who thought it would 'gratify Lady Byron's friends' (Broughton, Recollections 2:77). And they talked about literature. Byron lent Lewis some pre-publication extracts from Moore's hugely successful Oriental epic Lalla Rookh (1817), which Lewis was 'not much taken with,' and Maturin's unsuccessful tragedy Manuel (1817), which he liked (Letters 5:251-2). Lewis read the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron was then writing, and gave him some advice about Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1820), which he was already planning: '"If you make [the hero] jealous," said [Lewis], "recollect that you have to contend with established writers, to say nothing of Shakespeare, and an exhausted subject; - stick to the old fiery Doge's natural character, which will bear you out, if properly drawn; and make your plot as regular as you can"' (Byron, Works 4:304). Byron took his advice, on both counts. Lewis left Venice by 12 August. On 20 September he was in Paris, and in October he was back in London, already planning his second Jamaican voyage. On the 16th, he wrote to Wilberforce, asking for his advice about whether to free his slaves in his will and reporting on the success of the reforms he had 'invented to induce [the slaves] to work from motives of goodwill instead of terror and punishment': even his crops had increased (Wilberforce, Correspondence2:381-5).17 Lewis sailed for Jamaica on 5 November; once again, he left without saying goodbye to his mother. On board ship, he met Mary-Ann Finlason, 'an unfriended orphan,' who was going to Jamaica 'to endeavour to

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recover from unjust oppressors [her] rightful inheritance' (BaronWilson 2:198). As she remembered Lewis, His manners were bland, and gentlemanly, and his address extremely elegant; at times he seemed melancholy and abstracted, and would pace the deck for hours with a book in his hand, plunged it would seem in deep thought or study, and entirely unconscious of surrounding objects. (2:199)

In another mood, 'he enlivened our meals in the state cabin with flashes of wit and humorous conversation' (2:202). He told her that Tita, for whom 'he had a great respect' (2:230), had rescued him from banditti in Italy. He jokingly warned her to expect storms if she travelled with him: '"For," said he, laughing, "I have never yet undertaken a voyage or a journey, that something untoward did not occur. Either the wind was against us — or a storm arose — or a wheel came off— or I was attacked by banditd - or some misfortune unforeseen, and out of the common calculation of travelling casualties, happened"' (2:199-200). Sure enough, they encountered such a violent storm that the passengers had to be lashed in their bunks. It lasted eighteen days. Unlike most other people, Finlason did not find Lewis a bore. He had 'an excellent collection of modern books,' especially the novels of Scott, which he recommended. He had also a piano, and some good music with him; and he used to play on the instrument ... for hours together. Every thing that could be likely to afford relaxation and entertainment to the mind, and enliven the monotony of a sea voyage, seemed to have been stowed in Mr. Lewis's cabin. (2:202-3)

Like many other people, Finlason was struck by his 'natural benevolence': 'The whole crew loved him: was a sailor sick, he was the first to inquire into his disease, and send him cordials, or litde dainties from the kitchen. Did an accident occur, he was ready with sympathy or advice for the sufferer' (2:201). When he learned of Finlason's errand, he made sure she got proper legal advice, wrote letters on her behalf (2:209-13), and offered her financial assistance. His last letter, written at the beginning of his return voyage, is a similarly benevolent attempt to arrange for the well-being of one of his bookkeepers, who was afflicted with insanity (Peck 171).

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On 11 January 1818, his Aunt Blake wrote to St Aubyri that Lewis was in Jamaica again (the voyage was slow and he actually did not arrive until the 24th); she added, 'It appears to be his Heaven!' (Peck 265). She was close.

Eight

The Isle of Devils. 1815-1818

i Lewis made two trips to Jamaica, in 1815-16 and in 1817-18; on both occasions, he sailed on the Sir Godfrey Webster under a Captain Boyes. In the middle of his first voyage out, in December 1815, the ship was becalmed. Captain Boyes should have been used to such delays, but he was, Lewis noted, 'quite out of patience.' Lewis himself was philosophical: 'whether we have sailed slowly or rapidly, when a day is once over, I am just as much nearer advanced towards "that bourne," to reach which, peaceably and harmlessly, is the only business of life, and towards which the whole of our existence forms but one continued journey' (Journal 41; cf. Hamlet 3.1.81-2). Lewis passed the time partly in writing his long narrative poem 'The Isle of Devils'; on his return voyage, he passed the time in copying it into his Journal of a West India Proprietor. It ends with a debate between the narrator and a dissatisfied listener over the fate of its heroine, Irza. The listener asks: 'and did her days thus creep / So sad, so slow, till came the long last sleep? In his reply, the narrator repeats the metaphor of the journey to death and adopts the tone of Christian resignation Lewis used in describing his own journey: A life of pleasure, and a life of woe, When both are past, the difference who can show? But all can tell, how wide apart in price A life of virtue, and a life of vice. Then still, sad Irza, tread your thorny way, Since life must end, and merits ne'er decay. (Journal 28&-9)

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Whatever one makes of this argument, Irza's fate has certainly been harsh enough to provoke the listener's protest. She is shipwrecked on a desert island, where she is held prisoner and repeatedly raped by a demon.1 When her lover, who has also been shipwrecked, tries to rescue her, the demon brains him. She bears the demon two sons, one monstrous and one human; when she is finally rescued, the abandoned demon kills their children, and commits suicide, before her eyes. She spends the rest of her life in a convent, in penance and good works. Strangely enough, this fantastic and horrible poem, written on the way to Jamaica and copied on the way home, provides an allegorical frame for all the impressions of the island that Lewis recorded in his Journal, which is otherwise a realistic, cheerful, and (within limits) humane document. For the 'demon-king' of the poem is clearly a black slave, as re-created by the guilty and fearful fantasy of a white slaveowner. He recalls the devil who appears at the climax of The Monk, who is doubly black: 'A swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form' (412, emphasis added). Most of the time, he behaves with a servility reminiscent of Crusoe's Friday; this servility is interrupted, however, by the stereotypical acts of slave rebellion: the brutal murder of a white man and the rape of a white woman. The results of the rape seem to be a denial, in fantasy, of the possibility of racial mixture, a subject in which Lewis took, in reality, a keen interest (106-7, 171-2). And the demon's suicide suggests that the slave, however savage and rebellious, cannot survive without his master. The ethnographer James Clifford has argued that ethnography is inherently allegorical; the same point could be made about travel writing generally (especially travel writing with ethnographic pretensions, like Lewis's Journal). Ethnographers and other travellers come to terms with new experiences by turning them into allegories of familiar concepts (99). Clifford argues that travellers tend to assume that appearances need to be interpreted; whatever the content of these interpretations may be, the interpretive process itself is essentially reassuring, because it portrays the strange as 'meaningful within a common network of symbols' (101). Lewis allegorizes his experiences on board ship and in Jamaica in several different ways. A number of short neoclassical poems included in the Journal turn specific incidents into specific symbols. In 'Landing,' the pleasant sound of a woman's voice after nearly two months in the allmale ambience of the Sir Godfrey Webster becomes a sentimental symbol for the general superiority of women over men (Journal 71-3). In 'The

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Runaway,' a runaway slave becomes a symbolic victim of feminine perfidy. 'Missy Sally,' who leads the slave astray, recalls the temptress Matilda of The Monk, but also the unfortunate Irza of 'The Isle of Devils,' for she is a 'Lilly white girl,' and her whiteness reduces him to a servility like that of the 'demon-king.' His master ends the poem with a warning against white women, a misogynist inversion of the beginning of 'The Little Black Boy': 'Though fair without, they're foul within; / Their heart is black, though white their skin' (121). In 'The Humming Bird' and 'The Flying Fish,' flowers and flying fish become symbols of justly punished feminine presumption and unchastity (210-11, 246-9). These symbolic moments certainly reveal a preoccupation with sexual relations in a slave society; a tendency to think of gender, as well as race, in terms of binary opposites; and a drive, reminiscent of Ambrosio's, to penetrate beneath the white skin of femininity and uncover its heart of darkness. Considering Lewis's Gothic background, however, it is not surprising that the concepts of death, damnation, and the demonic are invoked more frequently and methodically.2 Lewis can conceptualize even the most pleasant experiences in terms of death. Two days after his arrival in Jamaica, he declares that he has never felt better in his life. This reminds him of an old joke: 'There was a man once, who fell from the top of a steeple; and, perceiving no inconvenience in his passage through the air, - "Come," said he to himself, ... "really this is well enough yet if it would but last"' (Journal 64). As a slave-owner in the uneasy period between abolition (1807) and emancipation (1833), Lewis might well have felt inter pontem etfontem. The next day, on a trip to Montego Bay, Lewis is struck by 'the fragrance of the Sweet-wood, and of several other scented trees, but above all, of the delicious Logwood'; these scents remind him of 'the buxom Air, imbalm'd / With odours,' which Satan, in Paradise Lost, promises to his children Sin and Death if they will follow him to Eden (Journalg66; Paradise Lost 2.842-3). If Jamaica is a paradise, it is a doomed one; within a page, Lewis is discussing the local snakes. The abundance and excellence of Jamaican fish make him wish for 'the company of Queen Atygatis of Scythia, who was so particularly fond of fish, that she prohibited all her subjects from eating it on pain of death, through fear that there might not be enough left for her majesty.'3 Lewis's train of thought leads him through Henry I, who died of a surfeit of lampreys, to Frederick the Great, who 'might have prolonged his existence, if he could but have resisted the fascination of an eel-pye;

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but the charm was too strong for him, and, like his great-grandmother of all, he ate and died.' Lewis meditates on the two fatal appetites: And now, which had to resist the most difficult temptation, Frederic or Eve? She longed to experience pleasures yet untasted, and which she fancied to be exquisite: he... pined after known pleasures, and which he knew to be good; she was the dupe of imagination; hefe\\ a victim to established habit. (104-5; cf. Mirabeau 40)

Like all allegorizing travellers, Lewis is somewhere between the two: he is experiencing pleasures yet untasted (the exquisite pleasures of Jewfish, hog-fish, mud-fish, snappers, god-dammies, groupas, and grunts), but his imagination falls victim to established habits. These imaginative habits are deathly ones: whether he is the dining companion of Queen Atygatis or a surfeited English king (which, as an English slave-owner, he somewhat resembles), he is doomed. Less surprisingly, he also conceptualizes unpleasant experiences in terms of death. The road to Spanish Town is so rough as to make him 'envy the Mahometan women, who, having no souls at all, could not possibly have them jolted out of their bodies' (159). The road from Cornwall to Hordley runs along the sea-shore; two of his horses are frightened by the waves: 'one of them actually fell down into the water, while the off-wheel of the curricle flew up into the air, and thus it remained suspended, balancing backwards and forwards, like Mahomet's coffin' (360) .4 Returning from this journey, Lewis stops for the night at a convenient estate and has 'supper with the musquitoes, — "not where I ate, but where I was eaten,"' like Polonius (375; cf. Hamlet 4.3.19). It is common enough for travellers to complain of being eaten alive; it must be more unusual to compare the experience to that of decomposition after death. Europeans have usually had more than decomposition to look forward to after death; Lewis's allegory draws on both classical and Christian religion for concepts of the afterlife. The difficulty of eating and drinking during a storm at sea makes Lewis think of a famous classical punishment: 'We drink our tea exactly as Tantalus did in the infernal regions; we keep bobbing at the basin for half an hour together without being able to get a drop' (Journaff11). Many writers compared the lotsg of the Jamaican slaves with those of English labourers, and both slaveowners like Lewis and radicals like Cobbett decided that the slaves were

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better off (cf. Baum 110); Lewis characteristically put the comparison in terms of life after death: 'if I were now standing on the banks of Virgil's Lethe, with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand, and asked whether I chose to enter life anew as an English labourer or a Jamaica negro, I should have no hesitation in preferring the latter' (Journafff101; cf. Vergil 6.748-51). References to the Christian afterlife, especially to the Christian hell, are more numerous. The tropical climate reminded Lewis of another old joke, about a courtier who died and went to hell. When the devil politely asked him how he found his new home, he replied politely: 'not at all disagreeable, by any manner of means, Mr. Devil, upon my word and honour! Rather warm, to be sure' (Journal 38). On his first departure from Jamaica, Lewis, himself something of a courtier, gave his slaves a holiday and asked them to drink the health of the Duchess of York. Their enthusiastic response recalled that of Milton's devils at the sight of Satan's standard: 'the negroes cheered with such a shout as might have "rent hell's concave."' The mood of the Miltonic passage is, in fact, distinctly mixed: the devils, who have just emerged from the fiery gulf, appear 'with looks / Down cast and damp, yet such wherein appear'd / Obscure some glimps of joy'; Satan's own countenance wears a 'Like doubtful hue,' and he only gradually manages to cheer up the troops. The slaves' enthusiasm for the Duchess of York may well have been equally forced (Journal 237; Paradise Lost 1.522-43). On his second voyage out, Lewis was becalmed even sooner and even longer than on his first. Three weeks after his departure, he was still in the English Channel, and his philosophical resignation began to wear thin: 'Here we are, still riding at anchor, with no better consolation than that of Klopstock's half-devil Abadonna; the consciousness that others are deeper damned than ourselves': another ship had left three weeks before them and was still becalmed (Journal 312).5 Lewis's identification with the half-damned Abadonna, like the mixed feelings of his Miltonic quotation, seems appropriate to the difficult position of the liberal slave-owner. The calm was suddenly succeeded by three weeks of storm, at the end of which Lewis reflected: 'I had often heard talk of "a hell upon earth," and now I have a perfect idea of "a hell upon water"' (Journaff312). A major purpose of this second trip was togf inspect his eastern estate, which he had not had time to visit on his first: 'here I expected to find a perfect paradise, and I found a perfect hell' (Journadddddd Not surprisingly, attempts to improve matters on such a bedevilled

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island often seemed like unsuccessful exorcisms: a planter named Sir Charles Price, finding his estate infested with rats, had once imported 'a very large and strong species for the purpose of extirpating the others.' The new rats did extirpate the old ones, but then they proved uncontrollable and overran the island. Since then, 'Sir Charles Price's rats, as they are called, have increased so prodigiously, that (like the man in Scripture, who got rid of one devil, and was taken possession of by seven others) this single species is now a greater nuisance to the island than all the others before them were together' (Journal 174-5; cf. Matthew 12.43-5, Luke 11.24-6). Lewis himself plays a surprising variety of roles in his allegory of death and damnation. He is in an Edenic world threatened but not yet entered by Sin and Death; he is journeying towards death; he is sentenced to death by Queen Atygatis or sentences himself to death by eating a surfeit of fish; he is seconds away from death, like the man falling from the steeple, or at the point of death, with his soul jolted out of his body; he has passed the point of death, like Mahomet in his coffin or Polonius feeding the worms. He is about to be reborn, like one of Vergil's purified dead, or half-damned like Klopstock's Abadonna, or damned like Tantalus or the courtier, or like Milton's Satan, inspiring a cheer that would tear hell's concave. The political tenor of the allegory is obvious enough. Jamaica is an isle of devils because it is an island inhabited largely by black slaves. Lewis's discourse is shaped, not by the pseudo-scientific racism of the Enlightenment, but by an older, religious racism that sees in blackness a sign of the curse of Canaan (Genesis 9.20—5), and of the diabolical.d (Lewis's characteristic mode is Gothic fantasy, not science fiction.)7 In Some Years Travels into Divers Parts of Africad(4th ed. 1677), Thomas Herbert remarks that the natives 'in colour so in condition are little other than Devils incarnate' (Jordan 24). In Defoe's Captain Singleton (1720), the hero and his comrades, marooned on Madagascar, decide not to raid the natives for provisions, because they are 'loath to bring down a whole Nation of Devils upon [themselves] at once' (21); later, on the African mainland, they grow bolder and fight a battle against a 'Black Army' of 'Devils' (75-8). In A Tour in the United States of America (1784), John Ferdinand Smyth complains that he once had to share a cabin with 'a parcel of nasty black devils' (Jordan 256). The very casualness of Smyth's tone suggests how automatic the association between Africans and devils has become.8 (Thomas Phillips, a seventeenth-century slave trader, thought that the Africans returned the compliment: 'the

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blacks ... say, the devil is white' [Katharine Rogers 9]. If Phillips was right, one can only add that the Africans, unlike the Europeans, had good reasons for their opinion.) The Devil is not only black; he is also a sort of slave-owner (Jordan 55); this paradox may partly account for the unsettling variability of roles in Lewis's allegory. The roles are already variable - even reversible - in The Monk. Matilda assures Ambrosio that there is no danger involved in dealing with the Devil. She has done so herself, and reports: 'I saw the daemon obedient to my orders: I saw him trembling at my frown; and found that, instead of selling my soul to a master, my courage had purchased for myself a slave' (265): the results of her experiment have been the reverse of what she feared. She is invoking (sincerely or not) a medieval conception of magic, according to which magicians could be good Christians, imposing their will on the Devil (and so, arguably, fighting the good fight against him) by purely technical means (Cohn 169-71; Quaife 38). The Malleus Maleficarum set out to supersede this conception, arguing that magic inevitably involves a diabolical pact (Kramer 7). In the novel, it seems instead to lead to one. At any rate, by the end of the novel, the unfortunate Ambrosio finds himself enslaved to the Devil - that is, damned (cf. Arnaud, Maitre et serviteur 139). Lewis's slaves seem to have perceived the allegorical relation between their condition and damnation, a concept to which they had been introduced by Christian missionaries. A slave catechism devised at about this time by John Shipman (who based it on Wesley's Instructions for Children) explains it: What sort of place is hell? A dark, bottomless pit full of brimstone. Will both [the] souls and bodies [of the damned] be tormented? Yes, every part of them at once. Who will be their tormentors? Their own conscience, the devils and one another. How long will their torments last? Forever. (Turner 78)

Lewis was amused to overhear one of his slaves accuse another of being so lazy 'that instead of being a slave upon Cornwall estate, he was only fit

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to be the slave of the devil' (Journal 344). In 1808, a British missionary to the Windward Islands had drawn much the same contrast: 'it is neither my business nor in my power to deliver [the slaves] from the bondage of men. I have always considered it my duty to endeavour thro' divine assistance to direct the poor negroes, how they may be delivered from the bondage of sin and Satan' (Craton, Testing246). In both cases, of course, the contrast is actually grounded on an analogy between the two types of bondage. One slave convert described hell as the place where 'twenty thousand driba [drivers] ... poke you wid fire stick' (Turner 78). 2

Jamaica was an island of death as well as an isle of devils, and for similar reasons. As Orlando Patterson argues, slavery 'always originated (or was conceived of as having originated) as a substitute for death, usually violent death'; it was a sort of living death or, as Patterson calls it, 'social death' (Slavery 5; cf. Freedom 10). Patterson distinguishes between two forms of social death. In the first and perhaps most common form, the slave was supposed to have lost the right to life by being taken prisoner in a war. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes declined to decide whether Servant was 'derived from Servire, to Serve, or from Servare, to Save': the implication of the second etymology was that the slave was a slave by virtue of having been saved, spared from slaughter. This form of slavery was as much a deferral of death as a substitute for it: 'he that hath Quarter,' Hobbes declared, 'hath not his life given, but deferred till farther deliberation; For it is not an yeelding on condition of life, but to discretion' - the discretion of the victor, the master (141). In the second form of social death, the slave lost the right to life by being convicted of a capital crime. According to Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689-90), this form of slavery is also essentially a deferral of death: if someone has 'forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it.' To Locke, the deferral of death was at the discretion of the slave as well as of the master: 'For, whenever he finds the hardship of his Slavery out-weigh the value of his Life, 'tis in his Power, by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death he desires' (302). The famous analysis in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is closer to Hobbes than to Locke, but Hegel is consistent

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with both his predecessors in calling the slave a 'consciousness in the form of thinghood" (115), or, in Alexandre Kojeve's paraphrase, 'a living corpse' (16). Whether or not the Jamaican slaves thought they were living corpses, they were aware that their masters did. Lewis's own slaves still sang a song about the brutal former proprietor of a nearby estate, who used to avoid the expense of feeding sick and aging slaves by having them thrown into a gulley, to be eaten by the vultures while they were still alive (Journal 322-4). Lewis himself did not explicitly refer to his slaves as living corpses, but he came close to it when he thought of them as virtually inanimate chattels, and he was acutely conscious of their mortality, for which he thought that the slaves themselves were largely responsible. He blamed the high rate of infant mortality on the carelessness of the mothers and their prejudices against such medical advances as immersing newborn infants in cold water to protect them from tetanus (Journalf97, 321).g Slaves who survived to adulthood found a variety of means of selfdestruction: they stabbed each other in quarrels over women (199, 234); they ran away and contracted palsy from sleeping in the rain (20910, 223-4); they put spells on each other (94, 350-7); they ate fatal quantities of dirt (327); if accused unjustly, they committed suicide (385-6); they made themselves sick by over-indulging at each other's funerals (327). Even when no one was at fault, they were vulnerable to disease and to the fatalities of everyday life. 'Whether it be the climate not agreeing with their African blood (genuine or inherited), or whether it be from some defect in their general formation,' Lewis concluded sadly, 'certainly negroes seem to hold their lives upon a very precarious tenure' (331). He does not seem to have wondered whether it might be from some defect in their living and working conditions. Masters held their lives on a similarly (though not equally) precarious tenure. Lewis felt that the Sir Godfrey Webster had brought him to a land of deadly dangers; moreover, to get him there, it had had to pass through seas infested with pirates. While in Jamaica, he lived in fear of a slave uprising like the one in Santo Domingo; plans for such an uprising were actually detected during his first visit: 'Above a thousand persons were engaged in the plot, three hundred of whom had been regularly sworn to assist in it with all the usual accompanying ceremonies of drinking human blood, eating earth from graves, &c.' (Journal 225). They had planned to kill all the whites on the island and found an African kingdom. This conspiracy followed smaller ones in 1806 and 1808;

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it was itself followed by further unrest in 1819, 1823, and 1824, and finally by the Baptist War of 1831-2, which led to the deaths of 14 whites and some 540 slaves, and which may have hastened the Emancipation Act of 1833 (Craton, Testing291, 293-4). Even without the support of a conspiracy, the slaves were believed to be unpleasantly prone to murder their masters. One of the 'worst faults' of 'the negro character,' according to Lewis, was 'the facility with which they are frequently induced to poison to the right hand and to the left'; he ascribed this bad habit to 'their ignorance of a future state, which makes them dread no punishment hereafter for themselves, and look with but little respect on human life in others' (Journal 148-50).10 During his first visit, Lewis attended the trial of a fifteen-year-old girl who had put corrosive sublimate (mercuric chloride) in her master's brandy-andwater. She was executed; the master lingered for two years and died during Lewis's second visit - as much, Lewis suspected, from the brandy as from the poison (397). Lewis made a list of the poisons most popular among the slaves: in addition to corrosive sublimate, these included the manioc root, the arsenic bean, and the alligator's liver and gall (329-30). Non-human dangers were equally sinister. The bad roads not only made him envy Mahometan women and think of Mahomet in his coffin, they also were the scene of two near-fatal accidents on trips between his estates. Most sinister of all was disease, especially yellow fever, which was then believed to be highly contagious. One of the occasional poems included in the Journal is a prayer to the 'tropic Genius,' which explicitly describes Jamaica as an isle of devils - devils of disease: Let not thy strange diseases prey On my life; but scare from my couch away The yellow Plague's imps; and safe let me rest From that dread black demon, who racks the breast...

(Journal 23)

If Lewis refers to yellow fever as the 'yellow Plague,' then the 'black demon, who racks the breast,' in the next line, is presumably the plague proper, the Black Death, in its severe, pneumonic form. Calling the Black Death a black demon identifies the two key concepts in Lewis's allegory; it brings together the Christian idea of the Devil as a black slave-owner and the Hegelian characterization of death as 'the absolute Lord' or master (117).11 These particular aspects of the deadliness of Jamaica were direct consequences of colonialism: yellow fever, a West African disease, would

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have been imported along with the slaves (Crosby 140, 198). The plague would have come with the shipboard rats. On his second trip, Lewis heard that yellow fever was 'committing terrible ravages' among the white population (Journal 331). On one of his trips about the island, he was disturbed to find that he had spent the night in an inn where two travellers had recently died of yellow fever, and a third was still dying of it (378-9). Although Lewis was wrong to believe that yellow fever was contagious, he was right to be concerned. Our best information concerning the danger of disease in Jamaica comes from a survey commissioned by the War Office in 1836, which concluded that of the British soldiers stationed in Jamaica between 1817 and 1836, 12.13 per cent a year died of disease; during yellow fever epidemics, the rate could be as high as 30.7 per cent - though for officers, to whom Lewis should probably be compared, it averaged only 8.34 per cent (Burroughs 14—15). Of those who caught yellow fever, 75 per cent died (Burroughs 17; cf. Terry xiv). Like Lewis's concern about slave mortality, these fears for his personal safety seem to have been both a cause and an effect of his allegory of death: he tended to allegorize his Jamaican experiences in terms of death because he thought Jamaica really was a deadly place, both for himself and for his slaves; and his Gothic imagination predisposed him to find the island deadly. The Gothic imagination itself, with its recurrent fantasies of domination and revolt, was presumably shaped by the contemporary debate over slavery and abolition.12 Lewis managed to be as philosophical about the prospect of dying in Jamaica as about his delays in getting there: if I could be contented to live in Jamaica, I am still more certain, that it is the only agreeable place for me to die in; for I have got a family mausoleum, which looks for all the world like the theatrical representation of the 'tomb of all the Capulets.' Its outside is most plentifully decorated 'with sculptured stones,' 'Arms, angels, epitaphs, and bones.' Within is a tomb of the purest white marble, raised on a platform of ebony; the building, which is surmounted by a statue of Time, with his scythe and hour-glass, stands in the very heart of an orange grove, now in full bearing; and the whole scene this morning looked so cool, so tranquil, and so gay, and is so perfectly divested of all vestiges of dissolution, that the sight of it quite gave me an appetite for being buried. (Journal 102)13

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Lewis's allusion to the Liebestod of Romeo and Juliet recalls the rape and murder of Antonia and the live burial of Agnes in The Monk, which are grotesque parodies of it. The 'appetite for being buried' which the tomb provokes in Lewis recalls the necrophilia of his novel; it also suggests guilt, as if the slave-owner recognized that his plantation would be a suitable place to die. He was tempted to follow his grandfather's example and ask for his body to be shipped back to Jamaica for burial.14 Lewis died on his second return voyage, in 1818. His friends and relatives promptly inverted the rhetorical strategy of his Journal, allegorizing his death by spreading grotesque rumours about it. Michael Kelly heard that his slaves, inspired by The Castle Spectre and by an 'indulgence, which they were not prepared to feel or appreciate,' petitioned him to emancipate them. He told them, that during his lifetime it could not be done, but gave them a solemn promise, that at his death, they should have their freedom. Alas! it was a fatal promise for him, for on the passage homeward he died; it has been said, by poison, administered by three of his favourite black brethren, whom he was bringing to England to make free British subjects of, and who, thinking that by killing their master they should gain their promised liberty; in return for all his liberal treatment, put an end to his existence at the first favourable opportunity.

The political point of this anecdote, as a warning against excessive indulgence, is obvious; not surprisingly, it seems to have been current in Jamaica. (Kelly noted that he had heard it 'from a gentleman, who was at Jamaica when Mr. Lewis sailed for England, and I relate it as I heard it, without pledging myself to its entire authenticity' [2:142-3; cf. BaronWilson 2:235-6].) Granting the slave a voice was dangerous enough in a drama performed for a metropolitan audience; allowing the slaves themselves to hear that voice might not only justify a slave revolt (as the Monthly Visitor had complained) but provoke one. The social anxiety expressed in the anecdote found its clearest expression in the anti-literacy laws and other controls on knowledge in the slave colonies (Winter, Subjects 32-3, 77-8). The same anxiety may have influenced the fate of Lewis's Journal: The Monk had been expurgated in 1798; so had the speeches of Hassan; the Journal, though clearly written for publication (Baron-Wilson 2:273), was not published until 1834, sixteen years after Lewis's death - and a year after the emancipation of his slaves.15 Lewis seems to have begun and ended his writing career by telling his compatriots more than they wanted to know about their bad consciences, and their bad dreams.

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Thomas Moore confided to his diary that Lewis had poisoned himself with emetics in an attempt to cure seasickness (Journal 1:59), and that he had spent his 'last day exclaiming every instant "the suspence - the suspence", which the physician who attended him was doubtful whether he meant to allude to religious doubts or the success of a medicine which he had taken' (1:167). Hobhouse noted: 'His servant told my servant that just before he died he wrote his will on his servant's hat' (Broughton, Recollections 2:100). In fact, Lewis died of yellow fever. The Tropic Genius had refused to hear his prayer. According to his fellow passenger Mary-Ann Finlason, he had evidently been delirious for several days: 'he grew obstinate and irritable, and instead of remaining in bed, and allowing the medicines to take proper effect, he would rush upon deck, walk for hours, and then return to his couch worse than when he left it... Continued retchings seemed to rack every nerve in his body, and his groans of agony pierced my very soul' (Baron-Wilson 2:231). He did not write his will on his servant's hat, having already written it some years previously, but he did dictate a memorandum to ensure that Tita would receive his wages. At four o'clock in the morning of 14 May, the steward found him 'lying with his head a little thrown back on the pillow, his arms crossed upon his breast, as though attempting to suppress some internal convulsive feeling' (Baron-Wilson 2:233). He was dead. Because of the fear of contagion, Captain Boyes had him buried at sea immediately. 'Never,' declared Finlason, 'shall I forget the sound of the splashing waters, as, for an instant, the ingulfing wave closed over his remains!' (Baron-Wilson 2:234-5). But it was only for an instant: the canvas shroud around his coffin had not been properly fastened; the weights slipped out, the coffin rose to the surface again, and, with the shroud acting as a sail, it was last seen heading back towards Jamaica.

Notes

Preface 1 'M. Lewis's Jamaica journal is delightful; it is almost the only unaffected book of travels or tours I have read of late years. You have the man himself, and not an inconsiderable man - certainly a much finer mind than I ever supposed before from his romances &c. It is by far his best work, and will live and be popular' (Table Talk 1:470-1). 2 For Lewis's influence on Artaud, see Abensour; Chenieux-Gendron 136-7, 141-4; Levy, LeRoman 'gothique' anglais 365-7; Praz 24-6; for Dacre, see Magnier, 'Zefloya [sic] et Le Maine; for Dumas, Baldensperger 207; for Hoffmann, G.A.W. Davis; Faure; Picot 20; Romero; for Hugo, Baldensperger 205-6, 212; for Keats, O'Connor; for Kleist, Jansen; for Maturin, Fierobe, 'Topographic' 20n5; for Merimee, Baldensperger 205, 218; for Sand, Baldensperger 206. The others are discussed in the text and notes. 3 Of the modern editions of The Monk, Peck's and MacLachlan's are based on the first edition; Anderson's, on a holograph manuscript apparently unknown to Peck. In 'The Manuscript of M.G. Lewis's The Monk,'1 Anderson argues strongly for the authority of the manuscript, which bears clear signs of having been used as the typesetters' copy (429-31). In the absence of a marked set of proofs, however, it is impossible to be sure who was responsible for most of the changes in the first edition. The issue needs further study; meanwhile, I have chosen to cite Peck's edition, partly because it is based on the form in which (as Lewis puts it in his prefatory poem) The Monk lpass[ed] that dangerous bourne / Whence never book can back return' (33) and began to do its cultural work in the world, and partly because Anderson's edition is marred by about forty substantive errors in transcription.

212

Notes to pages 5-10 1: The Hard Fist of Hymen

1 'Lewis against Lewis' describes Heath as a 'Relation' of Mrs Lewis (299b), evidently on her mother's side; Mrs Lewis's mother was also called Catherine Heath (Peck 290nl5). 2 In 1784, George III personally chose him to sing in the Messiah as part of the Handel Commemoration. In 1790, he married Miss Cantelo, a soprano (DNB 25:39). 3 Her daughter would be named Fanny, after her mother, and given the surname Lacey (see Mrs Lewis's will: PROB 11/1653, quire 87 f. 291r; Public Record Office). 4 This he seems, not unnaturally, to have refused to do; in a later letter, she urges him to be more charitable (7july 1782, DL/C/560/008/1-3, London Metropolitan Archives). 5 Even the most unforgettable detail of this event, the death and decomposition of Agnes's baby, may be based on fact, if not on a fact of such close personal concern. In 1790, a bereaved mother of Kidderminster had 'refused for several days to part with the remains of her child. She dressed the corpse as the living baby had been dressed, and kept it with her day and night till the mob threatened to tear down the house' (Stone, Family 249). The fifteenyear-old Lewis might well have encountered a newspaper report. The incident may also have a more general significance. According to Philippe Aries (396-401), the fear of live burial became widespread during the eighteenth century; Esther Schor (35) has argued for the central importance of the idea both for the moral philosophy of Adam Smith and, more generally, for the 'culture of mourning' in the period. Peter Brooks makes an even larger claim for it as a symbol of 'the entire mechanism and burden of repression, burying and encrypting a past that insists on continuing to live' and an expression of the 'specifically literary obsession with the buried utterancegg(Reading22l). 6 Frances Maria Lewis to Matthew Lewis, 1782. DL/C/560/8/3A, London Metropolitan Archives. 7 Hoxie N. Fairchild argues that Don Juan's farewell to Spain, in Byron's Don Juan (2.18-20), may be based, in part, on Gonzalvo's poem. 8 As the mouthpiece for Lewis's critique of marriage, Jordan (1761-1816) would have had a special valence. Though always known as 'Mrs Jordan,' she never married, and since 1791 she had been the mistress of the Duke of Clarence; their liaison was well known. She bore him ten children, and he heartlessly abandoned her in 1811, to marry and produce a legitimate heir (which he failed to do): see Claire Tomalin, Mrs. Jordan's Profession. Lewis

Notes to pages 10-26

213

commented heartlessly on the duke's desertion in a letter to Lady Charlotte Campbell in November 1811 (Bury 1:83). 9 Commerce was a popular early game of the Rummy family, in which 'the aim is to be the first to go out by matching all one's cards, and the score is determined by the penalty value of opponents' cards left unmatched in other players' hands' (Parlett 139-40, 142). Lewis's epilogue puts these two points in reverse order. 10 Since my German is not good enough to allow me to assess Lewis's translations, I rely on the scholarship of Peck, Syndy M. Conger, and Karl S. Guthke. 11 Judith Terry's critical edition of the Journal appeared too late for me to make more than passing use of it; I cite the first edition (1834). 12 Betty Rizzo argues (xlii n44) that Lewis's association of slavery and marriage, and his meliorist attitude towards slavery (discussed in chapter 3), may have been influenced by The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), by Sarah Scott. 2: The Fruits of a Single Error 1 For the story of William Kelly, see chapter 4. 2 This little fantasy of a bereaved mother mirrors the fantasy of a bereaved son in the mother's valedictory penetential letter (see chapter 1). 3 The theme of adultery and reconciliation is practically the only thing that is not plagiarized about the play, and it was singled out for particular disapproval by the critics, who also pointed out how much more harshly Lewis dealt with Zorayda than with the equally guilty Beaumont (Monthly Revieiv ns 32 [1800]: 257; New London Review 3 [1800]: 183). 4 Whether negative or positive, these are obviously the judgments of a European planter with no real knowledge of the emotional lives of his slaves. 5 Peck misdates the letter 1797. 6 This preference may be related to his literary preference for the 'unexplained supernatural' (see chapter 5). 7 Euphemism is, of course, related to the Gothic theme of the unspeakable. 8 See chapter 6. 9 Ellis may have overstated this part of her case: Antonia's sheltered upbringing does not prevent her from seeing through Ambrosio's seductive sophistries (256). 10 This particular softening, trivial as it may seem to us, was well judged; if anything, it did not go far enough. There was still room for the Critical Review to complain that the reader of the novel is 'encumbered and perplexed by long, crabbed and harsh sounding names, which he has not had time to

214

11

12

13

14

15

16 17

Notes to pages 26-34

render familiar to his mind or his eye till the piece is concluded and the curtain dropped, and another tale with a fresh batch of hard words is presented to his inspection' (276). The Monthly Review, similarly, exclaimed: 'never was heard any thing so dismal as the direful croaking of this German raven!' (438). Twenty-three years later, on her husband's plantation in Georgia, Frances Anne Kemble experienced a complementary embarrassment: 'Oh, if you could imagine how this title "Missis," addressed to me and to my children, shocks all my feelings! Several times I have exclaimed: "For God's sake do not call me that!" and only been awakened, by the stupid amazement of the poor creatures I was addressing, to the perfect uselessness of my thus expostulating with them' (60). Most of these fish still have the same names. Ajewfish is a kind of grouper. A grunt gets its name from the noise it makes when caught. A mudfish may be something like a catfish. I have been unable to identify the god-dammie; since the term was applied to Englishmen, Lewis may have found it cannibalistic. The slaves referred to any act of resistance - such as refusing to work or running away - as 'bad manners'; Lewis thought 'ingratitude' was the appropriate term (140; cf. Terry xxxi-xxxii). The same euphemism seems to have been current in the antebellum South (Morgan 31). As the author of a report on the treatment of slaves in Jamaica, John Shand should have known better. See the Kingston Royal Gazette38.3 (13-20 January 1816): 17, 25; 38.5 (27january-3 February 1816): 6. CO 141/7. Public Record Office, London. Lewis became a talented amateur pianist and composer, an avocation that might suggest a preference for Samuel Harrison over his birth father. His mother's artistic interests also seem to have been mostly musical. Peck misdates the letter 1797. PROB 11/1653, quire 87 f. 291r; Public Record Office. 3: The West Indian

1 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, 28 March 1782, Add. MS 38,218 ff. 67-8. 2 M. Lewis to W. Windham, Add. MS 37,889 f. 154. Lewis did not enter the War Office, either because the secretary refused his father's request, or, more probably, because his father was able to place him in Parliament instead. 3 His account of his income from 1772 to 1796 is in Add. MS 37,877 f. 174. 4 'Memorandum relative to Mr Lewis's situation Be Emoluments in the War Office,' 9 November 1797, Add. MS 37,877 f. 173.

Notes to pages 35-45

215

5 Add. MS 37,882 f. 159. 6 Lewis to Lord Holland, 29 August 1803, Add. MS 51,641 ff. 84-5. 7 Her name is given in Ricketts's will (PROB 11/1342, quire 399 f. 328v; Public Record Office). 8 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, 2 January 1780, Add. MS 38,213 ff. 7-8. 9 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, 25 July 1781, Add. MS 38,216 f. 303. 10 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, 28 March 1782, Add. MS 38,218 ff. 67-8. This was the letter in which he described his work at the War Office as 'not very congenial.' 11 Jenkinson to M. Lewis, 29 March 1782, Add. MS 38,309 ff. 51-2. 12 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, 22 April 1786, Add. MS 38,219 f. 98. 13 Jenkinson to M. Lewis, 22 September 1796, Add. MS 38,310 f. 166b. 14 The reference is to Piers Gaveston (1284-1312), the favourite and alleged lover of Edward II. 15 A 'more or less remittent, but never wholly intermittent' fever, 'which accompanies consumption or other wasting diseases' (OED). 16 Lewis to Lord Holland, Saturday [1 March 1806? or later], Add. MS 51,641 f.98. 17 The manuscript was not retained by Bentley and Company, whose archives are divided between the British Library and Macmillan and Company (which eventually acquired the firm's stock and assets). If it was returned to Sir Henry, then (as his collateral descendant Sir John Lushington informs me) it was almost certainly destroyed when his direct descendants died out (if not before). If Greville kept it, it may still turn up somewhere. 18 Warner, the equivalent character in Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), on which Lewis's play is based, is actually a West Indian magnate. Lewis may have made him into an East Indian to make the resemblance to his father less striking. It is possible that he is simply following The School for Scandal (1777), which is based on the same novel, and which makes the same change in Sir Oliver Surface. In other respects, however, Lewis follows the mother's novel much more closely than the son's play. 19 Lewis clearly disapproved of Alfonso's behaviour, though he was not much more indulgent towards Amelrosa; as he was working on the scene, he complained: 'I stick in the third act at a reconciliation between a King & a Princess, the two stupidest people I ever met with' (Peck 217). 20 Lewis was usually scrupulous about acknowledging his borrowings, so he may have been unaware that he had taken an image from Paradise Lost (2.174). The God Orsino invokes is even more vengeful than the one Belial fears: his whole right arm, not just his hand, is red with blood. (Lewis seems to have been fond of the image, which recurs in Adelgitha [63; 3.1].)

216

Notes to pages 46-57

21 Lewis did not recite any verses at the 1793 Encaenia, according to Jackson's Oxford Journal2097 (6 July 1793): 3. Walter (d. 1803) was an apprentice of Robert Dodsley; he was not the John Walter (1739-1812) who founded The Times (DNB 59:250). Lewis's work on Oberon may have helped to inspire 'Oberon's Henchman,' which he included in Romantic Tales (1808). 22 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, Wednesday 3 January 1780, Add. MS 38,213 f. 10. 23 M. Lewis to Jenkinson, 2 November 1781, Add. MS 38,217 f. 119. 24 M. Lewis to Liverpool, Thursday 26 June 1788, Add. MS 38,416 ff. 125-8. 25 Byron was not consistently careless about this. At another point in Don Juan (4.115), he remarked cynically that abolition had driven up the price of slaves. 26 Lewis himself did not arrange for the staging of any of his plays in Jamaica, but The Castle Spectre was performed there at least twice, on 14 April 1813 and on 31 October 1816 (Wright, Revels 320, 326). Another of his plays was performed during his second visit: 'I may reckon it among my other misfortunes on this ill-starred expedition, that it was my destiny to sit out the tragedy of 'Adelgitha,' whom the author meant only to be killed in the last act, but whom the actors murdered in all five' (Journal 363-4). 27 Lewis to Lord Holland, Saturday [1 March 1806? or later], Add. MS 51,641 f. 98. 28 Wilberforce to Zachary Macaulay, 5 August 1828, Add. MS 41,266 ff. 270-1. 29 A list of the slaves on Cornwall in August 1817 names 226 adults and only 96 children (Ms. 1856.1, National Library of Jamaica); the censuses or 'Return[s] of Slaves' made out every three years beginning in 1817 show a steady decline in the slave population on both estates: T 71/146 pp. 252-9, 147 pp. 203-4, 148 pp. 184-5, 149 n.p. (alphabetized under 'Lewis'), 150 f. 292, 179 Liber 19 pp. 12-14, 180 Book 7th pp. 6-7, 181 pp. 152-3, 184 n.p. (alphabetized under 'Lewis'), 189 f. 326. 30 Young (1749-1815) was a planter, anti-abolitionist author, and MR In 1807, he was appointed governor of Tobago. 31 William Wilberforce to Zachary Macaulay, 5 August 1828, Add. MS 41,266 ff. 270-1. 32 He does eventually transfer his allegiance, but not until Osmond has broken the feudal contract by trying to kill him. 33 Baron-Wilson identifies Finlason as 'Miss F '; her full name is given in the passenger lists in the Kingston Royal Gazette 40.6 (31 January-7 February 1818): 19 and 40.19 (2-9 May 1818): 19. 34 Out of a list of twenty-seven slaves bought by Lewis, and so possibly renamed by him, nine are surnamed Lewis (MS 1856.2, National Library of Jamaica). 35 Giving his slaves pet names was one of the ways in which he treated them like animals (cf. Patterson, Slavery 54-7).

Notes to pages 57-69

217

36 Patterson, however, argues that the sheer excess of endearments suggests that the slaves were being sarcastic (Slavery 65). 4: The Magnet 1 In so far as Lewis's misogyny is pathological, it is simply part of this social pathology. 2 The obituaries in the Literary Gazette and the Monthly Magazine say he had a daughter; there is no other mention of her, and she is probably a mistake for his half-sister, Fanny Lacey. William B. Todd, however, suggests (15n35) that she may have been the Mary G. Lewis who later published a poem, Zelinda (1823), and two novels, Ambition (1825) and The Jewish Maiden (1830). 3 Campbell married Colonel John Campbell in 1796; when he died in 1809, she was appointed lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. She married Rev. Edward Bury in 1818. 4 Peck thinks he also offered her poems (63), but Lewis himself says - in this same letter - that he did not, though she helped herself to one in A Modern Incident (1803). 5 A line of asterisks suggests that Baron-Wilson has omitted something from Lewis's letter - presumably, more serious offences on Kelly's part. 6 As Sedgwick has pointed out, though Peck is too scrupulous a biographer to suppress information, he does include a certain amount of possibly significant information without drawing attention to its possible significance (Between Men 92). 7 The allusion to Paradise Lost (2.846) identifies Lewis with Death. 8 The closing parenthesis may have been intended to fend off suspicions about Byron's own sexuality. 9 Caroline of Brunswick (1768-1821) had married the Prince of Wales in April 1795; he left her in January 1796. 10 Lewis to Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne, 16 October 1802, Inveraray. Add. MS 45,548 ff. 104-5. Another of Lewis's references to Lamb may contain an oblique expression of his feelings. On 22 May 1800, Lewis wrote to apologize to Lady Holland for not calling on her: 'yesterday I was detained by W. Lamb, & to-day I am kept at home by my nose, which thinks proper to shed some of its precious blood every five minutes' (Add. MS 51,641 f. 72). As David Oakleaf has argued in 'The Eloquence of Blood in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia,' nosebleeds were sometimes considered a symptom of passion (485-6). 11 Lewis to Lord Holland, 18 February [1805], Barnes. Add. MS 51,641 ff. 90-1.

218

Notes to pages 69-83

The quotation feminizes Lewis, since the words are originally Juliet's (Romeo and Juliet 2.2.114). Lewis included the ballad in Romantic Tales (1808). 12 Lewis to Lady Holland, 17 July 1809, Barnes. Add. MS 51,641 ff. 136-8. The (mis) quotation is from Hamlet (3.2.106). 13 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 109-13. 14 Eros also figures prominently in Lewis's unpublished anacreontic translations (see part 4 of this chapter). 15 As Gudrun Kauhl points out, 'Rosario' is actually a girl's, not a boy's, name; and it further associates Matilda with the Virgin, who is sometimes addressed as 'Madonna del Rosario,' our Lady of the Rosary ('Myths' 185n6). 16 At the end of the novel, the Devil claims that Matilda is really a demon who has entered the convent in order to tempt Ambrosio. Peter Grudin, who believes the Devil, has pointed out that transsexuality is a conventional characteristic of demons (140-1). In a long discussion of whether demons can beget children, the Malleus Maleficarum concedes that they cannot do so directly, since they do not have living bodies, but argues that they can indirectly, 'by obtaining human semen' as succubi and then 'themselves transferring it' as incubi (Kramer 22): 'For the devil is Succubus to a man, and becomes Incubus to a woman.' (Matilda seems to be a model for the 'female Lucifer' in P.B. Shelley's The Wanderingjew. For this and other parallels between Lewis's novel and Shelley's poem, see Curt R. Zimansky, 'Shelley's Wanderingjew.') I attempt to resolve the vexed question of Matilda's identity in chapter 5. 17 Mario Praz argues that Flaubert used this motif in early versions of Le Tentation de saint-Antoine. 'verbal coincidences ... show that Flaubert had Lewis's novel in mind' (32). 18 Joseph Andriano points out that Ambrosio is later overcome with desire for Antonia when he looks into a (magic) mirror (39). 19 It seems plausible that Hamilton never intended to resolve the tale; but Renouard's edition includes an endnote alleging that Crebillon fils saw (but did not read) the manuscript of a second part in the possession of Hamilton's niece, whom 'un zele peut-etre trop severe' subsequently inspired to burn it (2:398). 20 The Satirist, unwilling to grant this licence, accused Lewis of obscenity (414). When Henry G. Bohn republished Hamilton's/airy Tales in 1849, he felt obliged to warn his Victorian readers that they were 'strongly spiced' (vi). 21 In Hamilton's fragment (in the narrative past but the diegetic future), we have already seen the manly second Facardin fight the lion and string the bow. 22 In a detail reminiscent of the affair of Ambrosio and Rosario/Matilda, the

Notes to pages 83-101

219

fourth Facardin initially falls in love with a portrait of the first - or, to be precise, of her mother, whom she exactly resembles (3:110-11). William Beckford anticipates this motif in 'The Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah,' one of The Episodes ofVathek (39, 48), along with the theme of cross-dressing, the contrast between love and friendship (21), and the ironic invocation of the natural (49). The Episodes were not published until 1912, but there is evidence that some of Beckford's contemporaries knew something about their contents (14-15). 23 Kahn sees an intimate relationship between narrative transvestism and heteroglossia (55), so it is interesting to note that the British Critic accused Lewis of excessive heteroglossia, of mixing Hamilton's '"felicity of expression"' with his own 'gross vulgarity' (251). 24 Except for the two Westminster poems, Lewis's anacreontic translations are undated. In MS 114, the largest single group of them (comprising twentyseven) is preceded by a poem dated 26 August 1800 (p. 229) and followed by one dated 1801 (p. 263). The chronology of MS 114 is not consistent, so this is pretty slender evidence. 25 MS 114 pp. 68-71; Baron-Wilson 2:346-8. 26 Lucifer, who on his first appearance resembles the visitor of Lewis's poem (273-4), and who pretends to promote the erotic designs of Ambrosio, is an Anteros to Theodore's Eros. 5: Horribly Bit by the Rage of Writing 1 Ellis compares Lewis's education at Westminster - which is, after all, attached to an abbey - with Ambrosio's among the Capuchins (146). 2 'Bothwell's Bonny Jane,' one of Lewis's ballads in Tales of Wonder, applies the description to a devil: 'He roll'd his blood-shot eyeballs round' (1:8). 3 Reynolds (1764-1841) survived to become a successful dramatist: Lewis thought that his comedy How to Grow Rich (1793) had 'a mighty pretty title1 (Peck 197). 4 'Register of Marriages,' DL/C/560/008/4, London Metropolitan Archives. 5 Lewis's records are in the Collections Book 1789-1812, Li.b.3. 6 'Epistle to my Eldest Sister.' Oxford, 1791. MS 114 pp. 382-4. Cyrus diverted the Euphrates in order to enter Babylon in 539 BC; Lewis would have encountered the story in Herodotus 1.191. Caesar's attempts to hide his baldness were proverbial; see Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 4.144 and Hobhouse's note. 7 48.E.23 no. 58, National Art Library, London; there are some errors of transcription in Baron-Wilson's publication of the unfinished novel (2:242).

220

Notes to pages 105-16

8 For Lewis's use of the Schauerromane in The Monk, see Conger, Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans; Hushahn, 'Sturm und Drang in Radcliffe and Lewis'; and Levy, LeRoman 'gothique' anglais. 9 In 1797, as a matter of course, he was awarded an MA. 10 KariJ. Winter suggests that he was a spy ('Sexual/Textual Politics of Terror' 100). I have found no evidence to this effect, and employing a garrulous adolescent as a secret agent would surely have been an act of folly - though not one unparalleled in the history of intelligence. 11 Originally, a carmagnole was a workman's jacket, from Carmagnola, Piedmont. Adopted by the Revolutionaries, it became a metonym for them (and the name of a Revolutionary song and dance). 12 Chateaubriand, who met Lewis in London in 1796, thought that he had Tair et les manieres d'un Francais' (1:411). Mario Praz argues that Velleda, in Les Martyrs, is based, in part, on Lewis's Matilda (31-2). 13 Tric-trac is an early version of backgammon; 'work' refers to recreational sewing, not to work. 14 According to Fiona Robertson, 'Marie Antoinette is the Gothic heroine of post-revolutionary narrative' (74). 15 For further discussion of the dialogue between Radcliffe and Lewis, see Conger, 'Sensibility Restored'; Fitzgerald, 'Gothic Properties'; Reno, Gothic Visions; Winter, 'Sexual/Textual Politics of Terror.' 16 In France, The Monk was immediately recognized as a response to the Revolution: one of the first translations (1797) was entitled LeJacobin espagnol (Baldensperger 201 n 1). 17 In her review of The Italian, Wollstonecraft complained about the explained supernatural: 'we are led, again and again, round the same magic circle' (Works 7:485) 18 This incident, together with the episode of the Bleeding Nun and the crossdressing of Matilda, may have helped to inspire the episode of the Black Friar in Don Juan 16. 19 As Maurice Levy points out, the conjuration scenes in The Monk owe much to those in the Schauerromane, with the significant difference that those in the Schauerromane always turn out to be elaborate frauds, whereas those in The Monk are real (Roman 'gothique'343-6). Lewis, then, answers the Schauerromane much as he answers Radcliffe. 20 This would, in fact, have given Lewis's novel the same interest as Byron's drama Heaven and Earth. 21 Grudin makes fun of Peter Brooks for 'tak[ing] her at her word' (144); he does not seem to realize that he himself extends the same favour to the character he calls The Father of Lies' (141).

Notes to pages 119-29

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22 Voller warns that the unexplained supernatural is not always associated with radical politics, any more than the explained supernatural is always associated with conservative politics (23, 25, 48-9). Wieland, which Voller discusses along with The Monk as an example of the 'radical supernatural sublime' (74-87), is really an example of the explained supernatural; and Caleb Williams, surely the pre-eminent example of the radical Gothic, makes only metaphorical use of the supernatural. Nevertheless, Lewis's contemporaries, to judge from the reviews, do seem to have read the two Gothic modes as politically opposed. For more recent arguments that the explained (or conservative) supernatural is predominantly feminine, and the unexplained (or radical) supernatural predominantly masculine, see Voller 40-1; Williams, Art of Darkness; Winter, 'Sexual/Textual Politics of Terror': this debate does a good deal to complicate the question of the politics of the two modes. Rictor Norton, who advances some telling evidence that Radcliffe's politics were more radical than critics like me have assumed (108-10, 136, 166), also offers a radical reading of the circular plot, as ldemonstrat[ing] the circularity of women's real lives trapped in domestic space' (x). 23 Lorenzo's dream is based, as Lewis pointed out in a note to the fourth edition, on Lovelace's dream about Clarissa (Richardson 1218; letter 417 [22 August]). The event it foretells, the rape and murder of Antonia, is based, as Howells has pointed out (193nll), on Clarissa's corresponding dream about Lovelace (Richardson 342-3; letter 84 [7 April]). Not only is Lewis's text densely allusive, its allusions are carefully patterned. 24 The subplot is further structured, as Nancy Caplan Mellerski has shown, by the way the story of Agnes 'duplicate [s] inversely the history of the Bleeding Nun' (44). 25 For an extended discussion of 'the correspondence between the viewer's experience of the Gothic cathedral and the reader's experience of fiction' like The Monk, see Hennelly, "Tutting My Eye to the Keyhole,"' especially 289-91. 26 Antonia's name was presumably suggested by that of Marie Antoinette. 27 The decomposition of the baby may be modelled on what can only be called the living decomposition of Falkland, in Caleb Williams (325-6, 369); the fate of the sympathetic characters may be modelled on Caleb's regression to a living death (Graham 121). 6: An Inundation of Ghosts 1 The novel was printed, and some copies were released, in 1795 (Anderson, Introduction xxii-xxiii); according to Dorothy Blakey, novels were often

222

2 3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10

Notes to pages 129-35

post-dated so that they could be advertised as new for an additional year (29). The complicated publication history is clearly explained by William B. Todd. The attribution of the review to Wollstonecraft is uncertain (see her Works 7:14-18). Despite his disapproval, Coleridge was not above drawing on TheMonkespecially the portrayal of the Wandering Jew, which, he thought, 'display [ed] great vigour of fancy' (194) - in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (Lowes 245, 252-3, 258-9, 279, 545n48). For the (less likely) possibility that he also drew on the novel in 'Christabel,' see Grudin 143, Nethercot 194, 194-6nl7, 198-9. The parallel between Paine and Lewis was first drawn by Mathias (Todd 14). It was still current in 1808, when, in a review of Tales of Wonder, the Antijacobin Review said of The Monk, 'we hardly know of any work of so licentious a complexion, and of so mischievous a tendency, except the political crudities of the detestable Citizen PAINE' (322). This apparatus is vividly illustrated in the Home Office Papers, HO 42/3845, Public Record Office, London. As Parreaux explains, a 'rule nisi' was an instruction to show cause: that is, Lewis would have been instructed to show cause why an injunction should not be passed restraining the sale of The Monk (113). I found no record either of a criminal prosecution or of a civil suit in the Public Record Office, London. The copy Lewis expurgated is now in the British Library (C.28.b.4—6). The revisions are listed in Peck's edition (423-45). Mrs Lord, the keeper of a circulating library in Dublin, allegedly devised a simpler solution. When reprimanded for stocking The Monk, she admitted that it was 'A shocking bad book to be sure, sir; but I have carefully looked through every copy, and underscored all the naughty passages, and cautioned my young ladies what they are to skip without reading it' (Railo 347nl05) - thus saving, as Byron would say, the trouble of an index (Don Juan 1.44). In fact, as Todd shows (16-20), these were copies of the third edition, doctored to look like the first. It was followed by a 'Grand Ballet' by Charles Louis Didelot (Haymarket, 26 March 1801), in which (thanks to a good fairy) Alonzo is spared, Imogine [sic] is faithful, and the lovers are reunited; a 'Legendary Romantic MeloDrama' by Henry M. Milner (1852), in which Alonzo betrays and murders Imogine, her spectre interrupts his wedding, and he commits suicide at her tomb; a 'Tragical, Comical, Demoniacal, and whatever-you-like-to-call-it Burlesque' by Francis Cowley Burnand (ADC, Cambridge, 1863); 'An Hysterical

Notes to pages 135-9

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Drama' by Samuel M. Harrison (not performed, 1876); and a choral ballad, with music by Caroline Holland (1894). 11 It was followed by plays (including a 'Juvenile Drama') in 1809 and 1825. They adopt Farley's changes to the plot. The Bleeding Nun, and the fate of Agnes, haunt the pages of Bronte's Villette (e.g., 172, 204, 325, 381-2, 457-8, 501-2); and La Nonne sanglante (1854) was Gounod's third opera (libretto by Eugene Scribe and Germain Delavigne); one aria from it ('Le Calme'), sung by Isabelle Vernet, is available on Charles Gounod (1818-1893): Melodies (Ligia Digital, 1993). 12 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 30-1; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 279. Guthke's transcriptions contain a number of minor errors, which I have silently corrected. 13 The words in quotation marks are from the speech by Sir David Downright that closes the play (45). 14 Before its premiere, Boaden recalled, 'The Drury Lane management was ... at its wits end' (Memoirs 2:206). Despite his contempt for The Castle Spectre, Sheridan was willing to learn from it. Pizarro (1799), his own adaptation of Die Spanier in Peru, ends with a fight between Pizarro and Alonzo, who has defected to the Peruvians. Elvira distracts Pizarro by appearing in the conventual robes she had worn before he seduced her, and Alonzo kills him, much as the apparition of the Castle Spectre distracts Osmond, allowing Angela to stab him. 15 Fredric S. Schwarzbach argues that Dickens had probably seen the play (he mentioned it in two speeches) and lists a number of parallels between it and Dickens's novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities. 16 The Neapolitan Niccolo Jommelli (1714-74) composed mostly operas and religious music, but he did write a ciacona in E-flat. Kelly was notorious for his borrowings; he was also in the wine business, and Sheridan called him a 'composer of wines and importer of music' (New Grove 9:855). 17 On the opening night, the appearance of the Spectre was even accompanied by 'wild-fire,' but according to the Morning Chronicled 'offended the nostrils of the audience,' so the effect was not repeated. 18 Again, Coleridge may be protesting too much: for the possibility that he may have drawn on The Castle Spectre for 'Christabel,' see Nethercot 145-6, 181n52. 19 Judith Pascoe (not to mention Jane Austen) has discussed the importance of amateur theatricals in the often vacuous life of the British upper classes at this time (12). 20 Lord John Campbell (1777-1847) succeeded his brother to become the seventh Duke of Argyll.

224

Notes to pages 140-5

21 'EPILOGUE To Barbarossa Spoken at Inveraray. By Lady Charlotte Campbell,' MS 114, National Library of Jamaica, pp. 128-31. 22 Add. MS 51,641 f. 60. On one of his trips to Inveraray, according to BaronWilson (1:186-8), Lewis and Campbell, out on a walk, met an insane young woman, who inspired Lewis to write his poem 'Crazy Jane,' which he included in his 1812 Poems (24-5). Ole Munch-Pedersen has established the astonishing popularity of this poem: it was republished in broadsides and song chapbooks for about seventy-five years; it inspired two sequels ('The Death of Crazy Jane' and 'The Ghost of Crazy Jane'), a ballet, a melodrama by Charles A. Somerset, and a fashion in hats. A chapbook by Sarah Wilkinson, purporting to give the facts behind the poem, went through at least ten editions. The poem seems to have been especially popular in Ireland; Munch-Pedersen considers it possible that Yeats drew on this tradition for his cycle of Crazy Jane poems, but the evidence is inconclusive. 23 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 47-8; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 275-6. 24 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 49-50; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 277. The allusion to Johnson (London 151) suggests that the author of The Love of Gain was studying other imitations of Juvenal. 25 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 49-50; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 278. 26 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 30-1; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 279. 27 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, f. 37; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachx wirkung' 279-80. 28 Add. MS 47,577 f. 87. 29 Tyburn (near the modern Marble Arch) was the site of the Middlesex Gallows. 30 He was not, however, given a peerage. Lewis may be conflating him with Clive. 31 See D.L. Macdonald, Juvenal in the 1790s: The Imitation and the Plot of History.' 32 Add. MS 47,577 ff. 87b-88a. Lewis included Fox's translation when he published the poem in 1812 (Poems 13-18). 33 Add. MS 47,577 f. 88b. 34 Add. MS 47,577 f. 90. 35 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 30-1; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 278-9. 36 Partington 218; MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 34-5. 37 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 34-5; Scott, Partington 218.

Notes to pages 146-52

225

38 Unidentified review, Theatre History Museum, London. 39 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 39-40; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 281. 40 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 51-2; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 281. 41 Kelly (1790-1882), the niece of the composer, made something of a specialty of reviving Jordan's roles. 42 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 39-40; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 280. 'Stewart's Philosophy' was presumably either Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (vol. 1, 1792) or Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793). 43 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 39-40; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 280. Lewis also found the time to do a favour for another young friend, writing a letter of introduction for Augustus John Foster (17801848), who was on his way to Weimar and wanted to meet Goethe (Scott, Some English Correspondents 1-5). 44 George Lamb (1784-1834) later wrote some prologues of his own, and a comic opera, Whistle for It, which was produced at Covent Garden in 1807. 45 'Prologue to "the Metamorphoses," a Farce written by The Hon: George Lamb, and spoken at Brocket Hall on Saturday, March 30, 1799,' MS 114, National Library of Jamaica, pp. 143-7. 46 Lewis did, however, belong to a theatrical club, the Catamarans, whose other members included George Colman the Younger, Theodore Hook, John Philip and Charles Kemble, Thomas Morton (the creator of Mrs Grundy), and Tom Sheridan. It met in the Wrekin Tavern, in Broad Court, near Drury Lane (Sherson 282). 47 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 56-7; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 282; Peck 121. 48 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 39-40; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 280. 49 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 51-2; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 281-2. 50 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, f. 68; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 284; cf. Scott, Letters 1:96, 12:158. 51 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 51-2; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 281. 52 Baron-Wilson describes Leyden as having been 'fascinated' by Lewis's sister Sophia. He entered the colonial service and died in Java (1:31-8). 53 MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 56-7; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 282.

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Notes to pages 152-3

54 These elemental ballads cast a modest literary/theatrical shadow. In June 1801, John C. Cross (d. 1810) produced a 'grand ballet of action' based on 'The Fire-King'; in 1806, he followed it with a 'splendid melo-dramatic tale of enchantment' based in part on 'The Cloud-King.' The Island Spectres (1840), by 'Rossendale' (Albany Rossendale Lloyd), is, in part, a transgendering of 'The Water-King' (and in part, as its title suggests, of 'The Isle of Devils'), in which male castaways are lured to death (or near it) by water-spirits (one disguised as a woman and one as a sailor). Lavinia Jones's opera The Cloud King with his Cloud Castle (1864) follows Lewis's ballad closely, but so far as I know, it was never performed. 55 Add. MS 51,641 f. 80. 56 Lewis had taken so long to prepare his collection that an anonymous parody, Tales of Terror, could appear almost simultaneously (and from the same publisher); most reviewers preferred it to the original. It is an index of how 'The Gothic always hovers on the edge of self-parody' (Carnochan and Donaldson 357; cf. Weiskel 20) that this volume of parodies soon became attributed to Lewis himself. When P.B. Shelley and his sister Elizabeth plagiarized 'The Black Canon of Elmham; or, Saint Edmond's Eve' in their collaborative volume Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810), they were evidently under the impression that they were plagiarizing Lewis himself, not a parody. When their publisher, Stockdale, noticed the plagiarism, Shelley blamed it on Elizabeth and had the remaining copies of the book destroyed (Shelley, Works 8:14n; Zimansky,' Zastrozzi and The Bravo of Venice1 15n). For the bibliographic confusion created by Scott's Apology for Tales of Terror, Lewis's Tales of Wonder, and the anonymous Tales of Terror, see Bishop; Guthke, 'Some Bibliographical Errors'; and Peck, 'On the Date.' In 1812, James and Horace Smith included 'Fire and Ale. By M.G.L.' in Rejected Addresses, their famous volume of parodies (68-72). In their version of Lewis's elemental project, the fire-king is vanquished by the ale-king; perhaps they had heard something of the circumstances under which Scott had written his ballad. 57 This plunder is punished in More Wonders! An Heroic Epistle, Addressed to M.G. Lewis, Esq. (1801) by 'Mauritius Moonshine' (probably Thomas Dermody [1775-1802]: see Peck 125, 312n28). Moonshine dreams that he is in his study admiring Lewis's book: Before my sight, in pompous garment gay, Fresh from the Press, thy ' Tales of Wonder lay, And much I gloated, with lascivious eyes, On its white form, gilt edge, and comely size: When, sudden, from the lab'ring shelves around,

Notes to pages 153-61

227

I heard, at first, a small, still, solemn sound, That louder wax'd anon: - and, now, I view'd Descending from their cells, the motley brood, An animated host of various hue; Pale yellow, chestnut brown, caerulean blue, And glowing red, as if inflam'd by rage; All cover'd with the rev'rend dust of age! Fierce they approach'd, and (oh! extremest grief,) Each from the stranger-volume tore a leaf, Indignant tore; and while my anxious mind Quick doubts involv'd, scarce 'left a wreck behind;' Then, to their sev'ral seats, alertly fled, Mutt'ring low curses on thy fated head. Curious to know, what lucubration rare Those vellum-vested knaves would deign to spare, Thy Tome, all tatter'd as it was, I took: Good Heav'n! how much unlike the former book! For they had pick'd the meat, but spurn'd the bone, And, only left thee, S[outhe]yys, and - Thy Own. (242-65) 58 Bertrand Evans argues that this vision may have helped to inspire the visionary dramas of Byron and P.B. Shelley (148-9). 59 'To the Hon: Charles. W. S ,' MS 114, National Library of Jamaica, pp. 268-9. 60 Add. MS 51,641 f. 74. Southey had, however, resisted Lewis's desire to include 'The Old Woman of Berkeley' (New Letters 1:177). Lewis had complained to Scott about the resulting 'Imbroglio' (MS 3874, National Library of Scotland, ff. 39-40; Guthke, 'Die erste Nachwirkung' 280). Perhaps there were still ill feelings. 61 MS 114, National Library of Jamaica, p. 281; Poemsg82-3. 62 The critic is alluding to Memoirs of... Martinus Scriblerus 140; chap. 12. 63 Add. MS 51,641 f. 78. 64 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 160-1. 65 In addition to making this speech, Lewis had served on four parliamentary committees, in 1796-7 (Peck 43-4, 298n2; Thorne 4:433). 66 MS 114, National Library of Jamaica, pp. 340-1. 67 Add. MS 45,548 ff. 104-5. 68 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 81-2. 69 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 81-2. 70 Add. MS 51,641 f. 83. 71 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 84-5.

228

Notes to pages 161-70

72 Add. MS 51,64 Iff. 81-2. 73 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 88-9. 74 Add. MS 51,64 I f f . 90-1. 75 In ' Zastrozzi and The Bravo of Venice,' Curt R. Zimansky shows how P.B. Shelley drew on Lewis's work for the Venetian setting, and some of the plot, of his own first novel. 76 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 90-1. 77 Zschokke himself had turned his novel Abdllino, Lewis's source, into a tragedy in 1795. 78 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 96-7. 79 Add. MS 51,641 f. 98. 80 Add. MS 51,641 f. 104. 81 Add. MS 51,641 f. 104. 82 His description of it as 'new' seems to contradict Peck's otherwise plausible guess that he had translated it some time in the 1790s (135), but perhaps he only meant that it was newly published. 83 William Lane's Minerva Press was England's pre-eminent publisher of Gothic fiction. Most of its authors were women (Blakey 48); they included Lewis's beneficiary Isabella Kelly (later Hedgeland). 84 The Poetical Registers confidence that Adelgitha would 'certainly be numbered among the stock plays of the British theatre' was misplaced, but it held the stage for over a decade. Shortly after the original production, the young William Macready earned 'golden opinions' as Lothair, and in 1818 he triumphed as the villain Michael Ducas; he considered the role 'a great step in public opinion' (Reminiscences 130-1). 85 Theatre Museum, London. 86 An incomplete and inaccurate piracy was published in 1811. 87 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 106-7. 88 MS 3,876 ff. 105-6, National Library of Scotland; Guthke, 'Some Unpublished Letters' 218.1 have silently corrected Guthke's text. 89 Add. MS 51,641 f. 108. Thomas Percy (1729-1811) published the Reliquesin 1765; Lewis included several ballads from it in Tales of Wonder. 90 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 115-16. 91 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 122-4. Lewis was also capable, in a more unbuttoned mood, of reporting to Lady Holland: 'I was so ill, that I could bear it no longer, and poured wine down my throat in such desperate profusion, that I never was so drunk in my life; and when the rest of the party went to the Ball, I was obliged to go to bed' (31 August 1808, Add. MS 51,641 ff. 125-6). It was a hard-drinking age. 92 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 125-6.

Notes to pages 170-8

229

93 Siddons (1783-1844) was the daughter of Charles Murray as well as the daughter-in-law of Sarah Siddons. 94 There had been a royal menagerie at the Tower of London since the thirteenth century; by Lewis's time, it was open to the public. Hector and Miss Fanny were evidently its current star attractions (the General Evening Posd[13 December 1808: 2] andgThe Times [2 December 1808: 3] both mentioned the joke about the lions; the Monthly Mirror compared the actors, instead, to 'the royal Bengal tyger, and his mate' [375]). 95 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 131-2. 96 'On Lord Erskine's telling Lady Anne Smith, that Wives were "like Tin Cannisters,"' MS 114 p. 321; see also 'To Lord Erskine,' p. 321; 'Fidelio to the Rc Hon: Lady A. Smith Being a consolatory Epistle from one of his Majesty's four-footed and wra-cannistered Subjects,' pp. 322-4; and Baron-Wilson 2:2-3. 97 Lewis to Lady Holland, 24 February 1809, Add. MS 51,641 ff. 133-5. 98 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 133-5. General Sir Ralph Abercromby was killed at the battle of Alexandria in 1801; Moore was one of his disciples. Nelson was killed at Trafalgar in 1805. 99 'The Burial of Sir John Moore, after Corunna' (1817), by Charles Wolfe (1791-1823), recuperated the incident for imperial glory so effectively that I learned it at a primary school in Uganda, a hundred and fifty years later. 100 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 133-5. 101 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 136-8. 102 In 1933, Mrs Percy D. Leake, then the occupant of Lewis's apartment, told Peck a 'scarcely credible' rumour that Lewis had murdered an African servant and hidden his body in the coal bin (67). 103 Betty apparently worked for Lewis until 1815, when she married; characteristically, Lewis noted that her marriage was unhappy (Baron-Wilson 2:123-4). 104 'The Great Mahomet' is an allusion to the prince's polygamous propensities. 105 The Morning Chronicle was particularly severe (3 May 1811:3). 106 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 141-2. Between 1809 and 1811, two troughs were poisoned at Newmarket. In the first case, two horses were killed, others were 'damaged,' and 'the stable cat ran about like a maniac'; in the second, four horses were killed. Daniel Dawson was hanged for the second crime on 8 August 1812 (Longrigg 116). 107 Theatre Museum, London. 108 The equestrian mania was still fondly remembered in 1839, to judge from the proud boast of Mr Crummies, in Nicholas Nickleby: T am in the theatrical

230

Notes to pages 178-87

profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy; and my chaise-pony goes on in Timour the Tartar' (213). 109 Granville 2:397-8; cf. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 2 A.11Q-12. 110 As Esther Schor has pointed out (85), Burke characterized the Revolutionaries and their supporters as melodramatists (e.g., Reflections, in Writings 8:60); by contrast, his own counter-Revolutionary rhetoric is essentially tragic. 111 Ronald Paulson sees in both plots the ambivalence of a Whig response to the Revolution: both Ambrosio's escape from monastic discipline and the mob's attack on the convent are justifiable revolts that go too far (218). 112 In the preface to Adelmorn, the Outlaw, Lewis had to deny that a rather bland warning against 'laws which exclude mercy' was '"the sentiment of a Jacobin" !!!' (iv, 91). 113 Like Michael Ducas in Adelgitha and the emperor in Rugantino, Timour the Tartar is a caricature of Napoleon, as the General Evening Post (27-30 April 1811:4), the Morning Chronicle (30 April 1811: 2), and the Sun (30 April 1811: 3) all noted approvingly. 7: Converse with the Departed 1 Richard Payne Knight to the Earl of Aberdeen, 28 September [1812], Stonebrook Cottage. Add. MS 43,230 f. 147. 2 Add. MS 51,641 f. 143. 3 In addition to the elemental poems, Byron alludes to 'The Grim White Woman,' by Lewis, 'The Little Grey Man,' by H. Bunbury, and 'The Wild Huntsmen,' Scott's translation of Burger's 'Die Wilde Jager,' all in Tales of Wonder. 4 Byron's comments on The Castle Spectrem English Bards (596, 919-20) and in Hints from Horace (283-8), and his complaint about the use of horses in Timour the Tartar, in lines originally intended for his 'Address, Spoken at the Opening of Drury-lane Theatre' (1812), also reveal a class bias. Byron had evidently also read Lewis's Poems, for in October 1813, he wrote to Lady Melbourne criticizing the last two lines of'Pleasure and Desire' ('DESIRE must still awaken PLEASURE, / And PLEASURE lull DESIRE to sleep' [13]): 'to me the most pleasing moments have generally been - when there is nothing more to be required - in short the subsequent repose without satietywhich Lewis never dreamed of in that poem of his' (Letters 3:151): unfortunately, Byron saw no prospect of attaining this condition with his current object of desire, Lady Frances Webster.

Notes to pages 188-93

231

5 Thomas Erskine was so notoriously vain that he was known as 'Counsellor Ego' (see Pascoe 49-51, 65-6). 6 Tiberius spent the last ten years of his life (42 BC-AD 37) on Capri, where his indulgence in cruel and obscene entertainments was notorious. Cantharides is the dried form of Cantharis vesicatoria, or Spanish fly, thought to be an aphrodisiac. The naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-88), was disabled but not senile at the end of his life: the dotage of a naturalist, like the sour cream of an aphrodisiac, may be a metaphor for unnatural sexuality. 7 Clarissa Harlowe is the heroine of Clarissa (1748-9), by Samuel Richardson. SirJames Mackintosh (1765-1832) was the author of Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), a defence of the French Revolution; later, disillusioned with the Revolution, he became an admirer of Burke. In amoebean (Greek for 'interchanging') verse (e.g., some of the eclogues of Vergil), the lines, couplets, or stanzas are spoken alternatively (and often competitively) by the two speakers. 8 Add. MS 45,548 ff. 136-7. 9 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 146-8. It was widely believed that the dying Amelia's gift of a mourning ring containing a lock of her hair had precipitated George's final madness (DNB 1:352). 10 Blake's reference to Lewis as 'Mother Goos'es Son' is an allusion to The Old Hag in a Red Cloak (1801), a parodic tale of wonder by George Watson Taylor, in which Lewis is revealed to be the illegitimate son of Mother Goose and a German romancer. 11 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 146-8. William Warburton (1698-1779) published an edition of Shakespeare in 1747; it was notorious for unscholarly and gratuitous emendations. Kean's misquotations are from Macbeth 2.1.52-3 and 2.3.112. 12 Add. MS 51,641 ff. 149-50. 13 See D.L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori 83-98. 14 More of Lewis's impromptu ghost stories are recorded in The Murdered Queen, by 'A Lady of Rank' (29-36), and Rogers, Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (164-70). 15 For a discussion of Manfred as a response to the Faust tradition, see D.L. Macdonald, 'Incest, Narcissism and Demonality in Byron's Manfred.' Manfred's frustrated suicide attempts (2.2.135-9) recall those of the Wandering Jew (178-9), and his magical researches (3.4.113-19) recall those of Matilda's guardian, in The Monk. Lewis also influenced M.W. Shelley's ghost story: Osmond's nightmare, in The Castle Spectre (66-7), clearly inspired that of Victor Frankenstein (86), and H.L. Malchow thinks that the vengefulness of Hassan may have suggested that of the monster (17).

232

Notes to pages 193-201

16 Maria Louisa or Marie-Louise (1791-1847) was the daughter of Francis I of Austria; Napoleon had married her in 1810, after Josephine had failed to provide him with an heir. The Medici Venus was then the most highly regarded classical statue; Napoleon had taken it to Paris in 1803, and it had just been returned. 17 As Terry points out (xxiii-xxiv), there is no hard evidence that Lewis's reforms were successful or even that, in his absence, they were implemented. 8: The Isle of Devils 1 The rape of Irza, by a demon, in a cave, is reminiscent of the rape of Antonia, by the demon-assisted Ambrosio, in the catacombs, at the climax of The Monk, but there is a significant difference in presentation. The rape scene in the novel is focalized largely through the rapist and structured according to the logic of pornography. (Paul Lewis argues that Lewis's pornography is subordinated to his didactic purpose: by 'draw[ing] us into the crime,' it forces us to admit our own frailty [479]: this might even be true of 'us' straight men.) Almost the whole of the poem, however, is focalized through the victim, and since she is unconscious when the demon rapes her, the act is not represented at all. 2 The most important form of traveller's allegory, and perhaps the most common, is temporalization: the journey in space is interpreted as a journey (back) in time; the foreign is interpreted as primitive. Lewis's allegory is also based on temporal concepts, but by definition they refer to the future - to an undiscovered country- not to the past: Lewis's temporalizing allegory is the opposite of the usual one. 3 Lewis seems to be thinking of Atargatis, the subject of The Syrian Goddess, a work attributed to Lucian. Fish were sacred to her, and she was worshipped in Phoenicia, under the name Derceto, in the form of a woman with the tail of a fish (Lucian 21-3). This vague reference is one example of how Lewis's account of the West Indies is informed by Orientalism. Knox-Shaw draws a parallel between Lewis's and Beckford's Orientalist treatments of Jamaica (290-1). 4 The Orientalist belief that Islam denied that women had souls was widespread enough in Europe to be proverbial; so was the bizarre rumour that Mohammed's body had been encased in an iron coffin and suspended in mid-air by means of powerful magnets fixed to the roof of the great mosque in Mecca (evidently a post-mortem pseudo-miracle illustrating the belief that Mohammed was an imposter [Said 65-6, 72]): Wollstonecraft, for example, complained the double standard left women 'suspended ... according to the

Notes to pages 201-9

233

vulgar tale of Mahomet's coffin; they have neither the unerring instinct of brutes, nor are allowed to fix the eye of reason on a perfect model' (Vindication 144). 5 Abadonna is a repentant devil in the second canto of DerMessias; when Satan announces his plan to kill the Messiah, Abadonna objects: 'Yes, SATAN, I will speak, that the heavy judgments of the ETERNAL may more lightly fall on me than on thee' (Klopstock 1:86). 6 Macdonald, Tre-Romantic and Romantic Abolitionism' 175-6. 7 For a discussion of pseudo-scientific racism in nineteenth-century science fiction, see Brantlinger 233-5 and Butler xxx, xxxiv-xli. 8 Olaudah Equiano quotes from Paradise Lost four times in his autobiography; all four quotations serve to identify slaves (and Equiano in particular) with Milton's devils. There is some evidence that Equiano, distressingly but unsurprisingly, had internalized the racism of his masters; but, since the quotations emphasize the sufferings of the devils, and their continued resistance, it is possible that this devout Anglican may have been, like Blake's Milton, of the devil's party without knowing it. See The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African. Written by Himself 61, 69, 77, 81; Milton, Paradise Lost 1.175, 1.65-8, 2.616-18, 2.332-40. 9 When Lewis returned to England, he was amused to hear a rumour that 'the insurrection of 1816 was produced by [his] visit to Jamaica' and especially by his modest reforms (Wilberforce, Correspondence 2:385). 10 The real reason for their propensity to poison seems not to have been their lack of religious beliefs but their retention of the West African belief that misfortunes such as slavery were the result of witchcraft, and that poison was an effective antidote to witchcraft (Craton, Testing27-8, 46). 11 Hegel himself encountered the absolute lord in the form of Asiatic cholera. 12 For a parallel analysis of Beckford, see Knox-Shaw, 'The West Indian Vathek.' For analyses of how the Gothic, in turn, shaped the racial and imperial imagination of the later nineteenth century, see Brantlinger, especially 227-53, and Malchow, especially 5, 38, 231. 13 The quotation is unidentified. 'The Lewis arms were checquy azure and argent, with three quarterings' (Railo 343n84). Lewis's mother would surely have appreciated this airy tomb as much as her son. 14 When I visited the tomb in 1992, it was completely ruinous, and almost completely buried in garbage: understandably enough, the woman who lived next to it did not cherish this relic of her colonial heritage. As I was taking photographs of it, she asked me if I would take it away. 15 Before his second voyage, Lewis offered his journal to John Murray, Byron's

234

Notes to page 209

publisher, for £2000 (Peck 168). Murray, who eventually published the journal, did not then accept it, though when he wrote to Byron in 1818 to inform him of Lewis's death, he described it as 'very curious' and hoped it would not be lost (Smiles 1:395-6).

Bibliographyh

I. Manuscripts 235 1. Manuscript Works of M.G. Lewis 236 2. Letters from M.G. Lewis 248 3. Letters to M.G. Lewis 255 4. Other Letters 256 5. Miscellaneous Documents 258 II. Publications 1. Primary a. Works of M.G. Lewis 262 b. Contemporary Reviews and Notices 264 c. Musical Settings, Adaptations, etc. 269 d. Obituaries 272 e. Other Primary Works 272 2. Secondary 281 3. Bibliographic 295

I. MANUSCRIPTS Note: 'MS 114' is in the National Library of Jamaica, Kingston. Manuscripts labelled 'Add. MS' (Additional Manuscript) are in the British Library, London. (Lewis's letters to Lord and Lady Holland [Add. MS 51,641] have not yet been permanently bound and catalogued; their manuscript number and foliation may change.) Manuscripts labelled 'LA' (Larpent Collection) are in the Huntington Library, San Marino. The 'Letters' sections list all the letters from and to Lewis that I know of, whether or not I know of the whereabouts of MSS.

236

Bibliography 1. Manuscript Works of M.G. Lewis

'Absence - a Song.' MS 114 p. 432. 'Additional Lines to the Epilogue to 'The Castle Spectre". Spoken for Mrs Powell's Benefit, - 1798, By Mrs Powell and MrsJordan.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 165-7. 'Additional Songs in Artaxerxes (Introduced at Mr Braham's Benefit at Drury Lane theatre [)].' MS 114pp. 370-1. 'Address to Youth.' 1800. MS 114 p. 215. Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error. A copy of the 2nd ed. with MS revisions, prologue, and epilogue. 22, 27 April 1807. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1518. Adelmorn, the Outlaw. 17 March 1801. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1319. 'The Adieu.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 p. 36; second stanza (in Lewis's hand), p. 258. The Admiral Guarino. (From the Spanish.).' MS 114 pp. 290-5. 'Advertisement.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 6. 'Advertisement.' Bothwell Castle, 16 November 1804. MS 114 p. 416. 'Alatar. A Spanish Ballad.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 25-9. Alfonso, King of Castile. 19 November 1801. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1337. 'Anacreon - Ode 4.' MS 114 p. 232. 'Anacreon - Ode 5.' MS 114 p. 233. 'Anacreon - Ode 6.' MS 114 p. 234. 'Anacreon - Ode 7.' MS 114 p. 235. 'Anacreon - Ode 8.' MS 114 p. 236. 'Anacreon - Ode 9.' MS 114 pp. 237-8. 'Anacreon - Ode 10.' MS 114 p. 239. 'Anacreon - Ode 11.' MS 114 p. 240. 'Anacreon - Ode 12.' MS 114 p. 241. 'Anacreon - Ode 14.' MS 114 p. 242. 'Anacreon -Ode 15.' MS 114 p. 243. 'Anacreon - Ode 16.' MS 114 p. 244. 'Anacreon - Ode 17.' MS 114 p. 245. 'Anacreon - Ode 18.' MS 114 p. 246. 'Anacreon - Ode 19.' MS 114 p. 247. 'Anacreon - Ode 20.' MS 114 p. 248. 'Anacreon - Ode 28.' MS 114 pp. 249-50. 'Anacreon - Ode 31.' MS 114 p. 251.

Bibliography

237

'Anacreon - Ode 32.' MS 114 p. 252. 'Anacreon - Ode 34.' MS 114 p. 253. 'Anacreon - Ode 38.' MS 114 p. 254. 'Anacreon - Ode 40.' MS 114 p. 255. 'Anacreon - Ode 42.' MS 114 p. 256. 'Anacreon - Ode 46.' MS 114 p. 257. 'Anacreon - Ode 48.' MS 114 p. 258. 'Anacreon - Ode 50.' MS 114 p. 259. 'Anacreon - Ode 55.' MS 114 p. 260. 'And Oh Thou Wretch! whom hopeless woes oppress ...' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1783-1805. Ace. 1128/ 188. London Metropolitan Archives. 'Answer to Mr C 's lines on a Lady's Feathers, which concluded with - "Oh! severe mishap! / I neer can be a feather in your Cap!"' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 204. 'The Apology.' bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. The Assignation.' MS 114 p. 298. 'Aurelia.' MS 114 pp. 365-6. The Banks of the Shannon, a Ballad.' MS 114 p. 288. The Battle of Alporchones. a Spanish Ballad.' MS 114 pp. 398-402. 'Bertrand and Mary-Belle. Partly from a German Fragment.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 133-40. 'Bill Jones, a Tale of Wonder.' [July 1808]. Add. MS 51,641 ff. 118-21. The Blind Lover.' MS 114 pp. 286-7. The bonny Boy.' Undated copy (not in Lewis's hand) in a MS book of poems. MS 8,111 pp. 15-17. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. 'Bouts rimes (Filled up at Lady Douglas's request).' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 90. 'Caprice.'MS 114 p. 381. The Captive.' bMS Eng 1260 (44). Houghton Library, Harvard. The Captive, lines intended to be spoken in. 22 March 1803 [?]. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1374. The Castle Spectre. 25 November 1797. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1187. 'A Caution.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 51. 'Charades.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 p. 155. 'Charlotte to Olivia.' [29 November 1807], Inveraray Castle. Add. MS 51,641 f. 109. 'Chloe.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 60.

238

Bibliography

'A Christmas Carol.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'The Clerical Musician. To the Tune of "The De'il came fiddling through the Town."' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 158-60. 'Come on my Knee Love, take thy seat...' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1811-12. Ace. 1128/191. London Metropolitan Archives. The Consoler.' MS 114 pp. 300-3. The Cossack. (From the Ukrainian[)].' MS 114 pp. 337-8. 'CrazyJane[.] Air- "Que ne suis-je la fougere."' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 16-17. 'Crazy Jane.' Undated copy (not in Lewis's hand) in a MS book of poems. MS 10,367 pp. 1-3. National Library of Scotland. 'Danae. From a Fragment of Simonides.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114pp. 40-2. 'Danae: From the Greek of Simonides.' Undated copy (not in Lewis's hand). Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 'Delia to Edmund [Answer]. Written at a Lady's desire in answer to the following Stanzas by P. Pindar.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114pp. 117-20. The Demon of the Woods; or, The Clock Has Struck. [1807?]. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1534. The Disabled Seaman.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 14-15. The Domestic Tyrant. 27 April 1809. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1575. The Dying Author - from Peron.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 201. The Dying Bride — a Ballad. (Altered, from the German.).' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 174-8. The Effusions of Sensibility or Letters from Lady Honorina Harrow-heart to Miss Sophonisba Simper - a pathetic Novel in the Modern Taste. Being the first literary Attempt of a young Lady of tender feelings. Fragment. 48.E.23 no. 58. Forster Bequest. National Art Library, London, England. 'Elegy, On the approaching departure of a Friend.' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 85-9. 'Elegy Written on visiting a Royal Mausoleum.' 1799, Holland House. Copy (not in Lewis's hand). Add. MS 51,641 ff. 67-71. The English Kings. From Sl Evremond.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114p. 61.

Bibliography

239

'Envoi (written at Lady Dunmore's request, and sent by her with a CottageHouse to Lady Douglas's Spaniel, Tiney).' MS 114 p. 330. 'Epigram. From the French of Peron.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 125. 'EPILOGUE To Barbarossa Spoken at Inveraray. By Lady Charlotte Campbell.' 1797. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 128-31. 'Epilogue to 'John Bull, or an Englishman's Fire-side" - Spoken by Mrs H. Johnston at her last Benefit at Drury Lane Theatre.' MS 114 pp. 367-9. 'EPILOGUE To the East Indian, Spoken by Mrs Jordan.' 1799. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 187-9. 'EPILOGUE To "the Stranger," Spoken by Mr Suett, as a Gipsy.' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 151-3. 'EPILOGUE To Knave or not. Written by M.G. Lewis Esq. M.P. Spoken by Mrs. Jordan.' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections, notes, and date. MS 114 pp. 121-4. 'Epistle to my Eldest Sister.' Oxford, 1791. MS 114 pp. 382-4. 'Epitaph on a Dog.' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 200. 'Epitaph - on an old and faithful Servant.' MS 114 p. 407. 'Epitaph on Julia, (a Dog belonging to H.R.H. the Duchess of York, and placed upon her Grave near the Grotto at Oatlands).' MS 114 p. 349. 'Epitaph on Tiney (Inscribed upon her grave-stone in the Garden at Bothwell Castle).'MS 114 p. 331. 'Epitaph to the Memory of Jane Burdett (in Bristol Cathedral).' MS 114 p. 393. 'The Exile.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'The Expedition against Jaen. A Spanish Ballad.' MS 114 pp. 403-4. 'Familiar Epistle from Miss H to Mrs H .' 1798. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 190-9. 'Fanny Bayly to her Mother.' MS 114 p. 318. 'The Fate of Kings. - an Elegy, (written on visiting a royal Mausoleum.).' MS 114 pp. 270-8. 'The Fate of Kings - An Elegy (written on visiting a Royal Mausoleum).' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'The Fate of Sovereigns, an Elegy Written on visiting a royal Mausoleum.' [1799]. Add. MS 51,641 ff. 62-6. The Felon.' 1800. MS 114pp. 220-1. 'The Felon.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives.

240

Bibliography

Tidelio to the Rc Hon: Lady A. Smith Being a consolatory Epistle from one of his Majesty's four-footed and wn-cannistered Subjects.' Oatlands, 27 December [1808]. MS 114 pp. 322-4. Tidelio to the Right. Hon: Lady Anne Smith (Being a consolatory Epistle from one of His Majesty's ww-cannistered and four-footed Subjects.).' December 1808. Incomplete fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). 48.E.23 No. 43. Forster Bequest. National Art Library. 'The Flower of Paddington.' MS 114 pp. 376-7. 'The following impromptu was written at Oatlands in the winter of 1808, on a late Lord Chancellor's expressions respecting the married State.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'France and England in 1793.' MS 114 pp. 385-7. 'From Metastasio.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 141. 'From Metastasio.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 154. 'From Racine's Bazazet; Act 2d.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 142. 'The German Maiden's Song. (Translated literally from Klopstock).' MS 114 pp. 391-2. 'God's Revenge against Joking or Miss Bayly's Tragedy.' MS 114 pp. 319-20. '"God's Revenge against Joking" or Miss Bayly's Tragedy!' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'Granada's Beauty, a Spanish Ballad.' MS 114 pp. 405-7. 'The Grim White Woman A Romance.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 431-40. The Harper's Daughter. 8 April 1803. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1377. 'An Heroic Epistle from Miss Charlotte Clavering to Lady Kinnaird.' Inveraray Castle. MS 114pp. 378-9. 'Heroic Epistle from Lucretia, Queen of the Castle to the Princess Micomicona. written at Errol, 1797.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114pp. 161-4. 'The Highland Boy. an anecdote.' Inveraray, 30 August 1802. MS 114 pp. 340-1. 'A Hint to Coquettes.' MS 114 p. 388. 'Hope and Fear.' MS 114 p. 297. 'The Horse-Gaurds Penelope.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 34-5. 'The Husband's Return.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 76. 'I am not mad! a Scene in a private Mad-house.' MS 114 pp. 354-6.

Bibliographhgdgdgdfgdfgdfgdfgdfgdfgdfg241 'I love, but love in vain - A hopeless Flame ...' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'Imitation of Anacreon. Ode 3rd.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's note 'Written at Westminster.' MS 114 pp. 68-71. The Inconstant's Apology.' MS 114 pp. 350-1. 'Inscription for the Statue of Love from Voltaire.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 156. 'Jack's Complaint.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 19-20. 'Jeannie - a Scotch Ballad.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114pp. 169-70. 'Jenny's slip of the Tongue.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 49. 'Julia.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 126. 'Juli-a and Gili-o, or the Preliminary Glances - a favourite Duett, as performed on Saturday April the 15th 1809, at the Opera-House before a brilliant and crouded audience.' MS 114 p. 375. 'King Ingeborg's Twelve Brethren from the Danish.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 202-3. 'Know, all at Bothwell, that it true is ...' Verses dated 16 November [no year]. Add. MS 33,964 f. 273. 'The Ladder of Love, addrest to Lady Anne H.' Inveraray Castle, 7 August 1802. MS 114 pp. 333-6. 'Lamia from the French of the Marquis de la Fare.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 157. 'Lines, given to my Sister with a ruby set round with brilliants.' Undated. Add. MS 51,641 f. 159. 'Lines, sent to H.R.H. the Duchess of York with a Dog, called Julia.' 27 December 1804. MS 114 pp. 425-9. Another copy: bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'Lines to a Lady, written abroad, (in answer to a note addressed to me by the name of "the Wandering Jew.").' 1793. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114pp. 43-4. 'Lines written abroad, in answer to a Note addressed Aujuif Errant.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), dated by Lewis 1793. MS 114 pp. 83-4. 'Lines written on a Journey.' 1795. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 55-9. 'Lines Written on Returning from the Funeral of The Right Honble C.J. Fox.' 10 October 1806. Add. MS 51,641 ff. 100-3. 'Lines, written on returning from the Funeral of the Rl. Hon: C.J. Fox, Friday. Oct: 10. 1806 Addrest to Lord Holland.' MS 114 pp. 304-9.

242

Bibliography

'Lines (written under a Butterfly which was painted on a Screen.).' 1796. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 5. 'Literal Translation - from Virgil.' MS 114 p. 261. 'Lord Byron.' 13 August 1824. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Misattributed to Lewis, who died in 1818. 'Lord L' s address to his Finubles [?] (being an humble Companion to "Bruce's address to his Soldiers").' MS 114 pp. 389-90. 'The Lord of Falkenstein - A Ballad, altered from the German.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 206-10. 'The Loss of Alhama From the Spanish.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 30-3. 'Love and his Enemy. (Imitated from Fontenelle.).' MS 114 p. 342. 'Love and his Enemy imitated from Fontenelle.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1811-12. Ace. 1128/191. London Metropolitan Archives. 'Love and Time.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 50. 'Love and Time.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand, signed 'M.G.L.') in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1811-12. Ace. 1128/191. London Metropolitan Archives. 'Love at Sale.' 1792. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 1-4. 'Love at Sale.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1789-1814. Ace. 1128/189. London Metropolitan Archives. 'Love at Sale.' University of Kansas Library. 'The Lover's Astronomy.' MS 114 pp. 347-8. Another copy: bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'Lowland Jenny's Faith - a Ballad.' 1801. MS 114 p. 266. 'Lullaby - Intended to have been introduced by Mrs Jordan, as Cora, in the Play of Pizarro.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 p. 172. 'Mars and Cupid. From Anacreon. Ode the 45th.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 73-4. 'May. From the German.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 63. 'Mr Simpkin Blunderhead to his Mother.' Bothwell Castle, 14 August 1804. MS 114 pp. 419-24. 'The Modern Arachne. (occasioned by a Gentleman's frequently praising Ly Louisa Stewart's work as "being 50 rich and light\"[)].' MS 114 pp. 417-18. The Monk. Holograph manuscript: printer's copy for the first edition. Townshend MS ix. Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

Bibliography

243

The Monk. Sheets of the third edition interleaved and with holograph additions and alterations: printer's copy for the expurgated fourth edition. C.28.b.4-6. British Library. 'Monody on the death of Sr John Moore recited at Drury Lane Theatre by Mrs Powell.' 1809. MS 114 pp. 325-7. 'The Mother's Alarm. (Imitated from the Greek).' MS 114 p. 289. Another copy: bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'The Mother's Alarm.' Unsigned fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1789-1814. Ace. 1128/189. London Metropolitan Archives. 'My True-love's on the Sea.' 1802. MS 114 pp. 282-3. 'Nancy.'MS 114 p. 380. 'Nanine [?] or the Emigrant.' Undated copy (not in Lewis's hand) in a MS book of poems. MS 8,111 pp. 9-11. National Library of Scotland. 'The Oath - a Song.' MS 114 p. 415. Another copy: bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'Oberon's Henchman or the Legend of the Three Sisters.' 4 September 1803, Bothwell Castle. Stanford University Library. The manuscript is decorated with elaborate drawings, apparently by Lewis himself (Carnochan and Donaldson 346). 'Ode to Vanity.' Undated copy (not in Lewis's hand) in a MS book of poems. MS 10,367 pp. 15-23. National Library of Scotland. 'On a Friend's expressing some unfounded suspicions.' 1801. MS 114pp. 264-5. 'On a Lady's laughing at me for being short-sighted.' MS 114 p. 345. 'On a late decision of an Ex-Chancellor.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) dated 26 December [1808]. 48.E.23 No. 43. Forster Bequest. National Art Library. 'On a Love-quarrel.' MS 114 p. 388. 'On Excess.' 1800. MS 114pp. 216-18. 'On Lady M 's Dog, Tyn-ti.' 1800. MS 114 p. 214. 'On Lady Susan H. (showing, how she made a visit to Bothwell Castle on July 30th 1802, but not mentioning, whom She came to see).' MS 114 p. 329. Followed on the same page by another poem entitled 'On the Same.' 'On Lord Erskine's telling Lady Anne Smith, that Wives were "like Tin Cannisters."' Oatlands, 26 December 1808. MS 114 p. 321. 'On returning a Lady's Pocket-handkerchief.' 1799. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 127. 'On seeing advertised - "Alfred, an Epic Poem in 24 Books, byj. Cottle."' MS 114 p. 225. 'On Sorrow, (written upon the death of a much-valued Female Friend.).' MS 114 pp. 311-13.

244

Bibliography

One O'Clock; [or, TheNight and the Wood Daemon]. 16July 1811. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1686. The Orphan's Prayer.' 1799. MS 114 pp. 212-13. 'The Orphan's Prayer.' Copy (not in Lewis's hand) in a MS book of poems. MS 8,111 pp. 12-14. National Library of Scotland. 'Osric - The Lion.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 442-7. 'A Palpable Falshood.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 66. 'Papa's Nose From the German.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 52. 'Parodies, occasioned by some Ducks being from the Wood-house at Wycombe Abbey.' Wycombe Abbey, 15 January 1810. MS 114 pp. 410-11. 'Parody of the 1st Ode of Anacreon.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's note 'Written at Westminster School.' MS 114 p. 67. 'Pleasure and Desire.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 72. 'The Pond-Queen. (Parody of the Water-King.).' 1801. MS 114 pp. 262-3. 'Poor Anne.' bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'The Primrose (From the German of Goethe).' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 62. 'Prologue Spoken by Mr H.Johnston at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh on his return thither after an absence of many years.' MS 114 pp. 394-5. 'Prologue to the East Indian, Spoken by Mr C. Kemble.' 1799. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 184-6. 'Prologue to "the Metamorphoses," a Farce written by The Hon: George Lamb, and spoken at Brocket Hall on Saturday, March 30, 1799.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 143-7. 'PROLOGUE To "the Twins", Spoken by Mr Bannister Jun r 1799.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 179-83. The Pursuit - a Song.' MS 114 p. 413. Raymond and Agnes; or, The Bleeding Nun. 20 November 1809. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1597. Attributed to Lewis only tentatively in the Larpent Collection catalogue, it is not by Lewis. 'Real Love.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 168. The Reproach - a Song. (Imitated from the French).' MS 114 p. 414. The Resemblance.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 18. Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice. 11 October 1805. Add. MS 51,642. Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1459. The Ruins of Caernarvon Castle.' MS 114 pp. 408-9. 'Sacripante's Complaint From Ariosto.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 47-8.

Bibliography

245

'The Sailor-Boy's Ditty.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 64-5. 'The Sailor's Farewell.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 45-6. 'St Anthony the Second, [(] a Tale of wonder, very astonishing, but still more True).' [29 November 1807], Inveraray Castle. Add. MS 51,641 ff. 110b-12. 'Sl Anthony the Second, (a Tale of Wonder, very surprizing, but still more true).' 1807. MS 114pp. 314-16. 'Sir Guy the Seeker - A Legendary Tale, founded on a Northumbrian Tradition.' bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'Sir Watkyn, my dear!' MS 114 p. 373. 'The Soldier's departure.' MS 114 p. 310. 'The Soldier's Grave.' 1801. MS 114 p. 267. The Soldier's Return.' MS 114 p. 372. Another copy: bMS Eng 1260 (46). Houghton Library, Harvard. 'Song adapted to a Swiss Air.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 pp. 77-8. 'Song (Intended to have been sung in the 4th Act of the Castle Spectre.).' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 173. 'The Song of the Girls of Chios, while going to draw water.' MS 114 p. 328. 'Song (Sung by Mrs Mountain in "Deaf & Dumb."[) ]' MS 114 p. 223. 'Song [What though 'tis not mine to proffer ... ].' Undated. Add. MS 51,641 f. 162. 'Songs from Metastasio.' MS 114 p. 396. 'Stanzas [So soft, so hushed the noon-tide air ...]' [29 November 1807], Inveraray Castle. Add. MS 51,641 f. 110. 'Stanzas, sung by Mr Graham in an entertainment called 'Thalia's tears," performed for the benefit of the family of Mr King.' MS 114 p. 343. 'Stanzas (Written on the Eve of parting with a Friend.).' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 148-50. The Stranger, Prologue and Epilogue to. 24 March 1798. Examiner's copy (not in Lewis's hand). LA 1201. 'Sweet-heart, Weep no more! a Ballad.' 1801. MS 114 pp. 279-80. 'Sweet Willy, the Page, a Tale of Wonder.' MS 114 pp. 357-64. The Taylor's Wife. (Partly, but much altered from the German.).' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 98-116. Tiney Discovered.' 23 January 1803. MS 114 p. 284. Tiney's Tale. (Addressed to Lady Douglas.).' Bothwell Castle, 26 August 1800. MS 114 pp. 229-31. 'Additional Stanzas to Tiney's Tale.' MS 114 p. 285. To a Butterfly.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand, signed 'M.G.L.') in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1811-12. Ace. 1128/191. London Metropolitan Archives.

246

Bibliography

'To a Friend who expressed some unfounded Suspicion.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand) in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'To CJ. F Esqr on the mention made of the Empress of Russia in the House of Commons by Mr Sheridan on Thursday April the 25th.' Monday 20 [May] 1793. 48.E.23, F 375-8. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 197-9. 'To Caelia From the French.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand). MS 114 p. 205. 'To Greece, on the Death of Lord Byron.' 13 August 1824. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Misattributed to Lewis, who died in 1818. 'To H.R.H. the Duchess of York, (on the failure of her efforts to reclaim a worthless object of her bounty.).' MS 114 p. 296. 'To Lady Charlotte Campbell.' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand, signed 'M.G.L.') in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'To Lady M .' Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 p. 171. 'To Lady Sarah Bayly.' 1808. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand, signed 'M.G.L.') in Lady Jersey's commonplace book for 1808-9. Ace. 1128/190. London Metropolitan Archives. 'To Lady Sarah Bayly (On her desiring me to write some verses on Herself.).' Ramsbury Park, 3 January 1809. MS 114 pp. 317-18. 'To Lady Sarah Bayly (On her having talked me out of my Queen at Chess).' MS 114 p. 318. 'To Lesbia.' Add. MS 43,347 ff. 56-7. 'To Lesbia.' 1790. Fair copy (not in Lewis's hand), with Lewis's corrections. MS 114 pp. 79-82. 'To Lord Erskine.' MS 114 p. 321. 'To Louisa, on drinking out of the same Cup with her.' 8 June 1809. MS 114 p. 344. 'To Miss Harriet G (on returning her fan the morning after a Ball.).' MS 114 p. 346. To Miss S (on her birth-day) - March 31st - 1801.' MS 114 pp. 226-8. 'To Miss S (sent with the fore-going Poem ["On Excess"]).' 1801. MS 114 p. 219. 'To Mrs G (on her desiring me to write verses on her).' 1801. MS 114 p. 222. To MrsJordan.' MS 114 p. 339. To Mrs W. (sent to her the day before her Masquerade. Mayggggg 1800[)].'MS114p. 211.

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247

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Monday 20 [May] 1793, Christ Church. 48.E.23 no. 11. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 197-9. Sunday 12 [December 1793?], Bothwell Castle. 48.E.23 no. 10. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 199-200. Wednesday [late 1793?], Oxford. 48.E.23 no. 12. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 200-1. [Late 1793]. 48.E.23 no. 13. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 201-3. 25 December [1793]. 48.E.23 no. 14. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 203-6. [Postmarked 15 March 1794, Oxford]. 48.E.23 no. 15. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 206-7. Sunday 18 May [1794], The Hague. 48.E.23 no. 16. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 208-9. Tuesday 22 July 1794, The Hague. 48.E.23 no. 17. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 210-11. 23 September 1794, The Hague. 48.E.23 no. 18. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 211-14. 22 November 1794, The Hague. Printed in Baron-Wilson 1:138-49. [Early 1801], Barnes. 48.E.23 no. 19. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 217. Sunday [1801?]. 48.E.23 no. 36. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 217. 13 January 1803, Barnes. 48.E.23 no. 20. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 218-20. 15 March [1803?]. Printed in Baron-Wilson 1:275-8. Friday 18 March 1803. 48.E.23 no. 22. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 220-1. Wednesday [23 March 1803]. 48.E.23 no. 21. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 221-3. Wednesday [late 1803]. 48.E.23 no. 35. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 223-4. Tuesday [July/August 1804]. 48.E.23 no. 23. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 224-5. Tuesday [early August 1804]. 48.E.23 no. 24. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 226. 18 August 1804, Inveraray. 48.E.23 no. 26. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 226-8. 28 September 1804, Inveraray. 48.E.23 no. 27. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 228-30. [Postmarked 22 October 1804], Inveraray. 48.E.23 no. 28. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 230-1. Wednesda[y 1805], Barnes. 48.E.23 no. 30. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 231-3. [1805]. 48.E.23 no. 32. Forster Bequest. Printed in Peck 233-4.

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Plummer, H.W. 'Contingent Expenses of Cornwall Estate paid for the Crop 1818 ...' 20 July 1830. MS 701a. National Library of Jamaica. - 'Particular Account (extracted from Paper A) of produce, & those Negroes and Stock only, which were purchased by Mr M.G. Lewis.' 5 June 1830. MS 1856.2. National Library of Jamaica. 'Petition of Appeal.' Lushington vs. Sewell, 21 June 1829. C/36/29. Public Record Office. 'Register Book of Marriages for the Parish of Sl Martin in the Fields.' Record of the marriage of Matthew Lewis and Frances Maria Sewell, 22 February 1773. Copy. DL/C/560/008/4. London Metropolitan Archives. 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Saint Thomas in the East in the possession of Charles Scott as Attorney to George Scott, Matthew Henry Scott and Matthew Gregory Lewis, Owners, on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1817.' T 71/145 pp. 443-50. Public Record Office, London. (Includes name, sex, 'Colour,' age, origin ['African or Creole'], and sometimes parentage, for each of the 282 slaves.) 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Saint Thomas in the East in the Possession of Charles Scott as attorney to the Executors of Matthew Gregory Lewis deceased on the 28th day of June, in the year of our Lord 1820.' T 71/146 pp. 252-9. Public Record Office, London. (Includes the note: 'N.B. Last return was made on the 28th day of June 1817 by Charles Scott, as attorney to George Scott, Matthew Henry Scott & Matthew Gregory Lewis, but the undivided Moiety of the undermentioned slaves has since been purchased from George Scott and Matthew Henry Scott, by Matthew Gregory Lewis and the whole is now the property of his heirs.') 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Saint Thomas in the East in the Possession of Charles Scott as Attorney for the Executors of Matthew Gregory Lewis deceased on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1823.' T 71/147 pp. 203-4. Public Record Office, London. 'A Return of Slaves in the parish of Saint Thomas in the East in the possession of Charles Scott as Attorney to the Executors of Matthew G. Lewis, deceased on the 28 day of June in the Year of our Lord 1826.' T 71/148 pp. 184-5. Public Record Office, London. 'A RETURN OF SLAVES in the Parish of Saint Thomas in the East in the possession of Charles Scott as Attorney to the Executors of Matthew Gregory Lewis deed on the 28th day ofjune in the year of our Lord 1829.' T 71/149 n.p. (alphabetized under 'Lewis'). Public Record Office, London. 'A RETURN OF SLAVES in the Parish of St. Thomas East, in the Possession of Charles Scott as Attorney to the Executors of M.G. Lewis deceased on the

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Twenty-eighth Day of June, in the Year of our Lord 1832.' T 71/150 f. 292. Public Record Office, London. 'RETURN Of the Number of Slaves and Estimated Value thereof, in each Class, in possession of Charles Scott as Atty to the heirs of Matthew Gregory Lewis on the 1st day of August, 1834: Hordley Estate.' T 71/714 no. 94. Public Record Office, London. (The 241 slaves remaining on Lewis's Hordley estate were valued at £11,250. See also the Register of Claims, T 71/867 no. 94; and Claims and Certificates, T 71/992 no. 94.) 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Westmoreland in the Possession of Henry W. Plummer and Purchas Lumley as Attornies to Matthew Gregory Lewis proprietor of Cornwall Estate on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1817.' T 71/178 liber 3 ff. 159-62. Public Record Office, London. (Includes name, sex, 'Colour,' age, origin ['African or Creole'], and sometimes parentage, for each of the 285 slaves.) 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Westmoreland in the possession of Henry Waite Plummer as attorney to the Executors and Trustees of the late Matthew Gregory Lewis Esqr on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1820.' T 71/179 liber 19 pp. 12-14. Public Record Office, London. 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Westmoreland in the possession of Henry Waite Plummer as Attorney to the Trustees and Executors of Matthew G Lewis Esqr decd on Cornwall Estate on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1823.' T 71/180 Book 7th pp. 6-7. Public Record Office, London. (Gives causes for most deaths.) 'A Return of Slaves in the Parish of Westmoreland, in the possession of Henry Waite Plummer as Attorney to the Trustees and Executors of Matthew G Lewis decd on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1826.' T 71/181 pp. 1523. Public Record Office, London. (Gives dates of births, dates and causes of deaths.) 'A RETURN of SLAVES in the Parish of Westmoreland in the possession of Henry Waite Plummer as Attorney to the Trustees and Executors of Matthew Gregory Lewis Esqr decd on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1829.' T 71/184 n.p. (alphabetized under 'Lewis'). Public Record Office, London. (Gives dates of births, dates and causes of deaths.) 'A RETURN of SLAVES in the Parish of Westmoreland in the possession of Henry Waite Plummer as Attorney to the Trustees and Executors of Matt: Gregory Lewis Esqr deceased on the 28th day of June in the year of our Lord 1832.' T 71/189 f. 326. Public Record Office, London. (Gives dates of births, dates and causes of deaths.) 'RETURN Of the Number of Slaves and Estimated Value thereof, in each Class, in

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II. PUBLICATIONS 1. Primary a. Works ofM.G. Lewis Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error. A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: J.F. Hughes, 1806. Adelmorn, the Outlaw; A Romantic Drama, in Three Acts. London: J. Bell, 1801. Alfonso, King of Castile: A Tragedy, inFiveActs. London: J. Bell, 1801. The Bravo of Venice, A Romance: Translated from the German. London: J.F. Hughes, 1805. 'The Captive.' Seven Gothic Dramas. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992. 225-30. The Castle Spectre: A Drama. InFiveActs. London: J. Bell, 1798. 'The Castle Spectre.' Seven Gothic Dramas. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992. 149-224. 'The Cosack. A Ballad from the UKRANIAN.' A Collection of Melodies, Chiefly Russian ... Words by Amelia Opie. London: R. Birchall, [1806]. Air 12. The East Indian: A Comedy. InFiveActs. London: J. Bell, 1800. Evelina's Lullaby, A Favorite Ballad, Sung with Unbounded Applause at the Theatre RoyalDrury Lane by Mrs. Bland. London: Bland, [1801]. Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts ofCarlsheim and Sargans. A Romance. Taken from the German. 4 vols. London: J.F. Hughes, 1806. The Harper's Daughter: or, Love and Ambition. A Tragedy, inFiveActs. Translated from the German of Schiller. Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1813.

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He Loves and he Rides Away: A Favorite Ballad. London: R. Birchall, 1808. The Isle of Devils. A Historical Tale, Funnded on an Anecdote in the Annals of Portugal. Kingston, Jamaica: Courant and Advertiser, 1827. Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica. London: John Murray, 1834. Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815-17. Ed. Mona Wilson. Broadway Diaries, Memoirs, and Letters. Ed. Eileen Porter and Elizabeth Drew. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1929. Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica. Ed. and introd. Judith Terry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. The Love of Gain: A Poem. Imitated from the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal London: J. Bell, 1799. The Minister: A Tragedy, in Five Acts. London: J. Bell, 1797. The Monk: A Romance. London: J. Bell, 1796. The Monk. Ed. Louis F. Peck. Introd. John Berryman. New York: Grove Press, 1952. The Monk: A Romance. Ed. and introd. Howard Anderson. London: Oxford UP, 1973. World's Classics edition, 1980. Reissued with introduction and notes by Emma McEvoy, 1995. The Monk: A Romance. Ed. and introd. Christopher MacLachlan. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Monody on the Death of Sir John MooreLondon: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Ormeh, 1809. One O'Clock! or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon. A Grand Musical Romance, in Three Acts. London: Lowndes and Hobbs, 1811. Ply the Oar Brother, THE CEI£BKATED BOAT GI^EE, Sung with Unbounded Applause by Mess" Forster, G. Pyne & Ransford. Harmonized and arranged by Michael Kelly. London: Falkner's Opera Music Warehouse, [c. 1830]. Poems. London: Hatchard, 1812. Rich and Poor. A Comic Opera, in Three Acts. London: C. Chappie, 1814. Rich and Poor. A Comic Opera. London: W. Oxberry, 1823. Rolla; or, The Peruvian Hero. A Tragedy, in Five Acts. Translated from the German of Kotzebue. London: J. Bell, 1799. Romantic Tales. 4 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808. Rugantino: or, The Bravo of Venice. A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts. 2nd ed. London: J.F. Hughes, 1806. Tales of Wonder. 2 vols. London: J. Bell, 1801. Timour the Tartar. A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts. London: Lowndes and Hobbs, 1811. Twelve Ballads. London: R. Birchall, 1808.

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The Twins; or, Is It He, or His Brother? A Farce in Two Acts. Ed. Karl S. Guthke. Huntington Library Quarterly 25 (1961-2): 195-223. Venoni; or, The Novice of St. Mark's: A Drama, in Three Acts. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809. Village Virtues: A Dramatic Satire. In Two Parts. London: J. Bell, 1796. The Wood Daemon or 'The Clock Has Struck, 'A Grand Romantic Melo Drama, in Three Acts. 'Written by G.P. Lewis, Esq.' London: J. Scales, [1807]. b. Contemporary Reviews and Notices Adelgitha La Belle Assemble suppl. 2 (1807): 34-9. British Critical (1808): 661-2. Critical Review 3rd ser 11 (1807): 108-9. General Evening Post 30 April-2 May 1807: 2. Monthly Mirror ns 1 (1807): 353-6. Monthly Review ns 50 (1806): 329. Morning Herald 1 May 1807: 3. Poetical Register § (1806): 527. Sun 30 April 1807: 3; 1 May 1807: 2. Times 1 May 1807: 3. Adelmorn, the Outlaid British Critic 18 (1801): 545. Critical Review 2nd ser 34 (1802): 231-2. European Magazine 39 (1801): 358-9. General Evening Post 2-5 May 1801: 4; 5-7 May 1801: 2. Monthly Mirror 11 (1801): 410-11. Morning Chronicle 5 May 1801: 4. Morning Herald 5 March 1801: 3; 5 May 1801: 3; 8 May 1801: 3. Poetical Register 1 (1801): 462-3. Sun 5 May 1801:4. Times 5 May 1801: 3. Alfonso, King of Castile Annual Revieiv 1 (1802): 685-8. Bntish Critic 20 (1802): 558-9. Critical Review 2nd ser 34 (1802): 355. Edinburgh Revieiv 1 (1803): 314-17. Review by Sydney Smith. General Evening Post 14—16January 1802: 4. Monthly Mirror 13 (1802): 410-11. Morning Chronicle 16 January 1802: 3.

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Morning Herald 16 January 1802: 3. Poetical Register 1 (1801): 461. Sun 16January 1802: 3. Times 16 January 1802: 2-3. The Bravo of Venice Critical Review 3rd ser 5 (1805): 252-6. Flowers of Literature 5 (1806): 498. Monthly Magazine suppl. 20 (1806): 616. Monthly Mirror 19 (1805): 177. The Captive General Evening Post 22-4 March 1803: 4. Monthly Mirror 15 (1803): 266-7. Morning Chronicle 26 March 1803: 3. Morning Herald 23 March 1803: 3. Satirist 11 (1812): 554. Sun 23 March 1803: 3. Times 23 March 1803:3. The Castle Spectre Analytical Review 28 (1798): 179-91. British Critic 11(1798): 436-7. Critical Review 2nd ser 22 (1798): 476-8. European Magazine 33 (1798): 42. Gentleman's Magazine 69 (1799): 468-72. Article entitled 'Critique II. Of the Impropriety of Theatrical Representations, as far as they relate to the Scenery, Dresses, and Decorations, when brought forward as illustrative of the Antient History of this Country,' by 'An Artist and an Antiquary.' Monthly Magazine suppl. 5 (1798): 508. Monthly Magazine suppl. 6 (1798): 515. Monthly Mirror4 (1797): 354-9; 5 (1798): 106-9. Monthly Review ns 26 (1798): 96. Monthly Visitor 3 (1798): 105-8. Morning Chronicle 18 December 1797: 3. Morning Herald 15 December 1797: 4; 16 December 1797: 3; 26 December 1797: 2. Universal Magazine 101 (1797): 445-6. The East Indian British Cntic 15 (1800): 317-18. European Magazine 35 (1799): 327; 36 (1799): 399. Monthly Magazine suppl. 9 (1800): 641. Monthly Mirror 8 (1799): 367-8.

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Monthly Review ns 32 (1800): 255-8. Morning Chronicle 24 April 1799: 3. New London Review 3 (1800): 183. Feudal Tyrants Critical Review 3rd ser 11 (1807): 273-8. Flowers of Literature 5 (1806): 501-2. Journal de Paris 15 Janvier 1810: 95-6. Review of Les Orphelins de Werdemberg, the French retranslation by RJ. Durdent. Literary Journals 2 (1806): 480-5. Monthly Literary Recreations 1 (1806): 405. Monthly Review 2nd ser 53 (1807): 437-8. Oxford Review I (1807): 71-2. The Harper's Daughter General Evening Post 3-5 May 1803: 4. Morning Herald 6 May 1803: 3. Sun 5 May 1803: 3. Times 5 May 1803: 3. Unidentified, undated review. Gabrielle Enthoven Collection 4206. Theatre Museum, London. Journal of a West India Proprietor Athenaeum 1834: 156-8. Edinburgh Review 59 (1834): 73-86. Literary Gazette 1834: 150-2. Quarterly Review 50 (1833-4): 374-99. Review by John Gibson Lockhart. The Life and Correspondence ofM. G. Lewis Athenaeum 1839: 271-3. Corsair 1 (1839): 222-3. Review by Nathaniel Parker Willis. New Monthly Magazine ns 55 (1839): 560-2. The Love of Gain Analytical Review ns 1 (1799): 522-4. British Critic 13 (1799): 547-9. Critical Review 2nd ser 27 (1799): 231. Monthly Magazine suppl. 7 (1799): 536. Monthly Mirror 7 (1799): 165. Monthly Review ns 30 (1799): 22-5. Review attributed to John Ferriar (Kupersmith46, 51nl4). New Annual Register 20 (1799): 263. New London Review 1 (1799): 299-300. The Minister Critical Review 2nd ser 22 (1798): 103-4.

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The Monk Analytical Review 24 (1796): 403-4. Review attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft. British Critic 7 (1796): 677. Critical Review 2nd ser 19 (1797): 194-200. Review by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Decadephilosophique, litteraire et politique an V, 3e trirnestre: 290-7. European Magazine 31 (1797): 111-15. Flapper 1.55 (17 September 1796): 4. Journal de Paris 28 fevrier 1797: 641-2. Mercure deFranceS (5 prairial, an X): 344-52. Article entitled 'Spectacles'; ref. on 346. Monthly Magazine4 (1797): 120-1. Monthly Mirror 2 (1796): 98, 323-8; 3 (1797): 210-15; 5 (1798): 157-8. Monthly Review ns 23 (1797): 451. Review attributed to Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Parreaux 76nl). Morning Chronicle 26 ]u\y 1796: 3. Scots Magazine 64 (1802): Article entitled 'On Novels and Romances,' by 'W.W.' (470-4, 545-8); ref. on 546-8. Spectateur du Nord 6 (avril-juin 1798): 324—38. Article entitled 'Romans de Mistress Radcliffe'; ref. on 330-4. Monody on the Death of Sir John Moore European Magazine 55(1809): 144. General Evening Post 14—16 February 1809: 3. Monthly Mirror ns 5 (1809): 118. Monthly Review ns 61 (1810): 207-8. Poetical Register 7 (1809): 600-1. One O'Clock! British Critic 40 (1812): 639-40. General Evening Post 1-3 August 1811: 4. Morning Chronicle 2 August 1811: 3. Poetical Register8 (1811): 640-1. Sun 2 August 1811: 3. Times 2 August 1811: 3. Rich and Poor General Evening Post 21-3 July 1812: 4. Morning Chronicle 23 July 1812: 3. Satirist II (1812): 172-4. Scourge* (1812): 170, 293-303. Sun 23 July 1812: 3.

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Rolla Monthly Mirror 11 (1801): 111-12. Monthly Review 2nd ser 30 (1799): 214. Romantic Tales Annual Review 7 (1808): 616-18. British Critic 33 (1809): 247-54. Cabinet™ 1 (1809): 246-9, 338-43. Critical Review 3rd ser 15 (1808): 355-66. Gentleman's Magazine 79.1 (1809): 141-4. Satirists (1808): 409-15. Rugantino Critical Review 3rd ser 8 (1806): 99. European Magazine 48 (1805): 305. General Evening Post 17-19 October 1805: 4. Monthly Magazinesuppl. 21 (1806): 609. Monthly Mirror20 (1805): 273-4. Morning Chronicle 19 October 1805: 3. Morning Herald 19 October 1805: 2. Poetical Register 5 (1805): 508. Swn 19 October 1805: 2. Times 19 October 1805: 3. Tales of Wonder Antijacobin Review 8 (1801): 322-7. British Critic 16 (1800): 681. Critical Review 2nd ser 34 (1802): 111-12. Review attributed to Coleridge (Peck313n39). Monthly Magazine suppl. 11 (1801): 605-6. Poetical Register 1 (1801): 436. Temper General Evening Post 2-4 May 1809: 3. Monthly Mirror ns 5 (1809): 305-6. Morning Chronicled May 1809: 4. Satirist 4 (1809): 619. Sun 3 May 1809: 4. Timour the Tartar European Magazine 59 (1811): 377-8. General Evening Post 27-30 April 1811:4. Morning Chronicled April 1811: 2; 3 May 1811: 3. Satirists (1811): 479-86. Sun 30 April 1811:3.

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Times 30 April 1811:4. The Twins European Magazine 35 (1799): 257-8. Morning Chronicle 10 April 1799: 3. Unidentified review dated 8 April [1799]. Theatre Museum, London. Venoni Le Beau Monde1 (1808): 100-1. British Critic^ (1810): 183-4. General Evening Post 1-3 December 1808: 2. Monthly Mirror m 4 (1808): 373-7, 378, 379. Monthly Panorama I (1810): 125-7. Morning Chronicle 2 December 1808: 3; 12 December 1808: 3. Morning Herald 13 December 1808: 3. Poetical Register 7 (1809): 617. Sun 2 December 1808: 3; 13 December 1808: 2. Times 2 December 1808: 3; 13 December 1808: 3. Village Virtues Analytical Review 24 (1796): 66-8. Critical Review 2nd ser 19 (1797): 222. Monthly Mirror 2 (1796): 229. Monthly Review ns 21 (1796): 336. The Wood Daemon European Magazine 51(1807): 291-2. General Evening Post 31 March-2 April 1807: 4. Monthly Mirror ns 1 (1807): 212, 278-80. Morning Chronicle 2 April 1807: 3. Morning Herald 2 April 1807: 3. Sun 2 April 1807: 3. Times 2 April 1807: 3. c. Musical Settings, Adaptations, Parodies, and Forgeries Almagro & Claude; or, Monastic Murder; Exemplified in the Dreadful Doom of an Unfortunate Nun. London: Tegg and Castleman, T. Hurst, T. Brown, and B. Dugdale, 1810. A chapbook. Artaud, Antonin. LeMoine. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. The Bleeding Nun of the Castle of Lindenberg; or, The History of Raymond & Agnes. London: Hodgson and Co., [1823]. A chapbook, attributed to 'the author of The Castle Spectre.' Boaden, James. Aurelio and Miranda: A Drama. 3rd ed. London: J. Bell, 1799.

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Burnand, Francis Cowley. Alonzo the Brave; or, Faust and the Fair Imogene. A Tragical, Comical, Demoniacal, and whatever-you-like-to-call-it Burlesque, Uniting in its Construction the Romantic Pathos of the Well-Known Ballad, 'Alonzo and Imogene,' with the Thrilling Horrors of Goethe's 'Faust. 'London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1863. Busby, Thomas. Rugantino; or, the Bravo of Venice... Composed by Dr. Busby. London: Bland and Weller's Music Warehouse, [1805]. Cross, John C. Songs, Choruses, &c. mThe Fire King; or, Albert and Rosalie; Comprizing the most Interesting, Grand, and Striking Incidents recorded in the Collection of Tales of Wonder, By M.G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. A Grand Ballet of Action, in Two Parts, Performed at the New Royal Circus, For the first Time, On Saturday, June 20, 1801. London: J. Barker, 1801. - The Songs, Duets, Glees, Chorusses, &c. in the New Splendid Melo-Dramatic Tale of Enchantment, calledThe Cloud King, or, Magic Rose; Principally founded on the grand and superb Ballet q/^Zemire and Azor. As performed with the most unbounded Applause at the principal Theatres on the Continent, blended with the poetical Episode of the Cloud King, nrritten by M.G. Lewis, Esq. andpublished in /usTales of Wonder. London: J. Barker and Son, 1806. Didelot, Charles Louis. Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imagine; A Grand Ballet, in Three Acts. London: Bastie and Brettell, 1801. Farley, Charles. Airs, Glees, and Chorusses in a New Grand Ballet Pantomime of Action, called Raymond and Agnes; or, the Castle of Lindenbergh. London: T.N. Longman, 1797. Father Innocent, Abbot of the Capuchins; or, The Crimes of Cloisters. London: Tegg and Castleman, [1803]. A chapbook. Few, Charles. A Parody upon the Poem of Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene. Being a Juvenile Attempt at Poetry. London: Laurie and Whittle, 1799. A broadside. Grosette, W.H. Raymond and Agnes! or, The Bleeding Nun of Lindenberg. A Melo Drama, in Two Acts. London: John Buncombe, [1825]. An expanded version, entitled Raymond and Agnes; The Travellers Benighted; or, The Bleeding Nun of Lindenberg: An Interesting Drama, in Two Acts (London: John Cumberland, 1829), is attributed to Lewis. Harrison, Samuel M. Alonzo ye Brave and ye Fayre Imogene: An Hysterical Drama, in Three Acts. Liverpool: Lee and Nightingale, 1876. The History of Raymond and Agnes; or, The Castle of Lindenberg, A Romance. London: S. Fisher, [1803]. Attributed to Lewis. Holland, Caroline, composer. Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene: Choral Ballad. London: Chappell, 1894. (Jones, Lavinia.] The Cloud King with his Cloud Castle: An Opera. [Privately printed (?), 1864.]

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Kauntze, George. Crazy Jane... The Music by G: Kauntze. London: G. Kauntze, [1800?]. Kelly, Michael. Adelmorn, the Out-law ... The Overture and Music Composed by Michael Kelly. London: M. Kelly, [1801]. - The Castle Spectre ...The Music by Michael Kelly. London: J. Dale, [ 1798]. - The Favorite Song in ... Deaf and Dumb; or, The Orphan Protected ... With accompaniments for the harp or piano forte. London: Printed for M. Kelly, [1801?]. - The Songs Chorusses & Music, In the Grand Dramatic Romance of The Wood Daemon ... Composed & Selected by Michl. Kelly. London: M. Kelly, [1807]. - To-morrow; or, The Mars, Captn Connor. Composed ... by Michael Kelly ... London: Printed for M. Kelly, [1799]. - The Wife's Farewell; or, 'No, my love, no. 'A Ballad ... London, [1800]. Koenigsmark the Robber; or, The Terror of Bohemia: In which is included, The Affecting History of Rosenberg and Adelaide, and their Orphan Daughter. London: Dean and Munday, [1815]. An abridgment of Sarrett's chapbook, attributed to Lewis. Milner, Henry M. Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imagine; or, The Spectre Bride! A Legendary Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts. London: John Duncombe, 1852. Le Maine. Dir. Ado Kyrou. Co-written by Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere. Cinerama, 1972. One O'Clock; or, The Knight and the Wood Demon. London: G. Drake, [1840]. A chapbook. 'Raymond and Agnes.' The Romancist and Novelist's Library. Ed. William Hazlitt. New sen 6 vols. London: John Clements, 1841-2. Vol. 4. Excerpted from The Monk and attributed to Lewis. Raymond and Agnes; or, The Bleeding Nun of the Castle of Lindenberg. London: Dean and Munday, [1820]. A chapbook, attributed to Lewis. Raymond & Agnes; or, The Bleeding Nun of the Castle of Lindenburg. A Drama, in Two Acts: Adapted to Hodgson's Theatrical Characters and Scenes in the Same. Hodgson's Juvenile Drama. London: O. Hodgson, [1825]. Rossendale [Albany Rossendale Lloyd]. The Island Spectres: A Poem. Written in Imitation of Monk Lewis's Tales. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1840. Rugantino, the Bravo of Venice. London: Dean and Munday, [1815]. A chapbook, attributed to Lewis. Rugantino, the Bravo of Venice. London: Hodgson and Co. Juvenile Press, [1823]. A chapbook, attributed to Lewis. Rugantino, the Bravo of Venice. Durham: George Walker, 1838. A chapbook, attributed to Lewis. Sarrett, H.J. Koenigsmark the Robber, or, The Terror of Bohemia; in which is introduced, Stella, or, The Maniac of the Wood, A Pathetick Tale. London: Tegg and Castleman, [1802].

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Tomalin, Claire. Mrs. Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King. London: Penguin, 1995. Trostaniecki, Ignacy. 'La Poetique du cache dans LeMoinede M.G. Lewis.' Recherches anglaises et americaines 6 (1973): 43-59. Trumbach, Randolph. 'London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the 18th Century.'Journal of Social History 11 (1977-8): 1-33. - The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic P, 1978. — Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. - 'Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography.' Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment. Ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 109-21. Turner, Mary. Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834. Blacks in the New World. Gen. ed. August Meier. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982. Voller, Jack G. The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1994. Warrek, George. 'Nineteenth Century Journalists in the West Indies.' Revista/ Review Interamericana 4 (1974): 350-8. Watkins, Daniel P. 'Social Hierarchy in Matthew Lewis's The Monk.' Studies in the A/owH8 (1986): 115-24. Watson, Ernest Bradlee. Sheridan to Robertson: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century London Stage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1926. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Foreword Harold Bloom. Introd. Portia Williams Weiskel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Wendell, John R. 'E.T.A. Hoffmann's DieElixiere des Teufels and Its Dependence on M.G. Lewis' The Monk.' DAI 28: 699A. Westermarck, Edward. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1912-17. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. 1944; rpt. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966. Wilmeth, Don B. George Frederick Cooke: Machiavel of the Stage. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1980. Winter, KariJ. 'Sexual/Textual Politics of Terror: Writing and Rewriting the

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Gothic Genre in the 1790s.' Misogyny in Literature: An Essay Collection. Ed. Katherine Anne Ackley. New York: Garland, 1992. 89-103. - Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992. Wright, Philip. Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica. London: Society of Genealogists, 1966. Wright, Philip, and Paul F. White. Exploring Jamaica: A Guide for Motorists. London: Andre Deutsch, 1969. Wright, Richardson. Revels in Jamaica 1682-1838: Plays and Players of a Century, Tumblers and Conjurors, Musical Refugees and Solitary Showmen, Dinners, Balls and Cockfights, Darky Mummers and Other Memories of High Times and Merry Hearts. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1937. Wyndham, Henry Saxe. The Annals ofCovent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1897. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1906. Zimansky, Curt R. 'Shelley's Wandering Jew. Some Borrowings from Lewis and Radcliffe.' Studies in English Literature, 1500-190018 (1978): 597-609. - 'Zastrozzi and The Bravo of Venice. Another Shelley Borrowing.' Keats-Shelley Journal30 (1981): 15-17. 3. Bibliographic Anderson, Howard. 'The Manuscript of M.G. Lewis's The Monk: Some Preliminary Notes.' Papers of the Bibliographical Society ofAmerica&2. (1968): 427-34. Bishop, Morchard. 'A Terrible Tangle.' Times Literary Supplement 19 October 1967: 989. Blakey, Dorothy. The Minerva Press 1790-1820. London: Bibliographical Society/ Oxford UP, 1939. Carnochan, W.B., and David W. Donaldson. 'The Presentation Copy of "Monk" Lewis's "Oberon's Henchman," 1803.' Book Collector^ (1981): 346-59. Fongaro, Antoine. 'Baudelaire, L'Aminta et LeMaine.' Bulletin Baudelairien 17 (1982): 5-8. Frank, Frederick S. 'M.G. Lewis's The Monk after Two Hundred Years, 17961996: A Bicentenary Bibliography.' Bulletin of Bibliography 52 (1995): 241-60. Guthke, Karl S. 'Some Bibliographical Errors Concerning the Romantic Age.' Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 51 (1957): 159-62. Ingram, Kenneth. Sources of Jamaican History, 1655-1838: A Bibliographic Survey with Particular Reference to Manuscript Sources. Zug, Switzerland: Inter Documentation Co., 1976 Levy, Maurice. 'Le Manuscrit du Moine, de M.G. Lewis.' Caliban 3 (1966): 129-31.

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- 'Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk: Bibliographic selective et critique.' Bulletin de la Societe d'etudes Anglo-Americaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siecles 21 (1985): 69-83. Peck, Louis F. 'An Early Copy of The Monk.' Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 57 (1963): 350-1. - 'New Poems by Matthew G. Lewis.' Archivfurdas Studium derNeueren Sprachen undLiteraturen203 (1966-7): 189-94. - 'On the Date of Tales of Wonder.' English Language Notes 2 (1964-5): 25-7. Todd, William B. 'The Early Editions and Issues of The Monk, with a Bibliography.' Studies in Bibliography 2 (1949): 3-24.

Indegx

Abercromby, General Sir Ralph, 173, 229n98 Aberdeen, Lord, 179 abolition, 49, 164, 165, 200 Abolition Society, 132 Adam, 71 Addison, Joseph, 121 Aikin,John, 151 Albany, 23, 175, 188, 189, 229nl02 allegory, 200-1, 203-4, 208, 232n2 Amelia, Princess, 189, 231n9 American War of Independence, 34 anacreontic poems, 87-92 Analytical Review, 51,129,136,138,143 Anderson, Howard, 211n3 Andriano, Joseph, 218nl8 Annual Review, 157 Antijacobin Review, 153, 222n4 Antiquarian Society, 179 Apology for Tales of Terror, An, 151, 226n56 'Apology for the Monk, An,' 117, 130-1 Arabian Nights, 81, 86 Argyll, George William Campbell (1766-1839), sixth Duke of, 106, 139, 167, 169

Argyll,John Campbell (1723-1806), fifth Duke of, 68, 139, 161 Argyll,John Campbell (1777-1847), seventh Duke of, 139, 161, 223n20 Aries, Philippe, 212n5 Arley, 106 Armee du Nord, 107, 108, 128 Armstrong, Colonel, 170 Arnhem, 107 Artaud, Antonin, 21 In2 Arundell, 6 Astley, Philip, 177 Atargatis, 232n3 Athenaeum,ggggggg Athol, Duke of, 158 Aurelius (reviewer), 130 Austen,Jane: NorthangerAbbey, 111 Ballantyne, James, 151 Bannister, John, 145-6, 153 Barbados, 26, 36-7 Barnes, 153, 162, 168, 171, 175 Baron-Wilson, Margaret: The Life and Correspondence ofM. G. Lewis, 3, 4, 16, 29, 30, 33, 37, 59, 66, 67, 134, 168-9, 2l7n5, 219n7

298

Index

Barrington, William Wildman, Viscount, 33 Bastille, 101, 181, 182, 184 Bath, 160 bathos, 111-12, 113, 122-3 Bearcroft, William, 8 Beaujolois, Comte de, 158 Bebrance, Marquise de, 108 Beckford, William, 130; The Episodes of Vatheh, 219n22; Vathek, 80, 232n3, 233nl2 Bedford, Duke of, 169 Bell, Joseph, 134-5, 137,141,151,153 Bentley, Richard, 42, 215nl7 Berlin, 102 Bessborough, Countess of, 178 Betty (cook), 175, 229nl03 Bible, 25, 78, 130, 131, 133, 168, 200-1, 203 Blake, Anna (aunt), 17, 32, 38, 179, 189, 192, 197 Blake, William: The Little Black Boy,' 200; The Marriage of Heaven and

Hell, 233n8 Blakey, Dorothy, 221-2nl Boaden, James, 135-6, 137, 146, 182, 223nl4 Bohn, Henry G., 218n20 Borges, Jorge Luis, 83 Bothwell Castle, 106 Bouille, Vicomte de, 108 Bowlby,John: Attachment and Loss, 14, 17-18, 45-6 Bo wood, 161 Boyes, Captain, 198, 210 Brand, Thomas, 161-2 Bray, Alan, 64 Breteuil, Baron de, 108 British Critic, 147, 153, 154, 166, 168, 182, 219n23

British Library, 222n8 Brocket, 148-9, 161, 177 Brompton, 6 Bronte, Charlotte: Villette, 223nll Brooks, Peter, 184, 220n21; Reading for the Plot, 81,86, 212n5 Brown, Charles Brockden: Wieland, 221n22 Brown, John: Barbarossa, 139 Bruce, Patrick Craufurd, 169-70 Brueys, David-Augustin, and Jean Palaprat: Le Grondeur, 174—5 Buccleuch, Henry, Duke of, 66, 106, 159 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 188, 231n6 Bunbury, H., 187, 230n3 Burger, Gottfried August, 141, 230n3 Burke, Edmund, 75-6, 144, 231n7; An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 126; Philosophical Enquiry, 121-2, 123-4; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 105, 112, 113, 125, 126, 230nllO

Burnand, Francis Cowley, 222nlO Bury, Lady Charlotte. See Campbell, Lady Charlotte Bury, Rev. Edward, 217n3 Butler, Lady Eleanor, 67 Byron, Annabella Milbanke, Baroness, 195 Byron, George Gordon Noel, Baron Byron, 17, 24, 48-9, 58, 60, 65, 66, 73,77,115, 142,145,150, 175, 187-9, 190, 192-3, 194-5, 2l7n8, 234nl5; 'Address, Spoken at the Opening of Drury-lane Theatre,' 230n4; Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 195, 219n6; Don Juan, 49, 212n7, 216n25, 220nl8, 222n8; English

Index Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 187, 230nn3, 4; The Giaour, 188; Heaven and Earth, 220n20; Hints from Horace, 230n4; Manfredff122, 193,f 231nl5; MarinoFaliero, 195; 'Ode 3,'88 Caesar, Julius, 99, 219n6 Campbell (later Bury), Lady Charlotte, 59, 66-7, 139-40, 158, 159, 169, 175, 178-9, 213n8, 2l7n3, 224n22. See also Lewis, Matthew Gregory, letters Campbell, Colonel John, 139, 2l7n3 Campbell, Thomas, 186 Cantelo, Miss (singer), 212n2 Captain (slave), 56 Carnochan, W.B., 226n56 Caroline, Princess of Wales, 66-7, 174, 175-6, 177, 190, 2l7nn3, 9 Carder (manservant), 175 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 174 Catamarans (club), 225n46 Catherine the Great, 105 Cavendish, Lady Georgina, 151 Cavendish, Lady Harriet, 164 censorship, 25, 51, 134, 135, 156,173, 184, 188, 209, 222n8, 225n46 Charlotte, Queen, 176 Chateaubriand, Rene, 220nl2 Christ Church College, 97-100. See also Oxford 'Church and King' riots, 185 Cicero, 98 Clapham, 6 Clarence, Duke of, 170, 212n8 Clarke, Mary Anne, 174 Clelandjohn, 131 Clifford, James, 199

299

Clive, Robert, Baron Clive, 224n30 Cobbett, William, 201 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 111, 129-30, 134, 139, 181, 222n3; Biographia Literaria, 181; 'Christabel,' 222n3, 223nl8; Osono, 139; 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' 222n3; Table Talk, 211nl Colman, George, the Younger, 95,96, 225n46 commerce, 213n9 Committee of Finance, 34 Conger, Syndy M., 213nlO, 220nl5 Consistory Court of London, 8 Cooke, George Frederick, 156, 160 Copleston, Edward, 98-9 Cork, Lady, 163 Cornwall estate, 27, 28, 34, 201, 204, 216n29 Corunna, 173 Courier, 74—5, 76 Covent Garden, Theatre Royal, 135, 156, 159, 161, 177, 178, 190 Cowper, William, 66 Cox, Jeffrey N., 138, 159, 160, 183, 184 Crebillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de (fils), 218nl9 Critical Review, 111, 129-30, 136, 144, 152, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 182, 183, 213-14nlO Crompton, Louis, 64, 88 Cross, John C.,226n54 cross-dressing, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 81-3, 161, 219n22 Cunliffe, Mrs (singer), 160 Cyrus, 99, 219n6 Dacre, Charlotte, 211n2 Dacre, Lady, 162

300

Index

Dalkeith, 106, 159 Dal ton, Edward T., 190 'Death of Crazy Jane, The,' 224n22 Defoe, Daniel: Captain Singleton, 203; Robinson Crusoe, 13, 199; Roxana, 85,86 Delavigne, Germain, 223nll Dennis, John, 78 Dermody, Thomas. See Moonshine, Mauritius Devonshire, Duchess of, 193 Devonshire, Duke of, 151 Devonshire Place, 34, 38 Dibdin, Thomas John: Alonzo and Imogen, 135 Dickens, Charles, 223nl5, 22930nl08 Didelot, Charles Louis, 222nlO Donaldson, David W., 226n56 Donoughmore, Lord, 178 Dorset, Duke of, 4 Douglas, Lord and Lady, 106 Drimmy, 140 Drury Lane, Theatre Royal, 59-60, 62, 101, 135, 136, 139, 145, 146, 153, 161, 165, 172, 174, 191, 223nl4 Dugaw, Dianne, 83 Dumas, Alexandre, pere, 211n2 Durant, David, 112 Dutton, Thomas, 117, 132 Echo, 70 Edinburgh Review, 183 Edward (slave), 12-13 Egham Races, 170 Ellis, Kate Ferguson: The Contested Castle,^, 25, 213n9, 219nl EHiston, Robert, 165-6, 170, 171 emancipation, 49, 200, 209

Equiano, Olaudah, 233n8 Eros, 73, 87-92 Erskine, Thomas, 133, 144, 172, 188, 231n5 Erskine, William, 140, 141, 167, 190 Estwick, Samuel, 26 Euphrates, 99, 219n6 European Magazine, 129, 146, 153, 166, 177 Evans, Bertrand, 51, 227n58 Eve, 71, 201 Examiner, 176 Fairchild, Hoxie N., 212n7 Falcieri, Giovanni Battista ('Tita'), 175,196,210 fantastic, 116 Farley, Charles, 177; Raymond and Agnes, 135, 223nll Farquhar, Sir Walter, 40-1 Fawcett (actor), 147-8 Fawcett, Mary Laughlin, 113 Ferrier, Susan, 31 Fiedler, Leslie, 113 Fielding, Henry: The Mock-Doctor, 158 Finlason, Mary-Ann, 56, 194, 195-6, 210 Flagellant, 96 Flapper, 130 Flaubert, Gustave, 218nl7 Florence, 193 Flowers of Literature, 11, 165 Fonthill Abbey, 130 Fort 1'Ecluse Moreau, 108 Foster, Augustus John, 225n43 Foucault, Michel, 64 Fountaine, Rev. Dr John, 95 Fox, Charles James, 105, 129, 142, 144, 152, 155, 164, 224n32 Frederick the Great, 200-1

Index French Revolution, 100-1, 111, 113, 126,129,181,183,184-5,220nn 11, 16, 230nlll,231n7 Freud, Sigmund, 86, 113, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 Friend to Genius, A, 117, 130-1 Garrick, David: Isabella, 190 Gaveston, Piers, 36, 215n 14 Genette, Gerard, 80 Geneva, 192 Gentleman's Magazine, 134, 168 George III, 60, 133, 176, 183, 189, 212n2, 231n9 George, Prince of Wales, 67, 176, 178, 2l7n9 Georgia, 214n 11 'Ghost of Crazy Jane, The,' 224n22 Gibbon, Edward, 159, 161 Gibbs, Mrs (actor), 163, 164 Godwin, William, 129; Caleb Williams, 79, 109, 118-19, 221nn22, 27; Political Justice, 119 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 103, 105, 125, 141, 145, 193, 225n43. See also Lewis, Matthew Gregory, letters Goldsmith, Oliver: The Grumbler, 175 Goodwin, Betsey, 36 Gothic, 79, 80, 110-11, 113, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 167, 179, 181, 184, 200, 203, 208, 220nl4, 221n22, 226n56, 228n83, 233nl2 Gounod, Charles: La Nonne sanglante, 223nll Gramont, Comte de, 80 Greece, 73, 194 Greville, Charles Fulke, 42, 194, 215nl7 Grey, Charles (Earl Grey), 69, 177 Grudin, Peter, 115, 218nl6, 220n21

301

Guildford, 155 Guthke, Karl S., 213nlO, 223nl2 Haggerty, George E., 59, 79 Hague, The, 15, 31, 35, 106-7, 108 Haitian revolution, 51, 206 Hamilton, Anthony: Les QuatreFacardins, 80-2, 83-4, 86, 218nnl9, 20, 21 Hamilton, Duke of, 158 Handel, George Frederick: Messiah, 212n2 Hardy, Thomas, 133 Harris, Marvin, ix Harris, Thomas, 156, 159, 160, 165, 177, 178 Harrison, Samuel, 4-5, 6, 8, 29, 212n2,214nl5 Harrison, Samuel M., 222-3nlO Hastings, Warren, 123, 144, 224n30 Haymarket Theatre, 32, 222nlO Heath, Catherine (maternal grandmother), 212nl Heath, Catherine (mother's companion), 5-6, 212nl Heber (friend of Sir Walter Scott), 151 Hector, Old (lion), 171 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Phenomenology of Spirit, 26, 205—6, 207 Hellespont, 98 Hennelly, Mark M.Jr, 221n25 Henry I, 200 Herbert, Thomas, 203 Hermitage Cottage, 153 Herodotus, 98 heteroglossia, 219n23 Hindon, 129, 130 Hoagwood, Terence, 185 Hobbes, Thomas: Leviathan, 205

302

Index Ingall, John, 23, 32 Inveraray, 68, 70, 139-40, 158, 161, 168, 174, 224n22 Irish Rebellion, 67 Italy, 78

Hobhouse, John Cam (Lord Broughton), 24, 178, 194, 195, 210, 219n6 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 21 In2 Holcroft, Thomas: A Tale of Mystery, 182 Holland, Caroline, 223nlO Holland, Elizabeth Fox, Baroness, 24, 42, 51, 69, 139, 142, 155, 162, 178, 186; Journal, 47, 137, 139, 149, 150, 151. See also Lewis, Matthew Gregory, letters Holland House, 152, 178, 186 Holland, Norman N., viii Holland, Richard Fox, Baron, 24, 51, 69, 100, 142, 155, 164, 168, 178, 186, 192. See also Lewis, Matthew Gregory, letters Homer, 98, 186 homophobia, 74-6, 127 Hook, Theodore, 225n46 Hope, Louisa, 60 Horace, 98 Hordley estate, 27-8, 34, 201, 202 House of Commons, 48, 105, 129, 152, 157, 169, 174 House of Lords, 8, 144 Housman, A.E., 73 Howe, Miss Fanny (lion), 171 Howells, Coral Ann, 221n23 Howick, 69, 177 Hugo, Victor, 21 In2 Hunt, Leigh, 176

Jackson, Cyril, 41, 97, 98, 99, 100 Jackson's Oxford Journal, 21 Jacobinism, 50, 108, 126, 155, 181, 220nl6 Jamaica, 12-13, 21-2, 26-9, 35-6, 48, 52, 73-4, 192, 194, 197, 198-209, 210,216n26 James II, 80 Jenkinson, Charles, Earl of Liverpool, 33, 36, 48 Jessy (dog), 175 Joan of Arc, 77 John (slave), 12 Johnson, Samuel, 47, 141, 224n24 Johnston, Henry, 156, 160, 163, 165 Johnston, Mrs (actor), 156, 160, 163, 177 Jommelli, Niccolo, 137, 223nl6 Jones, Lavinia, 226n54 Jordan, Dorothy, 10, 59-60, 101, 103, 136, 137, 145, 146, 153, 170, 179, 212n8 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, viii Juvenal, 47, 98, 100-1, 142, 143, 224n24

idolatry, 78 illegitimacy, 8, 123, 182, 185, 192 Illingworth, George, 98 imagination, 98, 113, 121, 122, 201, 208. See also Lewis, Matthew Gregory Impartial Strictures on the Poem Called 'The Pursuits of Literature,' 132

Kahn, Madeleine, 82, 85-6, 219n23 Kant, Immanuel, 121 Kauhl, Gudrun, 218nl5 Kean, Edmund, 191-2 Kelly, Frances Maria, 147-8, 225n41 Kelly, Isabella (later Hedgeland), 60-1, 159, 217n4, 228n83

Index Kelly, Michael, 51, 153, 166, 209, 223nl6 Kelly, William Martin, 60-3, 159, 192, 2l7n5 Kemble, Charles, 153, 165, 225n46 Kemble, Frances Anne, 214nl 1 Kemble, John Philip, 135, 136, 145, 146, 161, 182, 225n46 Kensington Palace, 186, 190 Kerry, Francis Thomas, Earl of, 106-7 Kidderminster, 212n5 Kiely, Robert, 122 Kingston Royal Gazette, 214nl4, 216n33 Kinnaird, Lord, 140 Klancher, Jon P., 138 Kleist, Heinrich von, 19, 118, 211n2 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb: Der Messias, 202, 233n5 Knight, Richard Payne, 123, 131, 186 Knox-Shaw, P.H., 232n3 Kojeve, Alexandre, 206 Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von, 19 la Force, Duchesse de, 108 Lacey, Fanny (half-sister), 6-7, 32, 166, 170-1, 212n3, 217n2 Lamb, Lady Caroline, 68, 174, 177 Lamb, George, 148-9, 225n44 Lamb, William (Viscount Melbourne), 68-9, 142, 148, 149, 158, 163,177, 2l7nlO Lane, William, 228n83 Larpent, John, 25, 51, 135, 173, 184 Leake, Mrs Percy D., 229nl02 legitimacy, 137, 138, 181, 182, 185 Levy, Maurice, 220nl9 Lewis, Barrington (brother), 3, 33, 150

303

Lewis family tomb (Cornwall estate, Jamaica), 208, 233nnl3, 14 Lewis, Fanny Maria (Lady Henry Lushington, sister), 3, 7, 25, 38, 40, 41, 42, 99, 174, 193-4 Lewis, Frances Maria Sewell (mother), 14-19, 29; death, 32, 38; dependence on husband and son, 15, 30, 31, 35, 39; love for son, 7, 17; marriage, 3-4, 9, 97; separation, 3-9, 143, 172, 176, 212n4; valedictory penitential letter, 6-8, 10, 213n2; as a writer, 30-1. See also Lewis, Matthew Gregory, letters Lewis,John (slave), 57 Lewis, Mary G., 2l7n2 Lewis, Matthew (father): affair with Sophia Ricketts, 35-40; assistance to his son, 33, 35, 46, 128, 129; career, 33-5; character, 33; death, 40-1, 179; education, 95, 97; marriage, 3-4, 9, 97; money, attitude towards, 15, 33-5, 38-9; quarrel with son, 37-41, 161, 163, 175; separation, 3-9, 35, 36, 176, 212n4; slave trade and slavery, attitude towards, 48; will, 41-2, 179 Lewis, Matthew Gregory: allowance from father, 35, 38-9, 106; ambivalence towards father, 42-6, 146, 215nl9; ambivalence towards mother, 14-21, 22-4, 106, 109; death, 208-10; diplomatic career, 35, 100, 106-7, 220nlO; education, 95-106, 219nl, 220n9; euphemism in the works of, 25-9, 63-4, 213n7, 213-14nlO, 214nl3; gender, attitude towards, 18-19, 31-2, 104, 162, 200; ghost stories, 175-6, 1923, 231nl4; ghosts, belief in, 17,150,

304

Index

193; humour, sense of, 16-17, 22, - LETTERS: to Lady Charlotte Camp29, 30, 53, 70, 104, 149; imaginabell, 31-2, 59, 176, 177, 190, 212-13n8; tojohann Wolfgang von tion, 17, 22, 29, 75, 120, 208; marGoethe, 225n43; to Elizabeth, Lady riage, attitude towards, 9-13, 172, Holland, 69-73, 140, 142, 152, 155, 213nl2, 229nl03; nickname, 30, 71, 110; orientalism, 176, 201, 156, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167, 232nn3, 4; parliamentary career, 168, 169-70, 171, 173, 174, 177, 187, 189, 190-2, 217nlO, 228n91; 49, 51, 129, 130, 152, 157, 227n65; political opinions, 109, 127, 136, to Richard, Lord Holland, 35, 42, 157, 161, 184; quarrels, 24, 49, 150, 51, 69, 161, 162, 164; to John 163, 178, 188-9, 194; quarrel with Ingall, 23; to Isabella Kelly, 61; to father, 37-41, 161, 163, 175; race, William Kelly, 62; to Frances Maria attitude towards, 199, 200, 207; sexSewell Lewis, 5, 9, 14-17, 18-19, 22-4, 30-1, 32, 34, 35, 37-42, 55, uality, 59-92, 101-2, 148, 165, 172, 61, 62-3, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 231n6; slave trade and abolition, 105-6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 150, 159, attitude towards, 48-52, 164-5; slavery and emancipation, attitude 161, 163, 166, 167, 174, 177, 193-4, 219n3; to Matthew Lewis, 46-7; to towards, ix, 21-2, 26-9, 52-8, 192, 199-200, 201-2, 203-7, 209, Elizabeth, Lady Melbourne, 68-9, 213nl2; snobbery, 102-3, 106, 108, 158, 189; to the Monthly Mirror, 131; 163, 169, 187, 189, 192; will, 16-17, to Thomas Moore, 158-9; to John Plummer, 57; to Walter Scott, 135, 58 INFLUENCE: 222-3nlO, 223nll, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 167-8, 190, 227n60; to 226n54; on Artaud, 211n2; on Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, 186-7; Charlotte Bronte, 223nll; on to William Wilberforce, 52-3, 58 Byron, 122, 193, 195, 212n7, 220nl8, 227n58, 231nl5; on Cha- WORKS: 'Address to Youth,' 144; Adelgitha, 20, 45-6, 54, 117-18, 125, teaubriand, 220nl2; on Coleridge, 165-6, 180, 183-4, 215n20, 222n3, 223nl8; on Dacre, 211n2; 216n26, 228n84; Adelmorn, the Outon Dickens, 223nl5; on Dumas pere, 211n2;on Flaubert, 218n 17; law, 10-11, 54, 59-60, 135, 153-5, on Gounod, 223nl 1; on Hoff182, 227n58, 230n 112; Alfonso, King mann, 211n2; on Hugo, 211n2; on of Castile, 44-5, 54, 153, 155-7, 159, Kleist, 211n2;on Maturin, 211n2; 183, 184, 215nl9; anacreontic on Merimee, 21 In2; on Radcliffe, translations, 87-92, 218nl4, 110; on Sand, 211n2; on Scott, 219n24; The Bravo of Venice, 25, 162, 141-2, 168; on M.W. Shelley, 228n75; 'Bothwell's Bonnyjane,' 231nl5; on P.B. Shelley, 218nl6, 219n2; The Captive, 159-60; The 227n58, 228n75; on Sheridan, Castle Spectre, 20-1, 25, 29, 43, 50-1, 223nl4; on Yeats, 224n22 54-5, 135, 136-9, 145-6, 153,

Index 179-80, 181, 182, 183, 184-5, 209, 216nn26, 32, 223nnl4, 15, 17, 18, 230n4, 231nl5; 'Charlotte to Olivia,' 70-1; 'The Cloud-King,' 152, 187, 230n3; 'CrazyJane,' 169, 224n22; The East Indian, 10, 19-20, 30, 43-4, 55, 75, 97, 103, 109, 146-7, 213n3, 215nl8; TheEffusions of Sensibility, 101-2, 219n7; 'Elegy, On the approaching Departure of a Friend,' 67, 73; 'EPILOGUE to Barbarossa Spoken at Inveraray,' 139-40; 'Epistle to my Eldest Sister,' 99; The Epistolary Intrigue, 101, 103; Feudal Tyrants, 11-12, 25-6, 54, 165, 213-14nlO, 228n82; 'The Flying Fish,' 200; 'The Four Facardins,' 80-6, 218n20, 218-19n22; 'France and England in 1793,' 108-9, 184; 'The Grim White Woman,' 187, 230n3; The Harper's Daughter, 43, 160; 'He Loves and he Rides Away,' 168, 169; 'The Highland Boy,' 158; 'The Humming Bird,' 200; 'Imitation of Anacreon. Ode 3rd,' 88-92; 'The Isle of Devils,' 13, 198-9, 200, 232nl; Italian journal (lost), 42, 215nl7; Journal of a West India Proprietor, vii, 12-13, 21-2, 26-9, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55-6, 57, 74,92,198-209,21 Inl, 216n26, 232nn2, 3, 233-4nl5; 'Landing,' 199; 'Lines Written on Returning from the Funeral of the Right Hon. CJ. Fox,' 164—5; The Love of Gain, 47, 101, 117, 142-4, 153, 224n24; The Minister, 19, 43, 50, 54, 136; 'Mistrust,' 19, 118, 125; The Monk, vii, 5, 7, 9-10, 19, 20, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 46-7, 54, 61, 63, 71, 74, 76-80,

305

86, 91-2, 101, 104-5, 107-8, 109, 110-27, 128, 129-36, 149, 151, 155, 168, 180, 181, 188, 199, 200, 204, 209, 211n3, 212n5, 213n9, 218nnl5, 16, 17, 18, 218-19n22, 219nn26, 1, 220nn8, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 221nn22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 221-2nl, 222nn3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 222-3nlO, 223nll, 230nlll, 231nl5, 232nl; Monody on the Death of SirJohn Moore, 173-4; 'Oberon's Henchman,' 168, 216n21; 'On Lord Erskine's telling Lady Anne Smith, that Wives were "like Tin Cannisters,"' 172; OneO'Clock!, 166, 177-8; 'Pleasure and Desire,' 144, 224n32, 230n4; Poems, 179; 'Prologue to "the Metamorphoses,"' 148-9; Rich and Poor, 147-8; Rolla, 19, 50, 145, 183; Romantic Tales, 54, 80, 118, 168, 169, 218nll; Rugantino, 163-4, 185; 'The Runaway,' 199-200; 'Sir Guy the Seeker,' 69, 218nl 1; 'St. Anthony the Second,' 71-2; The Tailor's Wife,' 103; Tales of Wonder, 141, 148, 151-3, 162, 187, 219n2, 222n4, 226nn54, 56, 226-7n57, 227n60, 228n89; Temper, 174-5; Timour the Tartar, 21, 46, 53-4, 75, 177, 179, 229nl05, 229-30nl08, 230nnll3, 4; 'To CJ. F Esqr on the mention made of the Empress of Russia in the House of Commons by Mr Sheridan on Thursday April the 25th,' 105-6; To Mrs W. (Sent to her the day before her Masquerade [)],' 73, 88; To the Hon: Charles. W. S ,' 67-8, 155; Twelve Ballads, 168; The Twins, 109,

306

Index

145-6; Venoni, 26, 101, 170-2, 184; Village Virtues, 13, 103-4, 136, 223nl3; 'The Vindication,' 72-3; 'War, Victory, and Peace,' 155; 'The Water-King,' 151; 'What triumph moves on the billows so blue?' 207; The Wood Daemon, 32, 54, 166, 228n86 Lewis, Paul, 232nl Lewis, Sophia Elizabeth (Mrs John Shedden, sister), 3, 7, 29, 38, 41, 42, 63, 74, 158, 168, 225n52 Leyden, John, 151-2, 225n52 Litchfield, Harriet, 156, 159, 160 Literary Gazette, 2l7n2 Literary Journal, 165 Liverpool, Charles Jenkinson, Earl of. S