Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Like the Gothic genre he shaped so profoundly, Matthew “Monk” Lewis was often snubbed by the literati of his day. The picture that emerges from Dale Townshend’s meticulous and fascinating study is of a great talent (so much so that even his fiercest critics tended to acknowledge it) reluctantly out of step with his time. As chapter 2, “The Accidental Provocateur,” details, the twenty-year-old author was so far from intending to scandalize the public with his explosive entry onto the literary scene that he spent the rest of his career trying to counter and atone for the accusations of irreligion, obscenity, and political radicalism that plagued The Monk (1796). For “high” Romanticism, Lewis’s work epitomized the popular aesthetic whose deleterious cultural effects a new literary movement must militate against—the “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” of Wordsworthian fame.¹ Moreover, Lewis found himself perpetually on the defensive against suggestions of plagiarism.

This particular throughline of his career relates to the book’s central argument (insofar as such a comprehensive overview of an author’s oeuvre can centralize one argument). Townshend posits a Lewis who, against the grain of a culture that prized original genius, developed his own unique “conceptualisation of literary creativity as a process that depended upon the assemblage of other, pre-existent textual ‘ingredients,’” a “composite blend of other fictions” (65). The book’s painstaking tour through Lewis’s diverse array of sources makes this a [End Page 720] compelling point. Its structure reflects this preoccupation, with chapter 1 tackling The Monk through the lens of originality, imitation, and literary composition and chapter 4 focusing on the question of originality again as it considers Lewis’s prolific output as an adaptor and translator. Thematic concerns, however, are ultimately subordinate to the project of methodically documenting and contextualizing each of Lewis’s creative works, which, despite his reputation as a one-note horror author, are ultimately too many and too heterodox to bring under a simple characterization. Chapter 2, then, tracks The Monk’s reception and impact (the space the novel takes up in this study justified by the outsized influence it had over both literary culture and the remainder of Lewis’s life and career); chapter 3 turns to the six major original dramas Lewis produced for the theatre; and chapter 6 examines his posthumously published writings on slavery, after he came into his inheritance of two Jamaican sugar plantations and their enslaved workforces. The overriding organizational principle is, thus, a chronological one, which is very effective for the book’s purpose.

Townshend distinguishes his monograph from previous landmark studies on Lewis (by Margaret Baron Wilson, Louis F. Peck, Joseph James Irwin, and D.L. Macdonald) by emphasizing that it is “first and foremost a literary history” that merely “draws upon biography at certain moments” (43), rather than a work of biography or biographical criticism. A memorable introductory section on “Lewis, Biography and the Question of Sexuality” illustrates the inherent dangers of mixing one’s authorial biography and literary criticism. Chronicling a long scholarly history ever prone to unsubstantiated claims about Lewis’s romantic life, Townshend interrogates the “scant” evidence (and powerful personal motivations) on which the Gothic scholar Montague Summers fabricated an account of a “homosexual” Lewis obsessed with his much-younger protégé, William Martin Kelly, in The Gothic Quest (1938). This account, although initially asserted with enormous assurance, was “by Summers’s own admission” based on “the internal promptings and suggestions of [Lewis’s] fictions” rather than any “rigorous biographical research” (37). Townshend rehearses this noteworthy case of over-reading not because he is the first to dispute Summers’s account (Peck, for one, pronounced it “a piece of outrageous embroidery”; 39) but because “it is largely on the basis of these claims that the modern and contemporary critical [End Page 721] tendency to ‘queer’ Lewis’s life and works has established itself” (29). In demonstrating how a confident mispronouncement can cement itself into orthodoxy, this section raises larger existential questions for biographers and literary critics.

Townsend positions himself as a scholar with a more nuanced take on the relationship between an author’s life and works than some of his predecessors. Specifically, in exploring “representations of desire” in Lewis’s writings that “appear to be disparate or even mutually exclusive,” Townshend pronounces these representations “queer” not in the narrow sense argued for by Summers but “in the more radical sense of that word ... as in being neither one thing nor the other, and always inimical to an identity politics that would seek to regulate, name and contain them” (42). Furthermore, what Townsend calls a “textual queerness that need not be biographically anchored for it to exist as such” (43) points to a larger instability in the enterprise of biography: “such desires are also queer insofar as they are not tied to, or localisable within, any imaginary biographical subject named Matthew Gregory Lewis” (42–43). This is certainly the responsible position to take, respecting a historical figure for whom there are gaps in the record. But perhaps no critic can resist taking some creative licence with her “imaginary biographical subject.” I suspect Townshend himself of embroidery based on “the internal promptings and suggestions of [Lewis’s] fictions” when discussing Lewis’s description of his “partially manumitted mulatto slave” (367) Mary Wiggins in his memoir Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). Explaining Lewis’s reference to the “Inkle and Yarico” story—which tells of a shipwrecked British merchant who professes his love to a Native woman before betraying her into slavery—Townshend goes on to claim that in writing of Wiggins that her “air and countenance would have suited Yarico” (268), Lewis

is, at once, identifying himself with the interracial desires of Thomas Inkle and intimating that, as a white slave-owner, he will not hesitate in committing the soon-to-be-manumitted woman back to the institution of slavery.

(369)

That Lewis found Wiggins attractive he made explicit, and whether or not he impeded her manumission is presumably a matter of record (although one that Townshend never addresses). But the scholar’s [End Page 722] leap from Lewis’s opinion that she would suit a certain theatrical part to the confident statement of Lewis’s subconscious desires to betray her seems at least a distant cousin to the liberties Summers once took with the unknowable interior life of this controversial figure.

This quibble aside, it is a testament to both Lewis’s and Townshend’s storytelling abilities that, despite significant portions being devoted to plot summaries of various lesser-known works, these passages are neither tedious nor confusing. On the contrary, Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture holds rich rewards for the Lewis reader who has never ventured beyond the work that lent “Monk” his enduring sobriquet. [End Page 723]