Emma McEvoy

Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: Wounded Spectators, Perverse Appetites and Gothic History

On the Marylebone Road in London, a short distance from Regent’s Park and Baker Street, is Madame Tussaud’s.1 Tussaud’s today is an international phenomenon, with branches from Blackpool to Beijing, San Francisco to Sydney. It is one of the most famous, and one of tourist attractions in the world — and the London branch is the original Madame Tussaud’s. It arrived at its present location in 1884, but had been based round the corner, at the Baker Street Bazaar, for almost 50 years before that. Its history extends even further back. Before it became a fixed-site tourist attraction in London, it had been a touring exhibition since 1803. And the touring show that Marie Tussaud brought to London in 1802, had its origins in a French exhibition that dated from the late 1760s.

London’s Gothic Tourism: West End Ghosts, Southwark Horrors and an Unheimlich Home

London has had Gothic tourism for a long time. Indeed, as the example of Madame Tussaud’s shows, some of its oldest purpose-devised tourist attractions are Gothic. In the last half century, the amount of Gothic tourism in London has increased substantially. London’s latest acquisitions include: the Clink in Bankside (which announces itself as the London prison museum); the London Dungeon; the London Bridge Experience; the Ghost Bus Tours (the Necrobus); Dennis Severs’ house in Folgate, Spitalfields; Simon Drake’s House of Magic (‘hidden away at a secret Central London location’)1; as well as numerous ghost tours and Ripper walks. In this chapter, I’m going to be taking a tour of some of London’s contemporary Gothic tourism as a means of exploring contemporary Gothic tourism more generally. I will be starting with an example that is perhaps the most akin to Walpole’s house — Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields — before taking myself to Drury Lane Theatre in the West End, considering its ‘Through the Stage Door’ tour. After this, I will be going south of the river — to the Clink in Bankside, and the London Dungeon. Finally, I will be touring the city (or rather cities — Westminster and the City) on the Necrobus. En route, I will be discussing some of the dominant tropes and modes of the attractions.

A Tale of Three Castles: Gothic and Heritage Management

In this chapter I will be thinking about Gothic in relation to heritage management, taking for my case studies three castles from different economic sectors. In the first section I will be looking at Warwick Castle, which is owned and managed by the entertainments company Merlin. In the second section, I will be turning my attention to forms of Gothic tourism at Alnwick Castle, which is owned by the Percy family, and is the centrepiece of the family estates and businesses. In the third section I will be returning to Berry Pomeroy Castle, not only because it is managed by English Heritage, the largest of the heritage organizations in England, and, at the time of writing, a state-funded body, but also because it has ghost traditions to manage.1 I will be considering the way these castles are presented and interpreted, looking at the different kinds of visitor experience they offer, and thinking about the relationship of each with the discourses and tropes of the Gothic.

‘“Boo” to Taboo’: Cultural Tourism and the Gothic

In this chapter I will be thinking about Gothic in cultural tourism, looking at the Gothic content that was to be found at a sample of English arts festivals between 2009 and February 2015. Of the three festivals I focus on, two are publicly funded: the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Showzam! (‘Blackpool’s Annual Festival of Circus, Magic and New Variety’).1 The third, Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts,2 is not a publicly funded event, though it has a specific remit in terms of charitable giving. I will be considering the kind of content offered at these festivals, the genres favoured and the audiences aimed at. En route, I will be considering the status of certain kinds of Gothic, and its use by the great and the good: charities, educators, arts funders, councils and other spenders of public money. The way these festivals employ Gothic content, I argue, can tell us about the place of Gothic in a wider public psyche, and in the cultural politics of contemporary England (and the UK more generally). In the following sections I will be considering family-friendly Gothic at the Norfolk and Norwich, municipal Gothic at Showzam!, and Gothic consumption (and Gothic redemption) at Glastonbury.

Strawberry Hill: Performed Architecture, Houses of Fiction and the Gothic Aesthetic

In the April of 1763, Louis-Jules-Barbon Mancini-Mazarini, duc de Nivernais, visited Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s home in Twickenham. Nivernais and Walpole, who were almost exact contemporaries, had much in common. For a start, they were both politicians. Nivernais, an experienced diplomat, was acting in England as ambassador extraordinary, and earlier in the year had been involved in the negotiations for the Peace of Paris, one of the two treaties that concluded the Seven Years War.1 Walpole was the son of the eminent eighteenth-century first minister, Robert Walpole, and an MP in his own right, with what he called (using an Old English term to refer to parliament) a ‘Gothic passion … for squabbles in the Wittenagemot.’2 Besides politics, Walpole and Nivernais had many other mutual interests. Walpole was a francophile and Nivernais an anglophile. Both were connoisseurs of art, devotees of the landscape garden, and, above all, men of letters.3 The two were to remain in contact for many years afterwards (the last surviving letter that passed between them dates from 1792, by which time both men were in their mid-seventies). Nivernais’ visit to Twickenham in 1763, however, was not primarily social. His reason for calling was as much to see Strawberry Hill as to see Walpole.

Becoming a Haunted Castle: Literature, Tourism and Folklore at Berry Pomeroy

Berry Pomeroy Castle, in South Devon, has been a ruin since the early eighteenth century, and a tourist destination for over 200 years. Coming upon it is always a surprise. It is, as the English Heritage website states: ‘Tucked away in a deep wooded valley’.3 The main approach winds through woodland that suddenly opens into level and cleared ground where the castle sits. Before you are the gatehouse and the curtain wall. Within the walls are the remains of its towers (in varying degrees of preservation), the shell of a Tudor mansion, and (only relatively recently revealed) the remains of a colonnaded loggia, dating from around the year 1600. The back wall overlooks a steep bluff along the bottom of which runs the Gatcombe brook.