2.‘more in pity than in anger’: An adaptation of ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I.i.231. The latter phrase is quoted in Vol. III, Ch. V.
3. izard: In Gascony, isart. ‘A capriform antelope allied to the chamois, found in the Pyrenees’ (OED).
4. made very tasteful improvements: The manners, taste and accomplishments which Radcliffe gives to her characters are frequently anachronistic. St Aubert’s botanizing and country-estate improvement are pursuits which were in vogue among the English upper classes from the 1740s onwards. However, the modesty of his improvements, his readiness to sacrifice taste to sentiment, and the ‘chaste simplicity’ of his life position him socially as a man of virtue and creativity. In contrast, his pretentious brother-in-law, Monsieur Quesnel, plans extravagant extensions which involve demolishing the whole east wing of St Aubert’s cherished boyhood home and cutting down an ancient chestnut tree as well as an avenue of trees in the grounds. That Quesnel should favour shaven grounds and Lombardy poplars out of character with the heavy Gothic mansion, and that St Aubert should protest strongly and has himself planted larch, beech, pine and mountain ash, are significant in the context of 1790s debates concerning the aesthetic principles of siting and constructing country houses and landscaping the grounds. In the turbulent years of the revolution in France, such principles were often polemically aligned with political ideologies. See Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Stephen Daniels, ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Georgian England’ in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 43–82.
5. ‘Those tend’rer tints… die’: Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory, ii.271–2. Son of a wealthy banker, Rogers (1763–1855) was influenced by his mother’s Dissenting principles, and moved in foremost literary and political circles throughout his long life. At eighty-six he was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of William Wordsworth in 1850. His fame rested mainly on The Pleasures of Memory (1792), which was admired by Byron, and his travel poem Italy (1830). For particulars of his life, see Poems by Samuel Rogers (London: Edward Moxon, 1860), pp. vii–lxiv.
6. He taught her Latin and English… the sublimity of their best poets: Presumably, then, Emily has read John Gower (1330?–1408) and Geoffrey Chaucer (?1345–1400). The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) did not go to press until 1589, five years after the year in which the novel opens.
7. wrapt in a melancholy charm: rapt.
8. led to enthusiasm and poetry: Radcliffe’s frequent use of ‘enthusiasm’ coincides with that of William Duff (1732–1815), whose Essay on Original Genius (1767) explored the role of imagination in ordinary perception and related it to special acts of imagination of which only individuals gifted with original genius are said to be capable. According to Duff, one of the properties which indicates genius is ‘ENTHUSIASM of Imagination, which as it were hurries the mind out of itself’. The poet of original (in contrast to imitative) genius is supplied by Nature with the materials of composition and flourishes ‘in the peaceful vale of rural tranquillity’. See reprint edn (New York: Garland, 1970), pp. 171, 294.
9. pencil: This may be anachronistic, although the OED cites ‘pensil of black led (1612)’, and other materials were used at this time for such an instrument.
10. recollected courage: Gathered or summoned up courage.
11. the court of Henry the Third: This is one of the few historical references in Udolpho. The designated turbulence of the period alludes to religious struggles in France about which Radcliffe does not elaborate. In 1584 Henry III’s Catholic brother the duc d’Anjou died, leaving the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre as next in line to the throne. Thus ensued what is known as ‘the war of the three Henris’, the third Henri being the king’s powerful subject the duc de Guise. The husband of the queen’s younger sister, the duc de Joyeuse, was much favoured by the King. Thus, in speaking of ‘the character of the Duke de Joyeuse’, and of ‘the Porte’ (the official name for the seat of the Turkish government in that time), Quesnel is affecting a social status and intimate knowledge of the King’s court and official business which he does not have.
12. livres: The livre was old French money of account, divided into twenty sols (or sous) and approximately equivalent to the franc of 1900 (OED).
13. a salle à manger, a salon, a salle au commune: A dining room, a drawing room, and an everyday room in which to converse. (A ‘salle commune’ would have been appropriate to a large public building in a town or city.)
14. Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Summer’]: ll. 1672–5; ‘game’ (l. 1674) in the original.
15. The Glow-Worm: This is the first of thirteen poems attributed to Emily in Udolpho. Six others are variously attributed to Du Pont, St Aubert, Count Morano, a group of peasants, Blanche and Valancourt. The female glow-worm (Lampyris noctiluca), with which Emily is ‘so little acquainted’, emits a green light from the tip of its abdomen.
16. fays: fairies. In 1798 Nathan Drake, in his essay ‘On Gothic Superstition’, pointed out that, in concentrating on the fearful aspects of the supernatural, writers of Gothic romance had neglected the ‘sportive’ branch of medieval superstition, the ‘traditionary tales of elves and fairies’ which had been employed to good effect by Spenser and Shakespeare. See Literary Hours or Sketches Critical and Narrative, 2nd edn (Sudbury, for T. Cadell, Jun., and W. Davies, London, 1800), Vol. I, No. 8, p. 38.
17. Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Summer’]: ll. 1687–93; ‘flings’ (l.1689), ‘wavering woods’ (l. 1690) and ‘retained’ (l. 1691) in the original.
CHAPTER II
1. Shakespeare [Hamlet]: I.v. 15–16. The works of William Shakespeare enjoyed a great revival during the second half of the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole in the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765) claimed to have imitated Shakespeare (‘a star of first magnitude among the moderns’) in writing his five-chapter tale, and to have ‘shelter[ed] [his] own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced’ (see Peter Fairclough, ed., Three Gothic Novels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 41).
2. closet: A small private room for retirement.
3. Tholouse: Toulouse. Also spelt ‘Thoulouse’ in Vol. I. ‘Thoulouse’ appears on maps of the late sixteenth century.
4. commotions… tumults: During the time of Spanish control over Italy after 1559, there were some 7,000 Spanish soldiers in Lombardy and 5,000 in Naples. Their purpose was to keep the peace and maintain control in the face of any threats from the Papal States and Venice. But the army was ill-disciplined and was maintained through the system of condotti. That is, Philip II of Spain gave the independent Italian princes subsidies in return for military assistance in case of war – in the process, encouraging younger sons of the ruling Italian princes to take service and hold commands in the Spanish army. His task of keeping these princes of the small independent states themselves in check was made easier by the rampant jealousies amongst them. Radcliffe appears to be alluding to the constant skirmishing which occurred. Emily’s apprehension of ‘civil commotion’ and the warring between ‘petty’ states is again raised in Ch. XIII.
5. the French opera: This is anachronistic, as are the references to opera in the Venice section in Vol. II. Peri’s opera Dafne, now lost, was performed in Florence in 1597, but Monteverdi’s La Favola d’Orfeo, performed at Mantua in 1607, is generally considered the landmark in the history of opera. The first public opera house in the world, the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, did not open until 1637.
CHAPTER III
1. [Beattie] The Minstrel: or, The Progress of Genius, I.ix and x. James Beattie (1735–1803) was born in a small village in Scotland, where he nourished a love of sublime and beautiful scenery. He went on to receive academic acclaim and royal patronage for his Essay on t
he Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), which sought to refute work by philosophers David Hume and Bishop Berkeley. The first book of The Minstrel came out anonymously in 1771 and was praised in rapturous terms. The second book, together with a new and corrected version of the first, appeared in 1774, with the author’s name added. A long poem in Spenserian stanzas, it traces the progress, in a Gothic age, of the solitary and sensitive Edwin – son of a shepherd, but a poetical genius. It foreshadows Wordsworth’s The Prelude in its theme of Edwin’s enlightenment through nature. The Minstrel remained enormously popular in the late eighteenth century. All references given for Beattie are to The Poetical Works of James Beattie (London: Bell & Daldy, n.d.).
2. ‘Drag… chain’: Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society, l. 7; ‘And drags’ in the original. Goldsmith (1730?–1774) began writing The Traveller while pursuing medical studies on a tour of Europe in the summer of 1755. It was published in 1764. References are to Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (London and Harlow, Longman, 1969).
3. league: The league was an itinerary measure of distance, varying from country to country, but usually taken to be about three miles. The use of the term in England tended to occur in poetical or rhetorical estimates of distance, rather than in everyday parlance.
4. which science, rather than the eye, enabled him to describe: St Aubert’s mastery of his subject matter here arises from study or learning, rather than from local observation.
5.‘Rocks… green’: Beattie, The Minstrel, II.vii. ‘scorched with lightning’ (l. 57) in the original.
6. a scene as Salvator… had he then existed: Radcliffe alludes here to the popular dark, craggy mountain landscapes of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa, apotheosized as ‘savage Rosa’ by the poet James Thomson in his The Castle of Indolence (1748): ‘Whate’er Lorrain light-touched with softening hue, / Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew’ (I.xxxviii). Many of Radcliffe’s mountain, night and storm descriptions which evoke sublime awe and terror are reproductions in prose of the style of Rosa’s paintings. The threatening atmosphere of his Night Scene with Figures – The Banditti, for example, with its gloomy chiaroscuro shadings of moonlit sky, massive projecting rock, barren tree and inimical human figures, is created on occasion for St Aubert and Emily as they travel through the Pyrenees. However Radcliffe’s storm scenes also resemble the work of Nicolas Poussin (1593–1665), whose human figures are frequently frozen in moments of action and sublime emotion. Her picturesque scenes, particularly her melancholy evening landscapes, draw on the paintings of Claude Geleée (Lorrain) (1600–1682), whose expansive horizons are suffused with the soft luminosity of early morning or late afternoon.
7. banditti: Robbers, bands of outlaws found in Spain and Italy. They were part of the traveller’s everyday life, especially in mountainous areas and frontier regions, such as the borderlands between the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, between France and Savoy, and between France and Spain, where wild, hilly terrain made ambushes easier. Travellers’ diaries frequently contained accounts of the dangers they had encountered. See Antoni Maczak, Travel in Early Modern Europe, trans. Ursula Phillips (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 158–62.
8. laving: Washing or bathing.
9. brakes: Brushwood, thickets.
10. volumes of Homer, Horace, and Petrarch: Valancourt has had an eighteenth-century classical education. Homer, born some time in the eighth century BC, was a great Greek epic poet, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, born in 65 bc, was a Roman poet famous for his Satires, Odes, Epodes, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) was an Italian poet and humanist, most famous for the ‘Rime sparse’ which included his love sonnets in praise of Laura. Petrarch’s work had become very fashionable in the late eighteenth century, after a century of neglect.
CHAPTER IV
1. [Beattie] The Minstrel: I.xxii.
2. [Mason] Caractacus: Written on the Model of the Ancient Greek Tragedy (1759), ll. 443–51. William Mason (1725–1797) was a friend of both Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray (1716–71) and worked with the latter on a projected ‘History of English Poetry’. As Gray’s executor, he edited Gray’s poems and letters and wrote his memoirs. His own works, which include a poem in blank verse, The English Garden (1771–81), are little read today. References are from The Works of William Mason M.A. Precentor of York and Rector of Aston (London: printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies by W. Bulmer, 1811).
CHAPTER V
1. Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Spring’]: ll. 251–2.
2. louis: Louis d’or, a French gold coin issued in the reign of Louis XIII and subsequently until the reign of Louis XVI. In 1717 its legal value was fixed at seventeen shillings (OED).
3. Thomson [The Seasons, ‘Summer’]: ll. 673–5, 773–7; ‘Broad o’er my head the verdant cedar wave’ (l. 674) and ‘there let me draw / Ethereal Soul’ (ll. 773–4) in the original.
4. ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror’: Rictor Norton, in his biography of Ann Radcliffe, Mistress of Udolpho (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), points out (pp. 78–9) that this line appears to be appropriated from William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmorland (London: R. Blamire, 1786), Vol. I, p. 183. Gilpin himself attributes it to the ‘ingenious’ Mr Charles Avison, organist of St Nicholas in Newcastle upon Tyne, who said of Derwentwater, ‘Here is beauty indeed – Beauty lying in the lap of Horrour!’ Radcliffe’s happy change of ‘lying’ to ‘sleeping’ makes the phrase memorable. For Gilpin, features of landscape that are rough and irregular, are shaded in obscurity, or are in some way sublime, must combine with some degree of beauty for a scene to be deemed picturesque.
CHAPTER VI
1. Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]: II.iii.
2. fane: Spire; see ‘rich Cathedral fanes’ and ‘The fane conventual there is dimly seen’ in Mason’s The English Garden, III.59ff; vane.
3. Milton [Comus]: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), ll. 555–60; ‘steam’ (l. 556) in the original. The poetry of John Milton (1608–74), like the plays of Shakespeare, enjoyed a revival during the second half of the eighteenth century amid the reaction against the Augustan critical attitude and a new emphasis on spontaneity and the revival of things Gothic such as ‘folk-poetry’ and ballads. Bishop Hurd, in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), argued that Milton, among others, had been ‘charmed’ by the old Gothic romances and that his work had gained ‘power’ from them. All references for Milton are to The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
4. ‘narrative old age’: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), The Temple of Fame (1715), l. 291. Reference is to Pope: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).
5. [Smith] The Emigrants: A Poem in Two Books (London: T. Cadell, 1793), II.300–301. The first publication of Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) was her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, but she became a prolific writer of novels when a series of misfortunes required her to support herself and her eight surviving children.
CHAPTER VII
1. Beattie [The Minstrel]: I.xxvi.
2. coffee: An anachronism here, as is the allusion to coffee houses in Venice in Vol. II, Ch. III. Coffee was introduced into France in 1643 and was not in common use in Paris until 1669. The first public cafeé in Paris opened in 1672. There were several coffee houses around the Piazza San Marco in Venice by 1690.
3. the tumults: An allusion to the religious wars which had occurred in France during the previous decade.
CHAPTER VIII
1. Collins [‘Ode… Fontenoy’]: ll. 19–21. Little is known of the life and work of William Collins (1721–59), especially after the onset of the mental disorder which appears to have led to his early death. References are
to The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
CHAPTER IX
1. Mason [‘Ode; To a Friend’]: ll. 9–16.
CHAPTER X
1. [Shakespeare] Macbeth: III.iv.109–11.
2. ‘thick-coming fancies’: Ibid., V.iii.38.
CHAPTER XI
1. [Beattie] The Minstrel: III.iii; ‘artless all, as Edwin’s infant song’ (l. 27) in the original.
2. saloon: A lofty, spacious room used for assemblies in public places. Also the principal room in a house in terms of size. Radcliffe uses it to designate a large and resplendent salon in a private home.
CHAPTER XII
1. Collins [‘The Manners. An Ode’]: ll. 10–12.
2. the straight walks, square parterres, and artificial fountains of the garden: In opposition to the geometric style of laying out grounds in regular levels and plots bounded by artificial straight lines, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century landscaping moved increasingly to the so-called ‘English’ landscape style. Largely influenced by William Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque, this style, which sought to imitate nature in a painterly way, obviously appealed to Radcliffe. One of its leading exponents, the professional landscape gardener Humphry Repton, from 1788 onwards advocated formal layouts near his clients’ houses only on utilitarian grounds. By the early 1790s formal, ‘shaven’ gardens and ‘prim’ walks were the target of polemic from wealthy Whig landowners Richard Payne Knight and Sir Uvedale Price. Both enthusiastic amateur gardeners on their own Herefordshire estates, they advocated irregularity and variety in tree planting, and subsequently (in 1794) published works on landscaping in the picturesque style along with Repton. According to their Gilpinesque criteria, Madame Cheron’s garden would reveal her as a person of ‘pretended taste’, which is how she is depicted by Radcliffe. On the other hand, St Aubert’s garden at La Valleée, with its ‘negligent beauties’ so beloved by Emily, is one of which they would approve.
The Mysteries of Udolpho Page 94
