The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe Read Free Book Online

Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living
(1839; reprint edn New York: Arno Press, 1977). This work exposed the scandals of the Enon and Elim Chapels, which had been established in London in the 1820s. Walker (p. 154) is quoted in Hugh Meller,
London Cemeteries
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 9. See also James Stevens Curl,
A Celebration of Death
, pp. 285–6. I am indebted to Bob Davenport for these three references, as well as for those from
The Diary of John Evelyn
cited in note 21 and Julian Litten’s
The English Way of Death
cited in note 23.
    23 . See Julian Litten,
The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450
(London: Robert Hale, 1991), p. 221. On the other hand many English, irrespective of social class, seem to have preferred to be buried in churchyards. Indeed, the serenity of the English rural churchyard was romanticized in Thomas Gray’s immensely popular
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
of 1750. See Roger Lonsdale, ed.,
The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith
(London and Harlow: Longman, 1969), pp. 103–41. Gray contrasts the simplicity of the grave sited ‘beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade’ with the pomp and grandeur of ‘the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault’ of the high-ranking or wealthy.
    24 . Matthew Lewis,
The Monk
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). On p. 388 Lewis has his virtuous heroine ‘surrounded by mouldering Corses, breathing the pestilential air of corruption’. Earlier, on pp. 368–9, other characters have had to hurry through ‘a thick and pestilential fog’ in vaults under his monastery of St Clare. In contrast, Radcliffe alludes to this reality of contemporary burial places only under the cover of one of her Miltonic epigraphs (see Vol. III, Ch. III):
    Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,
    Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres,
    Lingering, and sitting, by a new-made grave.
    (
Comus
, ll. 470–72)
    In Chapter V, however, the ‘horrible’ scene in the chapel of Udolpho is lit by ‘gleams, thrown between the arches of the vaults, where, here and there, the broken ground marked the spots in which other bodies had been recently interred’.
    25 . See Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); William Gilpin,
Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty
, dated 1782 but published in 1783 (facsimile edn Richmond Surrey: Richmond Publishing, 1973); his
Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England: Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmorland
(1786), and his
Remarks on Forest Scenery
(1791). See also Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld’s essay ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ in
Miscellaneous Pieces
, which she produced with her husband, John Aikin (3rd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1792), pp. 119–27. For Radcliffe’s use of Barbauld’s ideas, see note 4 to Vol. II, Ch. VI, of
Udolpho
.
    26 . Here he stated his ‘preference for the more simple mode, of boldly avowing supernatural machinery’. See Ann Radcliffe,
The Novels Complete in One Volume
, p. xxv.
    27 . Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
(London: Source Book Press, 1972), p. 79.
    28 . Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry
, pp. 110–11.
    29 . Robert Miles,
The Great Enchantress
, pp. 132–3.
    30 . Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Memoir’, pp. 116–17.
    31 . Terry Castle, ‘The Spectralization of the Other in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
’ in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, eds.,
The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature
(New York and London: Methuen, 1987),