The Development of the Weird Tale
The Development of the Weird Tale
Other Books from Sarnath Press:
S. T. Joshi, Driven to Madness with Fright (2016, 2018)
S. T. Joshi, The Stupidity Watch: An Atheist Speaks Out on Religion and
Politics (2017)
Eleanor M. Ingram, The Thing from the Lake (2017)
Robert Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold (2017)
S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft and Weird Fiction: Collected Blog Posts, 2009–2017 (2017)
S. T. Joshi, H. L. Mencken as Artist and Critic (2018)
S. T. Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Short Biography (2018)
S. T. Joshi, 21st-Century Horror (2018)
H. L. Mencken, Collected Essays and Journalism (2018f.)
The Development
of the
Weird Tale
S. T. Joshi
Sarnath Press • Seattle
Copyright © 2019 by S. T. Joshi
Cover art by Allen Koszowski.
Published in 2019 by Sarnath Press, Seattle, WA
Contents
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein and Others
Théophile Gautier: The Eternal Feminine
A Forgotten Weird Fictionist: Henry Ferris
W. W. Jacobs: A Pessimistic Humourist
Barry Pain: The Occasional Weirdist
Algernon Blackwood and the Ghost Story
On “A Wine of Wizardry”
Samuel Loveman: Shelley in Brooklyn
Clark Ashton Smith: Poet of the Stars
A. The Fiction
B. The Prose-Poetry
C. The Hashish-Eater
The Poetry of Donald Wandrei
Thomas Burke: Look Back in Terror
D. H. Lawrence: Weird Fiction as Symbol
Surprised by Horror: The Fantasy Short Stories of C. S. Lewis
A Failed Experiment: Family and Humanity in The Sundial
Some Novels by L. P. Davies
A. Who Is Lewis Pinder? (1965)
B. Twilight Journey (1967)
C. The Shadow Before (1970)
Atheism and Anticlericalism in the Films of Guillermo del Toro
Lovecraft and Some Lost Classics of the Supernatural
Walter de la Mare, The Return (1910)
Algernon Blackwood, Incredible Adventures (1914)
Arthur Ransome, The Elixir of Life (1915)
Robert Hichens, The Dweller on the Threshold (1915)
Leland Hall, Sinister House (1919)
Eleanor M. Ingram, The Thing from the Lake (1921)
Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour (1924)
Henri Béraud, Lazarus (1925)
R. E. Spencer, The Lady Who Came to Stay (1931)
Acknowledgments
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein and Others
In the first twenty-five years of her life, Mary Shelley (1797–1851) packed more turmoil, heartache, and literary accomplishment than most writers do in a lifetime. The remaining three decades of her life were relatively uneventful, as she lived largely in the past, doggedly writing novels and tales that brought her some recognition in her own time but have now been eclipsed by the towering success of Frankenstein (1818). To some extent it is unfair to reduce the entirety of her output to this one pioneering novel—but it is certainly better to have written one iconic and enduring work than to have written an array of novels and tales that may now be only of historical significance.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin seemed destined from birth for literary greatness, as the child of two established literary figures. William Godwin (1856–1936) had achieved fame not only with the treatise An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) but with such novels as Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon (1799), which contributed to the proliferation of Gothic fiction during this era. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), was the notorious author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)—an attack on aristocracy and monarchy, in reply to Edmund Burke—and, even more outrageously, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a pioneering treatise on feminism. Like Godwin, she also published a few novels. By the time they met in 1796, Mary had already borne an illegitimate child, Fanny, whose father—the American speculator Gilbert Imlay—had deserted her. By the time of her marriage to Godwin (March 29, 1797), Wollstonecraft was already several months pregnant. She bore her second daughter, Mary,[1] on August 30. Tragically, she never recovered from the trauma of childbirth and died on September 10. (Her first published work was Thoughts on the Education of Daughters [1787]—a work whose principles she thus had no chance to put into practice.)
Godwin, stunned by the loss of his new wife, quickly looked around for a replacement, as he was incapable of managing a household and raising two small children on his own. He chose Mary Jane Clairmont, a widow with two small children, Charles and Jane, of her own; or, rather, she chose him. After their marriage on December 21, 1801, Mary Jane became something of a tyrant in the new household, giving obvious preference to her own children over those of her husband. She showed little love for Mary, whose shy, withdrawn nature didn’t endear her to her stepmother.
The literary celebrity of Godwin brought him many admirers and colleagues among the London literati, and the young Mary could remember the essayist Charles Lamb, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, and other notables coming regularly to the house. On one occasion Coleridge read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)—perhaps the greatest weird poem in literature—to the assembled guests, including Mary. She herself was an almost fanatically studious child, reading as many books on all manner of subjects as she could. Her father once described her as “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.”[2]
But Mary Jane Godwin’s persistent mistreatment of her stepdaughter caused Mary’s health to suffer, and in 1812 it was decided to send her away to live with a family friend, William Baxter, in Dundee, Scotland. Mary thrived in the Baxter household. In the autumn of that year she returned for a brief visit home, and there she met her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Shelley had become acquainted with Godwin the previous year, having written something of a fan letter to the philosopher who had championed anarchism, free love, and other tenets dear to his own heart. He came from a wealthy titled family, and this was music to Godwin’s ears, as he was constantly in financial difficulties. These difficulties were augmented by his wife’s unwise decision in 1805 to establish a publishing firm, M. J. Godwin & Associates, which—in spite of the fact that it published such notable works as Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807)—was a constant money drain. For much of his life Godwin pestered Shelley repeatedly for financial loans or gifts.
Shelley was at this time married to Harriet Westbrook, but their relations were troubled. When Mary returned home from Scotland in 1814, she and Shelley quickly fell passionately in love. Godwin was enraged when he found out about the relationship: his sole concern at this time was to make sure that Shelley raised a loan on his behalf to save the publishing company, and he didn’t wish mere affairs of the heart to jeopardise that mission. Shelley raised the loan, but also decided to run away with Mary as well as with her stepsister, Jane Clairmont (who soon took to calling herself Claire). Shelley was not emotionally or sexually involved with Claire, but she expressed an eagerness to leave the oppressive household. The three of them did in fact run away on July 28, 1814, traversing Europe and ending up in Lucerne, Switzerland, on August 23. Incredibly, Shelley had written to his wife Harriet en route, asking her to join his ménage! She refused.
The ill-conceived journey ended d
isastrously, however: thanks to Shelley’s spendthrift ways, the trio quickly ran out of money and were forced to return humiliatingly to London. Mary was by this time pregnant; she gave birth prematurely on February 22, 1815, but the child died two weeks later. Soon thereafter Claire, having come into some money of her own from an inheritance, left the household, much to the relief of Mary and Shelley. On January 24, 1816, Mary gave birth to a son, William. Throughout this whole period Mary was wounded by her father’s unkind treatment of her and her lover, especially since he was still begging Shelley for infusions of cash. The couple decided to leave England again for the Continent, since they had heard that Shelley’s friend Lord Byron (1788–1824) was planning to settle in a villa on Lake Geneva. They left on May 3, 1816. Claire Clairmont had come back into the picture, as a sometime mistress of Byron, and she accompanied the couple.
Byron had rented the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, and Mary and Shelley took a house nearby. At this time Byron was working on the third canto of the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (the first two cantos had been published in 1812). Accompanying the party was Dr. John William Polidori (1795–1821), Byron’s physician. The stage was thus set for one of the most famous literary contests in history.
In June 1816 the group had taken to reading Fantasmagoriana; ou, Receuil d’histoires d’apparitions et spectres, revenans, fantômes, etc. (1812; Fantasmagoriana; or, A Collection of Stories of Apparitions of Ghosts, Revenants, Phantoms, etc.), a French translation of some German ghost stories; and they decided to see who could write the best ghost story among their party. As Mary explains in the 1831 preface to Frankenstein, Shelley wrote nothing (in spite of the fact that, as will be explained below, he had written two short Gothic novels during his college years at Oxford); Byron wrote a fragment of a novel; Polidori eventually produced the long short story The Vampyre (1819). Only Mary, demonstrating the dogged “perseverance” that her father had detected when she was a young girl, produced a sustained literary work; she toiled relentlessly on Frankenstein until it was completed in May of the following year. She was not quite twenty years old.
Meanwhile, turmoil for the various members of the literary assemblage continued. Claire announced that she was pregnant with Byron’s child. Given that Byron showed a singular lack of concern about his future progeny, Mary and Shelley felt that they had no option but to return to England, taking Claire with them. They settled in Bath. Late in 1816 they were shaken by the deaths of two people close to them: Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft’s first child, who committed suicide when she learned that William Godwin was not her father, as she had been told throughout her life; and Harriet Shelley, who was found dead in the Serpentine (the large lake in the center of Hyde Park, London), also a possible suicide. The latter event fortuitously allowed Mary and Shelley to marry on December 31, 1816, chiefly as a means of securing custody of Percy’s two children with Harriet, Ianthe and Charles. But Shelley was denied custody because of his “highly immoral” behaviour—not merely his irregular cohabitation with Mary and Claire, but his open expression of atheism as reflected in his early pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811).
Mary gave birth to another child, Clara, on September 2, 1817. She was now beset with worries that Shelley might have tuberculosis, so the family decided to move to Italy and away from the fog and smoke of London. Meanwhile, in early 1818 Shelley had found a publisher for Frankenstein—the small London firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. The book was issued in March 1818.
Mary and Shelley—accompanied by their children William and Clara, as well as Claire and her child, Allegra—left for Italy in March 1818. They were outraged by the fact that, although Byron was leading a life of debauchery in Venice, he was demanding that Claire renounce all rights to Allegra and hand the baby over to him. But then Byron changed his tune, agreeing to lend the Shelleys his villa in nearby Este and let Claire and Allegra stay there. But this momentary respite was confounded by the unexpected death of Clara in September. Mary sank in a profound depression. Shelley, to relieve the strain on his wife, led her on an extensive tour of the sights in Rome and Naples. But tragedy once again supervened, and William fell ill and died on June 7, 1819. Just prior to her twenty-second birthday, Mary reflected in her diary on the years she had spent with Shelley: “We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy; but to have won and then cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.”[3]
Nonetheless, Mary became pregnant again and gave birth to a son, Percy, on November 12, 1819. He was her only child to live into adulthood. She attempted to transmute her sorrows into literature with the novel Mathilda (1819), a strange and intense tale of a father’s incestuous love for her daughter. It seems unlikely that there is any autobiographical significance in the central plot line, although an episode in which the protagonist Mathilda falls in love with a poet named Woodville is clearly based on Mary’s relations with Shelley. The family was now living in Pisa. On February 23, 1821, John Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis. He and Shelley were not close colleagues, but they had great admiration for each other’s poetry. Shelley rushed to complete his elegy on Keats, Adonais, which he had begun before Keats’s death as a tribute to his fellow poet.
In April 1822 the Shelleys moved into Casa Magni, a house near the city of Lerici, in the northeastern province of Liguria, on the Gulf of Spezia. Joining them were friends of Shelley’s, Ned and Jane Williams. Mary worried that Ned and Shelley were spending a lot of time taking boat trips up and down the coast, when neither of them knew a great deal about sailing. She became pregnant again, but on June 6 she miscarried and came close to dying. Soon they were joined by the essayist Leigh Hunt and his large family of six children; he, Shelley, and Byron were planning a literary magazine. The Hunts settled first in Livorno (known in English as Leghorn), then in Byron’s villa in Pisa.
On July 8, Ned and Shelley—who had accompanied the Hunts to Leghorn—sailed from there back to Lerici on a boat named the Don Juan. What happened next has remained unclear to this day. The boat clearly encountered a severe storm at sea, but when it was discovered weeks later it appeared to have been damaged by another, larger ship, leading to some speculation that pirates had sunk it. A friend of Shelley, Edward John Trelawny, claimed to have interviewed a fisherman on his deathbed who said that he and others had rammed the boat in the expectation that Shelley had a considerable amount of money with him, but the boat’s rapid sinking confounded the criminal plan.
Whatever the case, Mary was for weeks plagued by worries over the absence of her husband and the lack of news concerning him. Finally, on July 15, the bodies of Shelley and Ned Williams washed ashore, and Mary was informed on July 19. After much wranging with Italian officials, Shelley’s body was cremated on August 16.
Mary, understandably, fell once again into despair. Before the age of twenty-five, she had witnessed the death of her husband, her two small children, her half-sister Fanny, and Claire Clairmont’s child Allegra, who had died in a convent in 1821. On top of that there were her estrangement from her own father, William Godwin, and from her stepmother, Mary Jane Godwin. Nevertheless, Mary attempted to regroup by beginning the task of editing Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, issued in 1824. She and Percy moved in with the Hunts, but the living situation proved difficult. Money troubles were also a concern, as Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy Shelley, who had always disapproved of his son’s involvement with her, denied Mary an allowance. It didn’t help that Byron, who was now planning to go to Greece to fight for the independence of that nation from Ottoman rule, refused to repay the considerable sum of money that he had borrowed from Shelley. Mary felt she had to return to England, where a partial reconciliation with her father permitted her to move into his household.
Mary returned to England on August 25, 1823. She was buoyed by the success of both the novel Frankenstein and a dramatic a
daptation of it.[4] To her own surprise, she had become famous, and Valperga (1823), an historical novel set in the Middle Ages, begun as early as 1820, was also a success. Sir Timothy Shelley now relented and allowed Mary a sum of £100 a year, chiefly for Percy’s education—but on condition that Mary never write a biography of Shelley. In later years he increased this stipend to £300. Mary began writing The Last Man, her “last-man-on-earth” novel, one of whose central characters—Adrian, Earl of Windsor, son of the last king of England, but one who embraces republican principles—is based on Shelley. It was published in 1826. Now much sought after in literary circles, Mary began venturing into society, renewing her acquaintance with Coleridge and meeting such new figures as the Americans Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, both residing in London at the time. But Mary was shaken again when she learned of the death of Lord Byron on April 19, 1824, in Greece. She had by now become acquainted with the poet Thomas Moore and assisted Moore with his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of His Life (1830).
The remaining twenty-seven years of Mary Shelley’s life passed uneventfully, at least in comparison with the turbulence she had faced in previous years. She continued writing diligently and nurturing the poetic reputation of her dead husband. In 1828 she went to Paris to deliver some lectures but contracted a mild case of smallpox. Although she recovered, she felt that her appearance had been affected by the disease. Edward John Trelawny approached her and asked her to provide anecdotes of Shelley for a memoir he was writing; he was furious when, for various reasons, she refused, although she did help him prepare the work for publication. It appeared decades later as Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). Trelawny, who had clearly developed a romantic attachment to Mary from the moment he met her in January 1822, now abruptly proposed marriage to her, but she turned him down.