Abstract
Neill offers an overview of the horror novel from the eighteenth century to the late Victorian period. This chapter shows that, while the first horror novels were very popular with readers, they were disparaged by critics and moralists. Neill argues that this mixed response drove the development of horror writing, including its diversification in the nineteenth century when the early Gothic novels gave way to such subgenres as the vampire novel and the penny dreadful. Although horror writing became more varied, novelists continued to use stories about monsters, and the monstrosities of which human beings are capable, to dramatize the anxieties of their day—a defining attribute of horror writing that explains both its longstanding popular appeal and the negative responses that it has engendered.
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Notes
- 1.
In the order in which they appear in Austen’s list, the seven “horrid” novels are Eliza Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), Regina Maria Roche’s Clermont: A Tale (1798), Eliza Parsons’s The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (1796), Karl Friedrich Kahlert’s The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest, Founded on Facts, Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg by Peter Teuthold (1794), Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell: A German Story Founded on Incidents in Real Life (1798), Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine: A Romance in Four Volumes (1798), and Carl Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries: A Story Translated from the German of the Marquis of Grosse by Peter Will (1796). The Midnight Bell is the only one that was not originally published by Minerva.
- 2.
The anonymous author of the essay “Terrorist Novel Writing” (1799) expresses the conventional standards by which all novels were evaluated, as well as the prevailing negative attitudes toward horror writing: “A novel, if it is useful at all ought to be a representation of human life and manners, with a view to direct the conduct in the important duties of life, and to correct its follies,” he insists; “But what instruction is to be reaped from the distorted ideas of lunatics, I am at a loss to conceive” (p. 224).
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Neill, N. (2018). “We Stare and Tremble”: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Horror Novels. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_13
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