What is Gothic?
A word that implies the sinister, the supernatural, horror.
It's also a medieval style of building,
sacred architecture dedicated to the glory of God.
How did one word come to have such different meanings?
The term "Gothic" was coined by the artists of the Italian Renaissance
as an insult.
They used it to describe anything that did not come from the civilised
worlds of ancient Greece and Rome.
It meant barbaric, wild, gloomy.
With one word, they dismissed centuries of medieval art
and architecture as primitive and worthless.
The Middle Ages produced some of our most spectacular cathedrals
and churches.
They contained visions of heaven...
..and warnings of hell.
But the Protestant Reformation swept away the medieval world,
and for nearly three centuries, the language of Gothic art
and architecture was rejected as Catholic superstition -
until the Georgians fell back in love with it.
At first, they used it to declare that every Englishman's home
is his castle.
But Gothic grew like ivy.
It spawned new forms of literature...
..new types of painting...
..a new taste for terror...
..and weirdness.
It's no coincidence that Gothic marked a midnight moment
in British history,
when all kinds of terrors WERE going bump in the night.
Abroad, revolution in France.
At home, new industry, with its dark satanic mills...
..new science, with its Frankenstein menace.
The British could hardly bear to talk about such things out loud.
Gothic allowed them to whisper their deepest desires
and their darkest fears.
Read them right, and I believe the stones of Gothic revival
architecture, the terrors painted by Gothic painters, and the words
of the great Gothic novelists, amount to nothing less than a secret
history of Britain itself during its greatest age of change.
SCREAMING
Oh, my lord! My lord, we are all undone.
Villain! Monster! Sorcerer! 'Tis thou hast slain my son.
What sound was that?
Do I dream? Or are the devils themselves in league against me?
Speak, infernal spectre.
Horace Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto,
first published in 1764, the very first Gothic novel.
Immensely popular, ran into many editions -
this is my own personal copy, published in 1830 with these
rather charming steel plate engravings.
It's not actually a great book. It's rather badly written, very playful.
But it's remarkably forward looking, in the sense that
everything else in Gothic fiction comes from this. It's all here.
Haunted castles,
strange apparitions...
..tyrannical villains under the impulse of some nameless lust.
This really is the book that launched a thousand
Gothic horror fantasies.
The book's author, Horace Walpole, was an eccentric literary wit -
a kind of aristocratic, Georgian Oscar Wilde.
Centuries before Hammer horror movies were even dreamed of,
The Castle Of Otranto told the story of an evil lord,
cursed by the dark deeds of his ancestors.
He stops at nothing to try and outwit the curse.
But a monstrous suit of armour begins to haunt
the increasingly deranged tyrant.
Try as he might to escape,
the ghostly armour closes in on him, inexorably.
In the end, it defeats the tyrant and destroys the castle walls.
The book's 18th-century readers swooned. Pulses raced.
Now, Horace Walpole didn't actually publish the first edition
of The Castle Of Otranto under his own name.
The name on the title page was that of William Marshal -
himself supposedly the mere translator
of an ancient medieval document.
Now, Gothic literature would come to specialise in these guilty
disavowals - a number of Gothic novels were published
by writers who claimed they were merely discoveries,
books they hadn't written themselves.
It's as if the Gothic text had to arrive with the general
public accompanied by an alibi - "I didn't really write it."
Gothic fiction was the fiction of shame, written by an author
who, it seems, almost as soon as the work was done, wished to disappear.
The most important character in Walpole's novel is the castle
itself - a perfect metaphor for the darker recesses
of the apparently rational Georgian psyche.
So let's explore it - penetrate each secret room
and winding passage, to reveal a full picture of Gothic.
To begin with, what drove Walpole to write his strange tale?
The answer to that lies behind our first door.
Horace Walpole, Eton and Cambridge educated,
son of the first Prime Minister,
was part of the Establishment, yet never quite won its full approval.
The most telling insight we have into his character
is the house he built at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham.
Like his Gothic novel, it's a
theatrical reinterpretation of the past,
a pseudo-medieval stage set,
utterly unlike any other building of its day.
It speaks of a man with a strong tendency to go against the grain.
Horace Walpole was tremendously proud of Strawberry Hill.
He had descriptions of the house printed,
he loved taking visitors round.
It was clearly a statement, this building.
But what was it a statement of?
A great white Gothic meringue built on the outskirts of London.
Well, I think location was important.
The building was outside the centre of things,
rather like Walpole himself.
I think this building symbolised, to him,
an Englishman's right to be rather unusual.
I think Lytton Strachey got it dead right
when he said that what Horace loved about the Gothic style
was not its beauty, but the fact that it was a bit queer.
Walpole was not the marrying kind.
His letters reveal a string of passions for other men.
Whether consummated or not, we'll never know,
but it's telling that just before he wrote The Castle Of Otranto,
he was vilified in the press for an allegedly inappropriate
affair with his cousin, the MP Henry Conway.
It's hard not to project Walpole's undoubtedly troubled
state of mind onto the creation of his novel.
Walpole claimed that the idea for The Castle Of Otranto
came to him in a dream.
He found himself in a great Gothic stairwell, much like this one,
when he suddenly saw a monstrous disembodied hand in armour.
Strange image,
suggesting nameless motives,
perhaps the threat of punishment.
Right from the beginning, Gothic was a form cloaked in mystery.
But Walpole never meant HIS Gothic to be taken too seriously.
There's something playful, even slightly subversive about
The Castle Of Otranto,
a quality that's vividly reflected in his Gothic house.
Walpole claimed he designed Strawberry Hill to create
a sense of what he named "Gloomth", his own invented word for
the brooding atmosphere of crumbling medieval castles and abbeys.
Yet in truth, it was a rather polite, refined sort of Gothic.
It was gaily painted, and crammed with portraits,
antique trinkets, busts -
and, of course, a giant suit of armour.
Strawberry Hill's been largely denuded of Walpole's
extensive collection of antiquarian objects
and medieval curiosities, so nowadays the house is
very much a shell.
But what a splendid shell, and here in the Great Gallery,
you can really appreciate the lightness of the effect.
This is almost Gothic as if created from spun sugar.
And I think Walpole approached the whole creation of this house
very much in the manner of an exuberant amateur chef.
Let's start with some vaulting borrowed from Henry VII's chapel
in Westminster Abbey, stir in a few finials, add some mirrors
and then finish with a light sprinkling of stained glass.
It almost looks good enough to eat.
Strawberry Hill WAS light-hearted, but it was also
daringly unconventional.
Many of Walpole's contemporaries were shocked by it.
An English nobleman, living in a house that evoked a Catholic church?
Everyone knew that the English aristocracy were supposed to live
in houses built in a very different architectural style.
Surely THEY would never open their doors to Gothic.
Or would they?
The 18th century was the age of reason,
when powerful men built grand country estates
like Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, using the neat symmetry
and clean lines of an imported architectural style,
the very opposite of Gothic.
The English aristocracy built their great houses in the classical style
because it perfectly expressed their pride,
their sense of their own magnificence, their sense
of moral values, constructing these enormous pillared and pedimented
structures, more temples and palaces than domestic residences.
This was their way of saying that they were the true inheritors
of the values of ancient Greece and the power of ancient Rome.
They were the masters of a new Empire.
Stowe House exemplifies the Georgian obsession with Greek
and Roman styles of architecture.
In the 1720s, its owner, Lord Cobham, military hero turned
politician, followed fashion by remodelling his ancestral home.
He added porticos, and columns.
And he embellished his estate with classical temples,
to virtue and to wisdom.
But while aristocrats like Cobham idolised ancient Mediterranean
culture, they were surrounded everywhere by the crumbling remains
of their own British history.
Across the country, ruined abbeys and monasteries were
reminders of a vanished past,
swept away two centuries before
by Henry VIII and the fiercely Protestant Church of England.
It was a cultural cataclysm, that had decimated not just
the indigenous Catholic church,
but art, architecture,
and an entire way of life.
At Stowe House, Lord Cobham may have been an Enlightenment lover
of classical reason and logic.
But he also understood that the universe always has another side.
Light and dark, virtue and vice,
order and liberty -
opposing forces in creative tension.
So he turned to Britain's distant past, to the language of Gothic,
to create a building that conveyed his ideas about freedom.
This was a man who was proud of his Anglo-Saxon roots.
Stowe's Temple of Liberty, perched on the brow of a hill
in the rolling English countryside, is more than one of the first
architectural expressions of a revived taste for the Gothic.
It's also an important political statement.
Whigs like Lord Cobham idolised their ancient forebears
the Anglo-Saxons, because they saw in the workings
of the ancient Anglo-Saxon witan, or council,
a model for the workings of Parliament
and therefore the opposite of rule by an absolute monarch.
This was indeed a temple to English liberty.
But it was liberty seen from a very aristocratic viewpoint.
Let's not forget that to create his grand house,
his wonderful garden dotted with temples,
Lord Cobham had to demolish several villages
and displace their inhabitants.
Cobham's folly was an attempt by a hugely privileged landowner
to tether the meaning of Gothic to his own political agenda.
It helped to fuel an aristocratic fashion.
Whimsical Gothic follies, eccentric medieval novelties,
designed to decorate sprawling country estates, and affirm
the rather limited libertarian beliefs of a powerful group of men.
In the Midlands, the folly took on a new form,
the ivy-clad ruin,
made to LOOK as if it had been decaying for centuries.
The fake crumbling castle at Hagley Hall was built
not in the Middle Ages but in 1747, for the fervent Whig
Lord Lyttelton.
It's another Gothic folly designed to proclaim aristocratic power.
But the sham ruin also sparked a wider,
more democratic taste for REAL ruins.
After all, real ruins could be appreciated by anyone with
walking boots and a set of watercolours.
Budding artists scoured the land for picturesque abbeys
exposed to the sky.
The love of ruins became a cult,
and with it, developed a kind of Gothic philosophy.
Writers such as Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey
took ruins as the starting point for melancholy
reflections on the transience of all human societies and civilisations.
And the cult of ruins fed naturally into the cult of nature,
for what is a ruin but a building that has been overgrown,
overtaken by the great forces of the natural world?
What began as a Gothic folly
came to stand as one of the enduring symbols of the romantic imagination.
The new taste for Gothic ruins in a landscape
fostered new ways of seeing landscape itself -
a new approach to the natural world.
Travellers from Britain to Italy had, for many centuries,
passed through the Alps.
But it was only in the 18th century that they began to admire
the mountains, rather than see them simply as a barrier.
In Britain too, at places like the dramatic Gordale Scar in Yorkshire,
landscape began to inspire thrilling new feelings of awe and dread.
The melancholy taste for Gothic ruins went hand in hand
with a new taste for the wilder faces of nature.
Barren mountains, desolate ravines, torrents, waterfalls,
great cliff faces that seem almost as though
they're about to topple and crush you.
The Earl of Shaftesbury had written of HIS emotions in front
of such scenes, saying they reminded him
of the violence of the world, the indifference of nature,
the inevitability of the end of civilisation itself.
But it was another English nobleman, Edmund Burke,
who gave this new taste for wild nature a name.
He called it "the sublime".
Burke defined the sublime as that which excites
sensations of terror, the most powerful of our emotions.
He also pointed out that sublime nature is best enjoyed
at a distance.
Perfect for painting.
We can marvel at James Ward's vertiginous Gordale Scar,
because we know painted rocks can't crush us.
We can relish the dread of Philip de Loutherbourg's travellers,
caught in an avalanche, because WE'VE been spared.
And we can thrill at Turner's alpine storm, because WE can't be touched.
Sublime landscape has this in common with Gothic terror tales.
It gives us the frisson of danger without the risk.
Through the lens of the sublime
the Georgians began to see old paintings afresh.
Italian artist Salvator Rosa died long before the revived
fashion for all things Gothic.
Yet his paintings seem to have predicted the taste for the sublime.
Glowering skies, gnarled trees, craggy cliffs.
The Georgians were bewitched.
They bought up as many of his works as they could
and shipped them back to England.
The National Gallery in London now holds one of Rosa's
most unusual pictures.
It's a sublime landscape, but with a difference.
It's filled with monstrous figures,
as if straight from a Gothic nightmare.
Salvator Rosa's Witches At Their Incantations,
a witches' brew of a painting.
He's lit it as if by flashes of lightning
and that's how the eye experiences it - not as a composition
but as a series of sudden horrific visions.
A crone and her accomplice.
They've resurrected a skeleton from the grave, they've dug him up
and the coffin's been opened.
A witch and her sinister companion seem to be getting him
to write something.
Are they making him rewrite his will in their favour?
Immediately to the right, suddenly, again, another flash.
A naked, beautiful witch who's got a voodoo doll, balanced
in front of a mirror.
Tsshhh! Another flash.
An older witch, grinding up entrails for a potion...
Tsshhh!
A knight being beaten by a broomstick as he sets
fire to a rabbit on a piece of paper on which a spell has been written.
There's a heart, impaled on a sword -
Tsshhh! ..a baby being held up for sacrifice.
The monster of a skeleton bird that seems to have come to life.
Another witch arriving on some weird creature of the night,
and at the centre of it all,
a hanged man with a distended neck
being fumigated
while a witch cuts his toenails to put them in her potion.
What on earth, what in hell, did Salvator Rosa mean by it all?
Well, he was a cynical, sardonic, philosophical man,
not much given to superstition, and this was probably,
in 1646, his way of saying to his witch-hunting contemporaries,
"Do you really think this kind of thing
"goes on in the landscape outside Naples?
"I don't think so."
But that begs the question of why, more than 100 years later,
English gentlemen of the Georgian age, such as Earl Spencer,
who hung this picture at Althorp,
why on earth would THEY have wanted
to contemplate Salvator Rosa's feverish fancies?
Well, I wonder if it isn't precisely because they WERE
Georgian gentlemen living in the age of the Enlightenment, a time when
religion seems to have held less and less sway,
and when the old folklorish fantasies and superstitions
were all but dead.
Didn't they want to re-enchant their world?
To fill it once more with the frisson of horror?
Is that perhaps what Gothic was all about?
Fascinated by witchcraft and all things medieval,
the Georgians also stirred the cauldron of their own literary past.
There they found an almost forgotten writer, a playwright -
William Shakespeare.
Born within living memory of the Reformation,
he was like a stepping stone back to an earlier medieval world,
his plays full of the supernatural and the strange.
Macbeth, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest -
all steeped in the atmosphere of Gothic.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Ghosts, wandering here and there, troop home to churchyards,
damned spirits all.
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
Shakespeare answered a need for the magical, the visionary.
The Georgians republished him, performed him,
dedicated festivals, galleries and paintings to his plays.
Why does Shakespeare exert such a powerful hold
on the 18th-century Gothic imagination?
Well, I think it's because to them,
it seems as though his language springs
from the very soil of old England.
Reading him, it's as if they can hear, see, touch, taste
and smell the lost world of the Middle Ages.
He gives them the old superstitions,
the old folklore -
omens, ghosts, witches prancing on a hillside.
More than that, he gives them proud kings brought low by the fates -
"O, let me not be mad."
"To be, or not to be, that is the question."
"A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
He takes us inside the minds of his characters as no other writer.
But above all the Georgians idolised Shakespeare
because he was so irregular - he broke all the rules.
Shakespeare wrote comedies that turn into tragedies,
tragedies that turn into comedies.
He was no-one's servant - he was his own master.
And what could be more British than that?
Shakespeare also inspired 18th-century melancholics,
lamenting all that had been lost during the Reformation.
In one of his sonnets
Shakespeare had spoken of the spiritual void
left by Britain's sacked monasteries -
"Bare, ruin'd choirs, where once the sweet birds sang."
From that one line, an entire school of 18th-century poetry would grow.
In 1721, an Anglo-Irish clergyman called Thomas Parnell
wrote a short poem entitled A Night Piece On Death.
Full of Shakespearean echoes,
it was a reflection
on the inevitability of the passing of every human life.
Like a medieval memento mori, it was meant to remind us
that despite all our efforts and ambitions, all our quests
for knowledge, there's one lesson that trumps them all.
And as if to force that lesson home,
Parnell had the dead themselves rising from their graves.
The bursting Earth unveiled the Shades!
All slow and wan and wrap'd with shrouds.
They rise in visionary crouds,
And all with sober accent cry,
"Think, Mortal, what it is to die."
Thomas Parnell is now almost forgotten.
But his verse anticipated a whole generation of English writers
we now call the Graveyard Poets.
Like Parnell, they often preached a sombre
moral message about the inevitability of death.
But they drew on the same supernatural language
as the Gothic novel,
with its lurid, graphic imagery.
Doors creak, and windows clap, and night's foul bird...
Rook'd in the spire, screams loud!
From the low vaults, the mansions of the dead roused from their slumbers
In grim array, the grisly spectres rise.
What does it signify at a deeper historical level,
this cult of the graveyard?
And if Gothic really is a secret history of the workings
of the British mind, what part of that story is told here?
It sometimes seems to me, reading their work,
that the Graveyard Poets came into the graveyard precisely
because they didn't find what they were looking for in the church.
No sense of magic there,
and only a rather prosaic form of spirituality -
bare walls, clear glass, a preacher sermonising from his pulpit.
Their poems sound like incantations or prayers,
they're full of supernatural visions.
It's as if they were seeking to re-enchant a world
from which they feared the divine mysteries had fled.
By mid 18th century, the Gothic was fast mutating.
It was now much more than an architectural style.
It had become a movement in art and literature.
More, even - a new language,
to suggest what couldn't be openly voiced.
Gothic was becoming a way to speak the unspeakable.
WOMAN MOANS PASSIONATELY
But maybe we shouldn't go there quite yet.
After all, secret thoughts come before secret deeds.
One Gothic image gripped the Georgian imagination like no other.
The Nightmare.
Painted in 1781 by Henry Fuseli,
it shows an evil looking incubus
squatting on the chest of a sprawling woman.
Victim of sorcery, or just having a bad dream? We can't tell.
Perhaps there's a clue in the spectral steed that peers through
the drapes - the night mare.
Critics dismissed the work as meaningless nonsense,
but the public clamoured to gaze on its ghastly strangeness.
In truth, Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli
probably based his lascivious, sex-starved imp
on his own frustrated passion for a younger woman named Anna Landolt.
Whatever the inspiration,
his image has been endlessly borrowed
and parodied from that day to this.
But what was Fuseli's own original purpose?
Hidden in the vaults of the Tate Gallery is a relatively
unknown work that gives us a clue to the painter's murky intentions.
So he's rack 154. He is.
Here we are, Fuseli.
Thank you very much.
It's very appropriate that Fuseli's paintings
are generally to be found in the storerooms of the Tate.
They have a subterranean character,
they belong... They sit more easily in the vault, perhaps,
than on the wall of the gallery.
This painting, he exhibited to considerable confusion
at the Royal Academy in 1783,
under the title Percival Delivering Belisane
From The Enchantments Of Urma.
Adding a note, "See the tales of Thyot."
Byron once spent two entire days combing his library,
trying to find one of these references of Fuseli's to an ancient
text, came up with nothing, and said to Fuseli, "What's it all about?"
Fuseli said, "Actually, I made it up." So too with this picture -
there was no Thyot, it's not based on any tale from the past.
The only source is Fuseli's own fevered imagination.
What does the picture show us?
A swooning heroine, clasping to the hero
as he raises a sword
to behead this wizened crone.
I imagine she that has come from Fuseli's reading of Macbeth -
Hubble, hubble, toil and trouble,
Off with her head at the double!
Behind, we've got this gallery of Fuselian grotesques,
a kind of nightmare chorus.
An old man who seems to be throwing up...
This chap's in a trance. He's got sightless eyes.
He is wondering what's going on.
I think everybody was wondering what was going on!
Now, what Fuseli's actually doing in this picture is something
rather interesting, something rather subversive.
He took narrative painting in the grand heroic style
and made it into something else,
he made it into the exhalation of a series of nightmare visions.
It's even apparent at the level of his technique.
The background is a smoky murk
that looks like the kind of pictorial equivalent
to the caverns of the mind,
in which figures writhe and wriggle
like so much spectral ectoplasm.
No wonder William Hazlitt called Fuseli
"a nightmare on the breast of British art."
He'd done something to painting that was deeply troubling.
He'd turned it from the expression of grand objective truth
to the expression of subjective fear...
..psychoses.
This is a painting that's waiting
for Freud to arrive and psychoanalyse it.
Gothic fraudulence took many forms, and had many motives.
Perhaps Fuseli worried that his fantasies were so weird,
they'd only be taken seriously if he passed them off as stories of old.
For his part, Horace Walpole knew that English gentlemen shouldn't
really be writing trashy horror novels.
And that's probably why he claimed that The Castle Of Otranto
was translated from a medieval text.
But what of the strange case of the Scot, James Macpherson,
who in the 1760s published epic poems filled with ghosts
and witches, by an ancient bard named Ossian?
In fact, Ossian was Macpherson himself,
who perhaps hoped by this ruse to be seen as the equal of Homer.
Which, briefly, he was.
But the most intriguing and elaborate act of Gothic fakery
was the handiwork of a West Country schoolboy.
Young Thomas Chatterton was a loner who closeted himself away
in an attic room of his local church in Bristol.
He obsessed over the dusty medieval documents he found there,
reading them avidly.
Then, he committed the most sensational literary fraud
of the 18th century.
In the gloomy dusty attic room of the church,
Chatterton claimed to have discovered
a treasure trove of manuscripts and poems
by a 15th-century monk called Thomas Rowley.
In fact, these relics of Olde England
were just part of an elaborate newfangled con.
The monk, and his verse, said to be the equal of Chaucer's,
were all invented by Chatterton himself.
He was the first teenage Goth -
a young man, uneasy,
who immersed himself in a world of his own making.
He even invented his own language,
a bizarre eccentric form of Middle English.
Chatterton's forged documents are today housed in the British Library.
When first published in 1777, they caused a sensation.
Some critics were transfixed by these jewels of medieval verse.
Others smelled a rat.
Here we have it, a great Chatterton forgery.
Well, as late as 1800, the chap who left it to the British Museum
still insisted on presenting it as "Manuscripts and drawings
"supposed to have been written by Thomas Rowley, a priest of Bristol."
What does it consist of?
These curious blackened texts...
Fake aged.
They look as if they've been stained with mahogany-coloured tea.
He probably used varnish.
Written in spidery medieval handwriting.
That might be somebody's last will and testament.
A lot of the pages are blank.
HE CHUCKLES
Look at this leathery piece of parchment skin,
you can't read anything on it at all.
They've almost metamorphosed into works of abstract art.
Look at that.
My favourite bits I think are the drawings, which are
quite astonishingly naive in their handling.
Cathedrals, churches.
Always with these sort of... splats of staining,
as if time could have done that.
Does time go round with buckets of tea in either hand going...
"Now you're an old document"?
There are even some ingenious medieval machines.
Leonardo da Vinci acted in Bristol circa 1323,
or so we're supposed to believe.
What I love about the book is the way it saves the best for last.
Ah, this is the page I was looking for.
A series of quite astoundingly inept portraits
of supposed medieval personages.
And if you gently lift the leaf,
you can see that Chatterton
has actually used a genuine medieval document
in order to create his own concoctions,
or confections, of the medieval.
It was quite a prescient act.
Because after all, Gothic would actually cannibalise the past.
Gothic WAS new,
new like this.
If it began as a harmless enough act of Gothic impersonation,
Chatterton's story ended in Gothic horror.
Despite a precocious budding career as an author in his own right,
at the age of 17, Chatterton committed suicide
by drinking arsenic.
He didn't even live to see the fuss he'd caused, but poets and painters
would transform him into the embodiment of doomed young genius -
a beautiful pale-skinned boy, as alluring as a dead rock star.
Gothic had never been lacking in sexual symbolism.
Proud towers, dark passageways...
not to mention giant helmets.
But while plenty of writers and painters
had got a foot in this door,
surprisingly few went all the way.
WOMAN MOANS PASSIONATELY
William Beckford, son of the Mayor of London,
inherited one of the greatest fortunes in Britain
and spent it like there was no tomorrow.
Beckford pushed every limit, both as man and writer,
and he pushed Gothic itself East, to the Orient.
The result would be a book and a building which scandalised
all of England -
but it all began with a party.
His 21st birthday wasn't so much a celebration as an orgy.
It lasted for three days, the champagne flowed.
Castrati were hired to sing in their high-pitched voices.
Beckford sang along.
The decorations were lavish.
Oriental illuminations,
projected by an 18th-century form of magic lantern,
were supplied by the painter of sublime landscapes,
Philip de Loutherbourg.
There was debauchery too.
Beckford managed to seduce not only the wife of his cousin,
but also a 13-year-old boy called William Courtenay.
"Kitty", Beckford called him.
The events of his 21st birthday inspired Beckford to write Vathek,
his most famous novel.
It combines the saturated colours and fairy-tale quality
of One Thousand And One Nights,
with a degree of nastiness new to Gothic fiction.
At its centre is the degenerate caliph, Vathek.
He makes a Faustian pact with the Giaour, an oriental version
of the devil, so that he can indulge his most obscene desires.
The caliph is perhaps a self-portrait of Beckford,
certainly of Beckford as he would become.
But he's also based on Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost,
a shape-shifting creature in thrall to his own passions.
At the height of the novel he sacrifices 50 handsome young boys,
who are thrown down into the maw of the Giaour,
the devil, he devours them.
Vathek himself is destined to be devoured by the devil in due course.
When the novel was first published in English, it was, as so many
other Gothic novels, disclaimed as a translation of an Arabic original.
But as time went on,
Beckford wouldn't disclaim or disown his novel.
What makes him unique is that he alone, of all Gothic writers,
actually lived out the Gothic fantasy.
Or should that be nightmare?
The scandal of Beckford's affair with the teenage Courtenay
made him a social pariah.
For ten years he hid in self-imposed exile.
He returned, aged 31,
determined to shield himself against the hated outside world,
by building the most outrageous Gothic edifice of the age.
"My everlasting barrier" -
that was Beckford's name for Fonthill Abbey,
a private residence built on the scale of one of England's
great Gothic cathedrals, and built in about a tenth of the time,
it went up at a rate of knots. Perhaps that's why it collapsed
under its own weight and is now almost no more.
But you can still experience it in the form of these engravings,
these pictures in a book commissioned by Beckford
from a man called John Rutter, The Delineation Of Fonthill Abbey.
This was awe-inspiring.
This was a sublime house. Look at the size of it.
The couple going up the stairs are barely visible.
And here we can look the other way going down into the garden.
Nature almost is dwarfed by the scale of Beckford's Fonthill.
HE CHUCKLES
Talking of dwarves,
he actually HAD a dwarf draw back a curtain at the entrance
to this room, so that when the very few visitors he received
did come to call,
they could be doubly impressed because the scale
of the person drawing the curtain was so small
and the building so vast.
Inside, the effect - well, you can see here - was actually rather cosy,
with these windows.
You could look out across the rolling plains of Wiltshire.
What does it proclaim?
I think it proclaims Beckford's sense of his own singularity.
His unrelenting pride in his own foibles, sexual or otherwise.
I think the building was in a sense a performance as much as a piece of
architecture. It was Beckford's way of performing his own extravagance,
his own outsider status, his own uniqueness, his own madness.
The last decade of the 18th century
was a boom time for Gothic literature.
The novel itself was a fairly new art form.
Ordinary novels often presented some sort of moral lesson
to the reading public, but by far the most popular books were Gothic -
low on moral sermonising, high on thrills and terror.
The best selling author of the age was Ann Radcliffe,
who made a fortune through stories of brave,
breathless heroines overcoming the evil agents of darkness.
Now, these are modern paperback editions of Gothic novels
and their covers are appropriately lurid, erotic, bloodthirsty.
But it's very important to remember that
when the original editions of these books
appeared in the libraries of Georgian England,
all the way back then, they were seen as rude, lewd,
seditious, dangerous books.
Dangerous above all to impressionable young gels,
who, it was said, were spending far too much of their time embedded
in these books, bosoms heaving with fiction-induced excitement.
It was to save the soul of the English novel
that Jane Austen tried to force the Gothic genie back into the bottle.
She poked fun at the genre in her pastiche Gothic novel
Northanger Abbey, written in 1798.
Young Catherine Morland is shy and awkward,
but by reading so-called "horrid novels"
she can indulge fantasies of heroism in the face of sinister forces.
She's invited by a handsome young man to stay at his family's
gloomy mansion.
And after nightfall, she embarks on an intrepid exploration.
Suddenly, her candle blows out.
Catherine was motionless with horror.
Darkness impenetrable and immovable filled the room.
A violent gust of wind rising with sudden fury
added fresh horror to the moment.
Human nature could support no more.
Austen's heroine nearly loses her prospective husband,
thanks to her inflamed imagination.
I think Austen's point ultimately is that,
why worry about imaginary Gothic terrors?
There are enough horrors involved simply in living your life,
finding a husband, trying to do the right thing - THAT'S the challenge.
Forget Italian castles, subterranean vaults, corpses in the cellar -
real life is quite hard enough to manage.
Jane Austen's attempts to emasculate Gothic
with the sharpness of her wit were destined to fail.
The British obsession with terror was receiving a huge boost
from events just across the English Channel.
The French Revolution and the Terror that followed it were truly
earth-shaking events - a king dragged from his throne by the mob,
the political order turned upside down,
an infernal new killing machine, the guillotine,
slicing off head after head.
It was as if history itself were turning into some terrifying
Gothic novel, written not in ink but in blood.
The caricaturist James Gillray fed vampire-like on British horror
at the violence in France,
gleefully transposing the evils of mob rule
to an imagined French invasion of Britain.
A demonic peasant family of sans-culottes
gorges on the body parts of their aristocratic victims.
It's all very Gothic, right down to the double standards.
Behind the mask of satire,
Gillray grins at the gore and the guts of it all.
Blood from the severed head of Louis XVI cries out for vengeance.
Inspired by the death of a foreign king,
Gillray rose above cartooning to become a visionary -
England's Goya.
And the French Revolution would have just as profound an effect
on English Gothic fiction.
At the height of the Terror, 19-year-old Matthew Lewis,
junior British diplomat to The Hague,
fraternised with French refugees and heard their gruesome stories.
He was inspired to write the most shocking
of all 18th-century novels,
The Monk.
It's set in the monastery of a strict Catholic order,
undone by vice and sin -
a metaphor for the rigid Catholic ancien regime of Louis XVI's France.
It's ostensibly a warning against the corruption
that seethes beneath the skin of civilisation...
..but just like Gillray,
Lewis relished the depravity he pretended to attack.
The story revolves around a virtuous young monk who becomes corrupted
and swiftly plunges into debauchery,
committing murder, incest and rape.
The whole novel presents a world in which every individual
seems to be toiling under the burden of suppressed desires and fantasies.
Every monk is a secret libertine, every nun is a secret harlot.
The monk at the centre of the tale begins his slide to wickedness
when a besotted female admirer is unmasked and then undressed.
She made a motion as if to stab herself. Her bosom was half exposed.
The monk's eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous Orb.
And Oh! that was such a breast!
A raging fire shot through every limb.
I think the book is about what happens
when human passion is set free from the constraints of order.
And what happens is truly catastrophic, truly horrifying.
The novel is a vision of hell.
In an echo of the French Terror,
an angry mob dismembers a prioress and burns her priory to the ground.
Lewis played on the fear that scenes like this might soon be seen
on English soil.
In the end, the depraved monk's soul is claimed in person
by the devil himself.
A loud burst of thunder was heard.
The prison shook to its very foundations.
A blaze of lightning flashed through the Cell...
THUNDERCLAP ..and in the next moment,
borne upon the sulphurous whirlwinds, Lucifer stood before him.
Lewis himself had committed a double sin -
he'd said revolution could be sexy, and sex could be revolutionary.
His book caused a scandal.
Critics feared it would corrupt morals, that it would get
innocent readers hot under the collar, or worse.
Lewis was threatened with prosecution.
But in the end, Britain's appetite for Gothic won out.
The Monk would run through many editions,
though Lewis himself toned down the most graphic passages.
His contemporary, French writer the Marquis de Sade,
hailed it as "far superior in every way" to all earlier Gothic novels.
Of course, he was biased - but he was right.
It was the most subversive book written in English
about the most important event of the century.
And it said dark and dangerous things, that couldn't have been said
in any language other than Gothic.
Gothic began as a foible - a whim, a paper-thin fancy,
a playful recreation of an ancient architectural style.
But by the start of the 19th century
it had shapeshifted into something altogether different.
A fiery medium through which people had begun
to grope towards a new sense of the self,
of the conscious and the subconscious mind,
had begun to express their fears -
terror of revolution, terror of what it might mean
to live in a world where God's presence
was no longer quite so certain.
And begun to explore fantasies of sexual transgression.
Already so much fuel on the flames -
but the Gothic bonfire was only just getting started.