|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 14, 2021 16:48:54 GMT
I have no idea who any of those people are.
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 14, 2021 21:46:37 GMT
There's nothing spectacular about The Galanty Show but $65 sounds like a realistic price for a book that long out of print which had a fairly small print run, if memory serves. As opposed to the ridiculous prices for this sort of thing one tends to see nowadays on all these "bookjacking" sites. One of the odd things about the book that always sticks in my memory is how he mentions queen-cakes in an early passage. I'd never heard of such a thing, but it struck me as exactly the kind of snack one would imagine Montague Summers feasting upon. I was disappointed when I finally found a recipe for queen-cakes somewhere. H. I'd imagine lots of queen cakes were served up by old maids, along with a cup of tea, whenever a member of the clergy came to visit them in the old days. It has made me think of other cakes, like fairy cakes, and butterfly cakes.
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on May 15, 2021 2:48:05 GMT
Princess, the good "Reverend" (it seems unlikely he was ever actually ordained) was the kind of queen that seldom actually wears a crown. I know this is off topic but this rather twee page has some nice burbling commentary about the cakes, and one of the better recipes I've seen for them. She says they were popular during the reign of Queen Victoria, which was when little Montague basked in the sweetness of childhood. (Yes, I realize I'm laying it on with a trowel here.) www.theenglishkitchen.co/2013/01/queen-cakes.htmlH.
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 15, 2021 11:26:54 GMT
Princess, the good "Reverend" (it seems unlikely he was ever actually ordained) was the kind of queen that seldom actually wears a crown. I know this is off topic but this rather twee page has some nice burbling commentary about the cakes, and one of the better recipes I've seen for them. She says they were popular during the reign of Queen Victoria, which was when little Montague basked in the sweetness of childhood. (Yes, I realize I'm laying it on with a trowel here.) www.theenglishkitchen.co/2013/01/queen-cakes.htmlH. I know. I got the reference. I looked him up. He seems to have shared a passion for dressing up and pretending to be someone he wasn't with Aleister Crowley, whom he apparently knew. Didn't he pretend to be a Scots Laird? And wasn't he copying his occult master when he did that? I read Dennis Wheatley based the character Cannon Copley-Style on Summers.
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 15, 2021 21:05:43 GMT
I'm sure Crowley makes an appearance in the memoirs of the Welsh painter Augustus John. They drank in the same Soho pubs. I don't have the book available at the moment. I will look when I can. John did at least one drawing of Crowley. He was a great draughtsman, but lazy painter.
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 28, 2021 11:51:49 GMT
After dem bones introduced sensation drama in another thread, I've decided I will list the plays mentioned in this book. The Castle Spectre of Monk Lewis is mentioned:
One of his early attempts at fiction was a romance which he later converted into his popular drama, The Castle Spectre. This play was staged in 1798, and was reconverted by Miss Sarah Wilkinson in 1820 into a romance. Lewis spreads his banquet with a lavish hand, and crudities and absurdities abound, but he has a knack of choosing situations well adapted for stage-effect. The play, aptly described by Coleridge as a " peccant thing of Noise, Froth and Impermanence," would offer a happy hunting-ground to those who delight in the pursuit of " parallel passages." At the age of twenty, during his residence at the Hague as attache to the British embassy, in the summer of 1794, he composed in ten weeks, his notorious romance, The Monk. On its publication in 1795 it was attacked on the grounds of profanity and indecency.
More later.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 28, 2021 16:34:57 GMT
One of his early attempts at fiction was a romance which he later converted into his popular drama, The Castle Spectre. This play was staged in 1798, and was reconverted by Miss Sarah Wilkinson in 1820 into a romance. Did Sarah Wilkinson change the title for her adaptation? Not been able to find anything corresponding with The Castle Spectre under a listing of her works as yet. The Monk is still my all-time favourite novel. Very much doubt I'd be droning on about this stuff day in day out had it not been for the magnificent Mr. Lewis.
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 28, 2021 16:47:11 GMT
No, but it is here: books.google.co.uk/books?id=jz9WAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=falseHer books sound fun. I think helrunar would like them. The text says: Miss Wilkinson's sentences stagger and lurch uncertainly, but she delights in similes and other ornaments of style : " Adeline Barnett was fair as a lily, tall as the pine, her fine dark eyes sparkling as diamonds, and she moved with the majestic air of a goddess, but pride and ambition appeared on the brow of this famed maiden, and destroy- ing the effect of her charms." She is, in fact, more addicted to " gramarye " than to " grammar " — the fault with which Byron, in a note to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, charged the hero and heroine of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. Her heroes do not merely love, they are " enamoured to a romantic degree." Her arbours are " composed of jasmine, white rose, and other odori- ferous sweets of Flora." She sprinkles French phrases with an airy nonchalance worthy of the Lady Hysterica Belamour, whose memoirs are included in Barrett's Heroine. Her duchesses " figure away with eclat " — " a party quarrie assemble at their dejeune." Also: The sleeping potion, a boon to those who weave the intricate pattern of a Gothic romance, is one of Miss Wilkinson's favourite devices, and is employed in at least three of her stories
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 28, 2021 16:57:02 GMT
Monk Lewis:
Lewis was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, but a year spent in Weimar (1792-3), where he zealously studied German, and incidentally, met Goethe, seems to have left more obvious marks on his literary career. To Lewis, Goethe is pre-eminently the author of The Sorrows of Werther ; and Schiller, he remarks casually, " has written several other plays besides The Robbers." ! He probably read Heinse's Ardinghello (1787), Tieck's A bdallah (1792-3), and William Lovell (1794-6), many of the innumerable dramas of Kotzebue, the romances of Weit Weber, and other specimens of what Carlyle describes as " the bowl and dagger department/' where " Black Forests and Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the spectre nun and the charmed moonshine, shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge whiskers, and the most cat o' mountain aspect ; tear-stained senti- mentalists, the grimmest man-eaters, ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found in abundance. " 2 Throughout his life he seems to have made a hobby of the literature that arouses violent emotion and mental excite- ment, or Jacerates the nerves, or shocks and startles. The lifelike and the natural are not powerful enough for his taste, though some of his Romantic Tales (1808), such as My Uncle's Garret Window, are uncommonly tame. Like the painter of a hoarding who must at all costs arrest attention, he magnifies, exaggerates and distorts. Once when rebuked for introducing black guards into a country where they did not exist, he is said to have declared that he would have made them sky-blue if he thought they would produce any more effect. 3 Referring to The Monk, he confesses : " Unluckily, in working it up, I thought that the stronger my colours, the more effect would my picture produce."
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 28, 2021 17:41:32 GMT
Thank you! At that length, I'm disappointed Peter Haining didn't include it in GB Tales of Terror. This was the wardrobe for original staging of The Castle Spectre at the Theatre Royal.
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on May 28, 2021 18:29:26 GMT
Is there a biography of Monk Lewis?
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on May 29, 2021 10:27:55 GMT
Is there a biography of Monk Lewis? Would like to think so, as he led an extraordinary life (death pretty spectacular, also), but I'm not aware of any full length studies, just informative articles in such excellent publications as The Saturday Book and the Gothic Society's Udolpho magazine. Maybe someone clued in can set us straight?
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on Jun 9, 2021 15:15:23 GMT
Has anyone heard of this person?
The Gothic experiments of Dr. Nathan Drake, published in his Literary Hours (1798), are extremely instructive as indicating the critical standpoint of the time. Drake, like Mrs. Barbauld and her brother, was deeply interested in the sources of the pleasure derived from tales of terror, and wrote his Gothic stories to confirm and illustrate the theories propounded in his essays. He discusses gravely and learnedly the kinds of fictitious horror that excite agreeable sensations, and then proceeds to arrange carefully calculated effects, designed to alarm his readers, but not to outrage their sense of decorum. He has none of the reckless daring of " Monk " Lewis, who flung restraint to the winds and raced in mad career through an orgy of horrors. In his enchanted castles we are disturbed by an uneasy suspicion that the inhabitants are merely allegorical characters, and that the spectre of a moral lurks in some dim recess ready to spring out upon us suddenly. Dr. Drake's mind was as a house divided against itself : he was a moralist, emulating the " sage and serious Spenser " in his desire to exalt virtue and abase vice, he was a critic working out, with calm detachment, practical illustra- tions of the theories he had formulated, and he was a romantic enthusiast, imbued with a vague but genuine admiration for the wild superstitions of a bygone age. His stories exhibit painful evidence of the conflict which waged between the three sides of his nature. In the essay prefixed to Henry Fitzowen, a Gothic Tale, he distinguishes between the two species of Gothic superstition, the gloomy and the sportive, and addresses an ode to the two god- desses of Superstition — one the offspring of Fear and Midnight, the other of Hesper and the Moon. In his story the spectres of darkness are put to flight by a troop of aerial spirits. Dr. Drake knew the Gothic stories of Walpole, Mrs. Barbauld, Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe ; and traces of the influence of each may be found in his work.
Perhaps the Priestess can find a link to this book.
Updated:
In Dr. Drake's stories are patiently collected all the heirlooms necessary for the full equipment of a Gothic castle. Massive doors, which sway ponderously on their hinges or are forcibly burst open and which invariably close with a resounding crash, dark, eerie galleries, broken staircases, decayed apartments, mouldering floors, tolling bells, skeletons, corpses, howling spectres — all are there ; but the possessor, overwhelmed by the very profusion which surrounds him, is at a loss how to make use of them.
|
|
|
Post by Swampirella on Jun 9, 2021 15:39:41 GMT
I thought I'd have more trouble finding it, but it's here:
|
|
|
Post by 𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr on Jun 9, 2021 15:49:58 GMT
To show I can contribute a bit more than just silliness to the site, here is a long list of Gothic novelists and their work, courtesy of Edith Birkhead:
The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, from such works as Living Authors (1817), or from the four volumes of Watts' elaborate compilation, the Bibliotheca Britannica (1824). The titles are, indeed, lighter and more entertaining reading than the books themselves. Anyone might reasonably expect to read Midnight Horrors , or The Bandit's Daughter, as Henry Tilney vows he read The Mysteries of Udolpho, with " hair on end all the time " ; but the actual story, not- withstanding a wandering ball of fire, that acts as guide through the labyrinths of a Gothic castle, is conducive of sleep rather than shudders. The notoriety of Lewis's monk may be estimated by the procession of monks who followed in his train. There were, to select a few names at random, The New Monk, by one R. S., Esq. ; The Monk of Madrid, by George Moore (1802) ; The Bloody Monk of Udolpho, by T. J. Horsley Curties ; Manfroni, the One-handed Monk, whose history was borrowed, together with those of Abellino, the terrific bravo, and Rinaldo Rinaldini, 1 by "J. J." from Miss Flinders' library ; 2 and lastly, as a counter-picture, a monk without a scowl, The Benevolent Monk, by Theodore Melville (1807). The nuns, including " Rosa Matilda's" Nun of St. Omer's, Miss Sophia Francis's Nun of Misericordia (1807) and Miss Wilkinson's Apostate Nun, would have sufficed to people a convent. Perhaps The Convent of the Grey Penitents would have been a suitable abode for them ; but most of them were, to quote Crabbe, " girls no nunnery can tame." Lewis's Venetian bravo was boldly transported to other climes. We find him in Scotland in The Mysterious Bravo, or The Shrine of St. Alstice, A Caledonian Legend, and in Austria in The Bravo of Bohemia or The Black Forest. No country is safe from the raids of banditti. The Caledonian Banditti or The Banditti of the Forest, or The Bandit of Florence — all very much alike in their manners and morals — make the heroine's journey a perilous enterprise. The romances of Mrs. Radcliffe were rifled unscrupulously by the snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, and many of the titles are variations on hers. In emulation of The Romance of the Forest we find George Walker's Romance of the Cavern (1792) and Miss Eleanor Sleath's Mysteries of the Forest. Novelists appreciated the magnetic charm of the word " mystery " on a title-page, and after The Mysteries of Udolpho we find such seductive names as Mysterious Warnings and Mysterious Visits, by Mrs. Parsons ; Horrid Mysteries, translated from the German of the Marquis von Grosse, by R. Will (1796) ; The Mystery of the Black Tower and The Mystic Sepulchre, by John Palmer, a schoolmaster of Bath ; The Mysterious Wanderer (1807), by Miss Sophia Reeve ; The Mysterious Hand or Subterranean Horrors (181 1), by A. J. Randolph ; and The Mysterious Freebooter (1805), by Francis Lathom. Castles and abbeys were so persistently haunted that Mrs. Rachel Hunter, a severely moral writer, advertises one of her stories as Letitia : A Castle Without a Spectre. Mystery slips, almost unawares, into the domestic story. There are, for instance, vague hints of it in Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House (1793). The author of The Ghost and of More Ghosts adopts the pleasing pseudonym of Felix Phantom. The gloom of night broods over many of the stories, for we know : " affairs that walk, As they say spirits do, at midnight, have In them a wilder nature than the business That seeks despatch by day," and we are confronted with titles like Midnight Weddings, by Mrs. Meeke, one of Macaulay's favourite " bad-novel writers," The Midnight Bell, awakening memories of Duncan's murder, by George Walker, or The Nocturnal Minstrel (1809), by Miss Sleath. These " dismal treatises " abound in reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and of " Monk " Lewis, and many of them hark back as far as The Castle of Otranto for some of their situations.
1 Trans, from the German of Christian August Vulpius. a Cf . Thackeray, " Tunbridge Toys " (Roundabout Papers).
It's amusing to see how they titled the books, and there are enough here to keep any fan of early Gothic literature going for a good while, assuming you can source them.
|
|