Whereas the Early Gothic Novels Had Tended to Use the City As a Starting Point and Then

Urban Gothic

Whereas the early Gothic novels had tended to use the city as a starting point and then moved to rural locations, abandoning the settings and securities of urban civilisation for wild and dangerous rural regions, the Gothic novels of the mid-nineteenth century began to reverse this process, or were conducted entirely in the modern industrial city, which itself became a zone of liminality, danger and adventure, and from the late twentieth century have been referred to as urban Gothic.1

Robert Mighall sees the urban Gothic as a genre arising in London in the mid-nineteenth century out of the critique of the impact of industrialisation that led to the discourse on urban reform that can be seen in the works of authors like G. W. M. Reynolds' Mysteries of London (1844–8) and Charles Dickens', Oliver Twist (1837–8) and Bleak House (1854).2 These pointed to the juxtaposition of wealthy, ordered and affluent civilisation next to the disorder and barbarity of the poor within the same metropolis. Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film.3

The urban Gothic genre that developed in the Victorian Fin de siècle, beginning with Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(1886), was influenced by these views of a hidden city, the Whitechapel murders, by Charles Darwin's ideas on natural selection, and later by Freud's ideas about the human mind.3 They often incorporated ideas about the influence of modern science on life and the mixture of science and the supernatural in urban Gothic novels has led Katherine Spencer to describe them as "a mediating form between science fiction and fantasy."4 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde restated traditional debates about the nature of good and evil, using motifs from folklore, but with a modern and scientific explanation.5 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), similarly revisited the concept of a Faustian Pact, but in a modern social context.6 Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) utilised the eastern fringes of Europe in Transylvania as a point of origin for the arrival in modern provincial and then metropolitan London society of a creature from folklore.7 In the early twentieth century, the urban Gothic was extended to other cities, like Paris, utilised in Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1909–10).1

1 R. Mighall, "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 54–72.

2 R. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

3 R. Mighall, "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 56–7.

4 K. Spencer. "Victorian urban Gothic: the first fantastic literature", in G. E. Slusser and E. S. Rabkin, eds, Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction (SIU Press, 1987), p. 91.

5 B. M. Stableford, Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wildside Press LLC, 1998), p. 174.

6 James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: a Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Duke University Press, 1987), p. 171.

7 S. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 111.