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here we go again
23 Nov 06
Reeve, Clara. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story. 1778. Ed. James Trainer. London: Oxford UP, 1967.
Reeve originally published The Old English Baron anonymously in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story. In the anonymous preface to the first edition, she claimed to have transcribed the text from an old English manuscript. All this sounds very familiar somehow.
Plotwise, too: A mere eight pages in, the central character, a knight named Sir Philip Harclay, meets a peasant boy name Edmund Twyford:
The young gentlemen came up, and paid their respects to him; he apologized for intruding upon their sports, and asked which was the victor? upon which the youth he spoke to beckoned to another, who immediately advanced, and made his obeisance: As he drew near, Sir Philip fixed his eyes upon him, with so much attention, that he seemed not to observe his courtesy and address.
And you KNOW Sir Philip reacted this way because the youth looks so much like his dead friend, one-time Baron of the local castle (believed to have died in battle but doubtless assassinated and usurped). Edmund will turn out to be the true heir, blood will triumph over villainy, etc.
I’m interested in the use of the term “gothic” in the subtitle. There are accepted definitions of “gothic”, but for fun I’ve been allowing some of those definitions to accrue as I make my way ever so slowly through the literature. I wondered if there might be a contemporary definition, but Dr. Johnson didn’t deign to include the word in his Dictionary, so here’s the next best thing, from the OED Online:
3. †a. Belonging to, or characteristic of, the Middle Ages; mediæval, ‘romantic’, as opposed to classical. In early use chiefly with reprobation: Belonging to the ‘dark ages’ (cf. sense 4). Obs. [Cf. F. les siècles gothiques.]
1695 [see 4]. 1710 SHAFTESBURY Charact. (1727) I. III. 217 [The Elizabethan dramatists] have been the first of Europeans, who since the Gothick Model of Poetry, attempted to throw off the horrid Discord of jingling Rhyme. 1762 HURD Lett. Chiv. & Rom. 56 He [Spenser] could have planned, no doubt, an heroic design on the exact classic model: Or, he might have trimmed between the Gothic and Classic, as his contemporary Tasso did..Under this idea then of a Gothic, not classical poem, the Faery Queen is to be read and criticized. 1765 H. WALPOLE (title) The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story. —— Let. to Cole 9 Mar., A very natural dream for a head filled like mine with gothic story. 1771 BEATTIE Minstrel I. xi, There liv’d in gothic days, as legends tell, A shepherd swain. Ibid. I. lx, Here pause, my gothic lyre, a little while. 1773 JOHNSON Let. to Mrs. Thrale 21 Sept., A castle in Gothick romance. 1782 COWPER Table Talk 564 He sunk in Greece, in Italy he rose, And, tedious years of Gothic darkness past, Emerged all splendour in our isle at last.
. . .
4. Barbarous, rude, uncouth, unpolished, in bad taste. Of temper: Savage.
1695 DRYDEN Du Fresnoy’s Art Paint. 93 All that has nothing of the Ancient gust is call’d a barbarous or Gothique manner. 1710 SHAFTESBURY Charac. (1733) I. III. 274 We are not so Barbarous or Gothick as they pretend. a1715 BURNET Own Time (1753) V. 222 His [Chas. XII] temper grew daily more fierce and Gothick. 1732 BERKELEY Alciphr. v. §13 This Gothic crime of duelling. 1749 FIELDING Tom Jones VII. iii, ‘Oh more than Gothic ignorance,’ answered the lady. 1782 F. BURNEY Cecilia IV. ii, What he holds of all things to be most gothic, is gallantry to the women. 1812 SHELLEY Lett. Prose Wks. 1888 II. 384 Enormities which gleam like comets through the darkness of gothic and superstitious ages. 1833 CHALMERS Const. Man II. i. (1835) I. 173 Such a gothic spoliation as this. 1841 J. T. J. HEWLETT Parish Clerk I. 111 Dinner, which was eaten at the gothic hour of one o’clock.
I’m particularly fond of this Hewlett quotation at the end. I like to eat what the English call dinner at the paleolithic hour of 11.30am!
Posted by pzed on November 23, 2006 at 3.42pm
Categories: fragments, gothic, scripture
