The “good” characters are, for the most part, idiots: foolish clergyman, one-dimensional lovers doomed to die horrible (sometimes cannibalistic) deaths, and so on. There seems barely time to contemplate the afterlife when everyone’s so busy trying to escape the traps laid for them on earth-traps set by heredity and fate. Any benefits to leading a religious life seem to be completely erased in these stories, with paranoia and persecution complexes to take their place. These are stories that couldn’t exist outside a culture obsessed with sin and hellfire, and yet they’re not morality tales: the only lesson to be drawn from most gothic romances is that the supernatural can be easily substituted for the divine. Gothic horror usually revolves around the sinister absence of God inside some religious framework.
How well, really, do any of my favorite works hold up? Is The Castle of Otranto actually good, or just campy? Is The Monk great literature? Probably not-but as genres go, there’s none quite so pleasingly ridiculous as this one.
The reluctance comes from never quite knowing if it’s a genre worth caring about. I have long been a rather reluctant fan of gothic horror. Maturin's tales were, however, always more extravagant and macabre, and led to his reputation as one of the foremost writers of the Gothic school.From the Penguin Classics edition of Melmoth. His strongest influences were the authors of Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century, in particular, Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. He was also influenced by comic writers of epics and romances, such as Cervantes, Swift, Sterne and Diderot. Maturin's Calvinist upbringing lent to his work a strong sense of the soul's relationship with God, which can also be seen in the work of James Hogg, William Godwin and Godwin's daughter, Mary Shelley. In the 1890s his literary reputation in England was revived, and his works were reprinted in various editions. Melmoth the Wanderer appeared in 1820, but in the last years of his life his works were neglected, and he died in poverty in 1824. His next plays, Manuel (1817) and Fredolfo (1819) were failures, and Maturin returned to writing novels. A series of other novels followed, and his tragedy Bertram (1816) met with great success when it was produced by Edmund Kean at Drury Lane, after recommendation by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. His first novel, The Fatal Revenge (1807), was published under a pseudonym to protect his reputation as a clergyman.
He took orders and was a curate in Loughrea and Dublin, and also, for a time, worked as a teacher until literary success enabled him to give this up. Charles Robert Maturin was born in Dublin in 1782, and educated at Trinity College.
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