Welcome to another Hemlock Bazaar product spotlight. This is an occasional feature on the Hemlock Bazaar blog where we highlight some of the weird, wacky, or otherwise wonderful products we have for sale, talk about their history, etc. Today, March 8th, 2024, we’re talking about Gothic and Victorian Horror with the following products:

What is Gothic Horror?

Gothic Horror is a blanket name attributed to a huge group of vaguely spooky novels published from circa 1760 through to the present day, but with peak concentration during the reign of Queen Victoria.

The key element of Gothic Horror is the threat of the supernatural, which leads to an air of uncertainty and fear. This supernatural threat doesn’t have to be realized, and many Gothic novels don’t actually have verified supernatural elements, though many of the most famous do.

Gothic stories are often set in the stereotypical Old Dark House, that spooky mansion on a hill crumbling under the weight of decades and lack of care which somehow looks even more out of place due to it’s unusual architecture. These Neo-Gothic homes have come to serve as a shorthand for a specific kind of ghost story, as can be seen in media as diverse as Dark Shadows, Scooby Doo, and the original Scary Movie.

The Genesis of Popular Fiction

The Victorian period of English (and American) literature is unique in that it represents the first Mass cultural moment. Literacy rates soared in the 1800s, coupled with the rise of industrialization, and the ever falling cost of print, the Gothic Novel (and it’s later counterparts in the Penny Dreadful and Dime Novel) can be considered the first broadly appealing Popular Entertainment.

These novels and stories were widely read, and their authors often treated as celebrity. Even today, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, and Marry Shelly, and Robert Louis Stevenson are household names. Fixtures of Victorian Gothic stories continue to inform modern popular fiction. From Vampires and Werewolves to The Phantom of the Opera, Gothic horror remains an enduring element of pop-culture.

Penny Dreadfuls

Penny Dreadfuls were novels serialized over a period of weeks or months, with each new issue sold for a penny at the newsstand. They were, in many ways, the Victorian equivalent of television. Today we’re exploring two Penny Dreadfuls: Varney The Vampire and Spring-Heeled Jack.

Varney the Vampire

Varney the Vampire was a very popular Penny Dreadful, serialized weekly between 1845–1847. In it’s complete form, it totals just over 666,000 words. The two volume set we offer consists of two Huge volumes, measuring 10 inches by 7, and a total of 1600 pages across the two volumes, with numerous full and half page wood-cut illustrations. The single volume edition is letter sized, and nearly 1,000 pages.

It is from Varney that many of the modern vampire tropes arise. The sharp fangs which leave two marks, the hypnotic powers, the superhuman strength, all of these things start with Varney, and then weave their way through Dracula and other popular fiction from here.

Spring Heeled Jack

Spring-Heeled Jack is an urban legend turned super villain turned pulp hero. Originally, he was reported as a kind of devilish looking man who could leap incredible distances (hence the Spring-Heeled bit). The figure was quickly seized by the press of the day, presented as fact and reported on widely. The character featured in a number of fictional stories, both in the Victorian era and in the modern day. This particular volume collects a sample of the anonymous Spring Heeled Jack Penny Dreadful published in the 1860s.

Carmilla

After Varney, but before Dracula, Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu gave the world a lesbian vampire novella called Carmilla. Believed by many to be a direct inspiration for Dracula, Carmilla was serialized–not in a cheaply made penny dreadful, but rather– in the literary magazine The Dark Blue in the early 1870s.

It is, in many ways, a kind of idealized version of the Victorian Gothic milieu, both in setting and in subject matter. The threat of the supernatural, in this case a lesbian vampire, is used to explore the evolving role of women in Irish society. Today, this story is often overlooked in favor of Dracula, but it is a remarkable tale.

The Beetle

Published the same year as Dracula, an initially far more popular, The Beetle tells the story of an ancient shape-shifting Egyptian deity seeking revenge on a member of the British Parliament. Like Carmilla, The Beetle deals with Victorian anxieties about gender and sexuality. While it plays in many of the same spaces as more popular Gothic novels, and carries many of the same themes, The Beetle is also often seen as a turning point away from Victorian morality and an entrance in to modernism, with a plot that criticizes Colonialism.

The Phantom of the Opera

Of all the stories on this list, The Phantom of the Opera is probably the most widely known today, although it is more famous for it’s various film and stage depictions than as a novel. This is a very late entrant into the Victorian/Gothic style, but it is also in many ways the perfect example. If you’re only familiar with the film or stage play, it is well worth investigating the novel.

Carnacki The Ghost Finder

To round us out today, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about Carnacki The Ghost Finder. This series of short stories written by William Hope Hodgeson in the 1910s. Hodgeson is not often considered among Gothic writers, but I view Carnacki as an essential foil to other Gothic fiction. The character was directly inspired by the Occult Detective in Carmilla, but this collection also carries strong Doyle influences, both in the framing of the stories and in the character of Carnacki himself.

Carnacki is an occult detective. He investigates the kinds of stories that would otherwise become Gothic Horror. Sometimes, he finds at their heart something truly otherworldly, and sometimes he finds something entirely of this world, but in both cases, through Carnacki, Hodgeson shifts the focus off of the vague sense of foreboding that characterizes so much Victorian Gothic, and towards something to be studied, dismantlement, and understood. It is not enough for the phenomenon to be left unexplained. In this way, Hodgeson uses Carnacki to transform Victorian Gothic Horror in to something else entirely. This is a theme he would also explore in his other works such as The House on the Borderlands and The Night Lands, each of which takes a framing that would have been at home in Victorian Gothic and uses it to tell an entirely different kind of tale.

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