Gothic tales

Like most people, I first heard or rather read of the Gothic novel in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The heroine and her friend are gabbing away about The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole – at least I think it was The Castle of Otranto.

Years ago, the BBC produced a serial based on Northanger Abbey which attempted, but failed to create a suitably Gothic atmosphere. Lately, television attempted a straight version of Lady Audley’s Secret, a Victorian Gothic novel, and another borrowed from some tale of a madwoman who appears, limb by limb, through the plaster of a ceiling.

What with all the Van Helsing, werewolf, dracula films being made at present, I decided it was time to make a study of the Gothic novel in its golden age – that is, in the second half of the 18th century. OUP publishes a collection of four novels, including Walpole’s. So I began with The Castle of Otranto. The opening few pages are indeed a masterpiece – of unintentional comedy. The heir to the throne is late for his nuptials to the beautiful Princess Mathilda. The reason for this, it transpires, is that a giant helmet has fallen on his head. I quote:

He [Manfred, the ruler] beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

Golly, I thought, what a great cartoon this would make. Not to be continued. It is extraordinary that the reading public of the 18th century – allegedly so cultured – could lap up this kind of trash. Who said taste has deteriorated? Poor old Walpole should have stuck to his diaries.