Gothic Romance Illustration

Imaginarium : An Alternate History of Art

Welcome to Imaginarium: an alternate history of art. A podcast where we delve into the most obscure parts of art history. 

Hello, I’m your host Nadjah, and in this podcast, we try to shed light on less studied parts of the history of art and visual culture. In today’s episode, we’ll be covering the first part of a two episodes special on the subject of gothic romance, gothic literature as well as the images that accompany those stories. Let’s begin.  

The first part of this short series will be dedicated to the early Gothic and the images that illustrated these stories. 

There has been  a resurgence of interest for the gothic in the last years, especially for gothic romance and gothic horror. I can mention the movie Crimson Peak (2015) by the director Guillermo Del Toro as a mainstream movie that really is a gothic romance. In that movie, Del Toro really utilized the elements of what is a gothic romance to create an intricate story of love, and betrayal, and creepy houses, and of course : ghosts... 

Gothic romance used to be  the term used for gothic literature in its entirety, even though it now seems to distinguish a particular niche sub-genre of the gothic. Gothic literature can intersect many genres, from gothic horror to gothic sci-fi to gothic western. I remember reading somewhere that gothic is a very decorative genre. It's a very aesthetic genre and atmospheric genre. Of course, there are some plot-points that are particular to the gothic, but more often than not, it’s an added ambiance, an added mystery and darkness. The plot can be formulaic or can follow entirely another genre, but there needs to be some hidden secrets, maybe an isolated mansion on the top of a hill, this mansion might or might not be haunted. Maybe everyone has secrets and weird things happen at night.

You feel so terribly alone, you try to flee in your white nightgown through the moors but something dark chases you. 

This is gothic romance. 

First of all, before we go deeper, I think it's a good idea to just maybe go over quickly the history of the genre of gothic romance during the late 18th century. and the 19th c. before we start talking about the visual aspect of it. 

The first gothic story is generally attributed to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), this story has the first seeds of what would soon be known as gothic romance. Walpole was an eccentric rich man who loved to go against what was considered the norm during his time (even though, it was really just a superficial way to be counter-cultural, Walpole was a rich white man, and he loved the comforts that this afforded him, he just had the privilege to be as original as he wished). The second half of the 18th century, in which this novel was written,  had classicism being the main aesthetic of the era.  Rigid, rational and symmetric, following the Enlightenment and the rise of Reason, this aesthetic wasn’t one for illogical displays of originality and emotions. I am really sorry for going so far back to tell you about gothic romance, a genre that we now mostly associate with the 19th century, but Ido think it’s still important to put things back in their cultural and historical context. Horace Walpole was living during this era, and being a rich idle aristocrat, with no real responsibilities to speak of, being the third son in line for inheritance and all. He spent his life pursuing his interests to the fullest, before discarding them when he felt bored. His money and free time really enabled him to dedicate himself to whatever he wished to and whenever he wished to. For example, the house he built and lived in for the bigger part of his life was Strawberry Hill, a monstrous example of gothic inspired architecture. 

He also was one of the first to go with this kind of gothic-inspired architecture at the time.  He thought himself a pioneer of sorts, but really Walpole was a rich man with enough money to fund his interests, as insane and weird as they might seem to the norms of the society he lived in.  Strawberry Hill, as he called this enormous mansion of his, is a huge white building with gothic architectural elements.The gothic elements are not real, and more pastiche and decorative. The interior is a lavish mix of gothic and classical design, with various themed rooms across the house. It’s not yet the true gothic revival architectural style, but it is the humble beginnings of the interest to a more dramatic genre of architecture and of course, of literature. 

Nevertheless, The Castle of Otranto is the precursor to a genre that caused much engouement in the 19th century, and while it is now a pretty niche genre today, still has a lot of fanatics, and this book did shape the genre until this day. I have read The Castle of Otranto, and while I don’t know if I can safely advance that the book is Good…. I think I can still say that it’s a very overly dramatic and intense book. There’s a desire to go back to the middle ages, to the Romance of those Wilder Times™, to evoke grand emotions and create a mystical atmosphere. Between  (literally) giant monstrous ghosts and secret passages, kidnapping and helpless heroines, Walpole somehow manages to plant the seeds of a genre that will stick around for a long time…

maybe haunt us a little bit. 

just a little bit. 

...

Romanticism and the mystery of the heart : 

Ann Radcliffe published her books after Walpole and was arguably just as much of an influence on the genre as he was, if not more. Her books, especially The Mystery of Udolpho as well as Romance of the forest, truly kickstarted the genre, but also, they really kickstarted the genre of Female Gothic, and of gothic romance. Her books have a clear link with romanticism, the desire to go back to an era of emotions, of the wilderness of the Middle-Ages. It was a very romanticized (ha!) view of the past that the writers and artists of the romantic era imagined and depicted in their art. Tempestuous emotions and, most importantly, terror. 

I think it’s important here to make the distinction between terror and horror, in art as well as in literature, just to make sure that everyone here is on the same page when I will use those terms. Horror is mostly from uses of gore and scary things happening. Meanwhile, terror is more insidious and subtle. 

Ann Radcliffe also introduces the concept of the supernatural explained in her writings. The stories are full of strange and weird happenings, that end up having a rational explanation, no matter how somber that explanation might be. She was one of the first one to use this technique in gothic stories, and she shaped a lot of how gothic was going to be and created this dichotomy between the supernatural explained and unexplained that exists in gothic stories. Going forward, the gothic literature would forever be shaped by her influence.  I also want to mention that Radcliffe was one of the few gothic authors of her era that was taken seriously and as someone worthy of consideration. The gothic genre still was not taken seriously, as many critics of the time, like Tobias Smolett said that ““romance, no doubt, owes its origin to ignorance, vanity and superstition” The gothic romance genre was considered to be mindless mass fiction, with little to no intellectual appeal. Nonetheless, the gothic will continue to grow in popularity during the late 18th century and the 19th century

This genre comes to be at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, which is the height of the Classicism style in art and architecture, mainly. And with it, the beginning of the reactionary artistic movement of Romanticism.  Classicism was felt, by certain people, to be cold, rigid, too much taken by order to care about human emotions, about the violent power of nature. The gothic revival will, in a way, be the extreme version of romanticism. Of violent emotions and deep secrets and longings, and shameful desires. Of the strength of nature, of sharp cliffs and dangerous moors. One of the main points of the Romantic movement, was a look to the past, to the years of lore, to the stories of King Arthur, to the myths. We can think of the enthusiasm for Beowulf (as well as the first printed edition of that text in 1815) that really showcases that interest for centuries past. 

Before this period, the word gothic was a term mostly used to talk about Goth buildings. So it was really mostly an architectural term to describe a specific type of architecture, and goth architecture didn't have a particularly positive connotation in the society of the renaissance until the 18th century. But with the throwback of sorts that came with the romantic era and Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime, the meaning of the word did evolve to mean what we understand today when we talk about gothic. Since, i’m mentioning the Sublime, which is a cornerstone of the Romantic artistic movement and also in literature, I think I should at least explain it a bit, in case you are not familiar with the concept of the sublime. Nature is terror. Basically. Burke argues that nature is wild and dangerous and terrifying, and that’s what makes it beautiful. The sublime is the aesthetic of Terror, of those feelings that hit you when you are faced with something that is so wild and terrifying that you are in awe and scared at the same time. Instead of light and clear paintings, the artwork inspired by these philosophies are dark, full of shadows and the wrath of the elements that are in full display. A person seems small, inconsequential, compared to the vast powerful nature. It’s not hard to understand why this philosophy that Burke developed in the later half of the 18th century had such an impact on Gothic and romanticism. 

The genre then exploded during the late years of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century with titles such as Barozzi; Or the Venetian Sorceress : a romance of the sixteenth century, or The Caledonian bandit, or, The heir of Ducaethal : a romance of the thirteenth century,  and The castle of Arragon, or, The banditti of the forest : a romance. All of those books were written by the same author, Catherine Smith, in the early years of the 19th century and are the kind of titles that were available to the general public. You can obviously see the themes that were prevalent in those types of works, dramatic stories, Romances, wild and unchained and full of heightened Drama. 

Nonetheless, the popularity of the genre with a specific demographic, let’s say… young girls and women, made it that the genre was often considered low-class, and not very important nor something that brought anything valuable. (i don't think its needed, but just as a disclaimer, that’s just a general opinion about gothic romance, i, personally, am a Heaux for gothic romance and would die for it) (as demonstrated by me writing this whole thing) It’s a popular genre, and even more disgracing, it was a popular genre for women, which means that for critics of the time, it was “a cheap and tawdry form of popular entertainment that, in its formulaic and highly repetitive nature, fell foul of the emphasis that emergent Romantic aesthetics placed upon the category of ‘original genius’”. 

With the popularity of the genre, always comes reinvention and parody. When Jane Austen wrote her first novel Northanger Abbey, in 1803 (albeit, the novel was only published posthumously) , the genre of gothic romance was in full swing and wildly popular, especially with younger women who wanted to feel Sweeping Emotions.  With Northanger abbey, Jane Austen wrote a parody of gothic romances, but that in my opinion, can totally be counted as a gothic romance in itself. Austen turns on the familiar tropes of gothic romance, to do  what she does best, which means that she paints a picture of social life of the era in a very human and empathetic way. With Northanger Abbey, Austen turns all of the common tropes of gothic romance upside down, but by wanting to parody the gothic romances that the main character loves so much, Northanger Abbey becomes an actual gothic work. The main character of this book, Catherine Morland,  is a young woman who devours gothic romance, reads them one after the other, and convinces herself that she is a gothic romance ingenue uncovering  a deep dark secret.

I think that now that we have established the history of the beginnings of the gothic romance, we can go to the visual side of it. But it’s important to briefly talk about the  history of the culture of print and the visual culture as it relates to book illustration specifically. during the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century.   

What we have to understand here is that from the second half of the 18th c. and onwards, starts a really fast paced growth when it comes to communication and media. the betterment of printing techniques, made it just more widely available to the masses and to mass consumption. There has been a steadily growing amount of media and documents that have been created since the 18th. c., whether books, prints, newspapers, magazines, etc. And since the beginning of the digital age, that number skyrocketed even more once we introduce all the different types of electronic documents that exist. 

The 19th. C. in particular has really set the groundwork for the age of mass media as we know it today. the 19th c. was a period of extreme growth for the publishing industry and the book in general. With an increased literacy, the technological growth of printing as a medium, and capitalists noticing just how much money could be made from books. books started being  published in ever-growing numbers during the 19th c. 

In that era, books were more often than not illustrated, at the beginning of each chapter, as well as to enhance the reading experience of the audience. The late 19th and early 20th century was an era that was called the golden age of illustrations, because a lot of artists earned their lives with book, magazine and newspaper illustrations. posters as well.. A lot of them being women, since the illustration world was a bit less closed up than the elite world of the fine arts, made it easier for them to enter that specific market. 

I just want to say here that it's not that women were never admitted in the world of higher fine arts, just that it was very difficult and mostly reserved to a certain kind of woman. who had connections and were financially comfortable.

I also want to talk about the fact that illustrations in general, and everything that has to do with the world of print and  is considered to be low art compared to the world of fine arts - high arts. The main reason being that print culture was something that was accessible and popular with the general population. To sum it up again , these are the factors that really influenced the rise of the media culture and of print during the late 18th c. and 19th. c. such as technological advances, urbanization , increased literacy, a working class with more disposable income and just generally, the age of industry. 

One of the main techniques that was used during the 19th century when it came to printing was lithography. Lithography is a printing technique that was WIDELy used during the 19th c. and easily popularized by how easy it was to produce these types of images. A lithography, basically, is an image created by the process of drawing on a stone or metal plate, and then could be printed and reprinted in theoretically unlimited number of times. This technique was one of the main one during the 19th c. and was used for commercial as well as artistic purposes. 

So now let’s talk about the printing culture in the 19th. c.: The caricature is something that was used a lot in the visual culture of the late 18th c., especially in France at the time of the french revolution, but gained even more popularity during the 19th c. with the whole popularization of the printing culture. Caricature at that time, was very often on the same subjects that caricaturists today tend to critique. Which is  politics, current events and ofc whatever women wore at the time. 

This second area of printing culture that we will be talking about will be the illustrated press and newspapers. During that era, a new culture of the press got created. I feel like I could talk about this subject alone, but I'll try to not get carried away. The newspapers of the time were generally illustrated to provide both entertainment and information on the current events. Newspapers such The Illustrated London, Harper’s Weekly, and more were all competing to gain the attention of the readers which made it so that the front pages were getting more and more sensational as time went by. One of the other particularities of the press of that time period that I think is worth touching on is the serialized stories that were updated daily or weekly and were also illustrated. Authors were often writing in this serialized format, and were also published subsequently as a novel. Which is why we see a lot of really long winded books coming out from this era. i mean if i was paid to write something every week, i too would make sure that it would take a long time before i'm done writing this story 

And, the most important one, when it comes to our current subject : the illustrated book. 

So now that i have put the context of the industry and the readership of the 19th. century, i think we can now move on to talking about the actual illustrations that were accompanying these books. I think there’s a level of intertextuality and dialogue between the text and the images that we can’t deny. While you can simply appreciate the art for what it is, and read the story and appreciate it as well on its own , there’s no denying that the experience of reading a text that is complemented by the images, enhances the appreciation for both mediums . The images communicate with the story and the story gives a context to the images. The relationship between the word and the image is crucial to the understanding of the illustrations and to the actual book-object. 

For illustration work in that period, it can be harder to find the artists, compared to more classic forms of art (let’s say paintings, sculptures),  a lot of them were not very popular but their work still is a really important and under-appreciated part of art history. Nonetheless, if you dig and research a bit (a lot), it can still be possible to find some of the names and images. The later part of the 19th century and early 20th century is easier to research, since it’s the era that’s truly known as The Golden Age of Illustration (mostly between 1870-1920 w most art historians) and had produced some of  rly more well known illustrators of the time, such as kay Nielsen and Arthur rackham just to name a few of them ... 

Now, we can move on to the actual illustrations of the gothic novels, and get to talk about them a bit more deeply. First of all, these beautiful illustrations from the 1824 edition of the Castle of Otranto. I searched for the illustrator’s name, but unfortunately couldn’t find it. I think that it’s pretty lovely how the illustrations of this early gothic really do lean into that medievalist and romantic aesthetic that was prevalent in the beginning of the 19th.c. 

Even when comparing several illustrations of the same novel in different editions, it’s possible to notice that these types of illustrations really did have mainly a purpose of storytelling. Their goal is to further the narrative of the book and make you feel more engrossed in the stories. it’s possible to see that the compositions of the images really do center the character, and use a lot of contrast between lights and shadows.

For example, F. H. Townsend illustrated the  second edition of the book Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte. It was the first edition that was signed with her real name, the first one having been published under a pseudonym. With the use of crosshatch techniques, as well as again the emphasis on composition and the placement of the shadows and lights truly do wonders in creating a very specific atmosphere. The illustrations clearly capture that gothic feeling. With the mysteries that hides behind the shadows … 

The last thing I'm going to talk about, in the context of the 19th century, will be the penny dreadfuls. If you don’t know what penny dreadfuls are, basically they were those cheaply produced booklets that cost only a penny, hence the name,  w stories that were designed to give you chills and to shock you. Whether horror stories, ghost stories or murder mysteries. It was also very popular literature, with things inside of them that would shock. some sensibilities. Even though the concept started in the 1830s, it's really toward the 1870s that the popularity of the penny dreadful really jumped up in popularity. In my opinion, the penny dreadful is the one media that bridges the printing culture of the 19th century to the one that appears during the 20th century. 

So, in the first part of the episode,  I presented the beginnings of gothic romance as a literary genre and talked a lot about the illustrations that were part of that movement. From the castle of Otranto in 1764, all the way to Dracula’s first release in 1897, gothic romance and gothic horror grew exponentially and some of the books of this genre are now staples of our popular culture. But now we’re in the 20th century and gothic romance literature and the visuals aesthetic of it are going to be very different from what it used to be. 

Welcome to gothic romance, once again.  

To understand the second wave, or so i can call it like that, we have to understand the book industry of that era, specifically in the first half of the 20th century. So the growth of the paperback industry during the beginning of the 20th century will usher a new era of book publishing and book selling. Books, especially cheap paperbacks and mass market books were now selling really well and easily and people were buying a lot of them. If you remember how I ended the last episode, I was talking about penny dreadfuls and how they were basically a cheap and mass produced type of medium. The paperback is thus the logical continuation of it, with its cheap cost of production, its cheap cost to the clients, and the way it was easy to print them quickly and efficiently. and then. Sell them very quickly and efficiently as well. The mindset of the early 20th century in terms of book publishing was to sell books in places where people would buy them. So not necessarily only in bookstores, where only people who already had an interest in books would enter, but in drugstores and grocery stores, as to target the general public.

The books that were then published and marketed were easy books to sell, like romance, pulp noir, trash gothic romance, murder mysteries. Genre books that could easily be very formulaic and also very easy to write quickly and, thus, publish very  quickly as well. More than good books, publishers wanted books that sold well, more than quality, they just wanted books that would sell easily, and with this new marketing method. 

Well, it worked. 

With this, the age of pulp fiction had started. Of course, I'm going to focus on course here on the gothic romance pulp fiction that was popular in those times, which is often considered as the second wave of gothic romance. Those covers are often the ones that come to mind when we think about gothic romance, especially the ones from the1940s to the 1970s.  The names of the artists of those book covers are sometimes known, but more often than not, it's very difficult to find who the artists were. This is one of the things that is really sad, I feel, just how dismissive of these types of artists the field of art history is. And this is a conversation for another day, but I find it important to shed light on those less known parts of visual art history. 

During that era, book covers were really a way to tell people what they were going to get when they picked up the book. They had a very unique visual identity, that was … a bit standardized in some ways ? interesting enticing covers so that people knew what they were getting when they bought the book. It wasn't about.. the most unique mysterious cover, but it was more about an  effective communication with the buyer/reader. I’m not going to go on a rant about this, but i feel like lately, it’s v hard to find a book cover that effectively communicates what it is to the reader, add the fact that we somehow decided that summaries weren’t good enough for us anymore, and it’s better to just pat on a bunch of blurbs and testimonies about the book, like. let me know what your book is about. please.  I’m desperate. 

For example, you had the romance book covers, with the  racy covers, with a woman being held in the buff strong arms of a handsome man. w strategically ripped clothes. v risky stuff to get caught with haha

Or the noir & mysteries covers in which we can also see a common visual identity. lots of stark shadows and people in trench coats with guns, lurking in the dark.  a potential murder is going to happen… 

There’s also sci-fi, and these covers are truly under the umbrella of what we call retrofuturism today. But it was probably just their vision of the future at their time. Once again, you can definitely identify a common visual aesthetic. 

And of course : gothic romance covers. I just really want to highlight how strong the visual identity is. There’s visual conventions and  expectations that  really are in place for each genre. I personally think it’s a bit sad that we lost this sort of common aesthetic that books used to have. 

Since, the speed of production that was expected of this industry was really fast, and frankly, people did not consider that kind of art or literature as something worthwhile. This made it so that the names of cover artists are very often really hard to find. Add the fact that the gothic paperback was something that was mass produced for mass consumption. Unless the artist was prolific and successful, it can be rly hard to find the name of the artist. 

I just want to mention here, that most of the authors of the mid 20th century wave of gothic romance were mostly female authors, which i think has a double effect. First of all, being a genre mostly written by women and also for a mostly female audience, it made it so people really didn't attribute it any value of any sort. But also, on the flip-side, it gave those women financial independence that some of them might not have acquired otherwise.  Some of the names I could mention would be Victoria Holt, who, under a pen-name, wrote a hundred books during her career. Dorothy Eden and Marilyn Ross also were prolific and bestselling authors during that period. 

 This is during that era that the visual codes that now characterize what we think of as gothic romance really get set in stone. The young lady wearing a long nightgown, fleeing a dark mansion. She is chased by something that we cannot see. The house stands tall behind her. Her hair is flowing through the wind.  We can see that the colors that are often used are deep jewel tones, emerald greens, deep purples, sapphire blues, turquoises. These book covers often use one central color for the whole entire composition. 

The contrast between lights and shadows is also very much used as a way to showcase the contrast between the poor heroine and the dark menacing environment she’s in. A situation that feels desperate and that she is hopelessly trying to escape. But unlike the ink illustrations from the 19th c. that contrast is communicated using vibrant colors instead of just black and white, so the background would be a deep blue, the heroine would be dressed in a pale pink. Also the background will often be either a looming background with a house in a distance, with maybe.. one light open… or a cliff and very menacing clouds in the sky… all very very dangerous. The movement and flowiness, of the garments and of the hair, also are very much a game of contrasts against the unyielding solidness of the house that’s in the background. 

I did say it was very difficult to find the names of the artists, but i still want to showcase this one illustrator.. Harry Barton was a very prolific illustrator of the period and illustrated books of all sorts, from romances to mystery novels and also, of course, gothic romances. In all of his work in the realm of gothic romance covers, he really did respect all the visual conventions that we expect of a gothic romance book. In my opinion,  even if you create art within a certain set of visual expectations and tropes, it still doesn't mean that you cannot create something that can be very visually fresh and innovating. The colors Barton uses are very deep and the visible brush strokes really do add a depth to the whole image that wouldn't be there otherwise. 

Those gothic romance book covers were all very formulaic, as the books also often were. But it doesn’t mean that there’s not something very charming and appealing to them. The gothic heroine will always be so very compelling to me, with her nightgown and fleeing dark castles,  uncovering dark secrets and falling in love with dangerous men, and surviving in the end, somehow. And there’s something deeply beautiful and magical to this for me. 

Before we go, I put a bunch of relevant resources on today’s subject in the show notes, you have some books as well as some theses and articles that you can read if you maybe want to further your knowledge and read more on the subject. As always, all the relevant images will also be on all of our social platforms @ imaginarium_pod on instagram as well as on twitter. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so on patreon @ patreon.com - nadjah. Please rate and review and subscribe, it always helps the channel tremendously, 

On this, my very dear listeners, I wish you all a very lovely day, evening or night. and hopefully i will see you again very soon.