Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (11 page)

Thackeray was both right and wrong. For most modern readers, the author of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
has been laughed into extinction by the author of a much better novel. If they have ever met at E. M. Forster’s imagined round table of novelists in the sky, Mrs Radcliffe could, at least, have pointed out that her novel got £500, whereas
Northanger Abbey
yielded smart Miss Austen a mere tenner. Radcliffe’s initial payment (royalties followed) pro-rates as hundreds of thousands nowadays. So much for satire. Moreover Radcliffe, unlike the parson’s daughter (who had to use her brother), had a husband to sign her contracts (women had no legal identity at the period).

Whatever the mysteries of Udolpho, those swirling around Ann Ward Radcliffe are quite as impenetrable. What posterity knows about her is dependent on one not very reliable obituary. Her life, writes a contemporary biographer, resembles one of those torn, barely decipherable manuscripts beloved by her and her Gothic disciples. No portrait of Radcliffe survives, although a few personal recollections rhapsodise on her daintiness and prettiness. She was the daughter and only child of a London haberdasher, based in Holborn, who subsequently, in 1770, set up a prosperous emporium for Wedgwood ceramics in Bath (a town which, unlike Austen, Radcliffe never mentions and, it is plausibly supposed, did not like). Ann’s parents were well on in years at the time of her birth. Nominally Anglican, they may have had leanings towards Unitarianism. Her family, on both sides, had roots in the north-west and – despite the connection with ‘trade’ – boasted high literary connections (as, indeed, did the Wedgwoods). As a young girl, shy, mute, unnoticed, ‘Nancy’ (as she was nicknamed) found herself in the presence of ‘several persons of distinction, particularly in literature’. They included Mrs Piozzi (Johnson’s domestic biographer) and the formidably evangelical Hannah More.

The Wards also had ‘superior relatives’ in the Church and in medicine (one, very superior, was a physician to George III). Ann stayed with them during her childhood and picked up necessary social cultivation. Largely home-educated, she had no foreign or classical languages, but an excellent written command of English. In 1788, aged twenty-three, she married a lawyer turned journalist, William Radcliffe. He eventually made himself proprietor-editor of the
English Chronicle
in Bath,
a successful paper. It, like its editor, was ‘democratically inclined’, but not radical. The Radcliffes would have a long, fond, but childless, marriage and it is assumed William encouraged her writing (particularly her poetry).

Radcliffe’s fiction took its primal inspiration from
The Old English Baron
(1778), a proto-Gothic novel, by Clara Reeve. Reeve saw the future of English fiction as ‘romance’ not ‘realism’. She was wrong, but for a few decades ‘Gothic’ (the ‘domestic’ variety, headed by Radcliffe, and the ‘terrible’ variety, led by ‘Monk’ Lewis) flourished. The war with the French put a cramp on tourism, whether ‘grand’ or humble, and created a compensatory vogue for novels with foreign or otherwise interesting settings. The English reader’s mind could travel, if one’s feet could not. Radcliffe’s first published fiction,
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
(1789) is touristic, and has a male hero, Osbert. Radcliffe’s later novels would centre on heroines and go further afield. Her first work, unlike its successors, was published anonymously.

The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
has features to be found in all the author’s novels. She was fascinated by the disruption of the Reformation, the sinister persistence of Catholicism, the threats of secular European rationalism and, above all, by canons of beauty as epitomised in Burke’s advocacy of the Longinian sublime and James Thomson’s meditative poetry. One object, above all, crystallised this melange for her – the ruined English abbey or castle. Ann and her husband made tireless excursions to such sombre relics of past historical upheaval: history lessons in stone.

From the first, and increasingly, her fiction appealed to young women readers – a growing and powerful market at this period. The name ‘Ann Radcliffe’ featured on the title-page as a powerful selling point. Her multi-volume novels were, of course, circulating library wares (they were too expensive to be bought by individual readers). Radcliffe’s pace and lightness of touch in narration was accompanied by an unashamed indifference to historical and topographical ‘fact’. The depictions of Italy, which feature in
A Sicilian Romance
(1790), her second novel, are as fanciful as Ray Bradbury’s Mars. Readers of the period were indulgent about such laxities: as Walter Scott said, when challenged that he had never seen the Alps that feature majestically in
Anne of Geierstein
, ‘I have seen the paintings of Salvator Rosa.’

Radcliffe’s fourth novel, and her best,
The Mysteries of Udolpho
– ‘A Romance, Interspersed with some Pieces of Poetry’ – earned her a whopping advance of £500: equivalent to roughly £300,000 in modern currency. It cost £1 as a new four-volume set in 1794.
Udolpho
went through three editions in its first year. Its runaway sales warranted an increase in the advance to £800 for
The Italian
, three years later. These sums are put in perspective by the £10 which the Minerva Press, catering to the young female market, customarily paid its luckless hacks. In the 1790s, William Radcliffe was earning under £300 p.a. – a very respectable salary.

Although it laid the ground for the ‘horrid’ excesses of later Gothic fiction (as superheated by ‘Monk’ Lewis),
Udolpho
is an unswervingly moralistic novel advocating ‘fortitude’ and disparaging, by tragic example, ‘indulgence’. The story is set in Gascony in 1584. Monsieur St Aubert, an impoverished and widowed nobleman, has retired to his estate where he consoles himself with philosophy. He has a beautiful daughter Emily, whose upbringing he has personally taken in hand. ‘All excess is vicious,’ he sagely instructs her. St Aubert falls ill and is advised to recover his health by the sea. On their journey, father and daughter fall in with Valancourt, an ardent young chevalier who nobly forgives being accidentally shot by Emily’s trigger-happy father. When she is orphaned, she is consigned to the care of a worldly aunt, Madame Cheron, at Toulouse. The aunt turns away the worthy Valancourt, and tries unsuccessfully to marry off Emily to mercenary suitors.

For her part, Mme Cheron is flattered into marriage by a sinister Italian, Signor Montoni. He transports the two ladies off to his sinister lair in the Apennines, the
castillo di Udolpho
, whose rocky setting is thrillingly described. Having discovered, to his rage, that his wife has brought him no fortune, Montoni kills her. Emily, meanwhile, has been subjected to a barrage of apparently supernatural phenomena and is dumbstruck by the discovery of some utterly horrid
thing
that is hidden behind a veil of black silk in a locked room in the castle. The plot gets convoluted beyond the power of summary and ends with virtue rewarded, vice punished, and the thing behind the veil revealed (rather anti-climactically) as a wax dummy.

The Italian
(1797) opens, elegantly, with a group of English tourists in Naples in 1764, who accidentally come across the tale of lurid events that took place six years earlier. Vincentio di Vivaldi, the only son of a proud Marchesa, falls in love with Ellena Rosalba, whose origins are unknown. The Marchesa, aided by her confessor, Schedoni, sets out to foil the match. ‘His’, we are told, ‘was not the melancholy of a sensible and wounded heart, but apparently that of a gloomy and ferocious disposition.’ Things thereafter get very gloomy and ferocious. It culminates with Schedoni about to murder Ellena, only to discover, from a nearby portrait, that she is his own daughter. He goes on to poison himself.

‘The great enchantress’, as De Quincey called her, published five novels. Then, having recruited the largest readership in the history of English fiction, and vast sums, she stopped, with twenty-six years of life left. Why the long silence? No one knows. Some surmised that ‘she chose to retire from the stage in the very blaze of her fame’ – at the top of her game. Others assumed that she was confined in a lunatic asylum, her mind shattered by the Gothic intoxication of her own fiction. All things considered, a stifling excess of gentility and natural reticence seems to have been the real reason for her giving up fiction. As her memorialist, Thomas Noon
Talfourd recalls that ‘personal character’ meant more to her than ‘literary fame … the very thought of appearing in person as the author of her romances shocked the delicacy of her mind’. Her husband, it is supposed, may have ‘restrained’ her. She died, it is known, of asthma which had probably disabled her last decades.

Radcliffe enjoyed a revival in the second half of the twentieth century. Her oppressed heroines were read as victims,
avant la lettre
, of the ‘feminine mystique’. Trapped in their castles, abbeys and towers by villainous men they were precursors of the middle-class housewife trapped in her suburban kitchen. Jane Austen, her deadliest critic, merely found her fun – and fun to make fun of.

He was a man of contradictions.
Karl Miller

He was undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions.
William Wordsworth

James Hogg was a novelist who wrote a novel so extraordinary that, as with Emily Brontë, it has stretched credulity that James Hogg wrote it. He was born a peasant. In his last years he nursed the not unreasonable hope that George IV (a lover of all things Scottish, after his bekilted 1822 state ‘jaunt’ to Edinburgh) might knight him. He wasn’t, alas, ennobled and died in poverty with a modest reputation, already fading. He had been born in poverty in Selkirkshire, the second son of a sheep-farmer who was plunged into bankruptcy when Jamie was six years old. Ettrick was, at that period, an inaccessible region, although not that far, as the crow flew, from Edinburgh. Crows, however, had it easier than people, who had to lumber along rutted drovers’ paths.

‘Jamie the Poeter’, as his rustic neighbours nicknamed him, spent only two three-month periods at school. He graduated, as he touchingly records, into the class that read the Bible. Paradoxically this deprivation was – in later life – a career asset. The Romantics glorified ‘unspoiled’ peasants. Hogg, as pictured by his contemporaries, was
Lyrical Ballads
incarnate, Rousseauism in muddy breeches. His head was stuffed with folklore and balladry and, like Robert Burns, his adult tongue
handled dialect as fluently as King’s English. Following the example of other untutored geniuses, he taught himself to read from odd books that came his way in intervals of cattle-herding. He learned to play the fiddle the same way. Edinburgh – the Athens of the North – was the European home of reason. But the devil (as evident, most famously, in Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’) still roamed the Borders wilderness – or, more properly, belief in the devil did. The Prince of Darkness appears in Hogg’s later fiction as a convincingly actual personage.

As a child, Jamie was often, as he recalled, ill-treated, always hungry and ill-clothed. He had, as he reckoned, fifteen masters, none kind to him, before the age of eighteen. In 1790 Hogg, now a man, had the good luck to be employed as a shepherd by a cousin of his aged mother, Margaret. It was this family, the Laidlaws, persons of higher than normal rural cultivation, who improved Hogg’s mind. They it was who introduced him to Allan Ramsay’s kitsch Scots pastoral,
The Gentle Shepherd
. It was formative and Hogg went on to publish his
Scottish Pastorals
in 1801. The book came and went unregarded. If the Ettrick Shepherd were to make his way in literary Edinburgh, he needed patrons willing to promote him. In the meantime, helped on by the Laidlaws, he graduated to managing small border farms. He was always regarded by fellow farmers as a skilled shepherd (he wrote a manual late in life on the subject, a much more difficult craft than the Romantic poets and literary pastoralists liked to fantasise).

Long convinced of his genius, Hogg had been impatiently awaiting discovery for some years before his first patron, Walter Scott (six years his junior), took an interest in him. Scott was, as the century turned, not yet the author of
Waverley
but a Writer to the Signet (i.e. lawyer) with a life sinecure as Sheriff-Depute at Selkirk. He was, more avidly, a collector of border ballads. The ancient folk-art was dying out and urgently needed memorials. Antiquarians like Scott, Joseph Ritson and Bishop Percy set themselves to the task – typically quarrelling between themselves bitterly. In summer 1802 Scott had learned through his land agent, William Laidlaw, a relative of Hogg’s employers, that there was an aged balladeer in the Borders, who had, in her head, a complete version of a piece Scott particularly lusted after, ‘Auld Maitland’. This source was Hogg’s mother, Margaret.

According to Hogg’s version (his most recent biographer offers a much duller scenario), Scott duly galloped, neck and crop, to ‘Ettrick’s bleakest, loneliest sheil’ to hear Mrs Hogg sing (she despised recitation). She crooned out a suspiciously word-perfect version of the 65-stanza ‘Auld Maitland’, hitherto known to Scott only in tantalising fragments. As with everything surrounding Hogg’s life (he confessed to being an incorrigible falsifier), there is the likelihood of stage-management. Hogg, not to mince words, primed his mother and wrote her script. Scott had his doubts
but he wanted the ballad so much for the third volume of his
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
that he swallowed Hogg’s bait, hook line and sinker.