THE GOTHIC IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE The Creation of the Adolescent in Crossover Fiction Duncan Burnes A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield School of English February 2016 1 ABSTRACT This thesis traces the literary course of gothic narrative elements as they appear within children’s fiction, beginning from the late eighteenth century and concluding at the close of the nineteenth century. The thesis presents evidence and potentialities for children’s appropriation of gothic fiction written for adults, and links them to the contemporaneous development of gothic devices in fiction written for children. These are argued to reflect a single phenomenon: The burgeoning relevance, literary and social, of the adolescent, in whom gothic and children’s fictions find a natural point of crossover. This thesis contextualises critical negativity towards the gothic and particularly to potential adolescent audiences, highlighting how contentious and therefore radical their relationship was. Nonetheless, the thesis introduces two hitherto obscure examples of early gothic children’s fiction from the end of the eighteenth century which provide initial evidence of this trend, alongside readings of parodic representations of adolescent gothic consumption. This is developed in an analysis of twelve early nineteenth-century gothic bluebooks, examples of short, cheap gothic fiction, for their relevance and, more significantly, accessibility to potential adolescent readers. This point suggests mechanisms by which the very means used to acquire fiction can foster the development of the adolescent social unit. The adolescent, or maturing child, is then considered as a specifically literary figure, with the character-type’s role, both in major canonical works of fiction and more esoteric texts aimed at narrower and often younger audiences, scrutinised for continuing gothic resonance particular to their immature age and experience. The conclusion of this reading of literary and social history for evidence of the joint occurrence and significance of gothic and adolescence produces a theory regarding gothic fiction’s significance to the understanding and acceptance of the adolescent in society, and the success of the seemingly unlikely partnership of the gothic in children’s fiction. 2 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 INTRODUCTION: Dark Ages 4 CHAPTER ONE: Blurring the Boundaries, 1760-1800 34 CHAPTER TWO: Marginal Gothic For a Marginal Audience, 1800-1830 87 CHAPTER THREE: A Genre and Audience Without Boundaries, 1830-1900 147 Part I 155 Part II 177 CONCLUSION: A Happy Ending? 213 Bibliography 220 Bluebook Bibliography 234 3 INTRODUCTION Dark Ages ‘If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal.’ --Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)1 The gothic and children’s literature are, at first glance, not the most likely literary partners. The average modern-day impressions of the gothic have as their points of reference brooding nineteenth-century castles, the bloodthirsty figure of Count Dracula, dark deeds done by night – not on its own merits the most obvious reading material for innocent, impressionable children. And yet, when perusing the children’s section of a high street bookshop, or the library of a voracious reader of twenty-first century children’s fiction, the titles that appear owe much to this seemingly unlikely relationship. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter heptalogy, chiefly set in a haunted and magical castle which, though a sanctuary from the evil undead sorcerer Voldemort, has its own threats and mysteries; Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which the ill-starred Baudelaire orphans are marked for murder so that the fiendish Count Olaf can usurp their bountiful inheritance; R.L. Stine’s innumerable Goosebumps novellas, which number ghosts, vampires, and castles among the hundreds of other horrors that his countless child protagonists encounter: It is perhaps unsurprising that these books have had their inclusion in children’s libraries challenged or even banned, that young readers might be prevented from reading them.2 Yet these and countless other supernatural and historical mysteries have not been prevented by the thumbprint of the gothic from filling numberless children’s shelves; indeed, collectively the three series named above number nearly a billion books in print.3 Writers continue to evoke gothic impressions and 1 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 6. 2 American Library Association, ‘Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009’ <http://www.ala.org/bbooks/top-100-bannedchallenged-books-2000-2009> [accessed 13 October 2014]; Chris Zammarelli, ‘If You’re Good, You’re Not Necessarily Rewarded’, Bookslut.com, July 2004 <http://www.bookslut.com/banned_bookslut/2004_07_002813.php> [accessed 13 October 2014]. 3 Comprising 450 million Harry Potter titles, 60 million A Series of Unfortunate Events titles, and 350 million Goosebumps titles: TIME Staff, ‘Because It’s His Birthday: Harry Potter, By The Numbers’, TIME.com, 31 July 2013 <http://entertainment.time.com/2013/07/31/because-its-his-birthday-harry-potter-by-the-numbers/> [accessed 13 October 2014]; Sally Lodge, ‘Lemony Snicket Sneaks Back With ‘File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents’’, PublishersWeekly.com, 17 October 2013 <http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by- topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/59596-lemony-snicket-sneaks-back-with-file-under-13.html> [accessed 13 October 2014]; Scholastic, ‘Goosebumps™ Television Series Arrives on iTunes across Canada, the UK and Australia’, Scholastic.com, 27 May 2014 <http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/press- 4 parallels in their children’s literature, and children continue to respond positively. Any number of research questions might be posed as to why this is, and how great a factor it represents in literary success for children’s authors. But rather than seeking explanations in the present, this thesis concerns itself with the past: The literary history of the relationship between the gothic and children’s literature, its point of origin, and the development of its success. The crucial question is: How did this link originate and evolve, and what is its true source of success? Tracing the origins of the gothic in children’s literature demands a long bibliographical journey, for more examples emerge the farther back one treads. In the mid-twentieth century, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and other child mystery-solvers spent their time in ruins and secret passageways uncovering buried secrets whilst being menaced by foreign villains in clear tests of their independence and maturity; the turn of the century finds Jules Verne, whose thrilling adventure stories, as will be discussed, both crossed into gothic territory and were serialised for younger audiences.4 The gothic margins of children’s literature, and how the growing child negotiates the space between the two, are inhabited and addressed throughout the nineteenth century by writers as prominent as Charles Dickens and as understudied as Nicholas Wiseman, in forms as respectable as the novel and as disreputable as the chapbook, reaching to even the late eighteenth century. It seems, therefore, that the roots of the gothic in children’s literature must be shared with the roots of gothic literature itself. This may seem incredible, in an age in which children’s literature scarcely existed and both children and literature were subject to intense social scrutiny – but analysis of those social conditions, of popular gothic literature, and of hitherto-obscure children’s fiction, reveals a figure of prime significance to the modern literary market, but whose presence in the long nineteenth century has received less attention: The adolescent. Fiction reflects the culture that created it, but also, especially at its most popular, shapes that culture. This thesis argues that the authors of early gothic works saw in adolescence something suited to their fiction, and that same fiction made adolescents see the same potential within themselves. The broad period of the adolescent’s rise to cultural definition coincides with that of the gothic’s literary ascendance, and thus of that genre’s refinement of release/goosebumps-television-series-arrives-itunes-across-canada-uk-and-australia> [accessed 13 October 2014]. 4 Andrew Nash, ‘Jules Verne: Boys Own Paper / Boys Own Annual’ in The Jules Verne Collecting Resource Page <http://www.julesverne.ca/jvboysown.html> [accessed 3 March 2014]. 5 the adolescent as a character of fiction. Arguably, the adolescent is the perfect audience for popular fiction: Old enough to understand any concept presented to them, and yet endlessly regenerating itself as one generation grows into adulthood and a succeeding one grows from childhood. The gothic mode can be recycled and resold to an adolescent audience perpetually – and has been, from both an even superficial glance at present-day bookshop fare and this thesis’s closer scrutiny of pre-twentieth-century work. And yet this is not to forget that much of this work is, either strictly speaking or in addition to its adolescent status, children’s literature – even taking into account that clearly demarcated literature for adolescents is a comparatively recent invention, and that such literature would previously have been apportioned either to children or to adults, as is implied in the paradoxical age-group assigned to adolescent-level literature,