Behind the black veil : Italian terror and English imagination

Everyone will recognise this snatch of conversation recorded in Bath. Isabella Thorpe: 'Have you gone on with Udolpho?' Catherine Morland: 'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the Black Veil. ' Isabella: 'Are you indeed? How delightful; Oh ! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world. Are you not wild to know?' Catherine: 'Oh yes, quite; what can it be ? - But do not tell me - I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton.' In fact, what lay behind the black veil is one of the great disappointments in literature. The revelation that what Emily had thought was the embalmed corpse of the murdered Lady Laurentini was only a wax-work memento mori adds little or nothing to the unravelling of one of the more bizarre and operatic plots of its time. Yet publishers were mad to have a good mystery and paid the author the unprecedented sum of £500 for the rights to The Mysteries of Udolpho. And 'Tout Bath', according to a novel that earned Jane Austen £10 was talking about it as one might today the latest episode of Inspector Morse.peer-reviewe

A romantic view of Italy : 1815-1840

From the end of the seventeenth century Italy was visited by nearly every British writer of note. Some, like Walter Scott, spent only a few months there, other like Byron, the Shelleys, Leigh Hunt and Browning lived there for several years. John Keats went there to die. With the exception of the last they left the record of their experience in poetry and prose. They were all classically educated, they all came to visit a land which they acknowledged as one of the principal sources of their culture, and their principal object was to bask in the sunlit glory of its past. They were visiting a land called "Italia", home of classical ruins, great art, literature and landscape, a land with no present or future, a land without people. Its inhabitants, when they obtruded on their notice, were treated dismissively. It was as if they were being punished for the betrayal of their glorious Roman and Renaissance past. Italy, as such, was, in Metternich's patronising phrase, a geographical expression. Napoleon Bonaparte had called himself, for a time, King of Italy, implying that there was such a nation to be king of, but by Italy he meant the land between the Alps and Volturno. The Holy Alliance, after his fall, was determined to restore "Italia" to its patchwork of "signorie" and to keep it that way.peer-reviewe

Felicia's fantasy : the Vespers of Palermo

Given the number of works from contemporary pens which were set in Italia, it was strange that Walter Scott did not add to them. In his fragment of autobiography he confessed that Tasso and Ariosto, even in translation, had convinced him that the Italian language contained a fund of romantic lore. He even enrolled in a class of Italian and acquired 'some proficiency,' tackling Dante, Boiardo and Pulci, in the original. Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata were part of the inspiration for his crusading novels, The Talisman, Ivanhoe and Count Robert of Paris. But he did not have enough Italian to help him with his conversations, many years later, with the King of the Two Sicilies and the Archbishop of Tarentum, where his French and their Italian was mutually incomprehensible. If he did not publish an Italian tale, he certainly belonged to the 'stiletto school. ' But his Scotland was an Italia in itself, and could provide for 'the Master Spirit of the history of the Middle Ages [ ... ] spectres, magic, abbeys, castles, subterranean passages and praeternatural appearances' enough. He confessed that he had once toyed with writing a romance about Giovanna of Naples, a figure who, like Mary Queen of Scots, was either 'a model of female virtue or a monster of atrocity. ' But he was too good an historian to alter the past to make a novel. His portrait of Mary Queen of Scots in The Abbott, is probably as near the mark as can be, and William Gell thought he gave up the idea of writing about Giovanna of Naples because he was inclined to take her part. That would have been good history but a poor story.peer-reviewe