This thoroughly engaging exhibition ambitiously spans the Gothic in its various forms, from the publication of the first ‘Gothic novel’, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, right up to its most modern interpretations, such as the most recent Whitby Goth Weekend.
(Super)naturally I’d like to focus on Victorian and neo-Victorian manifestations of the Gothic, although all of the rooms and artifacts repay careful attention; I particularly enjoyed Walpole’s guidebook to Strawberry Hill – which describes such items as a print of Macbeth’s witches, a drawing of a young lady reading The Castle of Otranto to her friend, and Francis I’s suit of armour – and a handkerchief printed with scenes narrating the tragic lives of “distressed poets”.
As this exhibition demonstrates, two of the key physical sites of the Gothic are buildings and the body, and these are well represented in the Victorian and neo-Victorian sections. In the ‘Victorian Monstrosity’ room, the curators do a good job of delineating how Gothic in the 19th-century moved uncomfortably closer to its consumers – it was no longer a fantastical ‘Other’, distant in time and place, but something that touched the lives of everyone, whether in their own living spaces or in their reading matter (such as ‘penny dreadfuls’, serial fiction and newspaper reports of crime). In relation to the body, the Gothic was no longer something that happened to other people, but reflected contemporary middle-class urban neuroses and bodily conditions, as well as the horrors of lower class living conditions.
In this regard, Dickens features prominently as a cartographer of Gothic London, for example in Bleak House, where the links between the poles of society at Chesney Wold and Tom All Alone’s literally bring home the geographical and class inflected aspects of the Gothic.
‘Tom All Alone’s’, by Phiz, from ‘Bleak House’
A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist also feature here, and as Pete Orford has described on his Edwin Drood blog, Dickens’s work is replete with strong markers of the Gothic – ghosts, corpses, legal and familial hauntings from the past – as he adapts these original tropes to make them not only contemporary but socially relevant to his Victorian readers.
Sensation fiction also has a strong showing through the exhibition, as the Gothic become further domesticated through the course of the century in the work of Collins, Braddon and others, until those middle-class neuroses and horrific living conditions were brought into the grisliest of collisions in the “Jack the Ripper” murders of the 1880s.
From later in the century, Dracula casts his imposing dark shadow over proceedings, with his own dedicated room that has the appropriately dark and claustrophic feel of a tomb. Two particularly interesting items in this room are the original theatrical script for Dracula from 1897, rushed out to secure copyright in such a hurry that some later sections are visibly cut-and-pasted from the novel, and an elaborate ‘vampire-slaying kit’, complete with mallet, stakes and crucifix:
Vampire-slaying kit
Although most of its individual items date from the mid-19th century, the kit was not packaged together till the 1970s, and serves as an interesting waypoint at which the popular interest in vampires peaked. It was acquired by Leeds Armoury a few years ago, though in anticipation of what remains unclear.
Pleasingly, the neo-Victorian is also pervasive throughout, for while the exhibition follows a broadly chronological progression, book-ended by Otranto and Whitby, this is by no means a rigid pattern. The curators understandably attempt to recreate the Gothic through an appeal to the sensory that goes beyond the written word alone, by means of furniture, costumes, paintings, short animations, interviews, and most obviously clips from popular TV and film adaptations.
While these are sometimes used in an unreflective way, with the video clips merely presented as visual equivalents of the texts, rather than creative interpretations with their own story to tell, they do demonstrate the persistence and recurrence of particular Gothic tropes and narratives within the cultural memory. They also conversely show how others have lapsed into relative obscurity – outside specialist circles, Sweeney Todd or the Baskerville Hound are household names compared with Varney the Vampire or Spring-Heeled Jack, for example):
Two forgotten men of the Gothic: Varney and Jack
Here, I feel that Sameer Rahim’s view that “out of context [the film clips] seem silly” is a little harsh – the sweep of the entire exhibition provides a strong sense of context, and even these short snippets are well chosen to quickly evoke a sensory response. However, I would caveat this by saying that the lack of effective separation of some spaces can create some unusual juxtapositions – for example, it is hard to concentrate on the Walpole material without being distracted by the screams of Edward Woodward as he is sacrificed in The Wicker Man for what feels like the fiftieth time (the clip is on a quite short loop).
More consideration is given to neo-Victorianism’s development of the Victorian Gothic (rather than its reproduction) in the ‘Modern Horrors’ section of the exhibition. In one interview, novelist Sarah Waters explains how neo-Victorian writing has taken up the baton from the 19th century by giving the “sex and violence” that was “all there somehow in sensation fiction” the “slightest of nudges” to move into what would have been less comfortable territory for the Victorian reader, such as “lesbianism and masturbation and porn”. In this way, then, Waters and her fellow writers follow Ruskin’s description of the methods of the Gothic sculptor; while other sculptors tried to dispense with, or avoid, “all shadows which were not absolutely necessary to explaining the form”, “in Gothic sculpture, the shadow itself becomes the subject of thought” (The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849). Neo-Victorian Gothic, then, seems to delineate the shadows of the Victorian shadows as it were.
Summing up then, the exhibition as a whole successfully evokes a very tangible atmosphere of the Gothic, creating within its darkened rooms an experience akin to what Lotte Eisner calls the “haunted screen”, as visitors congregate in the dark to follow the flickering lights from space to space and creep around in the shadows.
But leaving the exhibition, you quickly realise that the Gothic is around us (a point also made recently by Alison Moulds in her own thoughtful review of the exhibition). The gift shop is not full of incongruous curios from another time, but with objects familiar to our modern cultural lives:
Some gifts from the exhibition gift shop: perfume, a necklace and an alternative Christmas tree decoration
And next door to the library is the sumptuously restored ‘High Victorian Gothic’ of George Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Hotel:
St Pancras Hotel
An apt symbol, then, of how one only need to literally step out of the shadows of library to see the Gothic that is all around us, as well as inside us.
Victorian is the New Black 