1 00:00:10,150 --> 00:00:12,430 What is Gothic? 2 00:00:12,430 --> 00:00:17,950 A word that implies the sinister, the supernatural, horror. 3 00:00:19,430 --> 00:00:22,270 It's also a medieval style of building, 4 00:00:22,270 --> 00:00:25,190 sacred architecture dedicated to the glory of God. 5 00:00:27,750 --> 00:00:30,990 How did one word come to have such different meanings? 6 00:00:33,070 --> 00:00:37,430 The term "Gothic" was coined by the artists of the Italian Renaissance 7 00:00:37,430 --> 00:00:39,190 as an insult. 8 00:00:39,190 --> 00:00:42,470 They used it to describe anything that did not come from the civilised 9 00:00:42,470 --> 00:00:45,110 worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. 10 00:00:45,110 --> 00:00:48,950 It meant barbaric, wild, gloomy. 11 00:00:48,950 --> 00:00:52,750 With one word, they dismissed centuries of medieval art 12 00:00:52,750 --> 00:00:56,470 and architecture as primitive and worthless. 13 00:01:03,390 --> 00:01:07,190 The Middle Ages produced some of our most spectacular cathedrals 14 00:01:07,190 --> 00:01:08,190 and churches. 15 00:01:09,510 --> 00:01:11,390 They contained visions of heaven... 16 00:01:13,630 --> 00:01:15,310 ..and warnings of hell. 17 00:01:18,670 --> 00:01:23,150 But the Protestant Reformation swept away the medieval world, 18 00:01:23,150 --> 00:01:26,310 and for nearly three centuries, the language of Gothic art 19 00:01:26,310 --> 00:01:31,630 and architecture was rejected as Catholic superstition - 20 00:01:31,630 --> 00:01:34,430 until the Georgians fell back in love with it. 21 00:01:36,910 --> 00:01:41,070 At first, they used it to declare that every Englishman's home 22 00:01:41,070 --> 00:01:42,350 is his castle. 23 00:01:43,950 --> 00:01:46,070 But Gothic grew like ivy. 24 00:01:47,470 --> 00:01:49,830 It spawned new forms of literature... 25 00:01:51,150 --> 00:01:52,670 ..new types of painting... 26 00:01:55,270 --> 00:01:57,390 ..a new taste for terror... 27 00:02:01,470 --> 00:02:02,830 ..and weirdness. 28 00:02:04,870 --> 00:02:07,830 It's no coincidence that Gothic marked a midnight moment 29 00:02:07,830 --> 00:02:09,390 in British history, 30 00:02:10,790 --> 00:02:13,590 when all kinds of terrors WERE going bump in the night. 31 00:02:15,550 --> 00:02:17,430 Abroad, revolution in France. 32 00:02:19,670 --> 00:02:24,110 At home, new industry, with its dark satanic mills... 33 00:02:26,270 --> 00:02:29,870 ..new science, with its Frankenstein menace. 34 00:02:31,070 --> 00:02:35,470 The British could hardly bear to talk about such things out loud. 35 00:02:35,470 --> 00:02:39,150 Gothic allowed them to whisper their deepest desires 36 00:02:39,150 --> 00:02:41,630 and their darkest fears. 37 00:02:45,590 --> 00:02:49,630 Read them right, and I believe the stones of Gothic revival 38 00:02:49,630 --> 00:02:54,510 architecture, the terrors painted by Gothic painters, and the words 39 00:02:54,510 --> 00:02:58,550 of the great Gothic novelists, amount to nothing less than a secret 40 00:02:58,550 --> 00:03:03,390 history of Britain itself during its greatest age of change. 41 00:03:35,070 --> 00:03:36,630 SCREAMING 42 00:03:36,630 --> 00:03:39,470 Oh, my lord! My lord, we are all undone. 43 00:03:41,350 --> 00:03:46,350 Villain! Monster! Sorcerer! 'Tis thou hast slain my son. 44 00:03:48,150 --> 00:03:49,870 What sound was that? 45 00:03:49,870 --> 00:03:54,550 Do I dream? Or are the devils themselves in league against me? 46 00:03:54,550 --> 00:03:56,750 Speak, infernal spectre. 47 00:04:02,430 --> 00:04:04,870 Horace Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto, 48 00:04:04,870 --> 00:04:09,430 first published in 1764, the very first Gothic novel. 49 00:04:09,430 --> 00:04:11,710 Immensely popular, ran into many editions - 50 00:04:11,710 --> 00:04:15,390 this is my own personal copy, published in 1830 with these 51 00:04:15,390 --> 00:04:18,750 rather charming steel plate engravings. 52 00:04:18,750 --> 00:04:22,830 It's not actually a great book. It's rather badly written, very playful. 53 00:04:22,830 --> 00:04:28,070 But it's remarkably forward looking, in the sense that 54 00:04:28,070 --> 00:04:31,550 everything else in Gothic fiction comes from this. It's all here. 55 00:04:31,550 --> 00:04:35,150 Haunted castles, 56 00:04:35,150 --> 00:04:36,630 strange apparitions... 57 00:04:38,550 --> 00:04:45,470 ..tyrannical villains under the impulse of some nameless lust. 58 00:04:45,470 --> 00:04:47,790 This really is the book that launched a thousand 59 00:04:47,790 --> 00:04:49,630 Gothic horror fantasies. 60 00:04:52,910 --> 00:04:57,710 The book's author, Horace Walpole, was an eccentric literary wit - 61 00:04:57,710 --> 00:05:01,430 a kind of aristocratic, Georgian Oscar Wilde. 62 00:05:01,430 --> 00:05:05,030 Centuries before Hammer horror movies were even dreamed of, 63 00:05:05,030 --> 00:05:09,470 The Castle Of Otranto told the story of an evil lord, 64 00:05:09,470 --> 00:05:12,190 cursed by the dark deeds of his ancestors. 65 00:05:12,990 --> 00:05:16,310 He stops at nothing to try and outwit the curse. 66 00:05:16,310 --> 00:05:19,990 But a monstrous suit of armour begins to haunt 67 00:05:19,990 --> 00:05:22,270 the increasingly deranged tyrant. 68 00:05:22,910 --> 00:05:24,950 Try as he might to escape, 69 00:05:24,950 --> 00:05:28,590 the ghostly armour closes in on him, inexorably. 70 00:05:30,950 --> 00:05:34,870 In the end, it defeats the tyrant and destroys the castle walls. 71 00:05:37,470 --> 00:05:42,030 The book's 18th-century readers swooned. Pulses raced. 72 00:05:46,550 --> 00:05:49,670 Now, Horace Walpole didn't actually publish the first edition 73 00:05:49,670 --> 00:05:51,750 of The Castle Of Otranto under his own name. 74 00:05:51,750 --> 00:05:55,630 The name on the title page was that of William Marshal - 75 00:05:55,630 --> 00:05:58,470 himself supposedly the mere translator 76 00:05:58,470 --> 00:06:00,910 of an ancient medieval document. 77 00:06:00,910 --> 00:06:05,550 Now, Gothic literature would come to specialise in these guilty 78 00:06:05,550 --> 00:06:08,310 disavowals - a number of Gothic novels were published 79 00:06:08,310 --> 00:06:11,190 by writers who claimed they were merely discoveries, 80 00:06:11,190 --> 00:06:13,190 books they hadn't written themselves. 81 00:06:13,190 --> 00:06:16,390 It's as if the Gothic text had to arrive with the general 82 00:06:16,390 --> 00:06:20,230 public accompanied by an alibi - "I didn't really write it." 83 00:06:20,230 --> 00:06:25,070 Gothic fiction was the fiction of shame, written by an author 84 00:06:25,070 --> 00:06:29,910 who, it seems, almost as soon as the work was done, wished to disappear. 85 00:06:36,030 --> 00:06:39,830 The most important character in Walpole's novel is the castle 86 00:06:39,830 --> 00:06:43,710 itself - a perfect metaphor for the darker recesses 87 00:06:43,710 --> 00:06:46,870 of the apparently rational Georgian psyche. 88 00:06:49,910 --> 00:06:54,190 So let's explore it - penetrate each secret room 89 00:06:54,190 --> 00:06:58,910 and winding passage, to reveal a full picture of Gothic. 90 00:07:01,830 --> 00:07:06,590 To begin with, what drove Walpole to write his strange tale? 91 00:07:08,350 --> 00:07:11,310 The answer to that lies behind our first door. 92 00:07:17,590 --> 00:07:20,750 Horace Walpole, Eton and Cambridge educated, 93 00:07:20,750 --> 00:07:23,590 son of the first Prime Minister, 94 00:07:23,590 --> 00:07:28,270 was part of the Establishment, yet never quite won its full approval. 95 00:07:32,910 --> 00:07:36,590 The most telling insight we have into his character 96 00:07:36,590 --> 00:07:40,070 is the house he built at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. 97 00:07:42,870 --> 00:07:44,790 Like his Gothic novel, it's a 98 00:07:44,790 --> 00:07:47,910 theatrical reinterpretation of the past, 99 00:07:47,910 --> 00:07:50,150 a pseudo-medieval stage set, 100 00:07:50,150 --> 00:07:52,830 utterly unlike any other building of its day. 101 00:07:53,950 --> 00:07:57,910 It speaks of a man with a strong tendency to go against the grain. 102 00:08:04,470 --> 00:08:07,830 Horace Walpole was tremendously proud of Strawberry Hill. 103 00:08:07,830 --> 00:08:10,150 He had descriptions of the house printed, 104 00:08:10,150 --> 00:08:12,350 he loved taking visitors round. 105 00:08:12,350 --> 00:08:15,550 It was clearly a statement, this building. 106 00:08:15,550 --> 00:08:17,190 But what was it a statement of? 107 00:08:18,070 --> 00:08:21,550 A great white Gothic meringue built on the outskirts of London. 108 00:08:21,550 --> 00:08:24,430 Well, I think location was important. 109 00:08:24,430 --> 00:08:27,310 The building was outside the centre of things, 110 00:08:27,310 --> 00:08:29,670 rather like Walpole himself. 111 00:08:29,670 --> 00:08:32,470 I think this building symbolised, to him, 112 00:08:32,470 --> 00:08:36,110 an Englishman's right to be rather unusual. 113 00:08:36,110 --> 00:08:38,590 I think Lytton Strachey got it dead right 114 00:08:38,590 --> 00:08:42,630 when he said that what Horace loved about the Gothic style 115 00:08:42,630 --> 00:08:46,870 was not its beauty, but the fact that it was a bit queer. 116 00:08:49,710 --> 00:08:53,150 Walpole was not the marrying kind. 117 00:08:53,150 --> 00:08:56,390 His letters reveal a string of passions for other men. 118 00:08:58,790 --> 00:09:01,710 Whether consummated or not, we'll never know, 119 00:09:01,710 --> 00:09:05,270 but it's telling that just before he wrote The Castle Of Otranto, 120 00:09:05,270 --> 00:09:08,910 he was vilified in the press for an allegedly inappropriate 121 00:09:08,910 --> 00:09:12,550 affair with his cousin, the MP Henry Conway. 122 00:09:14,910 --> 00:09:18,550 It's hard not to project Walpole's undoubtedly troubled 123 00:09:18,550 --> 00:09:21,110 state of mind onto the creation of his novel. 124 00:09:26,550 --> 00:09:29,710 Walpole claimed that the idea for The Castle Of Otranto 125 00:09:29,710 --> 00:09:31,470 came to him in a dream. 126 00:09:31,470 --> 00:09:35,590 He found himself in a great Gothic stairwell, much like this one, 127 00:09:35,590 --> 00:09:41,750 when he suddenly saw a monstrous disembodied hand in armour. 128 00:09:42,910 --> 00:09:44,990 Strange image, 129 00:09:44,990 --> 00:09:49,430 suggesting nameless motives, 130 00:09:49,430 --> 00:09:52,270 perhaps the threat of punishment. 131 00:09:52,270 --> 00:09:56,310 Right from the beginning, Gothic was a form cloaked in mystery. 132 00:10:02,630 --> 00:10:06,350 But Walpole never meant HIS Gothic to be taken too seriously. 133 00:10:08,030 --> 00:10:11,150 There's something playful, even slightly subversive about 134 00:10:11,150 --> 00:10:13,150 The Castle Of Otranto, 135 00:10:13,150 --> 00:10:16,910 a quality that's vividly reflected in his Gothic house. 136 00:10:18,710 --> 00:10:21,350 Walpole claimed he designed Strawberry Hill to create 137 00:10:21,350 --> 00:10:26,270 a sense of what he named "Gloomth", his own invented word for 138 00:10:26,270 --> 00:10:30,470 the brooding atmosphere of crumbling medieval castles and abbeys. 139 00:10:32,750 --> 00:10:37,710 Yet in truth, it was a rather polite, refined sort of Gothic. 140 00:10:37,710 --> 00:10:40,950 It was gaily painted, and crammed with portraits, 141 00:10:40,950 --> 00:10:44,070 antique trinkets, busts - 142 00:10:44,070 --> 00:10:46,910 and, of course, a giant suit of armour. 143 00:10:51,590 --> 00:10:54,670 Strawberry Hill's been largely denuded of Walpole's 144 00:10:54,670 --> 00:10:57,710 extensive collection of antiquarian objects 145 00:10:57,710 --> 00:11:00,510 and medieval curiosities, so nowadays the house is 146 00:11:00,510 --> 00:11:02,350 very much a shell. 147 00:11:02,350 --> 00:11:05,870 But what a splendid shell, and here in the Great Gallery, 148 00:11:05,870 --> 00:11:10,270 you can really appreciate the lightness of the effect. 149 00:11:10,270 --> 00:11:15,150 This is almost Gothic as if created from spun sugar. 150 00:11:15,150 --> 00:11:17,830 And I think Walpole approached the whole creation of this house 151 00:11:17,830 --> 00:11:21,550 very much in the manner of an exuberant amateur chef. 152 00:11:21,550 --> 00:11:25,910 Let's start with some vaulting borrowed from Henry VII's chapel 153 00:11:25,910 --> 00:11:29,910 in Westminster Abbey, stir in a few finials, add some mirrors 154 00:11:29,910 --> 00:11:35,070 and then finish with a light sprinkling of stained glass. 155 00:11:35,070 --> 00:11:37,110 It almost looks good enough to eat. 156 00:11:41,270 --> 00:11:44,550 Strawberry Hill WAS light-hearted, but it was also 157 00:11:44,550 --> 00:11:46,230 daringly unconventional. 158 00:11:47,110 --> 00:11:50,430 Many of Walpole's contemporaries were shocked by it. 159 00:11:50,430 --> 00:11:54,710 An English nobleman, living in a house that evoked a Catholic church? 160 00:11:58,710 --> 00:12:01,910 Everyone knew that the English aristocracy were supposed to live 161 00:12:01,910 --> 00:12:05,350 in houses built in a very different architectural style. 162 00:12:07,030 --> 00:12:10,910 Surely THEY would never open their doors to Gothic. 163 00:12:10,910 --> 00:12:12,630 Or would they? 164 00:12:22,990 --> 00:12:26,230 The 18th century was the age of reason, 165 00:12:26,230 --> 00:12:29,470 when powerful men built grand country estates 166 00:12:29,470 --> 00:12:33,590 like Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, using the neat symmetry 167 00:12:33,590 --> 00:12:37,310 and clean lines of an imported architectural style, 168 00:12:37,310 --> 00:12:38,910 the very opposite of Gothic. 169 00:12:40,310 --> 00:12:45,190 The English aristocracy built their great houses in the classical style 170 00:12:45,190 --> 00:12:49,550 because it perfectly expressed their pride, 171 00:12:49,550 --> 00:12:52,310 their sense of their own magnificence, their sense 172 00:12:52,310 --> 00:12:58,030 of moral values, constructing these enormous pillared and pedimented 173 00:12:58,030 --> 00:13:03,030 structures, more temples and palaces than domestic residences. 174 00:13:03,030 --> 00:13:07,390 This was their way of saying that they were the true inheritors 175 00:13:07,390 --> 00:13:12,790 of the values of ancient Greece and the power of ancient Rome. 176 00:13:12,790 --> 00:13:15,830 They were the masters of a new Empire. 177 00:13:20,510 --> 00:13:23,470 Stowe House exemplifies the Georgian obsession with Greek 178 00:13:23,470 --> 00:13:25,430 and Roman styles of architecture. 179 00:13:27,350 --> 00:13:31,470 In the 1720s, its owner, Lord Cobham, military hero turned 180 00:13:31,470 --> 00:13:35,750 politician, followed fashion by remodelling his ancestral home. 181 00:13:38,550 --> 00:13:41,190 He added porticos, and columns. 182 00:13:41,190 --> 00:13:44,070 And he embellished his estate with classical temples, 183 00:13:44,070 --> 00:13:47,270 to virtue and to wisdom. 184 00:13:51,270 --> 00:13:55,630 But while aristocrats like Cobham idolised ancient Mediterranean 185 00:13:55,630 --> 00:13:59,070 culture, they were surrounded everywhere by the crumbling remains 186 00:13:59,070 --> 00:14:01,390 of their own British history. 187 00:14:05,350 --> 00:14:08,630 Across the country, ruined abbeys and monasteries were 188 00:14:08,630 --> 00:14:12,070 reminders of a vanished past, 189 00:14:12,070 --> 00:14:13,710 swept away two centuries before 190 00:14:13,710 --> 00:14:16,870 by Henry VIII and the fiercely Protestant Church of England. 191 00:14:20,630 --> 00:14:24,750 It was a cultural cataclysm, that had decimated not just 192 00:14:24,750 --> 00:14:26,590 the indigenous Catholic church, 193 00:14:26,590 --> 00:14:29,590 but art, architecture, 194 00:14:29,590 --> 00:14:31,110 and an entire way of life. 195 00:14:37,990 --> 00:14:41,710 At Stowe House, Lord Cobham may have been an Enlightenment lover 196 00:14:41,710 --> 00:14:43,750 of classical reason and logic. 197 00:14:45,230 --> 00:14:49,870 But he also understood that the universe always has another side. 198 00:14:49,870 --> 00:14:53,110 Light and dark, virtue and vice, 199 00:14:53,110 --> 00:14:55,590 order and liberty - 200 00:14:55,590 --> 00:14:58,070 opposing forces in creative tension. 201 00:15:02,710 --> 00:15:08,390 So he turned to Britain's distant past, to the language of Gothic, 202 00:15:08,390 --> 00:15:12,950 to create a building that conveyed his ideas about freedom. 203 00:15:12,950 --> 00:15:16,350 This was a man who was proud of his Anglo-Saxon roots. 204 00:15:20,150 --> 00:15:24,430 Stowe's Temple of Liberty, perched on the brow of a hill 205 00:15:24,430 --> 00:15:29,070 in the rolling English countryside, is more than one of the first 206 00:15:29,070 --> 00:15:33,790 architectural expressions of a revived taste for the Gothic. 207 00:15:33,790 --> 00:15:36,870 It's also an important political statement. 208 00:15:36,870 --> 00:15:40,470 Whigs like Lord Cobham idolised their ancient forebears 209 00:15:40,470 --> 00:15:43,550 the Anglo-Saxons, because they saw in the workings 210 00:15:43,550 --> 00:15:46,630 of the ancient Anglo-Saxon witan, or council, 211 00:15:46,630 --> 00:15:48,590 a model for the workings of Parliament 212 00:15:48,590 --> 00:15:52,830 and therefore the opposite of rule by an absolute monarch. 213 00:15:52,830 --> 00:15:57,750 This was indeed a temple to English liberty. 214 00:15:57,750 --> 00:16:01,510 But it was liberty seen from a very aristocratic viewpoint. 215 00:16:01,510 --> 00:16:04,590 Let's not forget that to create his grand house, 216 00:16:04,590 --> 00:16:07,310 his wonderful garden dotted with temples, 217 00:16:07,310 --> 00:16:10,070 Lord Cobham had to demolish several villages 218 00:16:10,070 --> 00:16:12,270 and displace their inhabitants. 219 00:16:16,910 --> 00:16:21,670 Cobham's folly was an attempt by a hugely privileged landowner 220 00:16:21,670 --> 00:16:25,230 to tether the meaning of Gothic to his own political agenda. 221 00:16:26,070 --> 00:16:28,950 It helped to fuel an aristocratic fashion. 222 00:16:31,470 --> 00:16:35,390 Whimsical Gothic follies, eccentric medieval novelties, 223 00:16:35,390 --> 00:16:40,470 designed to decorate sprawling country estates, and affirm 224 00:16:40,470 --> 00:16:45,830 the rather limited libertarian beliefs of a powerful group of men. 225 00:16:49,070 --> 00:16:52,350 In the Midlands, the folly took on a new form, 226 00:16:52,350 --> 00:16:55,110 the ivy-clad ruin, 227 00:16:55,110 --> 00:16:58,390 made to LOOK as if it had been decaying for centuries. 228 00:17:00,550 --> 00:17:04,430 The fake crumbling castle at Hagley Hall was built 229 00:17:04,430 --> 00:17:08,830 not in the Middle Ages but in 1747, for the fervent Whig 230 00:17:08,830 --> 00:17:09,990 Lord Lyttelton. 231 00:17:12,270 --> 00:17:16,910 It's another Gothic folly designed to proclaim aristocratic power. 232 00:17:23,030 --> 00:17:25,990 But the sham ruin also sparked a wider, 233 00:17:25,990 --> 00:17:29,510 more democratic taste for REAL ruins. 234 00:17:29,510 --> 00:17:32,550 After all, real ruins could be appreciated by anyone with 235 00:17:32,550 --> 00:17:34,950 walking boots and a set of watercolours. 236 00:17:39,510 --> 00:17:42,950 Budding artists scoured the land for picturesque abbeys 237 00:17:42,950 --> 00:17:44,430 exposed to the sky. 238 00:17:48,190 --> 00:17:50,670 The love of ruins became a cult, 239 00:17:50,670 --> 00:17:53,550 and with it, developed a kind of Gothic philosophy. 240 00:17:57,670 --> 00:18:00,310 Writers such as Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey 241 00:18:00,310 --> 00:18:03,230 took ruins as the starting point for melancholy 242 00:18:03,230 --> 00:18:07,750 reflections on the transience of all human societies and civilisations. 243 00:18:07,750 --> 00:18:10,990 And the cult of ruins fed naturally into the cult of nature, 244 00:18:10,990 --> 00:18:14,510 for what is a ruin but a building that has been overgrown, 245 00:18:14,510 --> 00:18:18,350 overtaken by the great forces of the natural world? 246 00:18:18,350 --> 00:18:20,630 What began as a Gothic folly 247 00:18:20,630 --> 00:18:25,150 came to stand as one of the enduring symbols of the romantic imagination. 248 00:18:34,110 --> 00:18:37,550 The new taste for Gothic ruins in a landscape 249 00:18:37,550 --> 00:18:41,630 fostered new ways of seeing landscape itself - 250 00:18:41,630 --> 00:18:43,750 a new approach to the natural world. 251 00:18:55,270 --> 00:18:58,150 Travellers from Britain to Italy had, for many centuries, 252 00:18:58,150 --> 00:18:59,550 passed through the Alps. 253 00:19:00,750 --> 00:19:04,030 But it was only in the 18th century that they began to admire 254 00:19:04,030 --> 00:19:07,110 the mountains, rather than see them simply as a barrier. 255 00:19:10,310 --> 00:19:15,510 In Britain too, at places like the dramatic Gordale Scar in Yorkshire, 256 00:19:15,510 --> 00:19:20,550 landscape began to inspire thrilling new feelings of awe and dread. 257 00:19:22,390 --> 00:19:26,230 The melancholy taste for Gothic ruins went hand in hand 258 00:19:26,230 --> 00:19:30,190 with a new taste for the wilder faces of nature. 259 00:19:30,190 --> 00:19:34,510 Barren mountains, desolate ravines, torrents, waterfalls, 260 00:19:34,510 --> 00:19:37,430 great cliff faces that seem almost as though 261 00:19:37,430 --> 00:19:41,070 they're about to topple and crush you. 262 00:19:41,070 --> 00:19:44,030 The Earl of Shaftesbury had written of HIS emotions in front 263 00:19:44,030 --> 00:19:46,830 of such scenes, saying they reminded him 264 00:19:46,830 --> 00:19:50,110 of the violence of the world, the indifference of nature, 265 00:19:50,110 --> 00:19:54,790 the inevitability of the end of civilisation itself. 266 00:19:54,790 --> 00:19:58,350 But it was another English nobleman, Edmund Burke, 267 00:19:58,350 --> 00:20:02,830 who gave this new taste for wild nature a name. 268 00:20:02,830 --> 00:20:05,310 He called it "the sublime". 269 00:20:10,470 --> 00:20:14,110 Burke defined the sublime as that which excites 270 00:20:14,110 --> 00:20:18,310 sensations of terror, the most powerful of our emotions. 271 00:20:19,790 --> 00:20:23,670 He also pointed out that sublime nature is best enjoyed 272 00:20:23,670 --> 00:20:24,990 at a distance. 273 00:20:26,030 --> 00:20:27,790 Perfect for painting. 274 00:20:33,230 --> 00:20:37,470 We can marvel at James Ward's vertiginous Gordale Scar, 275 00:20:37,470 --> 00:20:41,070 because we know painted rocks can't crush us. 276 00:20:45,190 --> 00:20:48,990 We can relish the dread of Philip de Loutherbourg's travellers, 277 00:20:48,990 --> 00:20:52,590 caught in an avalanche, because WE'VE been spared. 278 00:20:54,630 --> 00:20:59,990 And we can thrill at Turner's alpine storm, because WE can't be touched. 279 00:21:03,910 --> 00:21:08,110 Sublime landscape has this in common with Gothic terror tales. 280 00:21:08,110 --> 00:21:11,950 It gives us the frisson of danger without the risk. 281 00:21:16,350 --> 00:21:17,910 Through the lens of the sublime 282 00:21:17,910 --> 00:21:20,470 the Georgians began to see old paintings afresh. 283 00:21:23,670 --> 00:21:26,990 Italian artist Salvator Rosa died long before the revived 284 00:21:26,990 --> 00:21:29,630 fashion for all things Gothic. 285 00:21:29,630 --> 00:21:33,950 Yet his paintings seem to have predicted the taste for the sublime. 286 00:21:37,510 --> 00:21:43,230 Glowering skies, gnarled trees, craggy cliffs. 287 00:21:44,670 --> 00:21:47,510 The Georgians were bewitched. 288 00:21:47,510 --> 00:21:50,150 They bought up as many of his works as they could 289 00:21:50,150 --> 00:21:51,950 and shipped them back to England. 290 00:22:00,750 --> 00:22:03,670 The National Gallery in London now holds one of Rosa's 291 00:22:03,670 --> 00:22:05,310 most unusual pictures. 292 00:22:08,030 --> 00:22:11,470 It's a sublime landscape, but with a difference. 293 00:22:11,470 --> 00:22:14,030 It's filled with monstrous figures, 294 00:22:14,030 --> 00:22:16,790 as if straight from a Gothic nightmare. 295 00:22:21,470 --> 00:22:24,750 Salvator Rosa's Witches At Their Incantations, 296 00:22:24,750 --> 00:22:27,550 a witches' brew of a painting. 297 00:22:27,550 --> 00:22:29,830 He's lit it as if by flashes of lightning 298 00:22:29,830 --> 00:22:33,030 and that's how the eye experiences it - not as a composition 299 00:22:33,030 --> 00:22:36,830 but as a series of sudden horrific visions. 300 00:22:36,830 --> 00:22:38,910 A crone and her accomplice. 301 00:22:38,910 --> 00:22:42,910 They've resurrected a skeleton from the grave, they've dug him up 302 00:22:42,910 --> 00:22:45,070 and the coffin's been opened. 303 00:22:45,070 --> 00:22:48,230 A witch and her sinister companion seem to be getting him 304 00:22:48,230 --> 00:22:49,670 to write something. 305 00:22:49,670 --> 00:22:52,710 Are they making him rewrite his will in their favour? 306 00:22:52,710 --> 00:22:56,790 Immediately to the right, suddenly, again, another flash. 307 00:22:56,790 --> 00:23:00,430 A naked, beautiful witch who's got a voodoo doll, balanced 308 00:23:00,430 --> 00:23:02,750 in front of a mirror. 309 00:23:02,750 --> 00:23:05,510 Tsshhh! Another flash. 310 00:23:05,510 --> 00:23:09,630 An older witch, grinding up entrails for a potion... 311 00:23:09,630 --> 00:23:10,870 Tsshhh! 312 00:23:10,870 --> 00:23:13,830 A knight being beaten by a broomstick as he sets 313 00:23:13,830 --> 00:23:19,910 fire to a rabbit on a piece of paper on which a spell has been written. 314 00:23:19,910 --> 00:23:23,670 There's a heart, impaled on a sword - 315 00:23:23,670 --> 00:23:28,270 Tsshhh! ..a baby being held up for sacrifice. 316 00:23:28,270 --> 00:23:33,830 The monster of a skeleton bird that seems to have come to life. 317 00:23:33,830 --> 00:23:38,630 Another witch arriving on some weird creature of the night, 318 00:23:38,630 --> 00:23:41,470 and at the centre of it all, 319 00:23:41,470 --> 00:23:44,310 a hanged man with a distended neck 320 00:23:44,310 --> 00:23:46,670 being fumigated 321 00:23:46,670 --> 00:23:52,390 while a witch cuts his toenails to put them in her potion. 322 00:23:52,390 --> 00:23:58,390 What on earth, what in hell, did Salvator Rosa mean by it all? 323 00:23:58,390 --> 00:24:02,950 Well, he was a cynical, sardonic, philosophical man, 324 00:24:02,950 --> 00:24:06,390 not much given to superstition, and this was probably, 325 00:24:06,390 --> 00:24:11,710 in 1646, his way of saying to his witch-hunting contemporaries, 326 00:24:11,710 --> 00:24:14,510 "Do you really think this kind of thing 327 00:24:14,510 --> 00:24:18,230 "goes on in the landscape outside Naples? 328 00:24:18,230 --> 00:24:19,910 "I don't think so." 329 00:24:19,910 --> 00:24:23,950 But that begs the question of why, more than 100 years later, 330 00:24:23,950 --> 00:24:27,950 English gentlemen of the Georgian age, such as Earl Spencer, 331 00:24:27,950 --> 00:24:30,830 who hung this picture at Althorp, 332 00:24:30,830 --> 00:24:33,270 why on earth would THEY have wanted 333 00:24:33,270 --> 00:24:38,350 to contemplate Salvator Rosa's feverish fancies? 334 00:24:38,350 --> 00:24:42,030 Well, I wonder if it isn't precisely because they WERE 335 00:24:42,030 --> 00:24:46,710 Georgian gentlemen living in the age of the Enlightenment, a time when 336 00:24:46,710 --> 00:24:49,830 religion seems to have held less and less sway, 337 00:24:49,830 --> 00:24:53,310 and when the old folklorish fantasies and superstitions 338 00:24:53,310 --> 00:24:54,910 were all but dead. 339 00:24:54,910 --> 00:24:58,230 Didn't they want to re-enchant their world? 340 00:24:59,590 --> 00:25:02,990 To fill it once more with the frisson of horror? 341 00:25:04,510 --> 00:25:08,910 Is that perhaps what Gothic was all about? 342 00:25:16,750 --> 00:25:20,310 Fascinated by witchcraft and all things medieval, 343 00:25:20,310 --> 00:25:25,950 the Georgians also stirred the cauldron of their own literary past. 344 00:25:25,950 --> 00:25:30,910 There they found an almost forgotten writer, a playwright - 345 00:25:30,910 --> 00:25:32,510 William Shakespeare. 346 00:25:32,510 --> 00:25:35,190 Born within living memory of the Reformation, 347 00:25:35,190 --> 00:25:39,590 he was like a stepping stone back to an earlier medieval world, 348 00:25:39,590 --> 00:25:43,550 his plays full of the supernatural and the strange. 349 00:25:43,550 --> 00:25:48,430 Macbeth, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest - 350 00:25:48,430 --> 00:25:51,550 all steeped in the atmosphere of Gothic. 351 00:25:55,710 --> 00:25:58,590 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 352 00:25:58,590 --> 00:26:01,270 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 353 00:26:02,590 --> 00:26:07,670 Ghosts, wandering here and there, troop home to churchyards, 354 00:26:07,670 --> 00:26:09,950 damned spirits all. 355 00:26:11,030 --> 00:26:14,390 When shall we three meet again? 356 00:26:14,390 --> 00:26:18,910 In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 357 00:26:23,550 --> 00:26:27,110 Shakespeare answered a need for the magical, the visionary. 358 00:26:28,790 --> 00:26:31,910 The Georgians republished him, performed him, 359 00:26:31,910 --> 00:26:35,870 dedicated festivals, galleries and paintings to his plays. 360 00:26:38,950 --> 00:26:42,270 Why does Shakespeare exert such a powerful hold 361 00:26:42,270 --> 00:26:45,190 on the 18th-century Gothic imagination? 362 00:26:45,190 --> 00:26:48,790 Well, I think it's because to them, 363 00:26:48,790 --> 00:26:51,430 it seems as though his language springs 364 00:26:51,430 --> 00:26:54,390 from the very soil of old England. 365 00:26:54,390 --> 00:26:58,030 Reading him, it's as if they can hear, see, touch, taste 366 00:26:58,030 --> 00:27:01,350 and smell the lost world of the Middle Ages. 367 00:27:02,430 --> 00:27:04,310 He gives them the old superstitions, 368 00:27:04,310 --> 00:27:06,070 the old folklore - 369 00:27:06,070 --> 00:27:09,790 omens, ghosts, witches prancing on a hillside. 370 00:27:09,790 --> 00:27:13,310 More than that, he gives them proud kings brought low by the fates - 371 00:27:13,310 --> 00:27:15,670 "O, let me not be mad." 372 00:27:16,750 --> 00:27:19,550 "To be, or not to be, that is the question." 373 00:27:19,550 --> 00:27:23,270 "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" 374 00:27:23,270 --> 00:27:27,830 He takes us inside the minds of his characters as no other writer. 375 00:27:30,710 --> 00:27:33,750 But above all the Georgians idolised Shakespeare 376 00:27:33,750 --> 00:27:38,070 because he was so irregular - he broke all the rules. 377 00:27:39,750 --> 00:27:43,230 Shakespeare wrote comedies that turn into tragedies, 378 00:27:43,230 --> 00:27:46,030 tragedies that turn into comedies. 379 00:27:46,030 --> 00:27:51,230 He was no-one's servant - he was his own master. 380 00:27:51,230 --> 00:27:54,110 And what could be more British than that? 381 00:27:57,550 --> 00:28:01,510 Shakespeare also inspired 18th-century melancholics, 382 00:28:01,510 --> 00:28:04,670 lamenting all that had been lost during the Reformation. 383 00:28:09,350 --> 00:28:11,190 In one of his sonnets 384 00:28:11,190 --> 00:28:13,270 Shakespeare had spoken of the spiritual void 385 00:28:13,270 --> 00:28:16,030 left by Britain's sacked monasteries - 386 00:28:16,030 --> 00:28:19,150 "Bare, ruin'd choirs, where once the sweet birds sang." 387 00:28:21,630 --> 00:28:26,830 From that one line, an entire school of 18th-century poetry would grow. 388 00:28:29,990 --> 00:28:35,390 In 1721, an Anglo-Irish clergyman called Thomas Parnell 389 00:28:35,390 --> 00:28:40,230 wrote a short poem entitled A Night Piece On Death. 390 00:28:40,230 --> 00:28:42,350 Full of Shakespearean echoes, 391 00:28:42,350 --> 00:28:43,830 it was a reflection 392 00:28:43,830 --> 00:28:47,870 on the inevitability of the passing of every human life. 393 00:28:47,870 --> 00:28:52,190 Like a medieval memento mori, it was meant to remind us 394 00:28:52,190 --> 00:28:55,190 that despite all our efforts and ambitions, all our quests 395 00:28:55,190 --> 00:28:58,870 for knowledge, there's one lesson that trumps them all. 396 00:28:58,870 --> 00:29:01,790 And as if to force that lesson home, 397 00:29:01,790 --> 00:29:05,750 Parnell had the dead themselves rising from their graves. 398 00:29:10,550 --> 00:29:13,790 The bursting Earth unveiled the Shades! 399 00:29:13,790 --> 00:29:16,950 All slow and wan and wrap'd with shrouds. 400 00:29:18,430 --> 00:29:20,870 They rise in visionary crouds, 401 00:29:20,870 --> 00:29:23,710 And all with sober accent cry, 402 00:29:23,710 --> 00:29:26,430 "Think, Mortal, what it is to die." 403 00:29:30,430 --> 00:29:33,950 Thomas Parnell is now almost forgotten. 404 00:29:33,950 --> 00:29:37,590 But his verse anticipated a whole generation of English writers 405 00:29:37,590 --> 00:29:40,310 we now call the Graveyard Poets. 406 00:29:42,630 --> 00:29:45,190 Like Parnell, they often preached a sombre 407 00:29:45,190 --> 00:29:48,070 moral message about the inevitability of death. 408 00:29:49,510 --> 00:29:52,390 But they drew on the same supernatural language 409 00:29:52,390 --> 00:29:54,190 as the Gothic novel, 410 00:29:54,190 --> 00:29:57,030 with its lurid, graphic imagery. 411 00:30:02,150 --> 00:30:06,230 Doors creak, and windows clap, and night's foul bird... 412 00:30:06,230 --> 00:30:10,070 Rook'd in the spire, screams loud! 413 00:30:11,910 --> 00:30:16,910 From the low vaults, the mansions of the dead roused from their slumbers 414 00:30:16,910 --> 00:30:20,430 In grim array, the grisly spectres rise. 415 00:30:26,950 --> 00:30:29,590 What does it signify at a deeper historical level, 416 00:30:29,590 --> 00:30:32,030 this cult of the graveyard? 417 00:30:32,030 --> 00:30:35,350 And if Gothic really is a secret history of the workings 418 00:30:35,350 --> 00:30:39,670 of the British mind, what part of that story is told here? 419 00:30:39,670 --> 00:30:41,950 It sometimes seems to me, reading their work, 420 00:30:41,950 --> 00:30:45,390 that the Graveyard Poets came into the graveyard precisely 421 00:30:45,390 --> 00:30:48,830 because they didn't find what they were looking for in the church. 422 00:30:48,830 --> 00:30:50,350 No sense of magic there, 423 00:30:50,350 --> 00:30:53,670 and only a rather prosaic form of spirituality - 424 00:30:53,670 --> 00:30:58,390 bare walls, clear glass, a preacher sermonising from his pulpit. 425 00:30:58,390 --> 00:31:02,070 Their poems sound like incantations or prayers, 426 00:31:02,070 --> 00:31:04,270 they're full of supernatural visions. 427 00:31:04,270 --> 00:31:07,190 It's as if they were seeking to re-enchant a world 428 00:31:07,190 --> 00:31:11,590 from which they feared the divine mysteries had fled. 429 00:31:15,190 --> 00:31:19,150 By mid 18th century, the Gothic was fast mutating. 430 00:31:19,150 --> 00:31:22,230 It was now much more than an architectural style. 431 00:31:22,230 --> 00:31:25,830 It had become a movement in art and literature. 432 00:31:25,830 --> 00:31:28,230 More, even - a new language, 433 00:31:28,230 --> 00:31:31,750 to suggest what couldn't be openly voiced. 434 00:31:33,750 --> 00:31:37,350 Gothic was becoming a way to speak the unspeakable. 435 00:31:38,590 --> 00:31:41,190 WOMAN MOANS PASSIONATELY 436 00:31:41,190 --> 00:31:44,430 But maybe we shouldn't go there quite yet. 437 00:31:44,430 --> 00:31:48,230 After all, secret thoughts come before secret deeds. 438 00:31:52,470 --> 00:31:57,150 One Gothic image gripped the Georgian imagination like no other. 439 00:31:57,150 --> 00:31:59,110 The Nightmare. 440 00:32:00,950 --> 00:32:03,750 Painted in 1781 by Henry Fuseli, 441 00:32:03,750 --> 00:32:06,230 it shows an evil looking incubus 442 00:32:06,230 --> 00:32:09,470 squatting on the chest of a sprawling woman. 443 00:32:12,350 --> 00:32:16,950 Victim of sorcery, or just having a bad dream? We can't tell. 444 00:32:18,030 --> 00:32:21,670 Perhaps there's a clue in the spectral steed that peers through 445 00:32:21,670 --> 00:32:24,430 the drapes - the night mare. 446 00:32:25,710 --> 00:32:29,750 Critics dismissed the work as meaningless nonsense, 447 00:32:29,750 --> 00:32:33,430 but the public clamoured to gaze on its ghastly strangeness. 448 00:32:36,630 --> 00:32:39,790 In truth, Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli 449 00:32:39,790 --> 00:32:43,430 probably based his lascivious, sex-starved imp 450 00:32:43,430 --> 00:32:48,270 on his own frustrated passion for a younger woman named Anna Landolt. 451 00:32:48,270 --> 00:32:51,110 Whatever the inspiration, 452 00:32:51,110 --> 00:32:53,110 his image has been endlessly borrowed 453 00:32:53,110 --> 00:32:55,310 and parodied from that day to this. 454 00:33:03,230 --> 00:33:06,310 But what was Fuseli's own original purpose? 455 00:33:12,750 --> 00:33:15,430 Hidden in the vaults of the Tate Gallery is a relatively 456 00:33:15,430 --> 00:33:20,270 unknown work that gives us a clue to the painter's murky intentions. 457 00:33:22,110 --> 00:33:24,790 So he's rack 154. He is. 458 00:33:27,670 --> 00:33:29,470 Here we are, Fuseli. 459 00:33:29,470 --> 00:33:30,950 Thank you very much. 460 00:33:33,150 --> 00:33:36,310 It's very appropriate that Fuseli's paintings 461 00:33:36,310 --> 00:33:40,390 are generally to be found in the storerooms of the Tate. 462 00:33:40,390 --> 00:33:42,310 They have a subterranean character, 463 00:33:42,310 --> 00:33:46,350 they belong... They sit more easily in the vault, perhaps, 464 00:33:46,350 --> 00:33:48,790 than on the wall of the gallery. 465 00:33:48,790 --> 00:33:52,070 This painting, he exhibited to considerable confusion 466 00:33:52,070 --> 00:33:55,510 at the Royal Academy in 1783, 467 00:33:55,510 --> 00:33:59,390 under the title Percival Delivering Belisane 468 00:33:59,390 --> 00:34:02,110 From The Enchantments Of Urma. 469 00:34:02,110 --> 00:34:06,630 Adding a note, "See the tales of Thyot." 470 00:34:08,510 --> 00:34:12,550 Byron once spent two entire days combing his library, 471 00:34:12,550 --> 00:34:16,710 trying to find one of these references of Fuseli's to an ancient 472 00:34:16,710 --> 00:34:19,990 text, came up with nothing, and said to Fuseli, "What's it all about?" 473 00:34:19,990 --> 00:34:23,270 Fuseli said, "Actually, I made it up." So too with this picture - 474 00:34:23,270 --> 00:34:26,790 there was no Thyot, it's not based on any tale from the past. 475 00:34:26,790 --> 00:34:31,550 The only source is Fuseli's own fevered imagination. 476 00:34:31,550 --> 00:34:34,350 What does the picture show us? 477 00:34:34,350 --> 00:34:38,550 A swooning heroine, clasping to the hero 478 00:34:38,550 --> 00:34:40,990 as he raises a sword 479 00:34:40,990 --> 00:34:43,550 to behead this wizened crone. 480 00:34:43,550 --> 00:34:49,470 I imagine she that has come from Fuseli's reading of Macbeth - 481 00:34:49,470 --> 00:34:51,710 Hubble, hubble, toil and trouble, 482 00:34:51,710 --> 00:34:54,550 Off with her head at the double! 483 00:34:54,550 --> 00:34:59,910 Behind, we've got this gallery of Fuselian grotesques, 484 00:34:59,910 --> 00:35:02,750 a kind of nightmare chorus. 485 00:35:02,750 --> 00:35:06,350 An old man who seems to be throwing up... 486 00:35:06,350 --> 00:35:10,110 This chap's in a trance. He's got sightless eyes. 487 00:35:11,190 --> 00:35:13,710 He is wondering what's going on. 488 00:35:13,710 --> 00:35:16,430 I think everybody was wondering what was going on! 489 00:35:18,710 --> 00:35:22,390 Now, what Fuseli's actually doing in this picture is something 490 00:35:22,390 --> 00:35:25,710 rather interesting, something rather subversive. 491 00:35:25,710 --> 00:35:29,390 He took narrative painting in the grand heroic style 492 00:35:29,390 --> 00:35:31,110 and made it into something else, 493 00:35:31,110 --> 00:35:35,310 he made it into the exhalation of a series of nightmare visions. 494 00:35:36,870 --> 00:35:39,510 It's even apparent at the level of his technique. 495 00:35:40,510 --> 00:35:43,150 The background is a smoky murk 496 00:35:43,150 --> 00:35:46,550 that looks like the kind of pictorial equivalent 497 00:35:46,550 --> 00:35:48,150 to the caverns of the mind, 498 00:35:48,150 --> 00:35:51,510 in which figures writhe and wriggle 499 00:35:51,510 --> 00:35:54,510 like so much spectral ectoplasm. 500 00:35:55,590 --> 00:35:58,630 No wonder William Hazlitt called Fuseli 501 00:35:58,630 --> 00:36:01,670 "a nightmare on the breast of British art." 502 00:36:01,670 --> 00:36:05,390 He'd done something to painting that was deeply troubling. 503 00:36:05,390 --> 00:36:10,390 He'd turned it from the expression of grand objective truth 504 00:36:10,390 --> 00:36:13,190 to the expression of subjective fear... 505 00:36:15,030 --> 00:36:17,350 ..psychoses. 506 00:36:17,350 --> 00:36:20,350 This is a painting that's waiting 507 00:36:20,350 --> 00:36:24,150 for Freud to arrive and psychoanalyse it. 508 00:36:30,110 --> 00:36:35,070 Gothic fraudulence took many forms, and had many motives. 509 00:36:35,070 --> 00:36:38,630 Perhaps Fuseli worried that his fantasies were so weird, 510 00:36:38,630 --> 00:36:43,750 they'd only be taken seriously if he passed them off as stories of old. 511 00:36:45,070 --> 00:36:48,990 For his part, Horace Walpole knew that English gentlemen shouldn't 512 00:36:48,990 --> 00:36:51,910 really be writing trashy horror novels. 513 00:36:51,910 --> 00:36:55,630 And that's probably why he claimed that The Castle Of Otranto 514 00:36:55,630 --> 00:36:58,590 was translated from a medieval text. 515 00:36:59,670 --> 00:37:03,630 But what of the strange case of the Scot, James Macpherson, 516 00:37:03,630 --> 00:37:08,150 who in the 1760s published epic poems filled with ghosts 517 00:37:08,150 --> 00:37:11,710 and witches, by an ancient bard named Ossian? 518 00:37:12,990 --> 00:37:16,310 In fact, Ossian was Macpherson himself, 519 00:37:16,310 --> 00:37:20,110 who perhaps hoped by this ruse to be seen as the equal of Homer. 520 00:37:21,270 --> 00:37:23,790 Which, briefly, he was. 521 00:37:27,870 --> 00:37:32,190 But the most intriguing and elaborate act of Gothic fakery 522 00:37:32,190 --> 00:37:35,110 was the handiwork of a West Country schoolboy. 523 00:37:37,230 --> 00:37:41,150 Young Thomas Chatterton was a loner who closeted himself away 524 00:37:41,150 --> 00:37:44,030 in an attic room of his local church in Bristol. 525 00:37:45,910 --> 00:37:49,590 He obsessed over the dusty medieval documents he found there, 526 00:37:49,590 --> 00:37:51,870 reading them avidly. 527 00:37:51,870 --> 00:37:55,590 Then, he committed the most sensational literary fraud 528 00:37:55,590 --> 00:37:57,470 of the 18th century. 529 00:37:58,950 --> 00:38:01,710 In the gloomy dusty attic room of the church, 530 00:38:01,710 --> 00:38:04,150 Chatterton claimed to have discovered 531 00:38:04,150 --> 00:38:06,950 a treasure trove of manuscripts and poems 532 00:38:06,950 --> 00:38:10,910 by a 15th-century monk called Thomas Rowley. 533 00:38:10,910 --> 00:38:13,710 In fact, these relics of Olde England 534 00:38:13,710 --> 00:38:17,710 were just part of an elaborate newfangled con. 535 00:38:17,710 --> 00:38:21,670 The monk, and his verse, said to be the equal of Chaucer's, 536 00:38:21,670 --> 00:38:24,910 were all invented by Chatterton himself. 537 00:38:24,910 --> 00:38:27,990 He was the first teenage Goth - 538 00:38:27,990 --> 00:38:30,350 a young man, uneasy, 539 00:38:30,350 --> 00:38:33,990 who immersed himself in a world of his own making. 540 00:38:33,990 --> 00:38:36,110 He even invented his own language, 541 00:38:36,110 --> 00:38:39,830 a bizarre eccentric form of Middle English. 542 00:38:44,910 --> 00:38:50,150 Chatterton's forged documents are today housed in the British Library. 543 00:38:50,150 --> 00:38:54,110 When first published in 1777, they caused a sensation. 544 00:38:56,830 --> 00:39:01,230 Some critics were transfixed by these jewels of medieval verse. 545 00:39:02,590 --> 00:39:04,310 Others smelled a rat. 546 00:39:09,670 --> 00:39:14,590 Here we have it, a great Chatterton forgery. 547 00:39:14,590 --> 00:39:19,390 Well, as late as 1800, the chap who left it to the British Museum 548 00:39:19,390 --> 00:39:22,550 still insisted on presenting it as "Manuscripts and drawings 549 00:39:22,550 --> 00:39:27,950 "supposed to have been written by Thomas Rowley, a priest of Bristol." 550 00:39:27,950 --> 00:39:30,030 What does it consist of? 551 00:39:30,030 --> 00:39:33,590 These curious blackened texts... 552 00:39:35,430 --> 00:39:37,190 Fake aged. 553 00:39:37,190 --> 00:39:41,230 They look as if they've been stained with mahogany-coloured tea. 554 00:39:41,230 --> 00:39:43,310 He probably used varnish. 555 00:39:43,310 --> 00:39:47,350 Written in spidery medieval handwriting. 556 00:39:47,350 --> 00:39:50,910 That might be somebody's last will and testament. 557 00:39:50,910 --> 00:39:52,950 A lot of the pages are blank. 558 00:39:52,950 --> 00:39:54,070 HE CHUCKLES 559 00:39:54,070 --> 00:39:56,590 Look at this leathery piece of parchment skin, 560 00:39:56,590 --> 00:39:58,670 you can't read anything on it at all. 561 00:39:58,670 --> 00:40:01,790 They've almost metamorphosed into works of abstract art. 562 00:40:01,790 --> 00:40:03,390 Look at that. 563 00:40:03,390 --> 00:40:06,990 My favourite bits I think are the drawings, which are 564 00:40:06,990 --> 00:40:10,310 quite astonishingly naive in their handling. 565 00:40:11,430 --> 00:40:13,550 Cathedrals, churches. 566 00:40:13,550 --> 00:40:18,390 Always with these sort of... splats of staining, 567 00:40:18,390 --> 00:40:20,950 as if time could have done that. 568 00:40:20,950 --> 00:40:25,470 Does time go round with buckets of tea in either hand going... 569 00:40:25,470 --> 00:40:27,710 "Now you're an old document"? 570 00:40:27,710 --> 00:40:32,510 There are even some ingenious medieval machines. 571 00:40:32,510 --> 00:40:37,710 Leonardo da Vinci acted in Bristol circa 1323, 572 00:40:37,710 --> 00:40:40,350 or so we're supposed to believe. 573 00:40:40,350 --> 00:40:46,510 What I love about the book is the way it saves the best for last. 574 00:40:46,510 --> 00:40:49,310 Ah, this is the page I was looking for. 575 00:40:49,310 --> 00:40:53,670 A series of quite astoundingly inept portraits 576 00:40:53,670 --> 00:40:56,510 of supposed medieval personages. 577 00:40:56,510 --> 00:40:59,670 And if you gently lift the leaf, 578 00:40:59,670 --> 00:41:01,950 you can see that Chatterton 579 00:41:01,950 --> 00:41:06,670 has actually used a genuine medieval document 580 00:41:06,670 --> 00:41:09,990 in order to create his own concoctions, 581 00:41:09,990 --> 00:41:13,070 or confections, of the medieval. 582 00:41:13,070 --> 00:41:15,310 It was quite a prescient act. 583 00:41:15,310 --> 00:41:21,630 Because after all, Gothic would actually cannibalise the past. 584 00:41:21,630 --> 00:41:23,470 Gothic WAS new, 585 00:41:23,470 --> 00:41:25,230 new like this. 586 00:41:29,350 --> 00:41:33,590 If it began as a harmless enough act of Gothic impersonation, 587 00:41:33,590 --> 00:41:36,150 Chatterton's story ended in Gothic horror. 588 00:41:37,990 --> 00:41:41,910 Despite a precocious budding career as an author in his own right, 589 00:41:41,910 --> 00:41:45,350 at the age of 17, Chatterton committed suicide 590 00:41:45,350 --> 00:41:46,550 by drinking arsenic. 591 00:41:48,870 --> 00:41:53,190 He didn't even live to see the fuss he'd caused, but poets and painters 592 00:41:53,190 --> 00:41:57,710 would transform him into the embodiment of doomed young genius - 593 00:41:57,710 --> 00:42:03,230 a beautiful pale-skinned boy, as alluring as a dead rock star. 594 00:42:08,550 --> 00:42:11,630 Gothic had never been lacking in sexual symbolism. 595 00:42:12,750 --> 00:42:16,270 Proud towers, dark passageways... 596 00:42:16,270 --> 00:42:18,230 not to mention giant helmets. 597 00:42:21,190 --> 00:42:23,550 But while plenty of writers and painters 598 00:42:23,550 --> 00:42:25,230 had got a foot in this door, 599 00:42:25,230 --> 00:42:28,030 surprisingly few went all the way. 600 00:42:28,030 --> 00:42:30,150 WOMAN MOANS PASSIONATELY 601 00:42:32,590 --> 00:42:35,470 William Beckford, son of the Mayor of London, 602 00:42:35,470 --> 00:42:38,190 inherited one of the greatest fortunes in Britain 603 00:42:38,190 --> 00:42:40,310 and spent it like there was no tomorrow. 604 00:42:41,430 --> 00:42:45,710 Beckford pushed every limit, both as man and writer, 605 00:42:45,710 --> 00:42:50,510 and he pushed Gothic itself East, to the Orient. 606 00:42:51,590 --> 00:42:54,590 The result would be a book and a building which scandalised 607 00:42:54,590 --> 00:42:56,830 all of England - 608 00:42:56,830 --> 00:42:59,230 but it all began with a party. 609 00:43:02,470 --> 00:43:07,390 His 21st birthday wasn't so much a celebration as an orgy. 610 00:43:07,390 --> 00:43:11,270 It lasted for three days, the champagne flowed. 611 00:43:11,270 --> 00:43:16,430 Castrati were hired to sing in their high-pitched voices. 612 00:43:16,430 --> 00:43:18,070 Beckford sang along. 613 00:43:20,510 --> 00:43:23,430 The decorations were lavish. 614 00:43:23,430 --> 00:43:25,270 Oriental illuminations, 615 00:43:25,270 --> 00:43:28,830 projected by an 18th-century form of magic lantern, 616 00:43:28,830 --> 00:43:32,070 were supplied by the painter of sublime landscapes, 617 00:43:32,070 --> 00:43:34,390 Philip de Loutherbourg. 618 00:43:35,630 --> 00:43:37,590 There was debauchery too. 619 00:43:37,590 --> 00:43:41,750 Beckford managed to seduce not only the wife of his cousin, 620 00:43:41,750 --> 00:43:47,030 but also a 13-year-old boy called William Courtenay. 621 00:43:47,030 --> 00:43:49,350 "Kitty", Beckford called him. 622 00:43:52,590 --> 00:43:56,750 The events of his 21st birthday inspired Beckford to write Vathek, 623 00:43:56,750 --> 00:43:59,310 his most famous novel. 624 00:43:59,310 --> 00:44:02,710 It combines the saturated colours and fairy-tale quality 625 00:44:02,710 --> 00:44:04,750 of One Thousand And One Nights, 626 00:44:04,750 --> 00:44:09,030 with a degree of nastiness new to Gothic fiction. 627 00:44:11,150 --> 00:44:14,230 At its centre is the degenerate caliph, Vathek. 628 00:44:15,750 --> 00:44:19,910 He makes a Faustian pact with the Giaour, an oriental version 629 00:44:19,910 --> 00:44:24,830 of the devil, so that he can indulge his most obscene desires. 630 00:44:29,270 --> 00:44:32,670 The caliph is perhaps a self-portrait of Beckford, 631 00:44:32,670 --> 00:44:35,150 certainly of Beckford as he would become. 632 00:44:35,150 --> 00:44:39,790 But he's also based on Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, 633 00:44:39,790 --> 00:44:43,670 a shape-shifting creature in thrall to his own passions. 634 00:44:46,870 --> 00:44:52,630 At the height of the novel he sacrifices 50 handsome young boys, 635 00:44:52,630 --> 00:44:55,470 who are thrown down into the maw of the Giaour, 636 00:44:55,470 --> 00:44:57,230 the devil, he devours them. 637 00:44:58,950 --> 00:45:03,270 Vathek himself is destined to be devoured by the devil in due course. 638 00:45:07,070 --> 00:45:10,910 When the novel was first published in English, it was, as so many 639 00:45:10,910 --> 00:45:17,390 other Gothic novels, disclaimed as a translation of an Arabic original. 640 00:45:17,390 --> 00:45:19,030 But as time went on, 641 00:45:19,030 --> 00:45:22,870 Beckford wouldn't disclaim or disown his novel. 642 00:45:22,870 --> 00:45:28,510 What makes him unique is that he alone, of all Gothic writers, 643 00:45:28,510 --> 00:45:32,390 actually lived out the Gothic fantasy. 644 00:45:32,390 --> 00:45:34,590 Or should that be nightmare? 645 00:45:38,310 --> 00:45:41,470 The scandal of Beckford's affair with the teenage Courtenay 646 00:45:41,470 --> 00:45:43,230 made him a social pariah. 647 00:45:44,350 --> 00:45:47,750 For ten years he hid in self-imposed exile. 648 00:45:49,910 --> 00:45:52,350 He returned, aged 31, 649 00:45:52,350 --> 00:45:56,750 determined to shield himself against the hated outside world, 650 00:45:56,750 --> 00:46:00,510 by building the most outrageous Gothic edifice of the age. 651 00:46:05,350 --> 00:46:08,110 "My everlasting barrier" - 652 00:46:08,110 --> 00:46:10,870 that was Beckford's name for Fonthill Abbey, 653 00:46:10,870 --> 00:46:14,030 a private residence built on the scale of one of England's 654 00:46:14,030 --> 00:46:18,510 great Gothic cathedrals, and built in about a tenth of the time, 655 00:46:18,510 --> 00:46:22,830 it went up at a rate of knots. Perhaps that's why it collapsed 656 00:46:22,830 --> 00:46:27,270 under its own weight and is now almost no more. 657 00:46:27,270 --> 00:46:31,950 But you can still experience it in the form of these engravings, 658 00:46:31,950 --> 00:46:35,270 these pictures in a book commissioned by Beckford 659 00:46:35,270 --> 00:46:39,630 from a man called John Rutter, The Delineation Of Fonthill Abbey. 660 00:46:39,630 --> 00:46:42,190 This was awe-inspiring. 661 00:46:42,190 --> 00:46:45,950 This was a sublime house. Look at the size of it. 662 00:46:45,950 --> 00:46:49,190 The couple going up the stairs are barely visible. 663 00:46:50,350 --> 00:46:54,110 And here we can look the other way going down into the garden. 664 00:46:54,110 --> 00:46:59,070 Nature almost is dwarfed by the scale of Beckford's Fonthill. 665 00:46:59,070 --> 00:47:00,590 HE CHUCKLES 666 00:47:00,590 --> 00:47:01,750 Talking of dwarves, 667 00:47:01,750 --> 00:47:05,950 he actually HAD a dwarf draw back a curtain at the entrance 668 00:47:05,950 --> 00:47:09,470 to this room, so that when the very few visitors he received 669 00:47:09,470 --> 00:47:11,070 did come to call, 670 00:47:11,070 --> 00:47:13,510 they could be doubly impressed because the scale 671 00:47:13,510 --> 00:47:15,990 of the person drawing the curtain was so small 672 00:47:15,990 --> 00:47:18,030 and the building so vast. 673 00:47:18,030 --> 00:47:22,030 Inside, the effect - well, you can see here - was actually rather cosy, 674 00:47:22,030 --> 00:47:23,950 with these windows. 675 00:47:23,950 --> 00:47:26,590 You could look out across the rolling plains of Wiltshire. 676 00:47:31,390 --> 00:47:33,390 What does it proclaim? 677 00:47:33,390 --> 00:47:37,310 I think it proclaims Beckford's sense of his own singularity. 678 00:47:37,310 --> 00:47:43,630 His unrelenting pride in his own foibles, sexual or otherwise. 679 00:47:43,630 --> 00:47:43,670 I think the building was in a sense a performance as much as a piece of 680 00:47:43,670 --> 00:47:48,310 architecture. It was Beckford's way of performing his own extravagance, 681 00:47:52,550 --> 00:47:58,870 his own outsider status, his own uniqueness, his own madness. 682 00:48:04,070 --> 00:48:06,470 The last decade of the 18th century 683 00:48:06,470 --> 00:48:10,110 was a boom time for Gothic literature. 684 00:48:10,110 --> 00:48:12,910 The novel itself was a fairly new art form. 685 00:48:12,910 --> 00:48:16,390 Ordinary novels often presented some sort of moral lesson 686 00:48:16,390 --> 00:48:22,470 to the reading public, but by far the most popular books were Gothic - 687 00:48:22,470 --> 00:48:27,350 low on moral sermonising, high on thrills and terror. 688 00:48:27,350 --> 00:48:30,990 The best selling author of the age was Ann Radcliffe, 689 00:48:30,990 --> 00:48:33,990 who made a fortune through stories of brave, 690 00:48:33,990 --> 00:48:38,030 breathless heroines overcoming the evil agents of darkness. 691 00:48:45,750 --> 00:48:49,030 Now, these are modern paperback editions of Gothic novels 692 00:48:49,030 --> 00:48:53,550 and their covers are appropriately lurid, erotic, bloodthirsty. 693 00:48:53,550 --> 00:48:55,710 But it's very important to remember that 694 00:48:55,710 --> 00:48:58,030 when the original editions of these books 695 00:48:58,030 --> 00:49:00,390 appeared in the libraries of Georgian England, 696 00:49:00,390 --> 00:49:05,150 all the way back then, they were seen as rude, lewd, 697 00:49:05,150 --> 00:49:07,750 seditious, dangerous books. 698 00:49:07,750 --> 00:49:11,790 Dangerous above all to impressionable young gels, 699 00:49:11,790 --> 00:49:17,350 who, it was said, were spending far too much of their time embedded 700 00:49:17,350 --> 00:49:23,070 in these books, bosoms heaving with fiction-induced excitement. 701 00:49:25,910 --> 00:49:28,710 It was to save the soul of the English novel 702 00:49:28,710 --> 00:49:33,710 that Jane Austen tried to force the Gothic genie back into the bottle. 703 00:49:33,710 --> 00:49:38,030 She poked fun at the genre in her pastiche Gothic novel 704 00:49:38,030 --> 00:49:41,030 Northanger Abbey, written in 1798. 705 00:49:43,310 --> 00:49:47,030 Young Catherine Morland is shy and awkward, 706 00:49:47,030 --> 00:49:49,830 but by reading so-called "horrid novels" 707 00:49:49,830 --> 00:49:54,350 she can indulge fantasies of heroism in the face of sinister forces. 708 00:49:54,350 --> 00:49:57,910 She's invited by a handsome young man to stay at his family's 709 00:49:57,910 --> 00:49:59,150 gloomy mansion. 710 00:50:00,990 --> 00:50:05,630 And after nightfall, she embarks on an intrepid exploration. 711 00:50:06,630 --> 00:50:09,710 Suddenly, her candle blows out. 712 00:50:12,150 --> 00:50:15,030 Catherine was motionless with horror. 713 00:50:15,030 --> 00:50:18,230 Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled the room. 714 00:50:19,270 --> 00:50:21,950 A violent gust of wind rising with sudden fury 715 00:50:21,950 --> 00:50:23,950 added fresh horror to the moment. 716 00:50:26,270 --> 00:50:28,590 Human nature could support no more. 717 00:50:31,430 --> 00:50:35,470 Austen's heroine nearly loses her prospective husband, 718 00:50:35,470 --> 00:50:39,710 thanks to her inflamed imagination. 719 00:50:39,710 --> 00:50:43,670 I think Austen's point ultimately is that, 720 00:50:43,670 --> 00:50:48,510 why worry about imaginary Gothic terrors? 721 00:50:48,510 --> 00:50:53,550 There are enough horrors involved simply in living your life, 722 00:50:53,550 --> 00:50:58,590 finding a husband, trying to do the right thing - THAT'S the challenge. 723 00:50:58,590 --> 00:51:05,790 Forget Italian castles, subterranean vaults, corpses in the cellar - 724 00:51:05,790 --> 00:51:08,510 real life is quite hard enough to manage. 725 00:51:12,190 --> 00:51:15,270 Jane Austen's attempts to emasculate Gothic 726 00:51:15,270 --> 00:51:18,550 with the sharpness of her wit were destined to fail. 727 00:51:20,270 --> 00:51:24,510 The British obsession with terror was receiving a huge boost 728 00:51:24,510 --> 00:51:27,070 from events just across the English Channel. 729 00:51:44,590 --> 00:51:49,030 The French Revolution and the Terror that followed it were truly 730 00:51:49,030 --> 00:51:53,750 earth-shaking events - a king dragged from his throne by the mob, 731 00:51:53,750 --> 00:51:56,550 the political order turned upside down, 732 00:51:56,550 --> 00:51:59,390 an infernal new killing machine, the guillotine, 733 00:51:59,390 --> 00:52:02,830 slicing off head after head. 734 00:52:02,830 --> 00:52:06,310 It was as if history itself were turning into some terrifying 735 00:52:06,310 --> 00:52:09,870 Gothic novel, written not in ink but in blood. 736 00:52:16,870 --> 00:52:21,590 The caricaturist James Gillray fed vampire-like on British horror 737 00:52:21,590 --> 00:52:23,550 at the violence in France, 738 00:52:23,550 --> 00:52:27,270 gleefully transposing the evils of mob rule 739 00:52:27,270 --> 00:52:30,070 to an imagined French invasion of Britain. 740 00:52:31,430 --> 00:52:34,790 A demonic peasant family of sans-culottes 741 00:52:34,790 --> 00:52:38,430 gorges on the body parts of their aristocratic victims. 742 00:52:40,110 --> 00:52:44,670 It's all very Gothic, right down to the double standards. 743 00:52:44,670 --> 00:52:46,990 Behind the mask of satire, 744 00:52:46,990 --> 00:52:50,710 Gillray grins at the gore and the guts of it all. 745 00:52:52,230 --> 00:52:56,910 Blood from the severed head of Louis XVI cries out for vengeance. 746 00:52:59,870 --> 00:53:02,510 Inspired by the death of a foreign king, 747 00:53:02,510 --> 00:53:06,190 Gillray rose above cartooning to become a visionary - 748 00:53:06,190 --> 00:53:08,430 England's Goya. 749 00:53:13,390 --> 00:53:16,310 And the French Revolution would have just as profound an effect 750 00:53:16,310 --> 00:53:18,590 on English Gothic fiction. 751 00:53:23,190 --> 00:53:27,270 At the height of the Terror, 19-year-old Matthew Lewis, 752 00:53:27,270 --> 00:53:29,790 junior British diplomat to The Hague, 753 00:53:29,790 --> 00:53:34,070 fraternised with French refugees and heard their gruesome stories. 754 00:53:35,190 --> 00:53:37,750 He was inspired to write the most shocking 755 00:53:37,750 --> 00:53:39,710 of all 18th-century novels, 756 00:53:39,710 --> 00:53:41,550 The Monk. 757 00:53:47,470 --> 00:53:50,870 It's set in the monastery of a strict Catholic order, 758 00:53:50,870 --> 00:53:53,150 undone by vice and sin - 759 00:53:53,150 --> 00:53:58,950 a metaphor for the rigid Catholic ancien regime of Louis XVI's France. 760 00:54:00,350 --> 00:54:03,510 It's ostensibly a warning against the corruption 761 00:54:03,510 --> 00:54:06,350 that seethes beneath the skin of civilisation... 762 00:54:08,150 --> 00:54:10,230 ..but just like Gillray, 763 00:54:10,230 --> 00:54:13,870 Lewis relished the depravity he pretended to attack. 764 00:54:16,750 --> 00:54:22,670 The story revolves around a virtuous young monk who becomes corrupted 765 00:54:22,670 --> 00:54:26,510 and swiftly plunges into debauchery, 766 00:54:26,510 --> 00:54:30,630 committing murder, incest and rape. 767 00:54:30,630 --> 00:54:34,790 The whole novel presents a world in which every individual 768 00:54:34,790 --> 00:54:40,590 seems to be toiling under the burden of suppressed desires and fantasies. 769 00:54:40,590 --> 00:54:45,510 Every monk is a secret libertine, every nun is a secret harlot. 770 00:54:48,590 --> 00:54:52,430 The monk at the centre of the tale begins his slide to wickedness 771 00:54:52,430 --> 00:54:57,190 when a besotted female admirer is unmasked and then undressed. 772 00:54:58,990 --> 00:55:03,230 She made a motion as if to stab herself. Her bosom was half exposed. 773 00:55:03,230 --> 00:55:08,310 The monk's eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous Orb. 774 00:55:08,310 --> 00:55:11,910 And Oh! that was such a breast! 775 00:55:11,910 --> 00:55:15,350 A raging fire shot through every limb. 776 00:55:17,070 --> 00:55:19,030 I think the book is about what happens 777 00:55:19,030 --> 00:55:24,790 when human passion is set free from the constraints of order. 778 00:55:24,790 --> 00:55:29,630 And what happens is truly catastrophic, truly horrifying. 779 00:55:29,630 --> 00:55:32,150 The novel is a vision of hell. 780 00:55:36,750 --> 00:55:38,590 In an echo of the French Terror, 781 00:55:38,590 --> 00:55:44,230 an angry mob dismembers a prioress and burns her priory to the ground. 782 00:55:46,150 --> 00:55:49,550 Lewis played on the fear that scenes like this might soon be seen 783 00:55:49,550 --> 00:55:51,190 on English soil. 784 00:55:56,510 --> 00:56:01,550 In the end, the depraved monk's soul is claimed in person 785 00:56:01,550 --> 00:56:03,110 by the devil himself. 786 00:56:05,390 --> 00:56:07,990 A loud burst of thunder was heard. 787 00:56:07,990 --> 00:56:11,110 The prison shook to its very foundations. 788 00:56:11,110 --> 00:56:13,750 A blaze of lightning flashed through the Cell... 789 00:56:13,750 --> 00:56:16,350 THUNDERCLAP ..and in the next moment, 790 00:56:16,350 --> 00:56:21,870 borne upon the sulphurous whirlwinds, Lucifer stood before him. 791 00:56:26,390 --> 00:56:29,510 Lewis himself had committed a double sin - 792 00:56:29,510 --> 00:56:34,350 he'd said revolution could be sexy, and sex could be revolutionary. 793 00:56:35,790 --> 00:56:37,350 His book caused a scandal. 794 00:56:39,030 --> 00:56:42,550 Critics feared it would corrupt morals, that it would get 795 00:56:42,550 --> 00:56:45,950 innocent readers hot under the collar, or worse. 796 00:56:46,910 --> 00:56:49,870 Lewis was threatened with prosecution. 797 00:56:49,870 --> 00:56:53,030 But in the end, Britain's appetite for Gothic won out. 798 00:56:54,910 --> 00:56:57,190 The Monk would run through many editions, 799 00:56:57,190 --> 00:57:00,470 though Lewis himself toned down the most graphic passages. 800 00:57:01,870 --> 00:57:05,590 His contemporary, French writer the Marquis de Sade, 801 00:57:05,590 --> 00:57:11,830 hailed it as "far superior in every way" to all earlier Gothic novels. 802 00:57:11,830 --> 00:57:14,350 Of course, he was biased - but he was right. 803 00:57:19,470 --> 00:57:21,750 It was the most subversive book written in English 804 00:57:21,750 --> 00:57:24,350 about the most important event of the century. 805 00:57:24,350 --> 00:57:27,870 And it said dark and dangerous things, that couldn't have been said 806 00:57:27,870 --> 00:57:31,190 in any language other than Gothic. 807 00:57:33,790 --> 00:57:39,830 Gothic began as a foible - a whim, a paper-thin fancy, 808 00:57:39,830 --> 00:57:44,190 a playful recreation of an ancient architectural style. 809 00:57:44,190 --> 00:57:46,990 But by the start of the 19th century 810 00:57:46,990 --> 00:57:50,670 it had shapeshifted into something altogether different. 811 00:57:50,670 --> 00:57:53,630 A fiery medium through which people had begun 812 00:57:53,630 --> 00:57:57,430 to grope towards a new sense of the self, 813 00:57:57,430 --> 00:57:59,950 of the conscious and the subconscious mind, 814 00:57:59,950 --> 00:58:03,030 had begun to express their fears - 815 00:58:03,030 --> 00:58:07,670 terror of revolution, terror of what it might mean 816 00:58:07,670 --> 00:58:09,630 to live in a world where God's presence 817 00:58:09,630 --> 00:58:12,950 was no longer quite so certain. 818 00:58:12,950 --> 00:58:17,790 And begun to explore fantasies of sexual transgression. 819 00:58:17,790 --> 00:58:21,910 Already so much fuel on the flames - 820 00:58:21,910 --> 00:58:25,350 but the Gothic bonfire was only just getting started.