2. the Wife of Walberg: Often taken to allude to Maturin’s wife, Henrietta Kingsbury. The grinding poverty in the story is close to their own struggles; after his death, she wrote to Scott, indicating how much his money-anxieties had affected her husband’s health.
3. Curates were paid a pittance, and had to work their way up. Maturin did not achieve preferment in the Church of Ireland and stayed a curate, he implies in a letter, because he was a ‘High Calvinist’. But the correspondence between Scott and the Church of Ireland hierarchy reveals that, whether he knew it or not, Maturin initially went against the wishes of one of the Bishops in returning to Dublin, instead of staying out in the curacy he had been found at Loughrea, Galway.
CHAPTER I
In compiling these notes, I gratefully acknowledge the work of previous editors, notably the attributional labours of Douglas Grant, which have turned an impossible task into a pleasure; I have benefited from Alethea Hayter’s textual work and her commentary on anachronisms. I am also grateful for particular pieces of information received from UEA doctoral students Ahlam Alaki and Marina MacKay.
1. 2 Henry VI, III, iii, 12–13 (Grant). The allusion is to the Bishop of Winchester’s raving mad deathbed speech, his words a response to the announcement that the King is present.
2. Wicklow: A mountainous region on the east coast of southern Ireland; traditionally a place for fugitives and for those who sought to prey on the inhabitants of the Dublin area. This is a classic example of a convention in the Gothic novel: the initial move away from a centre of culture to an isolated rural area, where beliefs, and even language, are unfamiliar.
3. shod with felt: Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, vi, 184–5. At the height of his madness, Lear fantasizes about stealing up on his sons-in-law and then: ‘kill, kill, kill, kill.’ In Maturin’s context, the hyperbole is comic.
4. the ghost of Beatrice in the Monk: There is a famous (comic) scene in the subplot of Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk, in which the ghost of Beatrice, the Bleeding Nun, gets into Don Raymond’s carriage.
5. governante: Housekeeper. The ironically over-polite term broadens the gap between the name and its bearer.
6. the second square: i.e. of Trinity College.
7. domain: Common word for an estate in southern Ireland, often spelt ‘demesne’ after Old French, with strongly feudal overtones.
8. kish: A wickerwork turf-basket.
9. withered Sybil: (1) An ironic reference to a classical prophetess (e.g. from Virgil’s Aeneid); (2) a witch.
10. cottar’s hut: A peasant’s tied cottage.
11. by spells, and by such daubry as is beyond our element: Shakespeare, Merrie Wives of Windsor, IV, ii, 176–7.
daubry: Specious or coarse work. Refers to Mistress Ford’s maid’s aunt of Braintree, whom the unconscious Falstaff is made to impersonate in order to get him out of the house.
12. ears polite: cf. Pope, Epistle to Burlington:
To rest, the Cushion and soft dean
Who never mentions Hell to ears polite.
(149–50)
Here the context is the Devil, however, rather than Hell.
13. Anglicè: In the English language. An ‘aside’ to the English reader, in which the narrator poses as translator and anthropologist. Cf. Hibernicè speaking: speaking in the Irish language, a few lines below. The trope (which derives from Scott) reveals Maturin’s ambivalence about his audience.
14. Lord Lyttleton: Thomas Lyttleton, Second Baron (1744–79), known as the ‘wicked Lord’, whose dream that he would the in three days was correct. The tale of the ‘poor girl’ is untraced; but for the superstition that the Vampire preys on its own flesh and blood see Byron’s ‘The Giaour’ (1813), in which there is a vivid picture of a daughter preyed upon by a vampire father.
15. groupe: An arrangement, a posed cluster of objects or people. The OED gives this as the original sense. Maturin consistently uses the archaic spelling and older sense: throughout the text, the term evokes painting.
16. imprimis: In the first place, originally (assimilated form of’in primis’).
17. Miss Edgeworth: Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) published The Absentee in 1812. To some extent, Maturin is carrying on the tradition, initiated by Edgeworth, of drawing attention to the poverty and neglect of Irish estates, taking some of his satirically comic tone from her most famous novel, Castle Rackrent (1800).
18. slink-veal: The flesh of a premature calf.
19. suo periculo: At his own risk (i.e. on oath). Here the author is a witness. (See Introduction, p. xix, note 16.)
20. the Dean of Killala: Maturin’s great-grandfather, Peter, held the post from 1724 to 1741.
21. potsheen: Raw alcohol, often made illegally from potatoes.
22. veritable Amphitryon: From Molière’s comedy of the same name in which Amphitryon, the foster-father of Hercules, gives a great dinner. The ‘true Amphitryon’ is whoever pays for your dinner: the whiskey, by analogy, justifies the food.
23. Don Quixote, Pt II, ch. Ixxiv; the last chapter of the book. The mention of Sancho’s ‘little carcase’ shows that Maturin is using Smollett’s translation. Cervantes’ point is that they have all received an inheritance from the dying Knight, and this has mitigated the strength of their mourning: here, they are simply taking advantage of the situation to raid the dying man’s larder.
24. Pythoness: A Prophetess (after the tripod ‘pythia’ on which they sit or stand to pronounce). A woman supposed, or professing, to have a ‘familiar spirit’ and to utter his words; having the power of divination, or soothsaying. In 1823, Byron applied this term to the Delphic Oracle.
25. the Irish præficae: Paid mourners.
26. Sinbad the Sailor: This story occurs in the fourth voyage of Sinbad. Maturin’s most likely source is the version of the Arabian Nights translated by Antoine Galland, published in Paris (1704–17).
27. arointed: Driven away with an execration. The classic source is Macbeth, I, iii, 6.
28. boot-jack: A contrivance for pulling off boots.
29. sowl: Person (i.e. dialect: ‘soul’).
30. in Dogberry’s time: Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, III, iii, 10–16.
31. our prayer-books: Protestant Church of Ireland prayer-books – note the partisan tone of ‘our’.
churching of women: A service for the thanksgiving of women after childbirth, which the illiteracy of the Irish servant makes her think refers to life after death, because it comes after the burial service.
32. niggers: Niggards, vents or doors in a firegrate to economize on fuel. Hence the term for a miser: niggardly.
33. Madeira: Amber-coloured, fortified wine, resembling sherry, made in the island of Madeira.
34. a portrait that hung on the wall: The convention in the Gothic novel of the picture which is alive begins with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) and carries on in Lewis’s The Monk (1796).
35. Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Bk II, v.5,10–11. This poem is an orientalist text, and has a significant relationship to the references to the ‘Eastern Tales’ in the novel, mediating between the Arabian Nights and the Gothic novel.
36. poor Butler: The poet and prose writer Samuel Butler (1612–80), who died in penury. He actually made this remark in The Antiquary (Grant). Maturin’s own sensitivity to poverty and betrayal is evident in the allusion.
37. facies Hippocratica: The appearance of the face immediately before death, named after Hippocrates, its discoverer.
38. blue chamber of the dwelling: The secret chamber into which the wife is forbidden to go, where Bluebeard keeps the bodies of his previous wives. It is not blue in the story: here ‘blue’ seems to be shorthand for Bluebeard himself, though it may be linked to the traditional superstition that candles burn blue when the devil is present. Charles Perrault’s popular tale was available in many editions by the end of the eighteenth century. This passage shows that the motif of prohibition and transgression is consciously transferred to t
his text from the fairytale.
39. a parish coffin: One paid for by the parish, a pauper’s coffin.
CHAPTER II
1. Nicolas Rowe, The Fair Penitent, 1703, v, i.
2. pamphlets on the improvement of Ireland: A satirical glance at the parlous state of contemporary affairs in the aftermath of the Act of Union (1801).
3. I think he had better not: The ritual prohibition of folktale is enacted in this phrase.
4. Curiosity…object: Reproof of curiosity is another folktale motif (from ‘Bluebeard’), grafted in this phrase on to the Sublime. Cf. Ann Radcliffe’s version of this connection:
But a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink.
The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. B. Dobree and F. Garber, Oxford, 1950, p.248.
5. deposed: Testified. The narrative purports to be edited testimony from here on, and thus itself beyond superstition.
6. good people: Fairies.
7. Virgil’s Alecto: Aeneid, vii, 324, 415–20, 445: Alecto, one of the furies, a monster with ‘black upsprouting vipers’ for hair, who initiates wars and horror. She appears to Turnus in the guise of the old woman, Calybe.
8. gossoon: (Anglo-Irish alteration of Fr. garçon): Servant-boy, lackey.
9. the dark banners: Cf. Song of Solomon vi, 10: ‘terrible as an army with banners’. Turned into a description of the night sky, this brooding epic simile is used repeatedly throughout the novel.
10. doddered: Having lost their tops or branches, especially through age and decay.
11. snuffers: A pair of instruments (often cone-shaped, but there is also a scissors-like variety) for putting out candles.
12. evidence: A witness, i.e. one who gives evidence. The legalistic nature of the simile is significant: it runs counter to ‘superstition’.
13. a gentleman…concealments: 1 Henry IV, III, i, 165. Owen Glendower is the Welsh Wizard and rebel against King Henry IV, defended in this phrase against the mockery of Hotspur.
14. Dryden calculated, etc.: There is an account of this event in Scott’s edition of Dryden, 1808, xviii, 207–13 (Grant).
15. ridiculous books of Glanville: Joseph Glanvill (1638–80): Sadducismus Triumphatus, published 1681. Maturin shows an Enlightenment contempt for Glanvill’s defence of a belief in witchcraft.
16. a dramatic writer: Thomas Shadwell (1642?–92) produced The Lancashire Witches in 1681. In his notes to the play he cites Martin Anton Delrio (1551–1608) and Johann Weyer – Wierus – (1516–88), both writers on witchcraft.
CHAPTER III
1. Apparebat eidolon senex: A phantom appeared in the shape of an old man (Pliny, Letters, VII, xxvii, 5). Pliny’s account of the haunting of a house in Athens, in his letter ‘To Sura’ about ghosts.
2. Michaelis: John David Michaelis (1717–91), Orientalist and biblical scholar. His autobiography, Lebenschreibung, was published in 1793.
3. Tom Coryat: Thomas Coryate (1577?–1617), traveller, who published Cory-ate’s Crudities in 1611.
4. Posada: Inn.
5. not a loop-hole…by: The contrast here is between power and pleasure (Roman) and sheer power (Moorish). See the motif of the ‘loop-hole’ in the (Eastern) story of Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i.
6. a l’outrance: To the point of exaggeration.
7. as Dr Johnson says: On 31 March 1772 (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1934, ii, 170). But he did not say the Greeks and Romans were savages.
8. old Christian: Indigenous Spanish Catholic: new Christians (Moors and Jews, forced to convert) were called ‘conversos’.
9. Væ victis: Woe to the conquered (Livy, History, v. xlviii, 9).
10. mock at the perishable monuments: Cf. Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Tell that its sculptor well those passions read/Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things/The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed…’, published in January 1818 by Hunt in The Examiner, repr. in Rosalind and Helen, 1919. The sonnet was written in response to an exhibition in London of findings from the tomb of Ramses II.
11. corse: Corpse (archaic).
12. Here…illegible: The pretence of a corrupted manuscript reflects a comic and satirical tradition from Cervantes, via Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – a book-making joke – here converted to the convention in the Gothic romance of a found manuscript which contains ‘horror’. Cf. Byron’s ‘broken tale’ The Giaour (1813), which also uses textual fragmentation in narrating sensational material.
13. Valentia: Valencia.
14. anathematization: Cursing (from Gr. anathema). But the term connotes more serious contexts: the curse of God, the formal handover of a hardened sinner to Satan, heresy and excommunication.
15. burning a few Moors: Rodriguez Diaz di Vivar (c.1043–99), known as the Cid (i.e. ‘Lord’), the most prestigious military leader produced by the eleventh century. In May 1094 he conquered Valencia and burnt the Muslim qadi (magistrate), Ibn Jahhaf, alive. He subsequently conquered Spain. Note Maturin’s sarcastic tone.
16. estrade: Dais, platform. Maturin seems to think it is a canopy. almohadas: Velvet cushions (Moorish).
17. Saguntum: Sagunto, a town in Valencia, eastern Spain, taken in 219BC by Hannibal, an action which caused the second Punic War.
18. contumacious: Stubbornly perverse, wilful, resistant. There is a legal sense: a refusal to accept the judgement of a court.
19. the Boy of Bilsdon: A fraudulent witness in a witchcraft trial of 1620 whose cheat was discovered by chance: the woman being almost condemned. Stanton’s blush is for the lack of standards of truth and rigour in the English legal process.
20. Who…among us? – Who?: Cf. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (1797), where it is an obsessive pattern. The hooded accusers have themselves been infiltrated. Maturin also uses this scene in his first novel, Fatal Revenge, where the diabolic monk, Schemoli, infiltrates a masquerade.
21. one of the prophets: Jeremiah ix, 21. The expression occurs in Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, Bk I, v.36,2–3, which Maturin may be also remembering: “Woe to Irem! Woe to Ad!/Death is gone up into her Palaces!’
22. under…water: Maturin echoes M.G. Lewis’s cynical picture in the first scene of The Monk of Spanish Catholicism.
23. all he knew: Note the narrative pretence in the gap which follows of having omitted confessional matter which was irrelevant.
24. to verify untrue things: Dogberry in Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, V, i. He actually says ‘to verify unjust things’, but Shakespeare’s theme, like Maturin’s, is the paradoxical nature of testimony which can defeat time: Providence, in the shape of the foolish rural constable, by the agency of his folly, brings to light the essential facts.
25. fædi oculi: Mistake for foedi: with bloodshot eyes (Sallust, Catiline, xv.5, Loeb trans.). The passage concludes: ‘his face and every glance showed the madman’.
26. The…away: Pope, Essay on Criticism, 540–41.
27. Juvenal (55BC-AD12), the most powerful of the Roman satirists; modern Puritan: i.e. both in the 1670s and a non-conformist in 1816 (i.e. in manuscript and ‘outer frame’).
28. vi et armis: By force of arms.
29. glass coach: A coach with glass windows (1667).
30. Kynaston: Edward Kynaston (1640?–1706), famous for his playing of female parts.
31. Lely: Sir Peter Lely (1618–1706) painted a series of famous portraits of the beauties of Charles II’s court.
Grammont: Antony Hamilton’s Mémoires de la Vie du Comte de Gramont, English translation 1714. A new edition, edited by Sir Walter Scott, appeared in 1811.
32. Lord Orrery: She was abducted by the Earl of Oxford, not Lord Orrery (Grant).
33. Prynne: William Prynne (1600–1669), Puritan pamphleteer against the theatre.
write down: Record. But also perhaps, figuratively, ‘discre
dit’.
34. n’importe…Nell Gwynne: The Duchess of Portsmouth: Louise Renée de Querouaille (1649–1734) became mistress to Charles II in 1671 and was made Duchess of Portsmouth in 1673. Nell Gwynne (1650–87) was her great rival for the King’s favours.
35. Dryden…Lee…Otway…Sedley…Rochester: A burst of local colour: John Dryden (1631–1700), poet and dramatist; Nathaniel Lee (1653–92), dramatist; Thomas Otway (1652–85), a writer of tragedies; Charles Sedley (1639–1701), dramatist; and the Earl of Rochester (1648–80), poet and dramatist.
36. Orondates: In La Calprenède’s romance, Cassandra, trans, into English in 1676.
37. Piazza’s of Covent Garden: The haunt of prostitutes.
38. cap-a-pee: From head to foot. The archaic phrase is derived from Hamlet, I, ii, 200, Horatio’s description of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Here it is wittily used to describe classical and neo-classical theorists of tragedy: Aristotle (384–322BC) and René Le Bossu (1631–89), armed by their authority.
39. Alexander Pope, The Satires of Dr Donne Versified, IV, 256–7.
40. The Old Batchelor: Comedy by William Congreve produced in 1693. The speech belongs to Belinda, not Araminta.
41. Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode: Produced in 1672. instar omnium: ‘As an image or likeness of all’.
42. templars: Trainee barristers of London’s Inner or Middle Temple.
43. tents of Kedar: Song of Solomon i, 5. Puritan jargon for brothels.
44. vizard masks: Often of black velvet, worn by women at this time when visiting the theatre; but also worn on stage, in ‘masking’ scenes. Associated with prostitutes, who masked their pock-marked faces.
Vizard: Slang for a whore.
45. Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne’s novel (1759–67). Tristram swears by his ‘great aunt Dinah’s old black velvet mask’.
46. orange-women: i.e. who sold oranges in the theatre. Nell Gwynne was the most famous of them.
47. dripping shroud: In Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, Pt II, IV, iii.
48. the ghost of…Laius: Dryden, Oedipus, III, i.
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