A Gothic Revival: William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London

Abstract

William Harrison Ainsworth had a deep and romantic attraction to the England of the Tudors and Stuarts, and he wrote popular books about the period for an audience which shared his passion. Ainsworth wrote quickly and spiritedly, and, for the first decade of his literary career at least, he maintained a phenomenal and often inexplicable success. He was a best-seller in an age which enjoyed the benefits of industrialism for the production and distribution of literature, but which nevertheless affected a sentimental attachment to a time and place without machines. His novels catered for a taste for easily assimilated historical romance, even though, like his audience, Ainsworth held an equivocal view of the relevance of the study of history. On the one hand, he was content to be a Victorian Englishman and to have escaped the plagues, racks and bigotry of the past; on the other, he was drawn to history in search of an imaginative release from the drabness and relative stability of life in the nineteenth century. Ainsworth was a product of the declining era of Romanticism, and of the Romantic tendency to long for an escape from modern reality; paradoxically, he happily accepted a concept of social progress and was both amused and shocked by the narrowness of his ancestors’ world.

The clothes were strewn on the grass. Cardboard crowns, swords made of silver paper, turbans that were sixpenny dish cloths, lay on the grass or were flung on the bushes. There were pools of red and purple in the shade; flashes of silver in the sun. The dresses attracted the butterflies. Red and silver, blue and yellow gave off warmth and sweetness. Red Admirals gluttonously absorbed richness from dish cloths, cabbage whites drank icy coolness from silver paper. Flitting, tasting, returning, they sampled the colours.

Miss La Trobe stopped her pacing and surveyed the scene. ‘It has the makings …’ she murmured. For another play always lay behind the play she had just written. Shading her eyes, she looked. The butterflies circling; the light changing; the children leaping; the mothers laughing — ‘No, I don’t get it,’ she muttered and resumed her pacing.

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts