Gothic.
It began with the desire to revive something that was dead,
a style of medieval architecture.
But it grew like graveyard ivy, more sinister at every twist and turn.
By the mid-19th century,
Gothic had spread in all directions.
There was Gothic painting, with
its fears and phobias, the Gothic novel, rooted in terror and dread.
But what happened to the Gothic ivy as it grew out of
the Victorian age and into the 20th century, into our own time?
It proliferated.
British novelists, poets, film-makers,
so many have seized on the Gothic or been seized by it.
Nowadays, it's everywhere.
It's infected our books, films, TV, music, fashion and beyond.
Even technology's Gothic. There are ghosts in the machine.
So Gothic can't be compared to ivy any more. It's gone viral.
But how did it happen?
To understand that, there's somebody you just have to meet.
Count Dracula's waxen hue became
greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes.
And the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin
like a palpitating wound.
"You think to baffle me, you, with your pale faces all in a row
"like sheep in a butcher's.
"You shall be sorry yet.
"My revenge has just begun.
"I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.
"Your girls that you all love are mine already,
"and through them, you and others shall yet be mine,
"my creatures to do my bidding,
"to be my jackals when I want to feed."
In the world of the Gothic, all roads lead to Dracula.
And, in fact, I'm standing above a fictional crossroads
here in Purfleet in Essex.
The novelist Bram Stoker knew this area well and in Dracula
he named the vampire's Essex estate Carfax,
from the French "quatre faces",
meaning "four faces" or cardinal points of the compass.
And it's in this place, with its sense of four different
directions, that the novel moves to its conclusion.
Dracula has 50 boxes of Transylvanian earth -
its vitalising properties help to keep him alive -
transported to this spot from Whitby via Kings Cross.
So when you look down at those buildings you're
looking at Dracula's domain, but how did he really get here?
In terms of the plot, the answer's straightforward.
Carfax appears at the start of the novel.
Dracula buys the house when the unsuspecting agent,
Jonathan Harker, pays him a visit at his Transylvanian castle.
Harker shows him
some black-and-white photos of the place -
Kodaks, taken with one of the first mass-produced cameras.
Deal done, and Dracula has a little piece of England.
Beyond the storyline, what I mean when I say
"How did Dracula get here?"
is also how did Dracula get up here?
How did he come to enthral and fascinate us
in such a powerful and all-pervasive way?
There had been vampires before Dracula, but none like him.
From the point of his creation in the mid-1890s, he looks both
backwards and forwards.
Backwards to the "gloomth" of the classic 18th-century Gothic novel
with its dungeons and haunted castles in foreign parts
and forwards through the 20th century and into our own time.
His influence has infused our culture through a veritable
blood bank of further novels,
comics, films, TV series - you name it.
And I think the question is how did it happen?
How did this extraordinary mythical creature come to take
possession of our collective imagination?
Whitby, where Dracula lands before going on to take
possession of his Carfax estate.
But to understand the phenomenon of Dracula we need to go
beyond the Yorkshire town with which he's become so associated.
Dracula lives on - remains undead -
because Stoker kept his tale chillingly simple.
A terrible creature arrives from foreign parts.
A vampire, which sucks the blood of its victims,
each becoming a vampire in turn.
Dracula's purpose?
To travel to London, the heart of British society,
and infect it with the vampire virus.
He's elusive, difficult to catch, but that's the appeal.
Onto his darkness we can project any anxiety we wish.
He's been plague, famine, syphilis, AIDS,
even computer viruses.
But what would his first audience have made of him,
in the late 19th century?
Bram Stoker's Dracula gripped readers
because it held up a mirror to a society full of foreboding.
The novel's dark vision, of a world where there are only vampires
and victims, played on a real anxiety -
the fear that a terrible change
was taking place in society,
that the modern world really was being stalked by a monster.
A monster who dwelled not in a Transylvanian castle,
but in the citadel of the modern market.
Capital is dead labour which vampire-like lives only
by sucking living labour and lives the more the more labour it sucks.
30 years before Stoker wrote Dracula, the economist
and philosopher Karl Marx had written his own great book
about a blood-sucking beast.
Das Kapital, he called it, its subject a real-life vampire -
the great demon Capital, which drains a drop of the worker's blood
every second of the working day.
Marx laid bare the workings of what he called capitalism,
the mechanism behind its face.
What made the market tick?
The vast forces of production.
And what made them tick was labour, workers grinding away under
the heel of their capitalist masters and the tyranny of the clock.
He backed up his thesis with facts and figures,
but to get his readers' blood up Marx used the imagery of Gothic.
The time during which the labourer works
is the time during which the capitalist consumes
the labour-power he has purchased of him.
The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day into the night
only slightly quenches the vampire thirst
for the living blood of labour.
Time is money, blood money.
Capitalism, as we think of it thanks to him, is presented by Marx
as predatory and ghoulish - red in spooky tooth and claw.
For Marx, the wiles of the vampire were at work
everywhere in the modern world.
Not just at the point of production, workers drained of blood,
but also at the point of consumption,
where purchasers were beguiled
by the new advertising and window displays of the 19th century.
Marx saw shopping as an unsettling experience, in which we're
mesmerised by commerce, just like victims seduced by a vampire.
Norman Mailer once said that Das Kapital is a great novel.
What he forgot to add is that it's a Gothic novel.
Because if Karl Marx's capitalists are the new vampiric villains
sucking the blood of the workforce, what are the consumers?
In Marx's view, they are the deluded devotees of a new sect.
When he looked at the shop window fronts of Victorian London
he didn't see fine porcelain, fob watches, beautiful furniture.
He saw a row of false idols beguiling
and enchanting people into purchasing them.
That's why he said "The commodity is a fetish".
This was voodoo economics.
For all its Gothic elements, Das Kapital was still
a dense theoretical study written by a German emigre.
Is that why its importance to British Gothic has gone unnoticed?
But Gothic without Marx is like Dracula without blood.
Bram Stoker never read Das Kapital, but it certainly
contributed to the fin-de-siecle mood that made Dracula so powerful.
It was Marx who'd first raised the vampire from mere horror to
modern myth.
He'd seeded the sinister thought that there was something
essentially vampiric about the modern world.
Marx certainly inspired the great optimist of late Victorian Gothic -
a man who was no writer of dark fantasy,
but the very opposite.
He was an idealist, an artist and designer who hoped
he could redeem the world of commerce from within.
Here we are. Number 449 Oxford Street.
This is where Morris and Company used to display their commodities.
The wallpaper and designs of William Morris, founder of
the Arts and Crafts movement,
associate member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
supporter of the Gothic Revival in architecture,
visionary poet and pamphleteer.
Now the idea that there was a kinship between Karl Marx and
Gothic Revivalists like Morris
wouldn't have surprised him in the slightest
because he was one of the first Englishmen to read Das Kapital.
He had it in a French copy.
He designed his own gilt-edged cover for it.
Morris, like Marx, was a revolutionary socialist
and he wanted to change the world, to halt the advance of
this newly named beast - "consumer capitalism".
To drive a stake through its heart.
As if anyone could stop all of this.
But Morris had a go, and one of his strategies was fighting
capitalist quantity, the endless conveyor belt of tatty
factory commodities, with the quality of his own goods,
individually crafted in the workshop.
Of course, they were far too expensive for ordinary
working people - the very people Morris wanted to empower.
But that is just one of the hazards of being a revolutionary.
You keep hitting contradictions.
You can't fault Morris's idealism, though.
Here he was in his twilight years,
miles away from the cliched view of him as an artist in rural retreat,
living in West London to be close to the action.
As Morris grew older he became more political
and he spent more time in London.
He had become a member of the Social Democratic Federation
but it wasn't radical enough for him.
So, he co-founded the new, more militant Socialist League.
Eleanor Marx, Karl's daughter, was one of the signatories
and Morris even set up its Hammersmith branch.
He lobbied, he made speeches and he went to rallies which were
met with a level of police brutality that appalled him.
Now, this was the house, the house where Morris and his workers,
freed from the vampiric clutches of capitalism,
created their carpets.
It was also their printing press
and where they held their political meetings.
Now, what were the foundation stones
of Morris's revolutionary socialist politics?
Two books - Marx's Das Kapital, of course,
but also a text he had read in his youth and which he believed in
so passionately that he personally re-printed it in this house.
The book? John Ruskin, The Nature Of Gothic.
John Ruskin was the most influential art critic
of the 19th century, but he was also a critic
of society, arguing that the Industrial Revolution was a blight.
Ruskin writing about the Gothic, printed by William Morris.
And I love the way they've placed the book for me
here at Kelmscott House on a little cushion.
It's almost as if it's asleep. So let's wake it up.
Beautiful thing.
So this really is an absolutely mint edition.
But it's actually a book with, I think, a very modern message and
it certainly would have seemed very modern to William Morris.
Here he is railing against modern factory production.
In particular, the production of glass beads. He says,
"Glass beads are utterly unnecessary.
"They are formed by drawing out the glass into rods,
"the rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads
"by the human hand.
"The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands
"vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy.
"The beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail." C-c-c-r-r-r...
You can hear it - what a wonderful description
of a horrible factory job,
and Ruskin goes on to say to his well-bred readership,
"Every young lady therefore who buys glass beads
"is engaged in the slave trade."
Strong words.
Why was Morris so keen to republish those words,
40 years after they had been written?
Partly because Ruskin's views chimed so well with those of Karl Marx.
But it was also because Morris was drawn to
Ruskin's aesthetic theories.
To fight the blood-sucking beast of capitalism,
Morris turned to his hero's core beliefs.
Ruskin had preached for a return to the Christian values
of the Middle Ages, and he'd argued that the spirituality
and love which medieval craftsmen had brought to their work
must somehow be recovered in the modern world.
Morris tried to turn Ruskin's ideas about art and craft
into a reality -
and hoped that one day everybody would live in surroundings
of handcrafted beauty.
Naive?
Maybe, but there's still one place where you can see
the beauty of the idea.
Welcome to Number Seven Hammersmith Terrace.
Now, no original Morris interiors survive at Kelmscott House, which is
just around the corner, but here they do,
and it's quite something.
This, this was once the home of Emery Walker, who was a close
friend of William Morris.
They collaborated on Morris's publishing ventures -
Walker was a typographer himself -
and they were also comrades, fellow members of the Socialist League
and you can feel that sense of their close attachment to one another
in this house, which, extraordinarily, has remained
almost untouched since Walker lived here 100 years ago.
Every inch is decorated with William Morris fabrics, William Morris
wallpapers, ceramics, even the sconce is a William Morris design.
It's almost uncanny, you expect Morris to call up
on the phone at any minute or walk through the door
and his spirit does still haunt this place.
He's there, present in the ghostly form of photographs.
It's just wonderful.
Wonderful too the Gothic Revival on a larger scale,
and equally poignant.
Keble College, Oxford, founded in 1870,
designed by William Butterfield,
is its last gasp, captured in patterns of polychrome stone.
Built according to Ruskin's blueprint for the true Gothic style,
it also looked back to Pugin's early Victorian dream
of refashioning all of Britain in the image of a medieval town.
But this was a final flowering of a style soon to be cut off
by the onslaught of the modern, the pragmatic, the utilitarian.
Elaborate detail? Waste of time and money.
Late Victorian Gothic might flourish a veritable forest
of crosses at its vampire enemy.
But the vampire, irresistible, carried on regardless.
In the middle of the 19th century, as a young man,
Morris had singled out the train as a shrieking abomination,
the symbol of all that was bad about industrialisation and the machine.
By the end of the century the train had certainly not stopped
shrieking, and the steam engine couldn't be halted.
Even entertainment was becoming industrialised.
Machines were becoming a source of pleasure.
William Morris was left behind, isolated,
a prophet in the wilderness.
One man's wilderness is another's paradise -
even a man with the same name.
By a strange quirk, in 1913, barely 15 years after William Morris's
death, another William Morris, the car manufacturer,
started up his factory in Cowley, on the outskirts of Oxford.
City of dreaming spires, stronghold of the Gothic Revival.
Adding to the irony, the first William Morris had been a student
here and later returned to lecture on the evils of the modern world.
The world doesn't come much more modern than this.
The second William Morris introduced the very latest production
techniques to early 20th-century Britain,
namely the assembly line used by the American Henry Ford
in his Detroit car plants.
The same division of labour that had horrified Ruskin had now
intensified, each worker given a single task to perform
again and again.
100 years later, and automation
has reached its logical conclusion, robots doing most of the work.
Seen through Gothic eyes, it's a nightmare come to pass.
Human beings replaced by Frankenstein monsters.
Or by mechanised Draculas, with soldering-iron fangs.
Is this what the second William Morris's workforce
looks like once Marx's great vampire
has drunk all the blood - an army of the living dead,
capable of working 24 hours a day?
It looks different, but it's really just Fordism brought up-to-date.
Robots and new technology aside, I think William Morris would
probably have felt very at home here.
He certainly would have recognised this modern chart
following the progress of the car through the production line
because, after all, it's very similar to the blueprints he'd
introduced all the way back in 1913.
Henry Ford's methods brought to Britain.
In those days it was 20 cars a week, now it's 900 a day,
and there's another difference too - the modern consumer can
choose the car any colour he likes, any type of wheel, the upholstery.
You name it, it's your car to design.
I wonder what the other William Morris might have made of that.
Would he have seen it as a good thing,
a little bit of power given back to the individual?
Or just another of the vampire's traps?
When Morris looked at the modern world he could only see
a relentless juggernaut, a huge, impersonal machine.
But factories and trains weren't the whole story.
The industry of the late 19th century brought other things
in its wake too -
more personal, almost human technologies were being developed,
what would come to be known as the new media.
They were destined to play a leading part in the story of Gothic,
and they should have been on Morris's radar.
Before he bought it,
his home in Hammersmith was where the telegraph had been invented.
But these new phenomena were certainly on Bram Stoker's radar.
In fact, they haunt his famous novel Dracula
every bit as much as the figure of the vampire.
You might expect Bram Stoker's Dracula
to be all about ruined abbeys
and castles, vampires and blood,
but in fact the novel is obsessively full of references to
the new technology, the new media of the late 19th century.
The telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph and the Kodak camera.
The very form of the novel draws on the possibilities of new technology.
Its narrative is composed from several characters'
voices or rather their raw materials, their diaries,
their journals, their letters, newspaper cuttings.
And it's the typewriter which Bram Stoker used to write the novel,
but IN the novel, Mina Harker's typewriter,
with its many-fanged mouth, its metal teeth,
ingests all this material and records it as print on paper.
Typing becomes a weapon,
the resulting documentation used to track Dracula to his lair.
The sharing and circulation of evidence is what brings him down.
So copying, and shortcuts to copying, like shorthand,
are an essential part of the plot.
This is where the manifold comes in,
enabling the typewriter to produce carbon copies.
Jonathan Harker's wife, Mina, uses it to churn out and duplicate
so much information she's virtually a one-woman printing press.
But it's the psychiatrist Dr Seward who takes copying to an extreme.
His journal relates the escape of Renfield,
the lunatic - in fact he's a vampire - who leaps over the walls
of his asylum in Purfleet, ominously close to Dracula's Carfax estate.
The doctor's observations take the form of a voice recording onto
the wax cylinder of a phonograph.
Then he has Mina transcribe it,
a process which she in turn writes up in her personal journal.
Mina Harker's journal, 29 September.
After dinner I came with Dr Seward to his study.
He brought back the phonograph from my room, and I took my typewriter.
He placed me in a comfortable chair, and arranged the phonograph
so that I could touch it without getting up,
and showed me how to stop it in case I should want to pause.
Then he very thoughtfully took a chair, with his back to me,
so that I might be as free as possible, and began to read.
I put the forked metal to my ears and listened.
Bram Stoker's description reminds me
of a seance or a session in psychoanalysis.
This is typing beyond the call of duty for a woman who is part of
a whole new class of female worker, the secretary or stenographer.
A little later on, Mina says that she is typing out the words
precisely so that other people won't have to listen to
the machine's cruel recording of the anguish in Dr Seward's voice,
like a soul crying out to Almighty God.
She is the secretary in touch with the dark or other side.
A spiritualist medium using the new medium or media
of the phonograph and the typewriter.
What's the subtext of all this, as they say?
The new technology might be used to fight the vampire,
but at the same time it can be read as another version
of the vampire virus - multiplying as it feeds
not on blood but on the information confided to the QWERTYUIOP keys
of the typewriter or spoken into the machine.
Stoker implies that it's not just our facts, information,
but a bit of us that's being copied in the process,
and that the modern age makes
vampires us of all, ghosts who live on,
in the phonograph or the photograph or in the moving picture.
Perhaps it's no wonder that Dracula's image,
which can never be seen in a mirror,
would multiply in the darkness of the auditorium.
The most thrilling new technology of the 1890s was cinema, which
started out as a fairground sideshow
but soon moved into cinemas like this, The Granada in Tooting,
less picture palace than movie cathedral,
complete with Gothic decoration.
Now, there's no film in Bram Stoker's Dracula
apart from that in the Kodak stills camera used by Jonathan Harker,
but the book would lend itself to countless adaptations for
the big screen, a multitude of spin-offs,
and a fair number of spoofs.
More than any other medium it was cinema that propelled
Gothic around the globe.
The genre was already well-established by 1931,
when Bela Lugosi played Dracula.
The floodgates had been opened nearly a decade before with
Nosferatu, which, much to the chagrin of the Bram Stoker estate,
did not acknowledge its literary source.
It's also as if the property had been whipped from under
the nose of the British film industry.
But that was about to change.
Watching the director of Nosferatu, FW Murnau, at work on his next
picture in the Bioskop-Atelier studios in Potsdam was
the young Alfred Hitchcock.
The lessons he learned in Germany he would bring home to
Gainsborough Studios in Islington,
where he directed The Lodger in 1927.
This "Story of the London Fog", as it was called,
was about the Avenger,
a serial killer in the mould of Jack the Ripper, whose bloody true
crimes Bram Stoker acknowledged as an influence on Dracula.
The chief suspect in the film is Jonathan Drew,
played by Ivor Novello, and he makes an entry out of the London fog
worthy of Dracula emerging from the mists of Transylvania.
SCREAMING
Is there something about the disembodied nature of
the film image that lends itself to Gothic?
I'd say that there is.
In fact, I'd argue that the cinema is the ultimate Gothic
haunted house because what does it present you with?
Apparitions, images of people who aren't really there
and if you're watching an old film the fact is that
you are watching people who are dead but they seem alive.
You are communing with ghosts.
SCREAMING
The film industry in Britain never established itself to
the commercial and artistic degree which it did in Germany, France,
Italy and, of course, America.
Hitchcock was soon off to Hollywood, taking with him
his predilection for murder and his penchant for the Gothic.
It's certainly there in the dream house of Manderley in Rebecca,
and the house of Oedipal necrophile horrors in Psycho.
For the British film industry, though,
there'd be a sting in the tail, a return of the repressed.
Come with us if you dare,
into a twilight world of unspeakable horror.
You must die. Everybody must die!
SCREAMING
DRAMATIC FILM MUSIC CONTINUES
Beware the vampire lovers.
You can't keep a good vampire down.
This is Oakley Court Hotel, once owned by
the 19th-century Liberal politician Lord Otto Fitzgerald.
During the 1960s it was used as a set for some of the most
commercially successful British films ever made.
Hard to believe now, but once these very walls dripped with blood.
SHE SCREAMS
Conveniently, Oakley Court's just a few hundred yards
from the studio which made some of its films there - Hammer Horror.
Now, Hammer closed down in 1979 and the studio hasn't been used
since 2010.
These days it's closed up, it's in private hands, but how
appropriate that Britain's most famous makers of horror films should
have worked out of an 18th-century Gothic-style mansion, like a piece
of Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole's Gothic house, blown upriver.
But I'm headed in the opposite direction. I'm going east.
Dracula's afterlife in the cinema is a well-known part of his story,
the story of Gothic.
But the Gothic has many tributaries, irrigating
the hinterlands of the British imagination.
And never more so than
with Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness,
published in 1899, just two years after Dracula.
It tells the tale of the evil Kurtz,
a trader in African ivory.
With his foreign-sounding name, his ability to stay
one step ahead, and his bloodthirsty nature -
well, does that remind you of anyone?
In chasing Kurtz's Dracula-like shadow,
the novel builds up a picture of the horrors wrought upon
Africa by Europeans along the banks of the Congo.
It might be a deeper, darker river than the Thames,
and one capable of swallowing it whole,
but it's the British river, as gateway to Empire
and the carve-up of Africa, which is the real villain of the piece.
In Heart Of Darkness, the Empire comes home to roost,
to London and the Thames estuary.
On the first page of the novel, Conrad describes the sky above
this reach as "dark, condensed to a mournful gloom, brooding motionless
"over the greatest town on Earth."
And then Charles Marlow begins his story
about the plunder of African ivory, telling it to the assembled company
of a boat called The Nelly, moored right here, just where
Conrad himself in real life moored his own boat, also named The Nelly.
There's a strong sense in Heart Of Darkness that
although it was the Belgians who first exploited
and colonised the Congo, we Europeans are all in it together.
We are all responsible for the atrocities of Empire.
The enslavement of millions of Africans was one of the great
historic crimes against humanity.
The point's brought home by Conrad's narrator,
Marlow, with a dark little fantasy.
Having described the actual abandoned dwellings
of Africans fleeing slavery, he then imagines the reverse -
black slavers coming here and rounding up the English.
A solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.
The population had cleared out a long time ago.
Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds
of fearful weapons suddenly took to
travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching
the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy
every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.
Conrad is widely seen as part of the canon in the great
tradition of the English novel,
but, like Dickens, he was a writer who drew deeply on the Gothic.
He understood that it wasn't merely a genre.
It could be a way of seeing, a way of thinking,
and in Heart Of Darkness he plunges the reader
into a labyrinth, at the centre of which lies a terrible secret.
What could be more Gothic than that?
And the whole tale is spoken - it comes
out of the mouth of a haunted man like a spell or an incantation.
Marlow is a mesmerising, magical narrator,
though he conjures with hideous images.
On the riverbank settlement that is his ultimate destination
he encounters the handiwork of Kurtz,
the enigmatic European trader, who has been applying his "philosophy"
of "exterminate all the brutes".
There was no enclosure or fence of any kind, but there had been
one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts
remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented
with round, carved balls.
Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result
was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow.
These round knobs were not ornamental.
Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way.
Black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -
a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the sunken
dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth smiling continuously
at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.
Marlow first sees the heads - Kurtz the vampire's human prey -
through his binoculars, "glasses" in the story.
He might almost have been filming or using a viewfinder.
No wonder that soon after publication and in the wake of
photos of mutilated African workers,
the novel was seen as a form of documentary,
a "Kodak on the Congo".
From the wizardry of Conrad's words comes a clear image,
the sort of reflection you'd expect from a writer who called
another book The Mirror Of The Sea.
In Heart Of Darkness
the Congo, for all its murky depths, is the river as mirror.
Telling the truth through a distortion -
it's one of the oldest tropes of Gothic fiction.
The idea of the wonky mirror which yet reveals
is at the heart of a much neglected section of Ruskin's essay on
the Gothic, which deals with the fearful and dark side,
the grotesque,
and might almost be a description of Conrad's method
in Heart Of Darkness.
In Ruskin's definition of the Gothic he places great weight
on its more horrifying, distorted imagery.
"The fearful grotesque" he calls it.
And yet he argues that it shows us a kind of truth.
Paraphrasing St Paul, he says, "The minds of men are dim.
"We see the world as if through a glass darkly."
And for Ruskin it's worse than that because...
HE EXHALES
..for him the mirror of our perception
is misted by the breath of Satan
and that is where the Gothic, with its grotesquery, comes in.
It cleans that mirror.
What it shows us might be distorted, might be terrifying,
but we see it, we know it is the truth, and we see it clearly.
Ruskin understood the dark side of the Gothic,
its potential to tell us truths we don't want to hear.
Kurtz's heads on sticks are pure Gothic grotesque.
They hark back to the bloodlust of Vlad Dracula,
also known as the Impaler,
the real-life 15th-century Romanian Prince who inspired Bram Stoker,
another reason to think of Kurtz as a kind of imperial vampire.
But those same heads, staring sightlessly into the Congo,
also indicate that there are even bigger fish in Conrad's river.
Heart Of Darkness has been described as Imperial Gothic but
it's a novel of ideas which goes far beyond anxieties about Empire alone.
Like HG Wells's The Time Machine,
published in 1895, just four years before,
Heart Of Darkness has the ambition to contemplate us as a species.
As the 20th century loomed, some writers looked forward with dread,
revising Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
Were we not in fact de-evolving rather than evolving?
Regressing rather than progressing.
Our civilisation merely a veneer beneath which
we were no more advanced than so-called primitive peoples.
Africa in Conrad is the site of utter human degeneracy.
But it is a European,
and a highly sophisticated one, Kurtz, who
goes beyond all moral limits to "the Horror, the Horror!",
as it is put at the end of the novel.
This is what Conrad brings back home to that stretch of the Thames -
his "Kodak on the Congo" is also a portrait of his own doorstep,
Great Britain and Europe.
Whether they were confronting the monsters of modern market forces
or the horrors of global colonialism,
the writers of the fin-de-siecle and early 20th century
found themselves increasingly drawn
to the terror and cruelty of the Gothic tradition.
And as the world itself seemed to descend into nightmare,
with the outbreak of the First World War, so too did
literature descend ever deeper into the realm of the Gothic.
One of the greatest poems in the English language would be
written in the immediate aftermath of that war.
Most of it's set in London, but a phantom London,
where even the commuters seem to be sleepwalking their way to Hell.
TS ELIOT: A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
TS Eliot's The Waste Land conveys a deep sense of personal crisis,
possibly triggered by the breakdown of the poet's marriage.
His reading of his own poem, made possible by technology,
allows us to hear his ghost.
Behind one man's pain, you sense that of a whole society struggling
through the aftermath of First World War death and destruction.
And that society is sleepwalking,
without spiritual comfort or moral compass, towards an even
bigger unspecified Apocalypse of biblical, even cosmic proportions.
The poet plays the prophet
but he is like a 20-century century Hamlet, too.
Something is rotten in his mental state,
not to mention the state of Denmark
and the state of every other nation and the whole blasted world, for that matter.
You forget the joins in a poem so hypnotic.
And although it works on the reader like some demonic incantation,
through it all there flows a sense of religious yearning.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
Although any Holy Grail is a tantalising absence, there is
the odd spiritually uplifting moment in the poem,
a sort of pessimist's epiphany.
O City City, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
It's often been said that there is something almost
cinematic about The Waste Land,
the way in which Eliot takes "a heap of broken images" in his words
and flashes them up, one after the other,
upon the screens of our imaginations.
But I also think you can see the whole poem
very much as a modern version of a medieval illuminated manuscript,
lit up throughout by flashes of Gothic brilliance, terror and decay.
There is barely a line in the poem which isn't laden with Gothic associations.
Eliot gives us bats, spectres, hooded figures, ruins, churches,
the Tarot, clairvoyants,
and that old occult force of nature, the Thames.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
Eliot uses his sense of place - of places -
to paint a mental landscape,
an anguished "unreal city" of the mind full of dreams,
dreams of the realities of all the rubble and destruction of war.
This fevered, spectral vision has its counterpart in the work
of certain British painters also haunted by war.
Eliot's bleakness is already there
in Paul Nash's We Are Making A New World,
which shows the real wasteland of World War I.
But no dead, no bodies.
And yet every image - amputated tree stumps, gangrene
swellings of earth - indicates the presence of war.
There's a yet more unsettling version of this abstract,
literally disembodied sense of the horrors of the Great War
in Algernon Newton's London paintings of the 1920s and '30s.
The city, a forlorn film set, eerie in the sunlight,
waiting for a generation that will never come back.
The greatest Gothic painter of the 20th century was
Francis Bacon - part of a later generation,
he was only 13 when The Waste Land was published.
But he was inspired by all of Eliot's poetry
and drew on it for the titles of some of his pictures.
And like Eliot, but in a far more visceral way,
Bacon filled his work with the Gothic - snarling mouths,
bodies in basements, blood everywhere.
The popular image of Bacon, and one which he was only too happy
to project, was that of the habitue of old Soho, a London bohemian.
But to get to the root of him - and ever closer to the vampire
heartland of Gothic - you've got come to Ireland.
In fact, Bacon's London studio is now here -
after his death it was transported, lock, stock and paintbrush,
to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.
Is this an installation or is it a reliquary?
A shrine to St Francis Bacon, painter.
It was amidst this clutter, the chaos he loved,
that Bacon created his bloodied triptychs and his mock crucifixions.
I think this is a very apt expression of the true,
awkward place he occupies in modern British Irish art.
The rest of this building is textbook neo-Classical.
This is a Gothic crypt.
Ireland's central to the history of Gothic,
not just because it was Bacon's birthplace
but because so much else that is Gothic
was born kicking and screaming here.
Charles Maturin's Melmoth The Wanderer, in which a man sells his soul to the devil,
was one of the first great Gothic novels, followed by many others,
including Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, the lurid tale of lesbian
vampirism on which Hammer's The Vampire Lovers would later be based.
Oscar Wilde also got in on the act with The Picture Of Dorian Gray,
his novel about a beautiful but damned young aesthete
haunted by a portrait that predicts his own decay.
And the Gothic fascinated Ireland's most famous modern poet,
WB Yeats, who wrote ghost stories, dabbled in the occult,
and revived Irish folk tales and myths,
for reasons as much to do with politics as poetry.
Yeats was part of the Anglo-Irish elite
and wanted to get in with the Catholic nationalists who
distrusted his whole class.
He was saying,
"Look, I'm one of you really - very Irish, very superstitious,
"I believe in magic."
Ireland was fertile ground for the Gothic precisely
because it was a divided place.
It was the earliest British colony, bloodily repressed.
The very first heart of darkness, you might say.
And Ireland was also Bram Stoker's birthplace.
It's been argued that Count Dracula feeding on the Transylvannian
peasantry is a grim caricature of the absentee Anglo-Irish landlord,
a bloodsucking parasite exploiting his tenants -
plausible, because when researching his novel Stoker did
compare Transylvanian peasants to "our Paddy".
So Stoker's Dracula, written in 1897, can be
read as a veiled commentary on problems that would boil over
two decades later, during Bacon's formative early years.
Bacon's background was grander than Stoker's
but they were both part of the Protestant ruling elite
and both inherited the same deep-rooted fears.
In fact, the Anglo-Irish had been on the defensive
since the mid-19th century.
By the 1860s, the Anglo-Irish ascendancy felt
more like a descendancy.
They were hemmed in,
threatened by the rise of anti-British Irish nationalism
and by the growth of the Catholic middle class.
There were anxieties and panics, most of them pure fantasies,
about attacks on "The Big House", the generic name for
these great Georgian slabs of granite
in which the ruling class mostly lived.
An Anglo-Irishman's home was fast becoming his haunted castle.
Francis Bacon's Anglo-Irish home was haunted by his sadistic,
manipulative father, a military man and racehorse trainer,
who had the young Bacon horsewhipped by his stable grooms.
Bacon was fascinated by the cruelties inflicted by authority.
Does that constant recurring image in his work
of the snarling vampire mouth
represent Bacon's own father? The Anglo-Irish class, even,
crying out not just in defiance but also in paranoia?
One thing is certain - for the young Bacon, the Irish countryside, with
its ancient peat bogs and all the old folklore,
was a landscape of fear,
especially in the 1920s, when trouble had brewed up,
as so often in Ireland, into The Troubles.
Bacon's sense that he was part of a threatened class was sharpened
when he stayed with his maternal grandfather, who,
as a chief of police, was a prime target for the Irish Republicans.
And one night, Bacon would have been around ten or 11,
he and his grandfather were driving along
when their car broke down somewhere round here in the Bog of Allan.
They had to abandon it and go on by foot.
It was dark, they could hear cries and halloos and see flashing lights.
The rebel groups were out to get them.
They made their way to safety.
They found refuge in a friendly house, a Big House, of course.
But Bacon never forgot the sense of terror he felt that night.
It was Bacon's achievement to make from his anxiety images that
could speak - scream - to Everyman.
He'd soon leave Ireland and feed on terrors far beyond its shores,
but I'm not sure Ireland ever left him.
Three Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion, 1946.
An altarpiece for the generation of Auschwitz.
The memory of the screaming father figure is still there,
but there's far more to the painting than a Freudian childhood trauma.
This was Bacon's way of saying that we in the modern world aren't
just living the Gothic nightmare, we may never wake up from it.
And who can say he was entirely wrong?
It was true by mid-20th century and it's even truer today -
Gothic's everywhere. We're all Gothic now.
What do I really mean by that?
Not just that Gothic's in our paintings, our books,
the films we go to see.
It's in our minds.
Many of the worst Gothic nightmares, like Frankenstein and Dracula,
were once branded weird or sensationalist.
But they were so prophetic that now they're everyone's bad dreams.
But the influence of Gothic's optimists is still with us too,
the influence of Marx and Morris, who saw the negative side
of the modern world but wanted to change it
into a better place.
As Morris said,
"We shall be our own Goths,
"and at whatever cost break up the new tyrannous empire of capitalism!"
You don't have to be an anti-capitalist to feel the pressure
modern advertising puts on us all to consume and conform.
So, the Goths of today are actually true to Morris in their own way -
asserting their individuality,
marking themselves out.
And if they all look different in the same kind of way -
well, maybe they're just finding out, like Morris,
that being a rebel comes with contradictions.
Yes, the legacy of Gothic's everywhere.
Which brings me back, one last time, to Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Not Count Dracula, but the book's other vampire, new technology.
I think Stoker was well and truly spooked by the idea that people,
or their traces, might continue to live, ghost-like, in the machine.
What would he have made of our main machine, the mobile?
It grips us by the ear and the eye, if not the neck,
and connects us constantly to a realm of the spirits.
Real life is elsewhere, a poet once said.
Well, now, it really is elsewhere, because this little device
doesn't just let us speak to people who aren't really here,
it allows us to listen to their music, to see their pictures.
But there's a cost because you have to disconnect
from your own immediate reality
to connect to the life that's in the machine.
I had not thought Google had undone so many.
Perhaps what this little piece of Gothic - all Gothic -
really proves is that we yearn to be haunted,
to be taken outside and beyond of ourselves.
You can call it megabytes,
but it's really just the bite of Dracula.
MOBILE PHONE RINGS