The Monk
Matthew Lewis
A more grievous fault remains, a fault for which no literary excellence can atone, a fault which all other excellence does but aggravate, as adding subtlety to a poison by the elegance of its preparation. Mildness of censure would here be criminally misplaced, and silence would make us accomplices. Not without reluctance then, but in full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1796). Matthew Gregory Lewis was in his late teens when he composed and published The Monk. Like Shelley, the Gothic had set his imagination alight, but while with Shelley this flowed into a Neo-Platonic Anarchism, Lewis detonated into a tendrilled three-volumes of sex, satan and unease. In some respects an expression of the 1790s English anti-Catholic sentiment Dickens was to explore in Barnaby Rudge, and an emblem, perhaps, of Ancien Regime Europe, Lewis’ novel develops its themes of lust, violence and spiritual corruption for the joy of it, delighting in touching on as many taboos as possible. The moral backlash forced him to revise and self-censure in subsequent editions, but the damage had been done; Walpole’s aesthetic and whimsical supernaturalism had taken off into horror for horror’s sake, whose themes of sexual cruelty and nihilistic violence were to be amplified by Byron.
