Abstract
The 1803 portrait of young Percy Bysshe Shelley reading ‘garish’ bluebooks under the rose bushes at Sion House, which he obtained from a rather sordid circulating library, is a familiar, if not a disquieting aspect of literary history. Apart from the vicarious thrills provided by such ‘horrid’ material, these tawdry rewrites of Gothic fiction had the added benefit for the middle classes, of being inexpensive to obtain—sixpence or a shilling—or a mere penny a night from the local circulating library which stocked a multitude of horrid and sensational titles.
Tell us, ye dead, will none of you in pity to those left behind, disclose the secret?
– Robert Blair, The Grave
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Notes
Watt, William Whyte, Shilling Shockers of the Gothic School: A Study of Chapbook Gothic Romances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932; New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), p. 21.
Botting, Fred, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 62.
Shepard, Leslie, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), p. 27.
Shepard, Leslie, John Pitts: Ballad Printer of Seven Dials, London 1765–1844 (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969), pp. 78–79.
Curwen, Henry, A History of Booksellers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1873), p. 389.
Frederick, Frank, ‘Gothic Gold: The Sadleir-Black Gothic Collection’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1998), p. 296.
Mayo, Robert, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 367.
See Dorothy Blakey’s The Minerva Press 1790–1820 (London: Oxford University Press, 1939)
Louis Dudek’s Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and Their Relation to Literature (Toronto: Ryerson Press and Contact Press, 1955)
Leslie Shepard’s The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973).
There is no evidence that the bluebook author had access to J.H.D. Zschokke’s Abdllino, Der Grosse Bandit (1794), but simply included it in the title because of the success of Lewis’s translation.
Cox, Philip, Reading Adaptations: Novels and Verse Narratives on the Stage, 1790–1840 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Wilkinson, Sarah, The Castle Spectre (London: J. Bailey, 1820), p. 2.
Surr, Thomas, George Barnwell (London: Symonds, 1798), p. 5.
Wilkinson, Sarah, The Pathetic and Interesting History of George Barnwell (London: Lemoine & Roe, 1805), pp. 4–5.
Maturin, Charles Robert, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Victor Sage (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. viii.
Maturin, Charles, Bertram (London: 1816), Act 1 scene V, pp. 11–12.
Coleridge, S.T., Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, Volume II (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), p. 200.
See Robert Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 79 and Frederick Frank’s The First Gothics, pp. 20, 414.
Hill, Aaron (1685–1750), The Tragedy of Zara (London: J. Watts, 1736), Act 3 Scene 1.
Anonymous, The Midnight Groan; or, The Spectre of the Chapel. A Gothic Romance (London: Printed for T. & R. Hughes, 1808), p. 7.
Wilkinson, Sarah, The Castle of Montabino; or, The Orphan Sisters (London: Dean & Munday, 1809), p. 28.
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© 2005 Franz J. Potter
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Potter, F.J. (2005). Literary Mushrooms: The Gothic Bluebook. In: The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512726_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512726_3
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