Literary Mushrooms: Tales of Terror and Horror contents?

[toff]

Literary Mushrooms: Tales of Terror and Horror from the Gothic Chapbooks, 1800-1830 (2009), edited by Franz J. Potter for Zittaw Press. OOP. Any idea what the contents are?

[humgoo]

Copied from a library catalogue:

The Black Castle (1800) - C.F. Barrett
Romances and Gothic tales (1801) - Anonymous
The Wandering Spirit (1802) - Anonymous
The Subterraneous Passage (1803) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Chateau de Montville (1803) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Maid of Lochlin (1803) - Sarah Wilkinson
Monkcliffe Abbey (1805) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Castle of Alvidaro (1809) - Anonymous
The Convent of St. Usurla (1809) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Bloody Hand (1810) - Anonymous
The Priory of St. Clair (1811) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Midnight Embrace in the Hall of Werdendorff! (1812) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Castle Spectre (1820) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Black Forest (1826) - Anonymous
Monster Made by Man (1826) - Anonymous
The Horrible Revenge ((1828) - Anonymous
The White Cottage of the Valley (n.d.) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Spectres (n.d.) - Sarah Wilkinson

[helrunar]

That title intrigued me. It would seem that the compiler refers to these gems as "mushrooms" in the sense of fungi found sprouting from decaying matter of various sorts. A blurb (or maybe it's a subtitle) speaks of "the fetishization of the formulaic." The compiler's paper on the "blue books" of the very early 19th century (I think these started sometime in the 1790s) states:

The 1803 portrait of young Percy Bysshe Shelley reading ‘garish’ bluebooks under the rose bushes at Sion House, which he obtained from a rather sordid circulating library, is a familiar, if not a disquieting aspect of literary history. Apart from the vicarious thrills provided by such ‘horrid’ material, these tawdry rewrites of Gothic fiction had the added benefit for the middle classes, of being inexpensive to obtain—sixpence or a shilling—or a mere penny a night from the local circulating library which stocked a multitude of horrid and sensational titles.

I was curious about Sarah Wilkinson (1779-1831), never having heard of this author, and I found this paper:

epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=gothic_scholar

Interesting that this author describes Wilkinson as a "female Gothic entrepreneur."

H.

[toff]

Thanks!  Regarding the title:

Despite the warning in The Use of a Circulating Library Considered (1797) that 'pamphlets in general are very properly excluded from the shelves of Circulating Libraries. They are literary mushrooms, which only enjoy a precarious existence, therefore cannot afford a lasting source of either instruction or amusement', large and small circulating libraries across the country commonly included a 'Pamphlet' section for their readers.

Potter, Franz J. Gothic Chapbooks, Bluebooks and Shilling Shockers, 1797-1830. U Wales P, 2021. 18-19.

Same editor has a 2013 book of fifteen stories of the same kind of content, Monsters and Mushrooms. The listing identifies the names of the stories, but not the authors or years - but a number of those can be filled in from the earlier book:

The Midnight Embrace [in the Hall of Werdendorff!] (1812) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Cavern of Death
The Spectre of the Murdered Nun
The Horrible Revenge (1828) - Anonymous    
Monster Made By Man
Subterraneous Passage (1803) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Spectres  (n.d.) - Sarah Wilkinson
The Spectre of the Murdered Nun
The Wandering Spirit (1802) - Anonymous
The Spectre of the Black Forest (1826) - Anonymous
Monkcliffe Abbey (1805) - Sarah Wilkinson
Castle of Alvidaro  (1809) - Anonymous
The Black Castle (1800) - C.F. Barrett
Chateau de Montville  (1803) - Sarah Wilkinson
Skeleton Witness

[helrunar]

Thanks for the info, toff!

cheers, Hel.