THE NOVEL IN IRELAND c.1760–1829 Christina Morin The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 • The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 • Christina Morin Manchester University Press Copyright © Christina Morin 2018 The right of Christina Morin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7190 9917 5 hardback ISBN 978 1 5261 2230 8 open access First published 2018 An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Contents • List of figures page vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: locating the Irish gothic novel 1 1 Gothic temporalities: ‘Gothicism’, ‘historicism’, and the overlap of fictional modes from Thomas Leland to Walter Scott 27 2 Gothic genres: romances, novels, and the classifications of Irish Romantic fiction 72 3 Gothic geographies: the cartographic consciousness of Irish gothic fiction 113 4 Gothic materialities: Regina Maria Roche, the Minerva Press, and the bibliographic spread of Irish gothic fiction 154 Conclusion 196 Appendix: A working bibliography of Irish gothic fiction, c. 1760–1829 201 Select bibliography 212 Index 228 • v Figures • 1 Irish gothic texts and their generic identifiers 81 2 The marketing cues of Irish gothic fiction 82 3 Irish gothic novels and their primary geographic settings 116 4 Map of the publication, reprint, and translation history of Roche’s novels in the long nineteenth century (adapted from a map created using carto.com, map data © OpenStreetMap) 166 • vii Acknowledgements • This book has been the work of several years, over which time I have benefited from the assistance and encouragement of a great many people. The initial research for this project was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Irish Research Council from 2010–12. I am very grateful to the Council for this funding, and to the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, which hosted me for the duration of my fel- lowship. My dear friend and former Ph.D. supervisor, Ian Campbell Ross, generously mentored me during this fellowship and over the course of the project as a whole. My particular thanks are due to him for his unfailing support of my scholarly endeavours over the years. Research for this project was further enabled by teaching relief provided by the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Limerick (UL) in spring 2015. I am thankful to the School for this opportunity. Thanks are also due to my wonderful colleagues at UL, conversations and research collaborations with whom have undoubtedly strengthened the arguments presented here. I particularly want to acknowledge David Coughlan, Mike Griffin, Meg Harper, and Elaine Vaughan in this regard. I owe, moreover, a debt of gratitude to the members of an informal writing group that met occasionally to critique works-in-progress with coffee cups and chocolate bars in hand: my thanks to Cathy McGlynn, Patricia Moran, Maggie O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh. I am further indebted to colleagues outside of UL who have selflessly read, commented upon, critiqued, and helpfully discussed elements of continuing research over the years. These include – but certainly are not limited to – Graham Allen, Norbert Besch, Claire Connolly, Marguérite Corporaal, Aileen Douglas, Niall Gillespie, Moyra Haslett, Jarlath Killeen, Ed Larrissey, Barry Monahan, • ix Acknowledgements Orla Murphy, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Jim Shanahan, and Julia M. Wright. The late Diane Long Hoeveler was a real source of inspiration throughout this project, and it is only right that I remember her generous collegiality and groundbreaking research here. Friends and family across the world have offered absolutely invaluable support – moral and otherwise – over the course of this project. Dani Blaylock, Dominic Bryan, Thérèse Cullen, Meg Hoyt, Ruth McCullough, Eveline Masco, Agnes Masengu, Jaele Rollins-McColgan, and Sara Templer have propelled me on through various stages of my research and have never, ever asked, ‘Is the book finished yet?’ My most sincere thanks are reserved for Bruce Harper, who may well be able to recite this book from memory so permanent a feature has it become in our household. For good humour, continued interest (feigned and otherwise), technical assistance with ‘graphs, maps, and trees’, and long Sunday afternoons spent amusing Grace and Ryan while Mommy was at the library, I am deeply grateful. Material originally printed in earlier versions in the collections Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (eds), Irish gothics: genres, forms, modes and traditions, 1760–1890 (2014) and Marguérite Corporaal and Christina Morin (eds), Traveling Irishness in the long nineteenth century (2017) is republished here with permission from Palgrave Macmillan. Reworked forms of arguments presented in the European Romantic Review and the Irish University Review are also reproduced here with permission from the editors. The full publication details are as follows: ‘Theorizing “gothic” in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (eds), Irish gothics: genres, forms, modes and traditions, 1760–1890 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 13–33. ‘Irish gothic goes abroad: cultural migration, materiality, and the Minerva Press’, in Marguérite Corporaal and Christina Morin (eds), Traveling Irishness in the long nineteenth century (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 195–203. ‘ “At a distance from [my] country”: Henrietta Rouvière Mosse, the Minerva Press, and the negotiation of Irishness in the Romantic literary marketplace’, European Romantic Review 28.4 (2017), pp. 447–60. See www.tandfonline.com. ‘Forgotten fiction: reconsidering the gothic novel in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Irish University Review 41.1 (2011): 80–94. x • Introduction: locating the Irish gothic novel • ublished in 1780 in a collection of tales titled Novellettes, selected for Pthe use of young ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Griffith’s little known but compelling short fiction ‘Conjugal fidelity’ narrates a domestic romance set against the backdrop of the 1641 Rebellion, or ‘Irish Massacre’.1 It tells of the troubled relationship between the Protestant Mr Pansfield – the descendant of ‘an English family that had received a grant of some lands in that country [Co. Kilkenny] from Queen Elizabeth’ – and his Catholic wife, Elvina Butler, as they weather the ‘storms’ then ravaging the country (‘Conjugal fidelity’, pp. 182, 186). In her 2006 chapter, ‘The gothic novel’, Siobhán Kilfeather identified the story as an early instance of Irish gothic fiction, but it has yet to receive serious scholarly analysis in studies of either eighteenth-century Irish or gothic literature.2 It will seem an odd choice with which to begin a discussion of ‘the Gothic novel’ in Ireland, as promised by the title of this book. Yet, its continued neglect, driven by its failure easily to satisfy critical expectations for either ‘Irish Gothic’ or ‘the Gothic novel’, as detailed in this introduction, highlights the aims of this monograph: to interrogate scholarly preconceptions about the bodies of work associated with these monolithic terms and to draw a new conceptual map of Irish gothic literary production in the period 1760–1829.3 Widely used today as identifying labels for gothic literature produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, ‘Irish Gothic’ and ‘the Gothic novel’ offer a helpful shorthand for referencing the shared themes, settings, and topoi that tie authors and texts together in recognisable gothic literary traditions. ‘Irish Gothic’ thus speaks of fiction that explores the mixed fears and desires of a minority Anglo-Irish population threatened • 1 The gothic novel in Ireland – imaginatively if not actually – by the unsettled native Catholics over whom they maintained precarious control.4 It is typified by the novels of Victorian writers such as Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), although its origins are often traced to Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). ‘The Gothic novel’, in turn, signifies ‘[a] strain of the novel’ that developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century and enjoyed notable popular success before exhausting itself in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.5 Commonly understood to begin with Horace Walpole’s The castle of Otranto (1764), its defining characteristics include, as David Punter outlines, ‘an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of suspense’.6 As terms, both ‘Irish Gothic’ and ‘the Gothic novel’ are valuable for the work they represent: the identification and scholarly recuperation of two interrelated bodies of popular fiction often overshadowed in contemporary critical responses and more