The Mysteries of Udolpho

by Ann Radcliffe

  CHAPTER II

  1. [Milton] Il Penseroso: ll. 89–2.

  CHAPTER III

  1. Milton [Comus]: ll. 470–72.

  2. She perceived the figure move… the action: Radcliffe here draws on the opening scenes of Hamlet, in which a ghost appears to the guards on the castle platform and later beckons Hamlet to follow it.

  CHAPTER IV

  1. [Shakespeare] Julius Cæsar: II.ii.14–16.

  CHAPTER V

  1. Mason [‘Elegy on the Death of a Lady’]: ll. 1–4.

  2. Domenichino: The abbreviated name of Domenico Zampieri (1581–1641), who was a major Italian baroque painter of church ceiling frescos and altar tableaux. His landscape paintings were admired by the French painters Claude Gelée (Lorrain) and Nicolas Poussin (see note 6 to Vol. I, Ch. III). Radcliffe is fond of simulating tableaux effects in her prose.

  3. Ossian [Fingal: An Ancient Poem]: Final sentence of Book V. The epic prose poems Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), purporting to be translations from the Gaelic of a legendary third-century warrior and poet called Ossian, were actually the work of James Macpherson (1736–96), who perpetrated an elaborate hoax not uncovered until after his death. ‘Ossian’ was fêted throughout Europe and became an icon of Romanticism.

  CHAPTER VI

  1. Milton [Comus]: ll. 343–9; ‘bowes’ (l. 349) in the original.

  2. ‘her place of dearest residence’: Mason, Elfrida; Written on the Model of the Ancient Greek Tragedy (1752), l. 8.

  3. ‘With many a foul, and midnight murder stain’d’: Gray, The Bard,(1757), II.iii.87; ‘With many a foul and midnight murther fed’ in the original.

  4. See the Abbe Berthelon on Electricity: Correct spelling ‘Bertholon’ – a French scientist and cleric who wrote De l’eélectriciteé du corps humain dans l’eétat de santeé et de maladie (1780), De l’eélectriciteé des veégeétaux (1783), and De l’eélectriciteé des meéteéores (1787).

  5. ‘darkness visible’: Milton, Paradise Lost, I.63.

  CHAPTER VII

  1. kest: a dialectical variation of ‘cast’, especially in the sense of ‘cast aside’; also used to mean ‘outdid’ and ‘kissed’.

  2. Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]: I.iii; ‘beds of pleasant green’ (l. 4) in the original.

  3. This poem… periodical publication: The publication has not been traced.

  4. sticcado: A kind of xylophone.

  5. vermeil: suffused with vermilion or bright red.

  6. Hesper: The evening star. Cf. Beattie’s Pastoral (1761), x.124: ‘Lo beamy Hesper gilds the western sky.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  1. [Shakespeare] Richard II: II.ii.197–9.

  2. Denunzie secrete, or lions’ mouths: Denunzie segrete (Italian), secret or anonymous denunciations. The carved lion’s mouth (bocca de leone), in which political information could be deposited, was outside the Sala della Bussola in the Doge’s palace. The Doge and his Council of Ten would give attention to such anonymous information to administer justice and maintain rule in the realm. While, in its assurance of anonymity, this system was in some respects like modern-day police-administered ‘crime-stoppers’ arrangements, it was also subject to abuse and was feared by innocent and guilty citizens alike. The ‘secret prisons’ of the Doge were located underneath his palace.

  3. ‘loud lament’: Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII.244; also ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, l. 83.

  CHAPTER IX

  1. Lapponian’s: Laplander’s.

  2. ‘When Sol from Cancer’: ‘Sol’ is the sun personified; ‘Cancer’ is the zodiacal constellation of the crab.

  3. Beattie [The Minstrel]: I.lix; ‘the season bland / and in their northern caves the storms are bound’ (ll. 525–6) in the original.

  4. ‘As when… stream’: Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, I.xx; ‘portal’ in the original.

  5. Arcadia: A mountainous region in the Peloponnese, taken as an ideal region of rural contentment.

  6. ‘under the opening eye-lids of the morn’: Unidentified.

  7. without a hat… necessary article of dress: In eighteenth-century England, respectability required ladies to wear a hat in public. This passage is contradicted later by one in which Emily unlocks a little box containing ‘some letters of Valancourt with some drawings she had sketched during her stay in Tuscany’ (Ch. XIII): Emily must have done more than ‘throw on her veil’ as she left Udolpho. In accord with the didactic purpose required of novels in her day, Radcliffe goes to what now seem ridiculous lengths to guard the perfect propriety and morality of her heroine. Eaton Stannard Barrett was to parody Emily’s purchase of ‘a little straw hat’ in his thoroughgoing burlesque The Heroine, or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader(1813). See The Heroine, with an Introduction by Michael Sadleir (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1928), p. 67.

  8. Leghorn: Modern Livorno in Tuscany. England imported plaiting for straw hats from Leghorn.

  9. lucciola… cicala: Lucciola, a firefly, an insect which has the property of emitting phosphorescent light; cicala, a cicada, a large insect noted for the shrill chirping or clicking sound produced by the vibrating membranes on the underside of the abdomen in the male.

  10. Collins [‘Ode to Evening’]: ll. 11–14.

  11. gulf of Lyons: Gulf of Lion (Golfe du Lion).

  CHAPTER X

  1. [More] Sacred Dramas: David and Goliath, ii.74–8, from Sacred Dramas; Chiefly Intended for Young Persons (1782) (London: T. Cadell Jun and W. Davies, 1799). An eminent member of the Blue Stocking Circle, Hannah More (1745–1833) wrote a number of plays, beginning with The Search for Happiness, a Pastoral Play for Schools (1773). Author of the proto-feminist poem Bas Bleu, she acted as patron to ‘plebeian’ poet Ann Yearsley, whose ‘primitive genius’ she discovered and championed in her circle. In later years she wrote tracts directed to reform of the poor and of female education.

  2. daughter-in-law: This term was still in use as a variant for ‘step-daughter’ in the nineteenth-century, although it was considered incorrect.

  3. embattled: Furnished with battlements or crenellated embrasures.

  4. a cup of the waters of Lethe: A cup of forgetfulness. In Greek mythology Lethe was one of the rivers to Hades, the underworld. Those who descended to Hades were obliged to drink of the waters of Lethe and forget everything they had done on earth as mortals.

  5. ‘with gay visions of to-morrow’: Unidentified.

  6. ‘To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new’: Milton, Lycidas, l. 192.

  CHAPTER XI

  1. Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]: I.xlviii; ‘What transport to retrace our boyish plays’ in the original.

  2. a train of friars, and then of nuns: Through having both nuns and monks reside under one roof, Radcliffe is frequently derided for her ignorance of monastic rules. However, an avid reader of travel literature, she may well have had in mind the Catholic monastery in Languedoc at Prouille a kilometre or two down the hill from Fanjeaux, south-east of Toulouse, established by Dominic Guzman (1171?–1221) in 1206. Here Dominic provided a home for women who had converted from the Albigensian heresy and who sought some equivalent spiritual life to the one they had been leading as heretics. His foundation also gave itinerant preachers a useful base. Thus, as the Dominican order took shape, Prouille had a small community of friars as well as nuns. The monastery had a wall down the middle and a courtyard on each side, separating the quarters for nuns and friars. This building can still be visited, but is now occupied only by nuns.

  3. The veil of the abbess… smile of welcome: Radcliffe’s kindly abbess is given a romantic appearance. In eighteenth-century England there were no Catholic parish priests or monastic institutions apart from two small unproclaimed nunneries at Hammersmith and York. Because the English were generally unfamiliar with the dress, establishments and practices of Catholic clergy, imagination could be and often was given free play by Gothic novelists. See Sister Mary Muriel Tarr, Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Natur
e and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820) (Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 1946).

  CHAPTER XII

  1. Gray [‘Ode for Music’]: ll. 32–4. The original edition was entitled, ‘Ode performed in the Senate-House at Cambridge, July 1, 1769, at the installation of His Grace Augustus-Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, Chancellor of the University. Set to Music by Dr Randal, Professor of Music’, although it was called simply ‘Ode for Music’ on the first page of the text. Gray, with ‘great reluctance’ but unsolicited, had taken on the task of writing the verse for this occasion because he felt himself ‘bound in gratitude’ to the Duke, who, while Prime Minister, had been responsible for his appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge in July 1768. Having flattered the Duke in his Ode, however, Gray and the verse were immediately targets for abuse and merciless parody in the press – vitriol instigated by the Duke’s enemies. Despite all this, it is recorded that, after the installation ceremony, the company went off cheerfully to ‘dinner, in Trinity College Hall, where were seven turtles and a number of haunches, with plenty of Claret, Champagne, and Burgundy’. See Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, pp. 264–7.

  CHAPTER XIII

  1. Pope’s Homer: Translated from The Iliad (1715–20), xv.752–7; ‘Bursts as a Wave that from the Cloud impends’ (l. 752) in the original.

  2. ‘Liquid notes, that close the eye of day’: Milton, ‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray’, l. 5.

  VOLUME IV

  CHAPTER I

  1. [Shakespeare] Midsummer Night’s Dream: III.ii.198–201, 215; ‘The sisters’ vows, the hours that we have spent’ (l. 199) and ‘Oh, is all forgot?’ (l. 201) in the original.

  CHAPTER II

  1. [Shakespeare] Romeo and Juliet: IV.i.45.

  CHAPTER III

  1. Shakespeare [The Tempest]: I. ii.406.

  2. oriel: A large recess with a window, of polygonal plan, projecting from the outer face of a building, usually in an upper storey, and supported either from the ground or on corbels. Formerly sometimes forming a small apartment attached to a hall, or the like (OED). Here it structures the closet of the Marchioness.

  CHAPTER IV

  1. Shakespeare [Midsummer Night’s Dream]: V.i.369–72.

  CHAPTER V

  1. Thomson [‘Hymn on Solitude’]: ll. 1–2, 25–6, 29–32; ‘And the faint landskip swims away’ (l. 30) in the original (1729).

  CHAPTER VI

  1. Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]: I.xxxi.

  2. such reflections… for eternity: The Count’s melancholy reflections on transience and death in the dilapidated saloon, like the frequent melancholy reveries of Emily and St Aubert in contemplation of the sublime and picturesque in nature, are important to Radcliffe’s ethical and religious view. Following the poets James Thomson, James Beattie, Robert Blair and William Collins, Radcliffe sees melancholy – especially at twilight hours – as healing, restorative and redemptive.

  3. Whether the spirit… to the sense: Belief / disbelief in the supernatural and the visibility of spirits had become serious topics of discussion in the latter half of the eighteenth century with Dr Johnson’s investigation of the Cock Lane ghost in 1762. See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  4. fictions of the Provençal writers: Given the location of Chateau-le-Blanc, it is appropriate that it should be hung with ‘depictured scenes from some of the antient Provençal romances’ and that ‘a volume of old Provencçal tales’ lies in an ‘obscure corner’ of the deceased Marquis de Villeroi’s library.

  5. The Provençal Tale: Rictor Norton (Mistress of Udolpho, pp. 99–100) has traced this as a version of the story of Sir Bevys of Lancaster reproduced in Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry (1774–81), with which Radcliffe appears to have been familiar.

  CHAPTER VII

  1. Shakespeare [ Julius Caesar]: II.i.230–33.

  2. rudely cut with a pen-knife: The subsequent length of the poem and the instant recognizability of Valancourt’s handwriting have made Radcliffe’s utilization here of a common practice – engraving on stones – a subject for readerly mirth.

  CHAPTER VIII

  1. [Shakespeare] Hamlet: I.iv.40–42; 44.

  2. executed upon the wheel: A reference to the barbaric medieval practice of killing by binding on a revolving wheel and striking with an iron bar.

  3. Tacitus: Cornelius Tacitus (ad c. 56–c. 118), a Roman historian among whose surviving works is an account of the Roman conquest of Britain in his De Vita Iulii Agricolae.

  CHAPTER IX

  1. Shakespeare [Hamlet]: I iii.59.

  CHAPTER X

  1. [Rogers] Pleasures of Memory: i.169–73. Samuel Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory, a long poem in which the author reflects as he wanders around the villages of his childhood, went through four editions in its first year and had sold 23,000 copies by 1816. Reference is to a facsimile edition in the Revolution and Romanticism series, chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989). Quoting the stanza chosen here by Radcliffe, he comments in his Introduction that ‘it is likely in fact that [William] Wordsworth first encountered Hartley’s associationist theory of the mind through The Pleasures of Memory’.

  2. the liburnum… the cerinthe: Probably the common Laburnam anagyroides of Europe, a small leguminous bush having racemes of yellow flowers, somewhat similar to wisteria. Cerinthe, the habit of which is difficult to trace with certainty, appears to be named for Cerinthus, a heresiarch of the first century who denied the divinity of Jesus, but held that a certain virtue descended into him at baptism, which filled him with the Holy Ghost.

  CHAPTER XI

  1. Gray [‘Ode on… Eton College’]: ll. 11–18; ‘soothe’ (l. 18) in the original.

  CHAPTER XII

  1. [Shakespeare] Macbeth: III.ii.50–53.

  2. Spanish Pavan: A grave and stately dance in which the dancers were elaborately dressed (OED). It is of Italian origin; occasionally the name appears as ‘Padovana’ (or ‘Paduana’), indicating Padua as the home of the dance. (The derivation from the Latin pavo, a peacock, is now generally discredited.) See Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music(London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 778.

  3. To a warm imagination… can shew: Cf. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry, Pt II, Section III on Obscurity, particularly, pp. 99, 107.

  4. Refines… roll: Unidentified.

  5. [Beattie] The Minstrel: I.xxi.

  6. He spoke of… stamp upon the world the history of the deluge: An allusion to the theories of the theologian Bishop Thomas Burnet, whose The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681–9), first published as Telluris theora sacra, was an imaginative and romantic cosmogony suggested to him by a journey across the Alps; it was praised by Addison in No. 146 of the Spectator. Burnet attributed the formation of the geological features of the Alps of which the Count speaks, as well as the changing seasons, to the cataclysmic flood in the time of Noah which followed the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As God’s judgement on the world, the great flood had meant the loss of original nature and a separation recalled in melancholy contemplation of the post-lapsarian natural world.

  CHAPTER XIII

  1. Beattie [Retirement]: ll. 45–7.

  CHAPTER XIV

  1. him, that left half told/The story of Cambuscan bold’: The reference is to Chaucer, who in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in his Canterbury Talesleft unfinished the story of ‘Cambyuskan’, King of ‘Sarray in the land of tartarye’. See The Canterbury Tales, ed. A. C. Cawley (London: Dent, 1958; Everyman, 1994), pp. 290–309.

  2. Milton [Il Penseroso]: ll. 109–10; ‘Or call up him’ in the original.

  CHAPTER XV

  1. Gray [‘Ode for Music’]: ll. 61–4.

  CHAPTER XVI

  1. [Shakespeare] Macbeth: V.i.71–4.

  2. ‘the peace
that passeth all understanding’: Philippians 4:7, in the King James version of the Bible; ‘the peace of God’ in the original.

  CHAPTER XVII

  1. [Shakespeare] Macbeth: I.vii.7–12.

  2. noviciation: Noviciate, the probationary period before taking religious vows. In The Italian (1796), Vol. I, Ch. XI, Radcliffe uses ‘noviciation’ to refer to the admission of a novice: ‘When this ceremony had concluded, another began, and he was told it was that of a noviciation’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 119).

  3. not human, but formed of wax: The description of what was hidden behind the black veil is derived from the first volume of Pierre Jean Grosley’s travel book New Observations on Italy and Its Inhabitants (French edition 1764; English translation, London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1769), in which Grosley relates that he was shown the waxen image of a woman in the Benedictine church of San Vitale in Ravenna. Her lover had had it made when, returning from a journey, he had found her dead and already three days buried. Having caused the vault to be opened so that he could gain comfort from beholding her once more, he saw her just as she was later presented in the wax: ‘Extremely beautiful, among the damp regions of the dead; a lizard is sucking her mouth, a worm is creeping out of one of her cheeks, a mouse is gnawing one of her ears, and a huge swolen [sic] toad on her forehead is preying on one of her eyes’ (Vol. I, p. 205). Grosley then comments, ‘at first sight I took this to be no more than a pious contrivance for mortifying pride, and alienating the heart from too violent a love of sublunary inticements’. This, too, accords with Radcliffe’s explanation of the wax image as a memento mori ‘designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho’. See J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘Ramond De Carbonnières, Grosley and Mrs Radcliffe’, Review of English Studies, Vol. 5, No. 19 (July 1929), p. 299. Partly decomposed corpses, or transis, were frequent representations of death in macabre Catholic iconography of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983), pp. 110–18.