The novel’s formula and melodrama are the traits that I see as essential to understanding what this novel can offer readers today: a better understanding of how readers learn to feel categorically according to the dictates of their cultural or critical values, and an option for learning to feel in accordance with other norms. In contrast to the critics above, who show only liminal interest in Wolfenbach, I found the novel profoundly affecting and absorbing, notwithstanding its shortcomings. Like many readers, I became aware of Wolfenbach through its inclusion in a list of “horrid” novels that Jane Austen mentions in her gothic parody Northanger Abbey . Curious about what constitutes a “horrid” novel, I set out to read all seven of the ones that Austen names. Though most of them engaged me, it was Wolfenbach that I found most compelling. Many other professional and nonprofessional readers have taken on the challenge of reading Austen’s horrid book recommendations, and they seem often to begin with Wolfenbach, since it is the first listed and first published of the seven . As I read all the assessments of Wolfenbach I could find, I knew not to expect rapturous praise of the novel from professional critics,wholesale grow bags but I was surprised that few amateur critics showed the kind of engagement that I experienced.
I scanned hundreds of online mentions of Wolfenbach and noticed frequent discussion of the novel’s sanctimoniousness, overuse of conventions, and lack of detail on literature blogs and review sites. The blog Simpler Pastimes articulates all three of these popular concerns, objecting to “the moralizing , became part of a conscious attempt to develop readers’ empathy and thereby encourage benevolent actions.However, critics continued to fear that the wrong kind of novels could corrupt vulnerable readers. As more and more novels were published, periodical reviewers took seriously their role of supervising what fiction taught, castigating immoral portrayals and cautiously praising moral ones. Joseph Bartolomeo observes, “Even novels that promised laudable instruction received careful scrutiny as reviewers searched for moral integrity.”For example, some critics took sentimental novels to task for promoting excessive feeling over good conduct. In 1793, the year Wolfenbach was published, a critic in the influential periodical the Monthly Review wrote of “most novel writers, except those of the very first class”: “They teach us to consider every failure of our wishes as an insupportable misfortune, instead of convincing us that misfortunes are often the creatures of our own fancy; in short, to weep and wail is the morality that such writers teach!”Though this critic was not reviewing Wolfenbach, these complaints could be applied to that work, despite the fact that Parsons herself raises concerns about self-absorption. As a writer of stories of misery who was not considered to be “of the very first class,” she was easily folded into broader critiques of the growing number of emotional novels of middling quality and questionable moral and emotional character.
Eighteenth-century literary critics valued not only fine writing and feeling but also uniqueness, a quality that they emphasized often as the growth in the print market produced an incipient mass culture.In the 1790s, the sheer number of gothic novels being written, published, and borrowed or bought by enthusiastic readers made critics especially skeptical about whether any of them were worthwhile. To be judged positively, a gothic novel needed to distinguish itself from many others of its kind, and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho was one of few to do so. A periodical critic thought to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in defending his previous review of Udolpho from accusations that it denigrated the work, writes that he would in fact call it “[t]he most interesting novel in the English language.”This high praise was not at all typical of reviews of gothic novels. Bartolomeo notes that more often, periodical reviewers judged gothic novels deficient because they lacked innovation. Yet, originality in gothic fiction was an ever-shifting standard that even Radcliffe could not always meet, and it was a quality that could easily become the subject of accusations that inventive gothic novels employed “excess for the sake of novelty and for the sake of pleasing a bloodthirsty readership.”At the time of the publication of The Castle of Wolfenbach, the two journals that reviewed the novel alluded to the villainous extremes it contains, but its scenes of bloody violence did not provoke accusations of “excess for the sake of novelty,” as was the case with Matthew Lewis’s later novel, The Monk, which I will discuss in the following chapter. Though its reviewers did not find Wolfenbach as “interesting” as Radcliffe’s exemplary work, they ranked it somewhere above many works of its type in its capacity to involve readers.
A reviewer in the conservative quarterly the British Critic writes that Wolfenbach is “more interesting than the general run of modern novels” and “abounds with interesting, though improbable situations.”The prominent Critical Review, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, sums up the novel in 1794 by claiming it “has . . . sufficient interest to be read with pleasure.”Wolfenbach, shortly after its publication, was “interesting” in the sense that the mysteries and adventures of its characters kept readers’ curiosity engaged, but its interest would soon be overshadowed by its affiliation with other works of its type. Parsons’s literary talent merited some amount of distinction from contemporary critics, but her writing was tainted by association with her publisher, Minerva Press. In a very brief review of Parsons’s Woman as She Should Be, a novel she published the same year as Wolfenbach, the Critical Review calls her “a writer of no inferior talents,” but ends the review with the tentative statement, “Upon the whole, we consider this lady’s labours less deserving the severity of critical remark than the general run of publications from the press of Mr. Lane.”In the 1790s, the decade Wolfenbach was published, William Lane’s Minerva Press produced approximately a third of new novels in London,15 many of which were sentimental, gothic, or, like Wolfenbach, both. These novels were widely distributed and read through Lane’s numerous circulating libraries, and the fact that many of their authors were anonymous or pseudonymous did not hinder their popularity, as the Minerva name itself promised similar style and quality that appealed to many readers—what E. J. Clery calls a “unified corporate style.”This brand did not appeal to everyone, however. A 1796 assessment of a Minerva novel in the Critical Review reads, “Since Mrs. Radcliffe’s justly admired and successful romances, the press has teemed with stories of haunted castles and visionary terrors; the incidents of which are so little diversified, that criticism is at a loss to vary its remarks.”This kind of apprehension about the mass production of formulaic gothic novels that Minerva enabled and the threat it presented to the powers of discrimination was coupled in some periodicals with a reignited moral panic over women’s reading. Though Minerva presented its novels as morally edifying and published many Radcliffean works, critics accused the press of spreading corruption with sensationalism and sensuality.18 For example, a 1797 letter in Gentleman’s Magazine argues that young women who read novels from circulating libraries have their imaginations “debauched by licentious description, and lascivious images.”Numerous critic combated the aesthetic and moral menace of popular fiction like Minerva’s with contempt and mockery. By the early nineteenth century, Dorothy Blakey writes, critics were using “Minerva” as a synonym for cheap, poorly written, melodramatic, and formulaic.According to James Watt, these criticisms of Minerva and other similar publishers “were always motivated by much larger concerns about the regulation of cultural production and the disciplining of readers—especially women and the lower classes,” and yet these early objections and “recipe satires” of gothic formula have persisted in scholarly discourse as grounds for dismissing the vast majority of popular gothic novels.
For example, Diane Long Hoeveler in her introduction to the Valancourt edition of Wolfenbach summarizes Parsons’s work as “writing to the gothic formula that had been established already: part sentimental virtue in distress, part novel of manners,grow bags for gardening part melodramatic confrontation between good and evil.”Elizabeth Neiman adds nuance to these sorts of assessments of formulaic fiction by demonstrating Minerva novelists’ communal contributions to Romantic-era ideas of authorship”.Even so, what Blakey wrote in 1935 is equally true today: “Few authors whose reputation has endured until to-day have owned a connexion with the Minerva Press.”Minerva Press and its lingering bad reputation may have influenced the fact that The Castle of Wolfenbach has rarely been treated as worthwhile by professional critics in any era, but an even more powerful contributor to the perception of Wolfenbach has been its status as one of the seven Northanger “horrid” novels, six of which were published by Minerva Press. We can assume that Jane Austen’s parodic Northanger Abbey, begun in 1798 amid the explosion in gothic novels but not published until 1818, deserves most of the credit for the fact that Wolfenbach is in print today, and the fact that readers today tend to express a mixture of disdain and delight when they choose to read it. In Austen’s novel, young Isabella Thorpe passes along book recommendations from her friend Miss Andrews to Catherine Morland, a fellow Radcliffe enthusiast. Isabella lists seven novels “of the same kind” as Radcliffe’s: The Castle of Wolfenbach ; Clermont ; The Mysterious Warning ; The Necromancer ; The Midnight Bell ; The Orphan of the Rhine ; and Horrid Mysteries . Before accepting these recommendations, Catherine demands assurance that these novels are “all horrid.”Several scholars have speculated about why Austen chose these particular novels for her list of horrid works. Bette Roberts suggests that “she regards them in all likelihood as typical of the very worst of the genre.”Natalie Neill characterizes them as “popular and fashionable, yet also shallow, manipulative, mercenary, emotive, and prone to exaggeration.”These scholars and others argue that Austen parodies the Horrid Novels in order to elevate Radcliffe’s better productions and as well as her own realistic work. Many scholars have complicated the popular reading of Northanger as a simple antigothic satire, but the narrator’s mocking tone speaks volumes in the ironic introduction to this scene as one that will demonstrate the young women’s “delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste.”Austen finds humor in the contrast between the “sweet” manners of the list maker, Miss Andrews, and her insatiable craving for formulaic, bloody gothic stories. The scene presents these novels as Radcliffe knockoffs and fun, frivolous reading, not novels worthy of serious attention. In explaining Northanger’s usage of the term horrid, Claudia Johnson points out that “horror is a de rigueur affect of gothic fiction” and that Austen employs the term in various contexts to suggest that it is overused.Additionally, the young women’s indiscriminate application of the word and its variants throughout the novel illustrates the ambivalence of this descriptor. Horror, as a feeling, is different from horrid, which is more often a judgment of quality. Though Isabella and Catherine here use it as a positive term that suggests these novels will pleasantly horrify, just after this Isabella uses horrid to mean unreadable when discussing Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. The word easily slips between referring to sensational content and signifying poor writing, making it ideal for labeling certain gothic novels as thrilling works with no merit and no individuality. It makes sense that several scholars have preferred the term “Northanger Horrid Novels” to simply “Northanger Novels” or “Northanger Canon” when alluding to the seven works, which have become representatives of bad gothic writing. In this way, many scholarly mentions of these books come packaged in condescension. Wolfenbach’s publication history through the twentieth century tended to reinforce the message that it is low-quality genre fiction, even when the novel shared space in a volume with more highly regarded works. Minerva, with its reputation for cheapness, printed the first edition of Wolfenbach in 1793 and the second in 1794.In 1824 it was reprinted with the title Castle of Wolfenbach; or the Horrid Machinations of Count Berniti as one of Fisher’s Editions, which Montague Summers describes as “dumpy little books,” inexpensive engraved editions of gothic favorites.An 1835 edition by J. Pattie was first published weekly as one of Pattie’s Pocket Library of Popular Novels and Romances, at a penny for each sixteen-page packet.In 1839 it was included in volume 1 of The Romancist, and Novelist’s Library: The Best Works of the Best Authors alongside more reputable works, like The Man of Feeling and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, but in a cheap edition.