Dublin Gothic

Charles Robert Maturin signals the transition from gothic romanticism to a form of modern gothic. He was born on 25 September 1780 in Dublin. His family were Huguenots who fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Maturin was appointed to the curacy of St Peter’s Church, Aungier Street in 1806.

Maturin initially turned to writing to supplement his meagre salary as a curate, although his reputation as an eccentric writer of romances prevented his promotion within the Church. He was known for his general flamboyance, extravagant dress, and love of dancing, even in daylight. 

He is best known for the Faustian gothic romance Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). He allegedly composed this novel with a communion wafer pasted to his forehead in order to signal to others that he was not to be disturbed. Maturin died from a laudanum overdose on 30 October 1824 at his house in York Street, and was buried in St Peter’s Churchyard.

Decrepit castles, villainous monks, persecuted heiresses – these are only a few of the most recognisable gothic devices found in romantic literature. At its heart, the gothic represents an interruption of the past into the present, the return of repressed memory and trauma. 

The original eighteenth-century Anglo-gothic romances, popularised by Horace Walpole, Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, and Anne Radcliffe, were set in convents and castles in foreign and exotic locales, projected safely onto a distant country and into the past. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is the last of these great gothic novels, although its focus on psychological terror marks a shift towards newer forms of horror writing. 

As the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century ushered in an explosion in population growth and increased urbanisation, the urban gothic was born. The nightmares of gothic writing were now unfolding much closer to home.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born 28 August 1814 at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a family descended from Huguenot nobility. In 1826 his family relocated to Abington, County Limerick, where his father served as a Church of Ireland clergyman.

After studying classics at Trinity College Dublin, Le Fanu passed the bar exams in 1839, but he never practised law. He became a prolific journalist, novelist, editor, and short-story writer. His contributions to gothic literature include his ghost stories, such as ‘Green Tea’ (1869) and ‘The Familiar’ (1872) and the locked-room mystery novel, Uncle Silas (1864). The vampire novella that later inspired Bram Stoker, Carmilla, followed in 1872. 

From 1856, Le Fanu rented the family home of his wife, Susanna Bennett, at 18 Merrion Square. After Susanna’s sudden death in 1858, Le Fanu gradually withdrew from society, and was known as ‘The Invisible Prince’ because of his reclusiveness. 

Le Fanu died at home on 7 February 1873. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.

Rather than exploring society’s greatest fears and anxieties from a distance, the horror of supernatural happenings gained an immediacy when set in the nineteenth-century city. This new gothic form expressed the anxieties of modern life, such as the unnerving proximity of strangers and the labyrinthian, unknowable spaces that developed through urban and industrial expansion. 

Similar to the haunted castles and convents of its romantic predecessors, the architecture of the city contributed powerfully to the urban gothic’s overwhelming sense of danger. In the 1840s, Le Fanu wrote haunted tales set in Dublin and London, placing his ghosts on horse-drawn omnibuses and trains as they invaded the city streets. 

Of course, the otherworldly fringes of the celtic periphery and the remote countryside still provided inspiration - Le Fanu and Elizabeth Bowen have also written ‘big house’ novels set in the isolated, dilapidated country estates of the Anglo-Irish.

Abraham (Bram) Stoker was born at 15 Marino Crescent, Dublin on 8 November 1847. Until the age of seven, Stoker was bedridden with an undiagnosed illness. These years seemingly fueled his imagination. His mother Charlotte entertained him with supernatural folktales and stories from the cholera epidemic that she witnessed as a girl in Sligo. These stories later shaped Dracula (1897), a tale of contagion and the undead that introduced the most enduring and recognisable character in gothic literature. 

Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin before becoming a civil servant at Dublin Castle, the administrative centre of British rule. He married Florence Balcome, a great beauty formerly courted by Oscar Wilde, in 1878 at St Ann’s Church, Dublin. The same year, Stoker moved to London to manage Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre.

Stoker died after a series of strokes at 26 St George's Square, London on 20 April 1912. His ashes are interred at Golders Green Crematorium, London. 

Nineteenth-century Irish writers often set their fiction outside of their native Ireland. This decision may partially be explained by economic necessity and the obligation to appeal to a wider British readership. Irish writers also often moved to London in order to capitalise on its expansive social and economic opportunities. Gothic conventions enabled covert explorations of Irish politics and culture as well as the anxieties and repercussions of imperial power. 

The peripheral spaces of Transylvania certainly ignited the imagination of a young Stoker, who researched Count Dracula’s historical source Vlad Tepes at Marsh’s Library, Dublin in 1866-1867. In Stoker’s work, the aristocratic Count travels by boat from the edges of Eastern Europe to Whitby, Yorkshire, and on to the imperial centre of London. As a migrant, Dracula’s contagious vampirism threatens to infect the city of London, which spirals downward into an archaic, superstitious, and uncivilised society in the novel. 

This map by Iulia Molnar explores the significance of Jonathan Harker’s journey to Transylvania, where he unwittingly enables the Count’s move to London. (from ERC 61893 VICTEUR, UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 at 21 Westland Row, Dublin. His parents, Sir William and Lady Jane “Sperenza” Wilde, were central figures in Dublin’s nineteenth-century intellectual and literary circles, and hosted an artistic salon in their home at 1 Merrion Square. 

After excelling at Trinity College Dublin, Wilde was awarded a scholarship to attend Magdalen College, Oxford. He established himself as a popular playwright before he published The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). This gothic novel presents a variant on the satanic pact and echoes the supernatural work of Maturin, Wilde’s great-uncle by marriage. 

In 1895 Wilde was convicted of Gross Indecency for his sexual relationships with men. Wilde served a sentence in Reading Gaol before he emigrated to France. He lived under the name Sebastian Melmoth, evoking the innocence of Saint Sebastian and the guilt of Maturin’s villain. He died on 30 November 1900 in Paris, France, where he is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.

The trope of the Biblical and mythic wanderer has been reincarnated in city writing as the  streetwalker, the leisurely flâneur, and the man of the crowd. Often male members of the aristocratic class, these figures transgress social boundaries in pursuit of experiential knowledge, moving freely between high and low society. Gendered conceptions of Victorian respectability largely precluded middle and upper class women from having the same freedom of mobility. 

In his novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Maturin perfected the demonic peripatetic who moves across oceans and continents. The cursed itinerant is reincarnated in Wilde’s gothic bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Dorian is the epitome of a gothic wanderer, and pursues new sensations by visiting opium dens in London’s impoverished West End, where he comes into contact with other ‘vagrants’ – sex workers, opium addicts, and tramps.

Dorothy Macardle was born on 7 March 1889, in Dundalk, Louth to an affluent brewing family. She attended Alexandra College at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin before studying at University College Dublin. 

An anti-treaty activist during the Irish Civil War, Macardle was arrested at the Sinn Féin headquarters at 23 Suffolk Street, Dublin. She was incarcerated in Mountjoy, Kilmainham, and North Dublin Union between 1921-1922. She was imprisoned with other notable writers and activists, including suffragette and actress Maud Gonne, with whom she lived at 75 St Stephen’s Green.

During her time in prison, Macardle kept meticulous journals and wrote what would become the collection Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). She later wrote three novels of the supernatural: Uneasy Freehold (1944), which provided the basis for the classic horror film The Uninvited (1944). The Unforeseen (1946), and Dark Enchantment (1953). 

On 23 December 1958, Macardle died from colon cancer and was buried in St Fintan’s Cemetery, Howth.

There is a reason that it is tempting to tell ghost stories around an open fire on a quiet, dark night: like fairy tales and supernatural myths, ghost stories are rooted in an oral, folkloric culture. The literary ghost story, however, is a modern phenomenon that developed in tandem with a burgeoning Victorian periodical culture. In Macardle’s collection Earthbound (1924), each story is shared as a personal testimony between a group of characters, a framing device that preserves the ghost story’s origins as a spoken rather than written form. 

Ghost stories have endured as a storytelling form. Ghosts are compelling, liminal figures that bridge the divide between life and death; they represent the contradictions between the past and the present, and force repressed memories and guilt to the forefront of a narrative. By transcending boundaries, apparitions dramatise political and social issues.

Elizabeth Bowen was born at 15 Herbert Place, Dublin on 7 June 1899. She is best known for her wartime fiction and, as a member of the Anglo-Irish landed class, her ‘big house’ novels. 

Bowen lived in London during the Blitz, serving as an air raid warden in Marylebone while secretly reporting on Irish neutrality to the British government. Her London wartime novels The Heat of the Day (1948) and the collection The Demon Lover (1945) feature supernatural and haunted environments that explore the boundaries between life and death. Her novel of the decline of an Anglo-Irish estate, The Last September (1929), continues to develop themes of liminality. 

An admirer of Le Fanu, Bowen wrote introductions to modern reprints of his novels Uncle Silas (1864) and TheHouse by the Churchyard (1863), noting their peculiar Anglo-Irish qualities. 

Bowen died of lung cancer in London on 22 February 1973. She is buried in Ireland in St Colman's Church, Farahy, Cork, close to the former gates of her family estate, Bowen's Court.

In the urban gothic, rented townhouses, shared flats, and dorm rooms replaced the haunted castles of the romantic era. These rented spaces, which were either previously occupied by or shared with unknown persons, represent impermanence, instability, and the dangers of anonymity within the citysphere. 

Ghost stories featuring haunted rental accommodation further explore anxieties surrounding privacy and property rights. A ghost story set in modern-day Dublin would certainly feature the truly hair-raising prices and precarious nature of the city’s rental economy.

Narratives of home invasions, either by malevolent spirits or more worldly beings, also symbolise a disruption of the private domestic sphere. ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) by Elizabeth Bowen features a home invasion in wartime London, in which past trauma threatens to unmoor the nuclear family. Bowen, like Maturin and Le Fanu, is also well-known for her dramatisation of Anglo-Ireland’s waning power and decline against the backdrop of an isolated, heirless ‘big house’ estate that is haunted by ancestral misdeeds.

Dublin is the birthplace of some of the world’s most influential writers of the supernatural. From Maturin to Bowen, the gothic and the ghostly have enriched the country’s literary tradition. Vampires, ghosts, and the undead have an enduring cultural legacy, and this tradition continues into the present day. 

In recent years, Irish women’s writing,like the work of Sara Maria Griffin and Sophie White, has drawn on gothic constructions of the monstrous in order to explore taboo female experiences of the body, maternity, and sexuality. Gothic memoirists, such as Doireann Ní Gríofa, have tapped into the ghostly to explore historical erasures, whereas Seán Hewitt has evoked the spectral tradition in his poignant depiction of queer identities and urban histories. 

The contemporary Irish gothic is evolving, and demonstrates the relevance of a gothic tradition that continues to produce powerful metaphors for social anxieties, marginalisation, and subaltern histories.