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Chapter X - Short Tales of Terror
The chapbook versions of the Gothic Romance; the popularity of
sensational story illustrated in Leigh Hunt's Indicator ;
collections of short stories; various types of short story in
periodicals; stories based on oral tradition; the humourist's turn
for the terrible; natural terror in tales from Blackwood and in
Conrad; use of terror in Stevenson and Kipling; future possibilities
of fear as a motive in short stories.
For the readers of their own day the
Gothic Romances of
Walpole,
Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe possessed the charm of novelty. Before
the close of the century we may trace, in the conversations of
Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey, symptoms
of a longing for more poignant excitement.
It was at this time that
Mrs. Radcliffe, after the publication of
The Italian in 1797,
retired quietly from the field. From her obscurity she viewed no
doubt with some disdain the vulgar achievements of "Monk"
Lewis and
a tribe of imitators, who compounded a farrago of horrors as thick
and slab as the contents of a witch's cauldron.
Until the appearance
in 1820 of
Maturin's
Melmoth, which was redeemed by its
psychological insight and its vigorous style, the
Gothic Romance
maintained a disreputable existence in the hands of those who looked
upon fiction as a lucrative trade, not as an art. In the meantime,
however, an easy device had been discovered for pandering to the
popular craving for excitement.
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