The Gothic Imagination at the British Library

Originally published in The Oxonian Review

For the comedian Tim Minchin, there is no better guard dog against superstition than that steadfast defender of enlightenment values, Scooby Doo. In Storm, a series of vitriolic verses attacking the fluffy excesses of faith in favour of the advances of science, Minchin attempts to unmask the “cheap, man-made myths and monsters” dreamt up by hippies and homeopaths – in the same way that Scooby Doo and his flare-wearing friends unmask dodgy janitors and party-trick hypnotists posing as ghouls, werewolves and zombies.

As demonstrated in a new exhibition at the British Library, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, those moustachioed rogues are directly descended from the manipulative monks of early Gothic fiction. Texts such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mystery of Udolpho (1794) established the trope of the “explained supernatural,” blending mock-medieval romance with a touch of the realism of the novel. The result was a thoroughly modern take on medievalism, tales which could be enjoyed from the comfort of a drawing room, preferably with a couple of cobwebs in the corner.

Any exhibition is a form of exposure, and it’s not surprising that the theme of forgery haunts the show. Descending a flight of stairs into the darkness of the exhibition hall, we find ourselves face to face with an artfully tarnished mirror designed for Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival villa in Twickenham. The product of an elaborately staged world, Walpole’s novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) initially posed as a translation of a 16th century Italian manuscript – today it is considered the very first example of Gothic fiction. Following in Walpole’s footsteps, the exhibition creates its own Gothic castle: flimsy black shrouds connect a series of labyrinthine rooms, spiralling into one another to create disorientating dead ends. The show coyly concludes with a credit to Farrow & Ball, the source of various lugubrious shades of Pitch Black, Rectory Red and the suitably fearsome Great White.

Dredged up from the darkest recesses of its collection, the British Library brings us prized artefacts ranging from early manuscripts of Frankenstein, Dracula and Jane Eyre, to an account of a Gothic pageant held in honour of the artist Henry Fuseli – the mind behind The Nightmare (1781), who reportedly ate raw pork to fuel his fevered imagination. A healthy proportion of the exhibition is given over to the sexual excesses of the genre (with fewer petit-mort puns than might have been expected), and due attention is given to Gothic fashion, children’s literature, comic books and pamphlet penny dreadfuls. Every step is accompanied by background patter from various film projections, echoing around the exhibition on a torturous loop.

The sense of theatricality is further emphasised by the objects scattered around the exhibition, bizarre props satisfying our craving for the solid and tangible, mistrusting the shifting, slippery power of words. You can’t help but marvel at Dr Dee’s obsidian spirit mirror, an eerie relic from the Elizabethan age and the prize of Horace Walpole’s collection. On the other hand, nothing could be as absurd as a spic-and-span vampire slaying kit, or a mawkish Victorian alarm clock featuring a grinning skeleton astride a kitschy coffin.

The Gothic is perhaps best appreciated from backstage – where we can admire the cords and pulleys, the intricate mechanisms that combine to create a satisfactory impression of the supernatural: convincing enough to hold our attention, fake enough to flatter our intelligence. Yet beyond all the knowing exposure lurks something far more disturbing. Those moments when the shock of the real reduces Gothic tropes to a collection of horror-house gimmicks.

Discussing the effects of tragedy in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke made the famous claim that no theatrical performance could ever compete with the lure of a public execution. In other words, the pleasures of the imitative arts were no match for the horrors of reality experienced in the flesh. Decades later, Burke was one of the first to condemn the brutal excesses of the French Revolution, while the reading public of Britain were baying for blood. The Gothic form adapted accordingly, moving away from a focus on natty interior design choices and pleasant play-acting and towards a literary incarnation of a Terror which was all too real. Readers found their fix in the salacious, semi-satirical sadism of texts like Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), where bleeding spectral nuns, matricide, mob-violence and rape provided a suitable substitute for the atrocities across the channel.

In banishing the Gothic to the domain of the imagination, we are perhaps denying some of the more troubling elements of the human condition – something more sinister than the undying appeal of hunky high school vampires. The exhibition has little time for such dismal thoughts and before we know it we surface to light, surrounded by Martin Parr’s dazzling photographs of this year’s Whitby Goth Weekend. Though clearly intended as candid portrayals of individual characters, the result is uncomfortably reminiscent of a freak show. A couple in full-mourning pose coquettishly for the camera. A lone witch prongs a greasy chip on a rainswept harbour front. There is no sense of empathy here; the high-res brightness only makes the characters appear more detached. A series of masks.

All in all, the show is a vast, elaborate romp, coloured by a slight cynicism even as it celebrates the power of the human imagination. Along with the Farrow & Ball accreditation, the words of Tim Minchin might have made a suitable epitaph:

Throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.

But what about the mysteries which remain unsolved? Can the post-medieval Gothic ever be expressed without cynicism, in “good faith”? One such example is Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-7) – a vast canvas housed at Tate Britain, in which a peaceful country graveyard suddenly swarms with the activity of the dead rising. The imagery is pure Hammer Horror, yet the mood is informed by the irrefutable truth of faith. The quality of paint is all about solidity, and the figures help one another out of their coffins with everyday ease. For Spencer this is precisely what the resurrection would look like taking place in his home of Cookham, and the archetype of the risen corpse is Christ. Perhaps this painting goes some way to reconcile our uncomfortable relationship with the Gothic, a celebration of spiritual authenticity which is far from flamboyant forgeries or the delights of horror held at arm’s length. Such a sense of authenticity could hardly be less fashionable. But perhaps there’s some truth in it.

Originally published in The Oxonian Review