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.