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Gothic.

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It began with the desire to revive
something that was dead,

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a style of medieval architecture.

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But it grew like graveyard ivy, more
sinister at every twist and turn.

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By the mid-19th century,

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Gothic had spread in all directions.

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There was Gothic painting, with

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its fears and phobias, the Gothic
novel, rooted in terror and dread.

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But what happened to the Gothic
ivy as it grew out of

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the Victorian age and into
the 20th century, into our own time?

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It proliferated.

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British novelists, poets,
film-makers,

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so many have seized on the Gothic
or been seized by it.

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Nowadays, it's everywhere.

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It's infected our books, films,
TV, music, fashion and beyond.

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Even technology's Gothic.
There are ghosts in the machine.

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So Gothic can't be compared to ivy
any more. It's gone viral.

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But how did it happen?

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To understand that, there's somebody
you just have to meet.

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Count Dracula's waxen hue became

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greenish-yellow by the contrast
of his burning eyes.

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And the red scar on the forehead
showed on the pallid skin

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like a palpitating wound.

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"You think to baffle me, you,
with your pale faces all in a row

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"like sheep in a butcher's.

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"You shall be sorry yet.

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"My revenge has just begun.

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"I spread it over centuries,
and time is on my side.

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"Your girls that you all
love are mine already,

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"and through them, you and others
shall yet be mine,

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"my creatures to do my bidding,

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"to be my jackals when I want
to feed."

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In the world of the Gothic,
all roads lead to Dracula.

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And, in fact, I'm standing
above a fictional crossroads

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here in Purfleet in Essex.

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The novelist Bram Stoker knew
this area well and in Dracula

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he named the vampire's Essex estate
Carfax,

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from the French "quatre faces",

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meaning "four faces"
or cardinal points of the compass.

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And it's in this place,
with its sense of four different

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directions, that
the novel moves to its conclusion.

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Dracula has 50 boxes
of Transylvanian earth -

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its vitalising properties help to
keep him alive -

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transported to this spot
from Whitby via Kings Cross.

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So when you look down at
those buildings you're

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looking at Dracula's domain,
but how did he really get here?

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In terms of the plot,
the answer's straightforward.

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Carfax appears at the start
of the novel.

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Dracula buys the house
when the unsuspecting agent,

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Jonathan Harker, pays him
a visit at his Transylvanian castle.

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Harker shows him

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some black-and-white photos
of the place -

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Kodaks, taken with one of
the first mass-produced cameras.

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Deal done, and Dracula has
a little piece of England.

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Beyond the storyline,
what I mean when I say

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"How did Dracula get here?"

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is also how did Dracula
get up here?

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How did he come to enthral
and fascinate us

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in such a powerful
and all-pervasive way?

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There had been vampires
before Dracula, but none like him.

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From the point of his creation
in the mid-1890s, he looks both

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backwards and forwards.

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Backwards to the "gloomth" of the
classic 18th-century Gothic novel

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with its dungeons
and haunted castles in foreign parts

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and forwards through the
20th century and into our own time.

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His influence has infused
our culture through a veritable

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blood bank of further novels,

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comics, films, TV series -
you name it.

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And I think the question is
how did it happen?

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How did this extraordinary mythical
creature come to take

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possession of our collective
imagination?

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Whitby, where Dracula
lands before going on to take

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possession of his Carfax estate.

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But to understand the phenomenon
of Dracula we need to go

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beyond the Yorkshire town with which
he's become so associated.

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Dracula lives on - remains undead -

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because Stoker kept his tale
chillingly simple.

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A terrible creature
arrives from foreign parts.

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A vampire, which
sucks the blood of its victims,

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each becoming a vampire in turn.

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Dracula's purpose?

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To travel to London,
the heart of British society,

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and infect it with
the vampire virus.

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He's elusive, difficult to catch,
but that's the appeal.

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Onto his darkness
we can project any anxiety we wish.

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He's been plague, famine,
syphilis, AIDS,

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even computer viruses.

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But what would his first audience
have made of him,

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in the late 19th century?

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Bram Stoker's Dracula
gripped readers

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because it held up a mirror to
a society full of foreboding.

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The novel's dark vision, of a world
where there are only vampires

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and victims, played on a real
anxiety -

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the fear that a terrible change

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was taking place in society,

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that the modern world really
was being stalked by a monster.

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A monster who dwelled
not in a Transylvanian castle,

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but in the citadel of
the modern market.

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Capital is dead labour
which vampire-like lives only

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by sucking living labour and lives
the more the more labour it sucks.

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30 years before Stoker wrote
Dracula, the economist

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and philosopher Karl Marx had
written his own great book

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about a blood-sucking beast.

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Das Kapital, he called it,
its subject a real-life vampire -

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the great demon Capital, which
drains a drop of the worker's blood

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every second of the working day.

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Marx laid bare the workings of what
he called capitalism,

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the mechanism behind its face.

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What made the market tick?

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The vast forces of production.

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And what made them tick was labour,
workers grinding away under

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the heel of their capitalist masters
and the tyranny of the clock.

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He backed up his thesis with facts
and figures,

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but to get his readers' blood up
Marx used the imagery of Gothic.

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The time
during which the labourer works

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is the time during which
the capitalist consumes

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the labour-power he has purchased
of him.

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The prolongation of
the working day beyond the limits of
the natural day into the night

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only slightly quenches
the vampire thirst

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for the living blood of labour.

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Time is money, blood money.

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Capitalism, as we think of it thanks
to him, is presented by Marx

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as predatory and ghoulish -
red in spooky tooth and claw.

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For Marx, the wiles of the vampire
were at work

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everywhere in the modern world.

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Not just at the point of production,
workers drained of blood,

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but also at the point
of consumption,

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where purchasers were beguiled

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by the new advertising and window
displays of the 19th century.

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Marx saw shopping as an unsettling
experience, in which we're

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mesmerised by commerce, just
like victims seduced by a vampire.

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Norman Mailer once said that
Das Kapital is a great novel.

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What he forgot to add is
that it's a Gothic novel.

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Because if Karl Marx's capitalists
are the new vampiric villains

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sucking the blood of the workforce,
what are the consumers?

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In Marx's view, they are the deluded
devotees of a new sect.

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When he looked at the shop window
fronts of Victorian London

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he didn't see fine porcelain,
fob watches, beautiful furniture.

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He saw a row of false idols
beguiling

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and enchanting people
into purchasing them.

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That's why he said
"The commodity is a fetish".

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This was voodoo economics.

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For all its Gothic elements,
Das Kapital was still

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a dense theoretical study
written by a German emigre.

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Is that why its importance to
British Gothic has gone unnoticed?

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But Gothic without Marx
is like Dracula without blood.

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Bram Stoker never read Das Kapital,
but it certainly

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contributed to the fin-de-siecle
mood that made Dracula so powerful.

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It was Marx who'd first raised
the vampire from mere horror to

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modern myth.

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He'd seeded the sinister
thought that there was something

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essentially vampiric
about the modern world.

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Marx certainly inspired the great
optimist of late Victorian Gothic -

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a man who was no
writer of dark fantasy,

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but the very opposite.

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He was an idealist, an artist
and designer who hoped

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he could redeem
the world of commerce from within.

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Here we are.
Number 449 Oxford Street.

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This is where Morris and Company
used to display their commodities.

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The wallpaper and designs of
William Morris, founder of

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the Arts and Crafts movement,

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associate member of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,

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supporter of the
Gothic Revival in architecture,

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visionary poet and pamphleteer.

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Now the idea that there was a
kinship between Karl Marx and

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Gothic Revivalists like Morris

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wouldn't have surprised him in
the slightest

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because he was one of the first
Englishmen to read Das Kapital.

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He had it in a French copy.

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He designed his own gilt-edged
cover for it.

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Morris, like Marx,
was a revolutionary socialist

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and he wanted to change the world,
to halt the advance of

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this newly named beast -
"consumer capitalism".

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To drive a stake through its heart.

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As if anyone could stop all of this.

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But Morris had a go, and one
of his strategies was fighting

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capitalist quantity,
the endless conveyor belt of tatty

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factory commodities,
with the quality of his own goods,

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individually
crafted in the workshop.

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Of course, they were far too
expensive for ordinary

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working people - the very people
Morris wanted to empower.

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But that is just one of the hazards
of being a revolutionary.

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You keep hitting contradictions.

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You can't fault Morris's idealism,
though.

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Here he was in his twilight years,

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miles away from the cliched view of
him as an artist in rural retreat,

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living in West London to be
close to the action.

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As Morris grew older
he became more political

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and he spent more time in London.

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He had become a member
of the Social Democratic Federation

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but it wasn't radical
enough for him.

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So, he co-founded the new,
more militant Socialist League.

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00:13:27,000 --> 00:13:30,880
Eleanor Marx, Karl's daughter,
was one of the signatories

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and Morris even set up
its Hammersmith branch.

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He lobbied, he made speeches
and he went to rallies which were

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met with a level of police
brutality that appalled him.

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Now, this was the house, the house
where Morris and his workers,

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freed from the vampiric clutches
of capitalism,

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created their carpets.

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It was also their printing press

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and where
they held their political meetings.

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00:14:01,480 --> 00:14:03,720
Now, what were
the foundation stones

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of Morris's revolutionary
socialist politics?

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00:14:07,760 --> 00:14:10,960
Two books - Marx's Das Kapital,
of course,

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but also a text he had read in his
youth and which he believed in

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00:14:15,880 --> 00:14:19,640
so passionately that he personally
re-printed it in this house.

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00:14:20,800 --> 00:14:24,560
The book?
John Ruskin, The Nature Of Gothic.

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00:14:27,560 --> 00:14:30,320
John Ruskin was the most
influential art critic

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00:14:30,320 --> 00:14:33,160
of the 19th century,
but he was also a critic

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00:14:33,160 --> 00:14:37,920
of society, arguing that the
Industrial Revolution was a blight.

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00:14:40,240 --> 00:14:47,640
Ruskin writing about the Gothic,
printed by William Morris.

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00:14:47,640 --> 00:14:50,800
And I love the way they've
placed the book for me

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00:14:50,800 --> 00:14:54,280
here at Kelmscott House
on a little cushion.

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00:14:54,280 --> 00:14:57,640
It's almost as if it's asleep.
So let's wake it up.

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00:15:01,600 --> 00:15:03,000
Beautiful thing.

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So this really is
an absolutely mint edition.

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00:15:07,920 --> 00:15:12,360
But it's actually a book with,
I think, a very modern message and

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00:15:12,360 --> 00:15:16,720
it certainly would have seemed
very modern to William Morris.

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Here he is railing against
modern factory production.

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00:15:21,160 --> 00:15:24,200
In particular, the production
of glass beads. He says,

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"Glass beads are utterly
unnecessary.

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00:15:26,760 --> 00:15:29,240
"They are formed by drawing out
the glass into rods,

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00:15:29,240 --> 00:15:32,280
"the rods are chopped up into
fragments of the size of beads

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"by the human hand.

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00:15:33,520 --> 00:15:36,520
"The men who chop up the rods sit
at their work all day, their hands

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00:15:36,520 --> 00:15:41,560
"vibrating with a perpetual
and exquisitely timed palsy.

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00:15:41,560 --> 00:15:46,480
"The beads dropping beneath their
vibration like hail." C-c-c-r-r-r...

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You can hear it -
what a wonderful description

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00:15:49,720 --> 00:15:51,600
of a horrible factory job,

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00:15:51,600 --> 00:15:55,480
and Ruskin goes on to say to his
well-bred readership,

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00:15:55,480 --> 00:15:58,600
"Every young lady therefore who buys
glass beads

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00:15:58,600 --> 00:16:00,680
"is engaged in the slave trade."

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00:16:02,200 --> 00:16:03,520
Strong words.

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00:16:08,120 --> 00:16:11,480
Why was Morris
so keen to republish those words,

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00:16:11,480 --> 00:16:13,960
40 years after
they had been written?

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00:16:13,960 --> 00:16:19,920
Partly because Ruskin's views chimed
so well with those of Karl Marx.

237
00:16:19,920 --> 00:16:22,200
But it was also because Morris was
drawn to

238
00:16:22,200 --> 00:16:24,080
Ruskin's aesthetic theories.

239
00:16:25,400 --> 00:16:28,360
To fight the blood-sucking beast
of capitalism,

240
00:16:28,360 --> 00:16:31,600
Morris turned to his hero's
core beliefs.

241
00:16:31,600 --> 00:16:34,360
Ruskin had preached
for a return to the Christian values

242
00:16:34,360 --> 00:16:37,520
of the Middle Ages, and he'd
argued that the spirituality

243
00:16:37,520 --> 00:16:40,920
and love which medieval craftsmen
had brought to their work

244
00:16:40,920 --> 00:16:43,520
must somehow be
recovered in the modern world.

245
00:16:45,360 --> 00:16:48,720
Morris tried to turn Ruskin's
ideas about art and craft

246
00:16:48,720 --> 00:16:50,360
into a reality -

247
00:16:50,360 --> 00:16:53,680
and hoped that one day everybody
would live in surroundings

248
00:16:53,680 --> 00:16:56,360
of handcrafted beauty.

249
00:16:56,360 --> 00:16:57,920
Naive?

250
00:16:57,920 --> 00:17:00,520
Maybe, but there's still one place
where you can see

251
00:17:00,520 --> 00:17:01,960
the beauty of the idea.

252
00:17:05,720 --> 00:17:08,720
Welcome to Number Seven
Hammersmith Terrace.

253
00:17:09,760 --> 00:17:14,200
Now, no original Morris interiors
survive at Kelmscott House, which is

254
00:17:14,200 --> 00:17:18,680
just around the corner, but here
they do,

255
00:17:18,680 --> 00:17:20,200
and it's quite something.

256
00:17:21,800 --> 00:17:26,440
This, this was once the home
of Emery Walker, who was a close

257
00:17:26,440 --> 00:17:28,880
friend of William Morris.

258
00:17:28,880 --> 00:17:32,040
They collaborated on Morris's
publishing ventures -

259
00:17:32,040 --> 00:17:34,680
Walker was a typographer himself -

260
00:17:34,680 --> 00:17:38,600
and they were also comrades, fellow
members of the Socialist League

261
00:17:38,600 --> 00:17:41,880
and you can feel that sense of their
close attachment to one another

262
00:17:41,880 --> 00:17:45,560
in this house, which,
extraordinarily, has remained

263
00:17:45,560 --> 00:17:49,960
almost untouched since Walker lived
here 100 years ago.

264
00:17:49,960 --> 00:17:55,000
Every inch is decorated with William
Morris fabrics, William Morris

265
00:17:55,000 --> 00:17:59,600
wallpapers, ceramics, even the
sconce is a William Morris design.

266
00:17:59,600 --> 00:18:04,160
It's almost uncanny, you expect
Morris to call up

267
00:18:04,160 --> 00:18:07,360
on the phone at any minute or
walk through the door

268
00:18:07,360 --> 00:18:10,360
and his spirit does still
haunt this place.

269
00:18:10,360 --> 00:18:13,960
He's there, present in the ghostly
form of photographs.

270
00:18:13,960 --> 00:18:15,760
It's just wonderful.

271
00:18:26,360 --> 00:18:29,520
Wonderful too the Gothic Revival
on a larger scale,

272
00:18:29,520 --> 00:18:30,960
and equally poignant.

273
00:18:32,240 --> 00:18:35,320
Keble College, Oxford,
founded in 1870,

274
00:18:35,320 --> 00:18:37,320
designed by William Butterfield,

275
00:18:37,320 --> 00:18:41,920
is its last gasp, captured in
patterns of polychrome stone.

276
00:18:43,280 --> 00:18:47,680
Built according to Ruskin's
blueprint for the true Gothic style,

277
00:18:47,680 --> 00:18:51,160
it also looked back to
Pugin's early Victorian dream

278
00:18:51,160 --> 00:18:54,960
of refashioning all of Britain
in the image of a medieval town.

279
00:18:56,720 --> 00:19:00,000
But this was a final flowering
of a style soon to be cut off

280
00:19:00,000 --> 00:19:05,360
by the onslaught of the modern,
the pragmatic, the utilitarian.

281
00:19:05,360 --> 00:19:09,120
Elaborate detail?
Waste of time and money.

282
00:19:09,120 --> 00:19:12,960
Late Victorian Gothic might
flourish a veritable forest

283
00:19:12,960 --> 00:19:15,680
of crosses at its vampire enemy.

284
00:19:15,680 --> 00:19:19,960
But the vampire, irresistible,
carried on regardless.

285
00:19:25,880 --> 00:19:28,800
In the middle of the 19th century,
as a young man,

286
00:19:28,800 --> 00:19:32,560
Morris had singled out the train
as a shrieking abomination,

287
00:19:32,560 --> 00:19:36,800
the symbol of all that was bad about
industrialisation and the machine.

288
00:19:38,720 --> 00:19:41,920
By the end of the century the train
had certainly not stopped

289
00:19:41,920 --> 00:19:45,400
shrieking, and the steam engine
couldn't be halted.

290
00:19:45,400 --> 00:19:48,520
Even entertainment was becoming
industrialised.

291
00:19:48,520 --> 00:19:51,720
Machines were becoming
a source of pleasure.

292
00:19:51,720 --> 00:19:55,240
William Morris was left behind,
isolated,

293
00:19:55,240 --> 00:19:57,520
a prophet in the wilderness.

294
00:19:58,960 --> 00:20:02,000
One man's wilderness is another's
paradise -

295
00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:04,520
even a man with the same name.

296
00:20:04,520 --> 00:20:09,960
By a strange quirk, in 1913, barely
15 years after William Morris's

297
00:20:09,960 --> 00:20:14,440
death, another William Morris,
the car manufacturer,

298
00:20:14,440 --> 00:20:18,120
started up his factory in Cowley,
on the outskirts of Oxford.

299
00:20:19,640 --> 00:20:23,560
City of dreaming spires,
stronghold of the Gothic Revival.

300
00:20:23,560 --> 00:20:27,520
Adding to the irony, the first
William Morris had been a student

301
00:20:27,520 --> 00:20:31,880
here and later returned to lecture
on the evils of the modern world.

302
00:20:36,600 --> 00:20:39,840
The world doesn't come much more
modern than this.

303
00:20:39,840 --> 00:20:43,040
The second William Morris introduced
the very latest production

304
00:20:43,040 --> 00:20:45,880
techniques to early
20th-century Britain,

305
00:20:45,880 --> 00:20:49,520
namely the assembly line
used by the American Henry Ford

306
00:20:49,520 --> 00:20:52,040
in his Detroit car plants.

307
00:20:52,040 --> 00:20:55,840
The same division of labour that had
horrified Ruskin had now

308
00:20:55,840 --> 00:21:00,080
intensified, each worker given
a single task to perform

309
00:21:00,080 --> 00:21:01,560
again and again.

310
00:21:06,600 --> 00:21:08,840
100 years later, and automation

311
00:21:08,840 --> 00:21:13,520
has reached its logical conclusion,
robots doing most of the work.

312
00:21:13,520 --> 00:21:16,640
Seen through Gothic eyes,
it's a nightmare come to pass.

313
00:21:17,760 --> 00:21:21,320
Human beings replaced
by Frankenstein monsters.

314
00:21:21,320 --> 00:21:24,440
Or by mechanised Draculas,
with soldering-iron fangs.

315
00:21:26,560 --> 00:21:29,160
Is this what the second
William Morris's workforce

316
00:21:29,160 --> 00:21:31,440
looks like once Marx's great vampire

317
00:21:31,440 --> 00:21:36,040
has drunk all the blood -
an army of the living dead,

318
00:21:36,040 --> 00:21:38,520
capable of working 24 hours a day?

319
00:21:39,720 --> 00:21:43,680
It looks different, but it's really
just Fordism brought up-to-date.

320
00:21:46,280 --> 00:21:49,840
Robots and new technology aside,
I think William Morris would

321
00:21:49,840 --> 00:21:52,720
probably have felt
very at home here.

322
00:21:52,720 --> 00:21:56,320
He certainly would have
recognised this modern chart

323
00:21:56,320 --> 00:21:59,000
following the progress of the car
through the production line

324
00:21:59,000 --> 00:22:02,040
because, after all, it's very
similar to the blueprints he'd

325
00:22:02,040 --> 00:22:05,240
introduced all the way back in 1913.

326
00:22:05,240 --> 00:22:08,360
Henry Ford's methods brought
to Britain.

327
00:22:08,360 --> 00:22:12,800
In those days it was 20 cars
a week, now it's 900 a day,

328
00:22:12,800 --> 00:22:17,560
and there's another difference too -
the modern consumer can

329
00:22:17,560 --> 00:22:23,000
choose the car any colour he likes,
any type of wheel, the upholstery.

330
00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:25,000
You name it,
it's your car to design.

331
00:22:26,280 --> 00:22:29,560
I wonder what the other William
Morris might have made of that.

332
00:22:32,040 --> 00:22:33,800
Would he have seen
it as a good thing,

333
00:22:33,800 --> 00:22:36,600
a little bit of power given
back to the individual?

334
00:22:37,760 --> 00:22:40,160
Or just another
of the vampire's traps?

335
00:22:42,040 --> 00:22:45,120
When Morris looked at
the modern world he could only see

336
00:22:45,120 --> 00:22:49,600
a relentless juggernaut,
a huge, impersonal machine.

337
00:22:51,440 --> 00:22:54,520
But factories
and trains weren't the whole story.

338
00:22:54,520 --> 00:22:57,600
The industry of the late
19th century brought other things

339
00:22:57,600 --> 00:22:59,760
in its wake too -

340
00:22:59,760 --> 00:23:03,800
more personal, almost human
technologies were being developed,

341
00:23:03,800 --> 00:23:06,320
what would come to be
known as the new media.

342
00:23:08,440 --> 00:23:11,960
They were destined to play a leading
part in the story of Gothic,

343
00:23:11,960 --> 00:23:14,520
and they should have been on
Morris's radar.

344
00:23:14,520 --> 00:23:15,800
Before he bought it,

345
00:23:15,800 --> 00:23:18,840
his home in Hammersmith was where
the telegraph had been invented.

346
00:23:20,480 --> 00:23:24,800
But these new phenomena were
certainly on Bram Stoker's radar.

347
00:23:24,800 --> 00:23:27,600
In fact,
they haunt his famous novel Dracula

348
00:23:27,600 --> 00:23:30,440
every bit as much
as the figure of the vampire.

349
00:23:41,600 --> 00:23:44,560
You might expect
Bram Stoker's Dracula

350
00:23:44,560 --> 00:23:46,720
to be all about ruined abbeys

351
00:23:46,720 --> 00:23:49,760
and castles,
vampires and blood,

352
00:23:49,760 --> 00:23:54,160
but in fact the novel is obsessively
full of references to

353
00:23:54,160 --> 00:23:58,360
the new technology, the new media
of the late 19th century.

354
00:23:58,360 --> 00:24:03,200
The telephone, the typewriter,
the phonograph and the Kodak camera.

355
00:24:08,720 --> 00:24:12,960
The very form of the novel draws on
the possibilities of new technology.

356
00:24:14,920 --> 00:24:17,960
Its narrative is
composed from several characters'

357
00:24:17,960 --> 00:24:21,520
voices or rather their raw
materials, their diaries,

358
00:24:21,520 --> 00:24:25,960
their journals, their letters,
newspaper cuttings.

359
00:24:25,960 --> 00:24:30,520
And it's the typewriter which
Bram Stoker used to write the novel,

360
00:24:30,520 --> 00:24:34,160
but IN the novel, Mina Harker's
typewriter,

361
00:24:34,160 --> 00:24:38,560
with its many-fanged mouth,
its metal teeth,

362
00:24:38,560 --> 00:24:43,760
ingests all this material
and records it as print on paper.

363
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:50,680
Typing becomes a weapon,

364
00:24:50,680 --> 00:24:54,840
the resulting documentation used to
track Dracula to his lair.

365
00:24:54,840 --> 00:24:59,240
The sharing and circulation
of evidence is what brings him down.

366
00:25:00,920 --> 00:25:05,080
So copying, and shortcuts to
copying, like shorthand,

367
00:25:05,080 --> 00:25:07,480
are an essential part of the plot.

368
00:25:07,480 --> 00:25:09,880
This is where the manifold comes in,

369
00:25:09,880 --> 00:25:14,040
enabling the typewriter to
produce carbon copies.

370
00:25:14,040 --> 00:25:18,320
Jonathan Harker's wife, Mina,
uses it to churn out and duplicate

371
00:25:18,320 --> 00:25:22,200
so much information she's virtually
a one-woman printing press.

372
00:25:24,800 --> 00:25:30,280
But it's the psychiatrist Dr Seward
who takes copying to an extreme.

373
00:25:30,280 --> 00:25:33,320
His journal relates
the escape of Renfield,

374
00:25:33,320 --> 00:25:37,360
the lunatic - in fact he's
a vampire - who leaps over the walls

375
00:25:37,360 --> 00:25:42,840
of his asylum in Purfleet, ominously
close to Dracula's Carfax estate.

376
00:25:45,600 --> 00:25:49,800
The doctor's observations take
the form of a voice recording onto

377
00:25:49,800 --> 00:25:52,400
the wax cylinder of a phonograph.

378
00:25:53,800 --> 00:25:55,840
Then he has Mina transcribe it,

379
00:25:55,840 --> 00:25:59,720
a process which she in turn
writes up in her personal journal.

380
00:26:09,080 --> 00:26:11,280
Mina Harker's journal, 29 September.

381
00:26:13,760 --> 00:26:16,920
After dinner I came with
Dr Seward to his study.

382
00:26:16,920 --> 00:26:20,920
He brought back the phonograph from
my room, and I took my typewriter.

383
00:26:20,920 --> 00:26:23,920
He placed me in a comfortable chair,
and arranged the phonograph

384
00:26:23,920 --> 00:26:25,920
so that I could touch it
without getting up,

385
00:26:25,920 --> 00:26:29,040
and showed me how to stop it in case
I should want to pause.

386
00:26:29,040 --> 00:26:33,200
Then he very thoughtfully took
a chair, with his back to me,

387
00:26:33,200 --> 00:26:36,280
so that I might be as free
as possible, and began to read.

388
00:26:37,480 --> 00:26:40,120
I put the forked metal to my ears
and listened.

389
00:26:44,880 --> 00:26:47,040
Bram Stoker's description reminds me

390
00:26:47,040 --> 00:26:50,600
of a seance or
a session in psychoanalysis.

391
00:26:50,600 --> 00:26:54,880
This is typing beyond the call
of duty for a woman who is part of

392
00:26:54,880 --> 00:27:00,080
a whole new class of female worker,
the secretary or stenographer.

393
00:27:00,080 --> 00:27:03,880
A little later on, Mina says that
she is typing out the words

394
00:27:03,880 --> 00:27:07,240
precisely so that other people won't
have to listen to

395
00:27:07,240 --> 00:27:12,280
the machine's cruel recording of
the anguish in Dr Seward's voice,

396
00:27:12,280 --> 00:27:16,080
like a soul crying out to
Almighty God.

397
00:27:16,080 --> 00:27:20,120
She is the secretary in touch with
the dark or other side.

398
00:27:20,120 --> 00:27:25,040
A spiritualist medium using
the new medium or media

399
00:27:25,040 --> 00:27:27,640
of the phonograph
and the typewriter.

400
00:27:30,520 --> 00:27:34,920
What's the subtext of all this,
as they say?

401
00:27:34,920 --> 00:27:38,400
The new technology might be used
to fight the vampire,

402
00:27:38,400 --> 00:27:40,680
but at the same time it can be
read as another version

403
00:27:40,680 --> 00:27:44,960
of the vampire virus -
multiplying as it feeds

404
00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:49,360
not on blood but on the information
confided to the QWERTYUIOP keys

405
00:27:49,360 --> 00:27:52,440
of the typewriter or
spoken into the machine.

406
00:27:56,040 --> 00:28:00,400
Stoker implies that it's not
just our facts, information,

407
00:28:00,400 --> 00:28:03,400
but a bit of us that's being copied
in the process,

408
00:28:03,400 --> 00:28:05,200
and that the modern age makes

409
00:28:05,200 --> 00:28:09,520
vampires us of all,
ghosts who live on,

410
00:28:09,520 --> 00:28:14,360
in the phonograph or the photograph
or in the moving picture.

411
00:28:15,440 --> 00:28:18,240
Perhaps it's no wonder that
Dracula's image,

412
00:28:18,240 --> 00:28:20,360
which can never be seen in a mirror,

413
00:28:20,360 --> 00:28:23,360
would multiply in the darkness of
the auditorium.

414
00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:30,040
The most thrilling new technology
of the 1890s was cinema, which

415
00:28:30,040 --> 00:28:32,760
started out as a fairground sideshow

416
00:28:32,760 --> 00:28:38,040
but soon moved into cinemas like
this, The Granada in Tooting,

417
00:28:38,040 --> 00:28:41,400
less picture palace
than movie cathedral,

418
00:28:41,400 --> 00:28:44,840
complete with Gothic decoration.

419
00:28:44,840 --> 00:28:48,520
Now, there's no film
in Bram Stoker's Dracula

420
00:28:48,520 --> 00:28:53,400
apart from that in the Kodak stills
camera used by Jonathan Harker,

421
00:28:53,400 --> 00:28:56,920
but the book would lend itself to
countless adaptations for

422
00:28:56,920 --> 00:28:59,840
the big screen, a multitude of
spin-offs,

423
00:28:59,840 --> 00:29:01,920
and a fair number of spoofs.

424
00:29:01,920 --> 00:29:05,640
More than any other medium it was
cinema that propelled

425
00:29:05,640 --> 00:29:07,200
Gothic around the globe.

426
00:29:13,120 --> 00:29:15,920
The genre was already
well-established by 1931,

427
00:29:15,920 --> 00:29:18,560
when Bela Lugosi played Dracula.

428
00:29:19,840 --> 00:29:23,200
The floodgates had been opened
nearly a decade before with

429
00:29:23,200 --> 00:29:27,320
Nosferatu, which, much to the
chagrin of the Bram Stoker estate,

430
00:29:27,320 --> 00:29:29,960
did not acknowledge
its literary source.

431
00:29:32,480 --> 00:29:35,240
It's also as if the property had
been whipped from under

432
00:29:35,240 --> 00:29:38,080
the nose of the British film
industry.

433
00:29:38,080 --> 00:29:40,520
But that was about to change.

434
00:29:40,520 --> 00:29:45,400
Watching the director of Nosferatu,
FW Murnau, at work on his next

435
00:29:45,400 --> 00:29:49,760
picture in the Bioskop-Atelier
studios in Potsdam was

436
00:29:49,760 --> 00:29:51,360
the young Alfred Hitchcock.

437
00:29:53,160 --> 00:29:57,040
The lessons he learned in Germany
he would bring home to

438
00:29:57,040 --> 00:29:59,520
Gainsborough Studios in Islington,

439
00:29:59,520 --> 00:30:02,000
where he directed The Lodger
in 1927.

440
00:30:04,480 --> 00:30:07,280
This "Story of the London Fog", as
it was called,

441
00:30:07,280 --> 00:30:09,040
was about the Avenger,

442
00:30:09,040 --> 00:30:12,520
a serial killer in the mould of
Jack the Ripper, whose bloody true

443
00:30:12,520 --> 00:30:16,040
crimes Bram Stoker acknowledged
as an influence on Dracula.

444
00:30:17,240 --> 00:30:20,080
The chief suspect in the film
is Jonathan Drew,

445
00:30:20,080 --> 00:30:24,680
played by Ivor Novello, and he makes
an entry out of the London fog

446
00:30:24,680 --> 00:30:28,280
worthy of Dracula emerging
from the mists of Transylvania.

447
00:30:29,480 --> 00:30:31,000
SCREAMING

448
00:30:33,920 --> 00:30:36,800
Is there something about
the disembodied nature of

449
00:30:36,800 --> 00:30:40,040
the film image that lends itself
to Gothic?

450
00:30:41,080 --> 00:30:42,400
I'd say that there is.

451
00:30:42,400 --> 00:30:46,520
In fact, I'd argue that the cinema
is the ultimate Gothic

452
00:30:46,520 --> 00:30:49,800
haunted house because what does it
present you with?

453
00:30:49,800 --> 00:30:54,120
Apparitions, images of people who
aren't really there

454
00:30:54,120 --> 00:30:57,920
and if you're watching
an old film the fact is that

455
00:30:57,920 --> 00:31:02,240
you are watching people who are dead
but they seem alive.

456
00:31:02,240 --> 00:31:04,800
You are communing with ghosts.

457
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:08,880
SCREAMING

458
00:31:15,400 --> 00:31:18,120
The film industry in Britain never
established itself to

459
00:31:18,120 --> 00:31:21,720
the commercial and artistic degree
which it did in Germany, France,

460
00:31:21,720 --> 00:31:23,920
Italy and, of course, America.

461
00:31:25,280 --> 00:31:27,920
Hitchcock was soon off to
Hollywood, taking with him

462
00:31:27,920 --> 00:31:31,440
his predilection for murder
and his penchant for the Gothic.

463
00:31:32,640 --> 00:31:36,520
It's certainly there in the dream
house of Manderley in Rebecca,

464
00:31:36,520 --> 00:31:40,360
and the house of Oedipal
necrophile horrors in Psycho.

465
00:31:41,920 --> 00:31:43,800
For the British film industry,
though,

466
00:31:43,800 --> 00:31:47,760
there'd be a sting in the tail,
a return of the repressed.

467
00:31:50,880 --> 00:31:52,360
Come with us if you dare,

468
00:31:52,360 --> 00:31:54,840
into a twilight world of
unspeakable horror.

469
00:31:56,160 --> 00:31:58,800
You must die. Everybody must die!

470
00:31:58,800 --> 00:31:59,840
SCREAMING

471
00:32:07,640 --> 00:32:09,600
DRAMATIC FILM MUSIC CONTINUES

472
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:15,760
Beware the vampire lovers.

473
00:32:22,240 --> 00:32:24,840
You can't
keep a good vampire down.

474
00:32:24,840 --> 00:32:28,920
This is Oakley Court Hotel,
once owned by

475
00:32:28,920 --> 00:32:32,360
the 19th-century Liberal politician
Lord Otto Fitzgerald.

476
00:32:33,440 --> 00:32:36,880
During the 1960s it was
used as a set for some of the most

477
00:32:36,880 --> 00:32:40,680
commercially successful
British films ever made.

478
00:32:40,680 --> 00:32:47,160
Hard to believe now, but once these
very walls dripped with blood.

479
00:32:51,720 --> 00:32:53,320
SHE SCREAMS

480
00:33:09,480 --> 00:33:12,840
Conveniently, Oakley Court's just
a few hundred yards

481
00:33:12,840 --> 00:33:17,240
from the studio which made some
of its films there - Hammer Horror.

482
00:33:17,240 --> 00:33:21,920
Now, Hammer closed down in 1979
and the studio hasn't been used

483
00:33:21,920 --> 00:33:23,360
since 2010.

484
00:33:23,360 --> 00:33:26,600
These days it's closed up,
it's in private hands, but how

485
00:33:26,600 --> 00:33:30,480
appropriate that Britain's most
famous makers of horror films should

486
00:33:30,480 --> 00:33:35,560
have worked out of an 18th-century
Gothic-style mansion, like a piece

487
00:33:35,560 --> 00:33:41,360
of Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole's
Gothic house, blown upriver.

488
00:33:41,360 --> 00:33:44,440
But I'm headed in the opposite
direction. I'm going east.

489
00:33:49,960 --> 00:33:54,120
Dracula's afterlife in the cinema is
a well-known part of his story,

490
00:33:54,120 --> 00:33:55,840
the story of Gothic.

491
00:33:55,840 --> 00:33:59,720
But the Gothic has many tributaries,
irrigating

492
00:33:59,720 --> 00:34:02,760
the hinterlands of the British
imagination.

493
00:34:02,760 --> 00:34:04,360
And never more so than

494
00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:07,040
with Joseph Conrad's
Heart Of Darkness,

495
00:34:07,040 --> 00:34:11,560
published in 1899,
just two years after Dracula.

496
00:34:11,560 --> 00:34:14,000
It tells the tale of
the evil Kurtz,

497
00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:16,000
a trader in African ivory.

498
00:34:16,000 --> 00:34:19,000
With his foreign-sounding name,
his ability to stay

499
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:21,840
one step ahead, and his bloodthirsty
nature -

500
00:34:21,840 --> 00:34:24,120
well, does that remind you
of anyone?

501
00:34:25,920 --> 00:34:28,360
In chasing Kurtz's Dracula-like
shadow,

502
00:34:28,360 --> 00:34:31,400
the novel builds up a picture
of the horrors wrought upon

503
00:34:31,400 --> 00:34:35,080
Africa by Europeans
along the banks of the Congo.

504
00:34:35,080 --> 00:34:37,920
It might be a deeper,
darker river than the Thames,

505
00:34:37,920 --> 00:34:40,240
and one capable of swallowing
it whole,

506
00:34:40,240 --> 00:34:43,160
but it's the British river,
as gateway to Empire

507
00:34:43,160 --> 00:34:47,040
and the carve-up of Africa, which is
the real villain of the piece.

508
00:34:49,200 --> 00:34:53,120
In Heart Of Darkness,
the Empire comes home to roost,

509
00:34:53,120 --> 00:34:56,120
to London and the Thames estuary.

510
00:34:56,120 --> 00:35:00,480
On the first page of the novel,
Conrad describes the sky above

511
00:35:00,480 --> 00:35:07,960
this reach as "dark, condensed to a
mournful gloom, brooding motionless

512
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:10,640
"over the greatest town on Earth."

513
00:35:10,640 --> 00:35:13,840
And then Charles Marlow begins his
story

514
00:35:13,840 --> 00:35:18,600
about the plunder of African ivory,
telling it to the assembled company

515
00:35:18,600 --> 00:35:24,040
of a boat called The Nelly,
moored right here, just where

516
00:35:24,040 --> 00:35:29,720
Conrad himself in real life moored
his own boat, also named The Nelly.

517
00:35:30,920 --> 00:35:34,400
There's a strong sense in
Heart Of Darkness that

518
00:35:34,400 --> 00:35:37,600
although it was the Belgians who
first exploited

519
00:35:37,600 --> 00:35:43,280
and colonised the Congo,
we Europeans are all in it together.

520
00:35:43,280 --> 00:35:46,280
We are all responsible
for the atrocities of Empire.

521
00:35:50,440 --> 00:35:53,600
The enslavement of millions
of Africans was one of the great

522
00:35:53,600 --> 00:35:55,680
historic crimes against humanity.

523
00:35:57,800 --> 00:36:00,160
The point's brought home
by Conrad's narrator,

524
00:36:00,160 --> 00:36:02,560
Marlow, with a dark little fantasy.

525
00:36:03,960 --> 00:36:06,920
Having described the actual
abandoned dwellings

526
00:36:06,920 --> 00:36:11,400
of Africans fleeing slavery,
he then imagines the reverse -

527
00:36:11,400 --> 00:36:15,440
black slavers coming here
and rounding up the English.

528
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:21,480
A solitude, a solitude,
nobody, not a hut.

529
00:36:22,680 --> 00:36:25,320
The population had cleared out
a long time ago.

530
00:36:26,920 --> 00:36:30,080
Well, if a lot of mysterious
niggers armed with all kinds

531
00:36:30,080 --> 00:36:31,920
of fearful weapons
suddenly took to

532
00:36:31,920 --> 00:36:35,360
travelling on the road between
Deal and Gravesend, catching

533
00:36:35,360 --> 00:36:39,480
the yokels right and left to carry
heavy loads for them, I fancy

534
00:36:39,480 --> 00:36:42,400
every farm and cottage thereabouts
would get empty very soon.

535
00:36:47,560 --> 00:36:52,160
Conrad is widely seen as part
of the canon in the great

536
00:36:52,160 --> 00:36:54,360
tradition of the English novel,

537
00:36:54,360 --> 00:36:58,480
but, like Dickens, he was a writer
who drew deeply on the Gothic.

538
00:36:58,480 --> 00:37:01,680
He understood that it wasn't merely
a genre.

539
00:37:01,680 --> 00:37:05,120
It could be a way of seeing,
a way of thinking,

540
00:37:05,120 --> 00:37:08,440
and in Heart Of Darkness
he plunges the reader

541
00:37:08,440 --> 00:37:13,480
into a labyrinth, at the centre
of which lies a terrible secret.

542
00:37:13,480 --> 00:37:15,800
What could be more Gothic than that?

543
00:37:16,920 --> 00:37:20,040
And the whole tale
is spoken - it comes

544
00:37:20,040 --> 00:37:25,320
out of the mouth of a haunted man
like a spell or an incantation.

545
00:37:32,600 --> 00:37:35,640
Marlow is a mesmerising,
magical narrator,

546
00:37:35,640 --> 00:37:38,800
though he conjures with
hideous images.

547
00:37:38,800 --> 00:37:41,680
On the riverbank settlement
that is his ultimate destination

548
00:37:41,680 --> 00:37:44,480
he encounters the handiwork of
Kurtz,

549
00:37:44,480 --> 00:37:49,240
the enigmatic European trader, who
has been applying his "philosophy"

550
00:37:49,240 --> 00:37:51,440
of "exterminate all the brutes".

551
00:37:55,120 --> 00:37:58,400
There was no enclosure or fence
of any kind, but there had been

552
00:37:58,400 --> 00:38:01,840
one apparently, for near the house
half-a-dozen slim posts

553
00:38:01,840 --> 00:38:05,880
remained in a row, roughly trimmed,
and with their upper ends ornamented

554
00:38:05,880 --> 00:38:07,520
with round, carved balls.

555
00:38:09,840 --> 00:38:13,520
Now I had suddenly a nearer view,
and its first result

556
00:38:13,520 --> 00:38:16,680
was to make me throw my head
back as if before a blow.

557
00:38:18,080 --> 00:38:21,080
These round knobs were not
ornamental.

558
00:38:21,080 --> 00:38:24,440
Only one, the first I had made out,
was facing my way.

559
00:38:24,440 --> 00:38:28,800
Black, dried,
sunken, with closed eyelids -

560
00:38:28,800 --> 00:38:33,760
a head that seemed to sleep at the
top of that pole, and with the sunken

561
00:38:33,760 --> 00:38:38,840
dry lips showing a narrow white line
of the teeth smiling continuously

562
00:38:38,840 --> 00:38:42,360
at some endless and jocose dream
of that eternal slumber.

563
00:38:47,000 --> 00:38:50,920
Marlow first sees the heads -
Kurtz the vampire's human prey -

564
00:38:50,920 --> 00:38:55,080
through his binoculars,
"glasses" in the story.

565
00:38:55,080 --> 00:38:59,000
He might almost have been filming
or using a viewfinder.

566
00:38:59,000 --> 00:39:01,720
No wonder that soon after
publication and in the wake of

567
00:39:01,720 --> 00:39:04,880
photos of mutilated African workers,

568
00:39:04,880 --> 00:39:08,280
the novel was seen as a form of
documentary,

569
00:39:08,280 --> 00:39:09,640
a "Kodak on the Congo".

570
00:39:11,040 --> 00:39:14,440
From the wizardry of Conrad's words
comes a clear image,

571
00:39:14,440 --> 00:39:17,280
the sort of reflection you'd
expect from a writer who called

572
00:39:17,280 --> 00:39:19,680
another book
The Mirror Of The Sea.

573
00:39:19,680 --> 00:39:21,240
In Heart Of Darkness

574
00:39:21,240 --> 00:39:25,920
the Congo, for all its murky depths,
is the river as mirror.

575
00:39:28,640 --> 00:39:31,840
Telling the truth through
a distortion -

576
00:39:31,840 --> 00:39:34,520
it's one of the oldest tropes
of Gothic fiction.

577
00:39:34,520 --> 00:39:38,600
The idea of the wonky mirror
which yet reveals

578
00:39:38,600 --> 00:39:42,160
is at the heart of a much neglected
section of Ruskin's essay on

579
00:39:42,160 --> 00:39:45,800
the Gothic, which deals with
the fearful and dark side,

580
00:39:45,800 --> 00:39:47,600
the grotesque,

581
00:39:47,600 --> 00:39:50,520
and might almost be a description of
Conrad's method

582
00:39:50,520 --> 00:39:51,760
in Heart Of Darkness.

583
00:39:53,800 --> 00:39:58,080
In Ruskin's definition of
the Gothic he places great weight

584
00:39:58,080 --> 00:40:03,000
on its more horrifying,
distorted imagery.

585
00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:05,640
"The fearful grotesque" he calls it.

586
00:40:05,640 --> 00:40:10,160
And yet he argues that it shows us
a kind of truth.

587
00:40:10,160 --> 00:40:15,520
Paraphrasing St Paul,
he says, "The minds of men are dim.

588
00:40:15,520 --> 00:40:18,960
"We see the world as
if through a glass darkly."

589
00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:21,440
And for Ruskin it's worse than that
because...

590
00:40:21,440 --> 00:40:22,920
HE EXHALES

591
00:40:22,920 --> 00:40:26,240
..for him the mirror of our
perception

592
00:40:26,240 --> 00:40:29,120
is misted by the breath of Satan

593
00:40:29,120 --> 00:40:33,080
and that is where the Gothic,
with its grotesquery, comes in.

594
00:40:33,080 --> 00:40:35,600
It cleans that mirror.

595
00:40:35,600 --> 00:40:42,160
What it shows us might be distorted,
might be terrifying,

596
00:40:42,160 --> 00:40:45,840
but we see it, we know it is
the truth, and we see it clearly.

597
00:40:49,400 --> 00:40:51,960
Ruskin understood the dark side
of the Gothic,

598
00:40:51,960 --> 00:40:55,920
its potential to tell us
truths we don't want to hear.

599
00:40:55,920 --> 00:40:59,200
Kurtz's heads on sticks are pure
Gothic grotesque.

600
00:41:00,720 --> 00:41:03,800
They hark back to the bloodlust
of Vlad Dracula,

601
00:41:03,800 --> 00:41:05,880
also known as the Impaler,

602
00:41:05,880 --> 00:41:12,080
the real-life 15th-century Romanian
Prince who inspired Bram Stoker,

603
00:41:12,080 --> 00:41:15,640
another reason to think of
Kurtz as a kind of imperial vampire.

604
00:41:18,160 --> 00:41:22,720
But those same heads,
staring sightlessly into the Congo,

605
00:41:22,720 --> 00:41:26,520
also indicate that there are even
bigger fish in Conrad's river.

606
00:41:29,360 --> 00:41:34,120
Heart Of Darkness has been
described as Imperial Gothic but

607
00:41:34,120 --> 00:41:39,360
it's a novel of ideas which goes far
beyond anxieties about Empire alone.

608
00:41:39,360 --> 00:41:42,200
Like HG Wells's The Time Machine,

609
00:41:42,200 --> 00:41:46,000
published in 1895,
just four years before,

610
00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:52,320
Heart Of Darkness has the ambition
to contemplate us as a species.

611
00:41:52,320 --> 00:41:58,040
As the 20th century loomed, some
writers looked forward with dread,

612
00:41:58,040 --> 00:42:01,440
revising Darwin's
Theory of Evolution.

613
00:42:01,440 --> 00:42:05,360
Were we not in fact de-evolving
rather than evolving?

614
00:42:05,360 --> 00:42:08,320
Regressing rather than progressing.

615
00:42:08,320 --> 00:42:12,800
Our civilisation merely
a veneer beneath which

616
00:42:12,800 --> 00:42:16,320
we were no more advanced than
so-called primitive peoples.

617
00:42:19,680 --> 00:42:23,480
Africa in Conrad is
the site of utter human degeneracy.

618
00:42:24,560 --> 00:42:25,880
But it is a European,

619
00:42:25,880 --> 00:42:29,160
and a highly sophisticated one,
Kurtz, who

620
00:42:29,160 --> 00:42:34,840
goes beyond all moral limits to
"the Horror, the Horror!",

621
00:42:34,840 --> 00:42:36,640
as it is put at the end
of the novel.

622
00:42:40,240 --> 00:42:44,000
This is what Conrad brings back home
to that stretch of the Thames -

623
00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:48,440
his "Kodak on the Congo" is also
a portrait of his own doorstep,

624
00:42:48,440 --> 00:42:50,040
Great Britain and Europe.

625
00:42:58,440 --> 00:43:02,720
Whether they were confronting
the monsters of modern market forces

626
00:43:02,720 --> 00:43:05,440
or the horrors of global
colonialism,

627
00:43:05,440 --> 00:43:09,040
the writers of the fin-de-siecle
and early 20th century

628
00:43:09,040 --> 00:43:11,760
found themselves increasingly drawn

629
00:43:11,760 --> 00:43:16,000
to the terror
and cruelty of the Gothic tradition.

630
00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:19,240
And as the world itself seemed to
descend into nightmare,

631
00:43:19,240 --> 00:43:23,280
with the outbreak
of the First World War, so too did

632
00:43:23,280 --> 00:43:27,960
literature descend ever deeper
into the realm of the Gothic.

633
00:43:34,640 --> 00:43:37,200
One of the greatest poems
in the English language would be

634
00:43:37,200 --> 00:43:39,840
written in the immediate
aftermath of that war.

635
00:43:41,440 --> 00:43:44,840
Most of it's set in London,
but a phantom London,

636
00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:49,120
where even the commuters seem to be
sleepwalking their way to Hell.

637
00:43:50,800 --> 00:43:55,200
TS ELIOT: A crowd flowed over
London Bridge, so many,

638
00:43:55,200 --> 00:43:58,280
I had not thought death had
undone so many.

639
00:43:59,760 --> 00:44:04,200
Sighs, short and
infrequent, were exhaled,

640
00:44:04,200 --> 00:44:07,280
And each man
fixed his eyes before his feet.

641
00:44:08,960 --> 00:44:12,080
Flowed up the hill and down King
William Street,

642
00:44:12,080 --> 00:44:15,680
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth
kept the hours

643
00:44:15,680 --> 00:44:18,880
With a dead
sound on the final stroke of nine.

644
00:44:22,320 --> 00:44:27,000
TS Eliot's The Waste Land conveys
a deep sense of personal crisis,

645
00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:30,560
possibly triggered by the breakdown
of the poet's marriage.

646
00:44:30,560 --> 00:44:34,400
His reading of his own poem,
made possible by technology,

647
00:44:34,400 --> 00:44:36,240
allows us to hear his ghost.

648
00:44:38,160 --> 00:44:42,680
Behind one man's pain, you sense
that of a whole society struggling

649
00:44:42,680 --> 00:44:47,240
through the aftermath of First
World War death and destruction.

650
00:44:47,240 --> 00:44:49,760
And that society is sleepwalking,

651
00:44:49,760 --> 00:44:53,800
without spiritual comfort or
moral compass, towards an even

652
00:44:53,800 --> 00:44:59,800
bigger unspecified Apocalypse of
biblical, even cosmic proportions.

653
00:44:59,800 --> 00:45:01,680
The poet plays the prophet

654
00:45:01,680 --> 00:45:04,800
but he is like a 20-century
century Hamlet, too.

655
00:45:04,800 --> 00:45:07,760
Something is rotten in his
mental state,

656
00:45:07,760 --> 00:45:10,040
not to mention the state of Denmark

657
00:45:10,040 --> 00:45:15,160
and the state of every other
nation and the whole blasted world,
for that matter.

658
00:45:15,160 --> 00:45:18,280
You forget the joins in a poem
so hypnotic.

659
00:45:20,040 --> 00:45:24,480
And although it works on the reader
like some demonic incantation,

660
00:45:24,480 --> 00:45:28,120
through it all there flows
a sense of religious yearning.

661
00:45:30,760 --> 00:45:34,440
In this decayed hole
among the mountains

662
00:45:34,440 --> 00:45:37,040
In the faint moonlight,
the grass is singing

663
00:45:37,040 --> 00:45:40,520
Over the tumbled graves,
about the chapel

664
00:45:40,520 --> 00:45:43,600
There is the empty chapel,
only the wind's home.

665
00:45:45,680 --> 00:45:49,600
Although any Holy Grail is
a tantalising absence, there is

666
00:45:49,600 --> 00:45:52,520
the odd spiritually uplifting moment
in the poem,

667
00:45:52,520 --> 00:45:54,400
a sort of pessimist's epiphany.

668
00:45:56,000 --> 00:45:59,880
O City City, I can sometimes hear

669
00:45:59,880 --> 00:46:02,920
Beside a public bar in
Lower Thames Street,

670
00:46:02,920 --> 00:46:05,760
The pleasant whining
of a mandoline

671
00:46:05,760 --> 00:46:08,560
And a clatter and
a chatter from within

672
00:46:08,560 --> 00:46:12,960
Where fishmen
lounge at noon: where the walls

673
00:46:12,960 --> 00:46:15,400
Of Magnus Martyr hold

674
00:46:15,400 --> 00:46:20,160
Inexplicable splendour
of Ionian white and gold.

675
00:46:23,200 --> 00:46:25,640
It's often been
said that there is something almost

676
00:46:25,640 --> 00:46:28,240
cinematic about The Waste Land,

677
00:46:28,240 --> 00:46:33,480
the way in which Eliot takes "a
heap of broken images" in his words

678
00:46:33,480 --> 00:46:36,240
and flashes them up,
one after the other,

679
00:46:36,240 --> 00:46:38,840
upon the screens of
our imaginations.

680
00:46:38,840 --> 00:46:42,040
But I also think you can
see the whole poem

681
00:46:42,040 --> 00:46:47,640
very much as a modern version of
a medieval illuminated manuscript,

682
00:46:47,640 --> 00:46:52,880
lit up throughout by flashes of
Gothic brilliance, terror and decay.

683
00:46:52,880 --> 00:46:58,200
There is barely a line in the poem
which isn't laden with Gothic
associations.

684
00:46:58,200 --> 00:47:05,000
Eliot gives us bats, spectres,
hooded figures, ruins, churches,

685
00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:07,120
the Tarot, clairvoyants,

686
00:47:07,120 --> 00:47:10,960
and that old occult force of nature,
the Thames.

687
00:47:15,840 --> 00:47:19,840
Sweet Thames, run softly,
till I end my song.

688
00:47:22,000 --> 00:47:25,160
Eliot uses his sense of place -
of places -

689
00:47:25,160 --> 00:47:27,560
to paint a mental landscape,

690
00:47:27,560 --> 00:47:31,480
an anguished "unreal city"
of the mind full of dreams,

691
00:47:31,480 --> 00:47:34,840
dreams of the realities of all
the rubble and destruction of war.

692
00:47:36,400 --> 00:47:39,840
This fevered, spectral vision has
its counterpart in the work

693
00:47:39,840 --> 00:47:42,360
of certain British painters
also haunted by war.

694
00:47:45,520 --> 00:47:47,520
Eliot's bleakness is already
there

695
00:47:47,520 --> 00:47:50,720
in Paul Nash's
We Are Making A New World,

696
00:47:50,720 --> 00:47:54,320
which shows the real wasteland
of World War I.

697
00:47:54,320 --> 00:47:56,800
But no dead, no bodies.

698
00:47:56,800 --> 00:48:01,120
And yet every image -
amputated tree stumps, gangrene

699
00:48:01,120 --> 00:48:04,280
swellings of earth -
indicates the presence of war.

700
00:48:07,200 --> 00:48:10,440
There's a yet more unsettling
version of this abstract,

701
00:48:10,440 --> 00:48:14,640
literally disembodied sense of the
horrors of the Great War

702
00:48:14,640 --> 00:48:18,440
in Algernon Newton's London
paintings of the 1920s and '30s.

703
00:48:20,160 --> 00:48:24,680
The city, a forlorn film set,
eerie in the sunlight,

704
00:48:24,680 --> 00:48:27,640
waiting for a generation that will
never come back.

705
00:48:29,640 --> 00:48:32,560
The greatest Gothic painter
of the 20th century was

706
00:48:32,560 --> 00:48:35,960
Francis Bacon -
part of a later generation,

707
00:48:35,960 --> 00:48:38,920
he was only 13
when The Waste Land was published.

708
00:48:38,920 --> 00:48:42,320
But he was inspired by all of
Eliot's poetry

709
00:48:42,320 --> 00:48:45,360
and drew on it for the titles
of some of his pictures.

710
00:48:45,360 --> 00:48:49,080
And like Eliot,
but in a far more visceral way,

711
00:48:49,080 --> 00:48:53,280
Bacon filled his work with
the Gothic - snarling mouths,

712
00:48:53,280 --> 00:48:55,760
bodies in basements,
blood everywhere.

713
00:48:57,160 --> 00:49:01,000
The popular image of Bacon,
and one which he was only too happy

714
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:07,480
to project, was that of the habitue
of old Soho, a London bohemian.

715
00:49:07,480 --> 00:49:10,920
But to get to the root of him -
and ever closer to the vampire

716
00:49:10,920 --> 00:49:14,440
heartland of Gothic -
you've got come to Ireland.

717
00:49:19,280 --> 00:49:22,480
In fact, Bacon's London
studio is now here -

718
00:49:22,480 --> 00:49:26,560
after his death it was transported,
lock, stock and paintbrush,

719
00:49:26,560 --> 00:49:29,040
to the National Gallery of Ireland
in Dublin.

720
00:49:30,640 --> 00:49:35,040
Is this an installation or is
it a reliquary?

721
00:49:35,040 --> 00:49:39,000
A shrine to St Francis Bacon,
painter.

722
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:42,840
It was amidst this clutter,
the chaos he loved,

723
00:49:42,840 --> 00:49:48,320
that Bacon created his bloodied
triptychs and his mock crucifixions.

724
00:49:48,320 --> 00:49:52,080
I think this is a very apt
expression of the true,

725
00:49:52,080 --> 00:49:57,640
awkward place he occupies in
modern British Irish art.

726
00:49:57,640 --> 00:50:01,920
The rest of this building is
textbook neo-Classical.

727
00:50:01,920 --> 00:50:04,720
This is a Gothic crypt.

728
00:50:11,240 --> 00:50:13,840
Ireland's central to
the history of Gothic,

729
00:50:13,840 --> 00:50:16,160
not just
because it was Bacon's birthplace

730
00:50:16,160 --> 00:50:18,840
but because so much else that is
Gothic

731
00:50:18,840 --> 00:50:21,160
was born kicking and
screaming here.

732
00:50:22,400 --> 00:50:28,040
Charles Maturin's Melmoth The
Wanderer, in which a man sells his
soul to the devil,

733
00:50:28,040 --> 00:50:32,520
was one of the first great Gothic
novels, followed by many others,

734
00:50:32,520 --> 00:50:37,400
including Sheridan Le Fanu's
Carmilla, the lurid tale of lesbian

735
00:50:37,400 --> 00:50:41,680
vampirism on which Hammer's The
Vampire Lovers would later be based.

736
00:50:42,960 --> 00:50:46,640
Oscar Wilde also got in on the act
with The Picture Of Dorian Gray,

737
00:50:46,640 --> 00:50:50,680
his novel about a beautiful but
damned young aesthete

738
00:50:50,680 --> 00:50:54,200
haunted by a portrait
that predicts his own decay.

739
00:50:56,760 --> 00:51:00,360
And the Gothic fascinated Ireland's
most famous modern poet,

740
00:51:00,360 --> 00:51:04,400
WB Yeats, who wrote ghost stories,
dabbled in the occult,

741
00:51:04,400 --> 00:51:07,280
and revived Irish folk tales and
myths,

742
00:51:07,280 --> 00:51:09,680
for reasons as much to do with
politics as poetry.

743
00:51:10,800 --> 00:51:13,040
Yeats was part
of the Anglo-Irish elite

744
00:51:13,040 --> 00:51:15,880
and wanted to get in with
the Catholic nationalists who

745
00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:17,720
distrusted his whole class.

746
00:51:18,800 --> 00:51:20,360
He was saying,

747
00:51:20,360 --> 00:51:23,840
"Look, I'm one of you really -
very Irish, very superstitious,

748
00:51:23,840 --> 00:51:25,000
"I believe in magic."

749
00:51:30,080 --> 00:51:32,720
Ireland was fertile ground
for the Gothic precisely

750
00:51:32,720 --> 00:51:34,880
because it was a divided place.

751
00:51:36,040 --> 00:51:40,240
It was the earliest British colony,
bloodily repressed.

752
00:51:40,240 --> 00:51:43,000
The very first heart of darkness,
you might say.

753
00:51:45,400 --> 00:51:48,800
And Ireland was also
Bram Stoker's birthplace.

754
00:51:48,800 --> 00:51:52,160
It's been argued that Count Dracula
feeding on the Transylvannian

755
00:51:52,160 --> 00:51:56,840
peasantry is a grim caricature of
the absentee Anglo-Irish landlord,

756
00:51:56,840 --> 00:51:59,520
a bloodsucking parasite
exploiting his tenants -

757
00:51:59,520 --> 00:52:03,160
plausible, because when researching
his novel Stoker did

758
00:52:03,160 --> 00:52:06,120
compare Transylvanian peasants
to "our Paddy".

759
00:52:07,920 --> 00:52:11,520
So Stoker's Dracula,
written in 1897, can be

760
00:52:11,520 --> 00:52:15,360
read as a veiled commentary
on problems that would boil over

761
00:52:15,360 --> 00:52:18,920
two decades later, during Bacon's
formative early years.

762
00:52:20,240 --> 00:52:22,520
Bacon's background was
grander than Stoker's

763
00:52:22,520 --> 00:52:26,560
but they were both part of
the Protestant ruling elite

764
00:52:26,560 --> 00:52:30,120
and both inherited
the same deep-rooted fears.

765
00:52:30,120 --> 00:52:33,120
In fact, the Anglo-Irish had
been on the defensive

766
00:52:33,120 --> 00:52:34,720
since the mid-19th century.

767
00:52:36,080 --> 00:52:40,320
By the 1860s, the Anglo-Irish
ascendancy felt

768
00:52:40,320 --> 00:52:42,560
more like a descendancy.

769
00:52:42,560 --> 00:52:44,160
They were hemmed in,

770
00:52:44,160 --> 00:52:48,720
threatened by the rise of
anti-British Irish nationalism

771
00:52:48,720 --> 00:52:52,440
and by the growth
of the Catholic middle class.

772
00:52:52,440 --> 00:52:55,920
There were anxieties and panics,
most of them pure fantasies,

773
00:52:55,920 --> 00:53:00,440
about attacks on "The Big House",
the generic name for

774
00:53:00,440 --> 00:53:03,280
these great Georgian slabs
of granite

775
00:53:03,280 --> 00:53:06,200
in which the ruling class
mostly lived.

776
00:53:06,200 --> 00:53:12,240
An Anglo-Irishman's home was fast
becoming his haunted castle.

777
00:53:16,640 --> 00:53:20,840
Francis Bacon's Anglo-Irish home was
haunted by his sadistic,

778
00:53:20,840 --> 00:53:24,920
manipulative father, a military man
and racehorse trainer,

779
00:53:24,920 --> 00:53:28,880
who had the young Bacon
horsewhipped by his stable grooms.

780
00:53:28,880 --> 00:53:32,760
Bacon was fascinated by the
cruelties inflicted by authority.

781
00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:36,840
Does that constant recurring image
in his work

782
00:53:36,840 --> 00:53:38,880
of the snarling vampire mouth

783
00:53:38,880 --> 00:53:43,800
represent Bacon's own father?
The Anglo-Irish class, even,

784
00:53:43,800 --> 00:53:47,640
crying out not just in defiance
but also in paranoia?

785
00:53:53,120 --> 00:53:57,520
One thing is certain - for the young
Bacon, the Irish countryside, with

786
00:53:57,520 --> 00:54:01,120
its ancient peat bogs and all
the old folklore,

787
00:54:01,120 --> 00:54:03,120
was a landscape of fear,

788
00:54:03,120 --> 00:54:06,280
especially in the 1920s,
when trouble had brewed up,

789
00:54:06,280 --> 00:54:09,600
as so often in Ireland,
into The Troubles.

790
00:54:11,800 --> 00:54:17,400
Bacon's sense that he was part
of a threatened class was sharpened

791
00:54:17,400 --> 00:54:20,920
when he stayed with his maternal
grandfather, who,

792
00:54:20,920 --> 00:54:26,640
as a chief of police, was a prime
target for the Irish Republicans.

793
00:54:26,640 --> 00:54:30,440
And one night, Bacon would have
been around ten or 11,

794
00:54:30,440 --> 00:54:33,080
he and his grandfather
were driving along

795
00:54:33,080 --> 00:54:37,840
when their car broke down somewhere
round here in the Bog of Allan.

796
00:54:37,840 --> 00:54:40,720
They had to abandon it
and go on by foot.

797
00:54:40,720 --> 00:54:46,280
It was dark, they could hear cries
and halloos and see flashing lights.

798
00:54:46,280 --> 00:54:49,520
The rebel groups were out
to get them.

799
00:54:49,520 --> 00:54:51,600
They made their way to safety.

800
00:54:51,600 --> 00:54:55,040
They found refuge in a friendly
house, a Big House, of course.

801
00:54:55,040 --> 00:54:59,640
But Bacon never forgot the sense
of terror he felt that night.

802
00:55:04,000 --> 00:55:08,040
It was Bacon's achievement to
make from his anxiety images that

803
00:55:08,040 --> 00:55:12,000
could speak - scream - to Everyman.

804
00:55:12,000 --> 00:55:16,240
He'd soon leave Ireland and feed
on terrors far beyond its shores,

805
00:55:16,240 --> 00:55:19,000
but I'm not sure Ireland
ever left him.

806
00:55:22,040 --> 00:55:26,640
Three Figures At The Base
Of A Crucifixion, 1946.

807
00:55:26,640 --> 00:55:29,760
An altarpiece for the generation
of Auschwitz.

808
00:55:29,760 --> 00:55:33,840
The memory of the screaming father
figure is still there,

809
00:55:33,840 --> 00:55:37,680
but there's far more to the painting
than a Freudian childhood trauma.

810
00:55:37,680 --> 00:55:41,200
This was Bacon's way of saying
that we in the modern world aren't

811
00:55:41,200 --> 00:55:45,280
just living the Gothic nightmare,
we may never wake up from it.

812
00:55:46,440 --> 00:55:48,640
And who can say
he was entirely wrong?

813
00:55:51,120 --> 00:55:55,240
It was true by mid-20th century
and it's even truer today -

814
00:55:55,240 --> 00:55:59,320
Gothic's everywhere.
We're all Gothic now.

815
00:55:59,320 --> 00:56:01,560
What do I really mean by that?

816
00:56:02,600 --> 00:56:06,240
Not just that Gothic's in
our paintings, our books,

817
00:56:06,240 --> 00:56:08,400
the films we go to see.

818
00:56:08,400 --> 00:56:10,760
It's in our minds.

819
00:56:10,760 --> 00:56:14,280
Many of the worst Gothic nightmares,
like Frankenstein and Dracula,

820
00:56:14,280 --> 00:56:17,480
were once branded
weird or sensationalist.

821
00:56:17,480 --> 00:56:21,760
But they were so prophetic that now
they're everyone's bad dreams.

822
00:56:27,840 --> 00:56:30,680
But the influence of Gothic's
optimists is still with us too,

823
00:56:30,680 --> 00:56:34,800
the influence of Marx and Morris,
who saw the negative side

824
00:56:34,800 --> 00:56:37,680
of the modern world but
wanted to change it

825
00:56:37,680 --> 00:56:39,000
into a better place.

826
00:56:39,000 --> 00:56:40,760
As Morris said,

827
00:56:40,760 --> 00:56:42,680
"We shall be our own Goths,

828
00:56:42,680 --> 00:56:48,600
"and at whatever cost break up the
new tyrannous empire of capitalism!"

829
00:56:48,600 --> 00:56:52,120
You don't have to be an
anti-capitalist to feel the pressure

830
00:56:52,120 --> 00:56:56,680
modern advertising puts on us
all to consume and conform.

831
00:56:56,680 --> 00:57:02,360
So, the Goths of today are actually
true to Morris in their own way -

832
00:57:02,360 --> 00:57:04,680
asserting their individuality,

833
00:57:04,680 --> 00:57:06,840
marking themselves out.

834
00:57:06,840 --> 00:57:09,800
And if they all look
different in the same kind of way -

835
00:57:09,800 --> 00:57:12,800
well, maybe they're just finding
out, like Morris,

836
00:57:12,800 --> 00:57:15,600
that being a rebel comes with
contradictions.

837
00:57:18,360 --> 00:57:20,880
Yes, the legacy of Gothic's
everywhere.

838
00:57:20,880 --> 00:57:25,840
Which brings me back, one last time,
to Bram Stoker's Dracula.

839
00:57:25,840 --> 00:57:29,720
Not Count Dracula, but the book's
other vampire, new technology.

840
00:57:30,840 --> 00:57:35,360
I think Stoker was well and truly
spooked by the idea that people,

841
00:57:35,360 --> 00:57:41,080
or their traces, might continue to
live, ghost-like, in the machine.

842
00:57:44,000 --> 00:57:47,240
What would he have made of
our main machine, the mobile?

843
00:57:48,440 --> 00:57:52,440
It grips us by the ear and the eye,
if not the neck,

844
00:57:52,440 --> 00:57:55,880
and connects us constantly to
a realm of the spirits.

845
00:57:57,080 --> 00:58:00,120
Real life is elsewhere,
a poet once said.

846
00:58:00,120 --> 00:58:04,920
Well, now, it really is elsewhere,
because this little device

847
00:58:04,920 --> 00:58:09,160
doesn't just let us speak to people
who aren't really here,

848
00:58:09,160 --> 00:58:12,840
it allows us to listen to
their music, to see their pictures.

849
00:58:14,520 --> 00:58:17,920
But there's a cost because you have
to disconnect

850
00:58:17,920 --> 00:58:20,200
from your own immediate reality

851
00:58:20,200 --> 00:58:23,600
to connect to the life
that's in the machine.

852
00:58:23,600 --> 00:58:27,640
I had not thought Google had undone
so many.

853
00:58:27,640 --> 00:58:30,760
Perhaps what this little piece of
Gothic - all Gothic -

854
00:58:30,760 --> 00:58:34,840
really proves is that we
yearn to be haunted,

855
00:58:34,840 --> 00:58:39,520
to be taken outside
and beyond of ourselves.

856
00:58:39,520 --> 00:58:41,560
You can call it megabytes,

857
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:44,760
but it's really just
the bite of Dracula.

858
00:58:46,400 --> 00:58:47,480
MOBILE PHONE RINGS