Zeluco, and: The Two Emilys,and: The Veiled Picture (review)

Valancourt Books are to be congratulated for the services they have rendered to the study of the Gothic. Generally referred to as the “trash” of the circulating libraries, Gothic novels failed to survive their heyday (1790–1820) in large numbers, with volumes perishing en masse, as changes in use and fashion dictated. Copies survived in odd pockets, such as Castle Corvey, Germany, where Victor Amadeus, Landgraf of Hesse-Rotenburg, sated his bibliophilia by buying everything, trash included. Britain’s great copyright libraries and the libraries of its ancient universities also have scattered collections. Being rare, Gothic novels naturally appealed to collectors and cognoscenti such as Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers, whose efforts did much to ensure a virtually complete corpus survived, including (to a lesser extent) chapbooks. Accessing the material remains difficult, however, even in the age of Google Books and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Devendra Varma’s efforts, through reprint series such as Arno, ensured that a basic canon remained widely accessible. Still, for really rare items, and for non-canonical material, there was nothing for it but to sharpen one’s note-taking pencil and travel.

The publisher of Valancourt Books, James D. Jenkins, a Missouri lawyer, may be described as a latter-day Summers, a dedicated amateur (in the best sense), who started the press in 2005, beginning with its flagship series, Gothic Classics. As the name suggests, many of these are now standard works, readily available in earlier reprints, such as the “horrids” mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (published in a set by Varma) or the less popular works of such canonical Gothic authors as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Robert Maturin, and Charlotte Dacre. But many others exist in such small numbers that reading them would entail considerable expense, if not for the Valancourt editions. For a relatively modest sum, readers can now luxuriate in a reading of Edward Montague’s The Demon of Sicily (1807). “Infinitely more extravagant than The Monk,” was how Summers put it. The Valancourt blurb is blunter: The Demon “outdoes Lewis’s novel in its outrageous depiction of sex and violence.” Working my way through Summers twenty years ago, I was agog to read The Demon, finally having to make to do with a speedy skim in the British Library as I made my way through the pile. Other Valancourt titles include Love and Horror (1812) by “Ircastrensis,” a “bizarre and comical pastiche” featuring a heroine named Annabella Tit, a “sinister Armenian merchant,” and a talking frog; The Mystery of the Black Tower (1796) by John Palmer, an important early historical romance; and The Forest of Valancourt; or, The Haunt of the Banditti (1813) by Peter Middleton Darling. The Forest of Valancourt is the first in a special hardback series devoted to the “rarest of the rare,” Gothic novels that exist in only one or two copies. In the case of The Forest of Valancourt, only one copy is extant, in the Bodleian.

More recently Valancourt Press has branched out into rare early twentieth-century Gothics, and to neglected classics from the eighteenth century. Zeluco and The Two Emilys are the first two volumes in the latter venture. The Veiled Picture, from the Gothic Classics series, is the heavily redacted version of Radcliffe’s Udolpho, as Catherine Morland, for one, could instantly tell you. Anyone interested in a Gothic literary history, not of works produced, but of works consumed, will want a copy of this chapbook. All three works have been edited, introduced, and annotated by highly respected scholars in the field. These are not reprints: all have been reset in readable type and are lovely objects in themselves.

Zeluco (1789) fills the most obvious hole. Barbauld quite rightly included Zeluco...