Fatal Revenge: Really Exciting Literature from 1807
Created | Updated Oct 21, 2018
Fatal Revenge: Really Exciting Literature from 1807
To start with: 'Dennis Jasper Murphy' was the pseudonym for a Dublin clergyman by the name of Charles Maturin. Maturin got in a lot of trouble with the church authorities for his rather florid Gothic writing. After all, his best-known novel, Melmoth the Wanderer, is about a deal with the devil. The Church of Ireland might have suspected Maturin of divided sympathies. He also wrote a novel about the Albigensians (a bunch of medieval religious dissenters) that had werewolves in.
Which is why this Preface to Fatal Revenge is so funny. It's all about how low-class all those German horror stories are. The link is there in case you get the urge to read it, having run out of Dark Shadows DVDs in October. Be warned, though: that's just the link to Volume One. There are two more, which you can also find at archive.org.
The title page is there so you can relish the fact that a potboiler writer quotes Greek. Enjoy!
The present style of novels is most piteouslv bewailed by those who are, or say they are, well affected to the cause of literature. Diavolerie, tales fit to frighten the nursery, German horrors, are the best language they give us. Whatever literary articles have been imported in the plague ship of German letters1, I heartily wish were pronounced contraband by competent inspectors2. But I really conceive that the present subjects of novels and romances, are calculated to unlock every store of fancy and of feeling. I question whether there be a source of emotion in the whole mental frame, so powerful or universal as the fear arising from objects of invisible terror. Perhaps there is no other that has been at some period or other of life, the predominant and indelible sensation of every mind, of every class, and under every circumstance. Love, supposed to be the most general of passions, has certainly been felt in its purity by very few, and by some not at all, even in its most indefinite and simple state.
The same might be said, a fortiori, of other passions. But who is there that has never feared? Who is there that has not involuntarily remembered the gossip's tale in solitude or in darkness? Who is there that has not sometimes shivered under an influence he would scarce acknowledge to himself. I might trace this passion to a high and obvious source.
It is enough for my purpose to assert its existence and prevalency, which will scarcely be disputed by those who remember it. It is absurd to depreciate this passion, and deride its influence. It is not the weak and trivial impulse of the nursery, to be forgotten and scorned by
manhood. It is the aspiration of a spirit; it is the passion of immortals, that dread and desire of their final habitation.
The abuse of the influence of this passion by vulgar and unhallowed hands, is no argument against its use. The magic book has indeed often been borne by a rude ignorant, like William of Deloraine, journeying from the abbey of Melrose with his wizard treasure. The wand and robe
of Prospero have often been snatched by Caliban; but, in a master's hand, gracious Heaven! what wonders might it work3!
I have read novels, ghost-stories, where the spirit has become so intimate with flesh and blood, and so affable, that I protest I have almost expected it, and some of its human
interlocutors, like the conspirators in Mr. Bayes's play, to 'take out their snuff-boxes and feague4 it away.' Such writers have certainly made ridiculous what Shakespeare has considered and treated as awful5.
Such have occasioned the outcry against converting the theatre of literature into a phantasmagoria, and substituting the figures of a German magic lanthorn6, for those forms which are visible to 'the eye in a fine frenzy rolling,' But pace tantorum virorum7 I have presumed to found the interest of a Romance on the passion of supernatural fear, and on that almost alone. It is pitiful to deprecate deserved and inevitable censure8; every work must have faults, and the Reviewers are heartily welcome to mine9. I am not insensible of praise, nor inaccessible, 1 hope, to animadversion. If youth, in acquaintance with literary habits, and the 'original sin' of national dulness, be any mitigation of severity, critical or eclectic, or of the cold and bitter blasts of the north) let this serve to inform my Readers, that I am four and twenty, that I never had literary friend or counsellor, and that I am an Irishman of the name of
Dennis Jasper Murphy10.
Dublin,
December 15 1806.
Editor's Note: They say this guy was a really popular preacher. He went around saying things like, 'Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.' Churchgoers were really weird back then.
