John Howison’s New Gothic Nationalism and Transatlantic Exchange

In 1821 when Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published “The Florida Pirate,” John Howison was one of the magazine’s most prolific writers of fiction. Most of the tales he contributed to the magazine are best understood as “tales of terror,” a genre made popular in large part in the pages of Blackwood’s. Ubiquitous in the first half of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, tales of terror supplanted eighteenth-century gothic novels, which had become less trenchant once the political threat of the French Revolution no longer loomed. The more immediate form of the magazine’s fiction was perfectly suited for the new political tensions in Britain’s post-Waterloo years, a period marked by a revitalized, radical reform movement and violent events such as the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 (See Chandler). Tales of terror typically blend psychological realism with fantastic accounts of near-death experiences, including drowning, being trapped overnight in the catacombs, and church bells, the sounds of which paralyze.¹ What is distinctive about “The Florida Pirate” is its introduction of features that do not fit neatly within the generic conventions of “terror.” Furthermore, unlike Howison’s own terror tales, such as “The Floating Beacon,” “The Florida Pirate” is set within the new national space of the Americas, not in the old Europe.² As I will suggest, this is not a coincidence.

Critics such as Peter Garside, Robert Miles, Chris Baldick, and Robert Morrison read the rise of the Blackwoodian tale as a replacement for the gothic novel, under strain by the late eighteenth century in the United Kingdom.³ The gothic novels of atmospheric or conspiratorial terror like Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) gave way to a condensed, realistic, and easily consumed tale of terror. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine quickly became its primary purveyor, frustrating writers such as Leigh Hunt and Samuel Coleridge by its mandate for “grim stories,” while inspiring writers like Edgar Allan Poe to create the modern gothic tale and short story.⁴ While the majority of John Howison’s Blackwoodian tales adhere to the features of the magazine’s terror genre in their generous application of the macabre, the fantastic, and the ghastly, “The Florida Pirate” resists generic conventions, and is situated geographically and politically off the coast of the southern states. In this essay, I argue that “The Florida Pirate” itself makes visible a certain strain in the British tale of terror when it encounters the new national context of the early republic. Read within the context of uniquely early American anxieties, fantasies, and debates about slavery and the infectious possibility of the Haitian Revolution, Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” exposes an integral relation between the source of terror within the tale and its correlative within national discourse.⁵ Ultimately, “The Florida Pirate” bears a striking resemblance to the burgeoning American gothic far more than the Blackwoodian tale of terror.

A story of an ex-slave turned pirate captain, “The Florida Pirate” utterly captivated early republican readers. Publishers, too, recognized the tale’s potential for a broad audience: in all, “The Florida Pirate” went through seven different editions up through 1834 and circulated up and down the Atlantic seaboard. While Howison’s later work, Tales of the Colonies (1830), is unmistakably gothic, “The Florida Pirate” is much more playful with generic conventions, moving between gothic violence, the historical “romances” of Walter Scott, and the slave narrative made popular by Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789; see Caretta). Particularly striking in its implicit link between southern slave insurrection and the large-scale slave violence that liberated Saint-Domingue, “The Florida Pirate” touches upon core anxieties of the early republic, anxieties over race, slavery, and collective violence. And no event came to symbolize this combination of early republican anxiety quite like the Haitian Revolution, a fact illustrated by its ubiquity throughout literary and popular writing.⁶ Where Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine sought to protect against a newly vitalized radicalism in Britain by returning to the Revolutionary Terror of 1789, tales in the American context...