Michael Gamer

Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing libel laws. Simply put, libel law conceives of genre differently than do authors, publishers, and readers. As the reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate, public denouncements and threatened prosecutions forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of Real Life

An objective interest in human nature and the way it manifests itself in social custom no doubt lies behind Maria Edgeworths liking for facts. But she never makes a general declaration of this kind. Thefacts in the notebooks do not coalesce with one another or provoke trains of thought. They are merely evidence of a jackdaw-like attitude towards examples of human behaviour. -Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth 239-40

1813: The Year of the Laureate

By most appearances, 1813 was a good year for the Poets sometimes dubbed the Lake School. A winter night in late January saw the Drury Lane triumph of Samuel Coleridge’s Remorse, which, running twenty nights, set a record for the longest-running tragedy of the still-young nineteenth century. Just as Coleridge’s play was winding down its run, William Wordsworth was receiving welcome spring news in the form of the office of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and Penrith, a government office made possible through the patronage of William Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale. And where spring bestowed one office, summer held out another prospect of another with the August death of Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate since 1790. Robert Southey had to wait for autumn for the offer of that position to materialize, but with October nearing its end he was duly sworn in, his borrowed court dress and chapeau-bras making him feel like, as he put it, a character in “the last scene of a pantomime.”3