Things That Go Bump

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 338, 14 December 1945, Page 8

Things That Go Bump

HOMAS LOVE PEACOCK’s Nightmare Abbey, the theme of the latest BBC "Have You Read?", was written chiefly to satirise the matrimonial difficulties of the poet Shelley, or rather the philosophical and feminist principles implicit in those difficulties, and does so

very entertainingly. But it took also the form, very common among ,the satirists of the early nineteenth century, of guying the popular thrillers of the day. In the latter decades of the eighteenth, even’ the first stirrings of the Romantic Movement provoked an outburst of "Gothic" novels, which were invariably set in ruined castles or abbeys, swarming with owls, bats and other of God’s humbler creatures; and were just as invariably concerned with the adventures of the unfortunate heroines, against whom the universe had taken a grudge and who were forever being abandoned, betrayed, forsaken, deserted, disinherited, and (occasionally) dishonoured, in an atmosphere of refined but Stygian darkness and the highest sentiments. Yet so rich and

strange was the atmosphere and vocabulary in which these happenings were clothed that they have ever since enjoyed vast popularity with those who cultivate and relish literary backwaters, like the school of critics in Chesterton’s Napoléon of Notting Hill who declared "Next to authentic goodness in a book (and that, alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness."