Terrific Register: The Gothicization of Atrocity in Irish Romanticism

Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief.

—Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets

General Lake . . . had ordered the heads of Mr. Grogan, Captain Keogh, Mr. Bagenal Harvey, and Mr. Colclough, to be placed on very low spikes, over the courthouse door of Wexford. A faithful servant of Mr. Grogan had taken away his head; but the other three remained there when I visited the town. The mutilated countenances of friends and relatives, in such a situation, would, it may be imagined, give any man most horrifying sensations!

—Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Time

I am dying of a fright.

—Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale

Of the approximately twelve hundred curious incidents gathered in The Terrific Register; or, Record of Crimes, Judgments, Providences and Calamities, thirty-one stories are Irish. These include four stories of ghosts or apparitions; six cases of medical freaks, monstrosities, miracles, or apparent resurrections; one heiress abduction; six anecdotes from the 1798 rebellion and one from 1642; and a further miscellany whose content is well indicated by the following titles: "Female Infatuation for a Murderer," "A Son Condemned to Death by His Own Father," "The Piracies and Murders of Philip Roche," "The Melancholy Fate of an Innocent Dupe of an Artful Villain," "Resurrection of a Highwayman," "Unfortunate Delay," "Surprising Discovery of Murder," "The Vaults of Saint Michan's," "Deaths by Lightning," "Dreadful Accident in Ireland," "The Staunch Friend," "Military Despotism" (excerpted from Letters from the Irish Highlands), "Captain David Roche, the Tiger," "The Victim of a Broken Heart," and "An Instance of a Singular Dream and Corresponding Event."

The place of Ireland and the Irish in the register is suggested in the preface: "The greater portion of the misfortunes which it recounts, are by a happy union of circumstances far removed from us. Treading a highly cultivated soil; [sic] the incursions and depredations of wild animals and men still more ferocious than they are to us unknown and unregarded. Enjoying a full toleration in matters of conscience, the Inquisition has no horrors for us, and guarded by laws whose letter and spirit secure liberty we are under no apprehension of being reduced to dust by the iron mace of a capricious tyrant."¹

Elaine Freedgood's study of Victorian writing about risk is an account of the work done by ephemeral texts that "tend to have the 'forces and contradictions' that they seek to master very close to the surface." She does not include penny dreadfuls and other popular fiction, but she offers one of the most cogent descriptions of how fictions of English safety demanded that readers imagine the threat of Irish horrors as well as the dangers from Africa, India, and other colonial locations.² From the first extract on the execution of the French regicide Damiens in 1757, to its conclusion in a Bedfordshire graveyard, The Terrific Register circumnavigates the globe and traverses history from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century. Among its most exploited sources are Mungo Parks's travels in Africa, the adventures of Baron De Trenck, and anonymous sources on the plague and the Great Fire of London, as well as the baroque Italian atrocities collected in God's Revenge against Murder.³

The preface to The Terrific Register states that the editors "have ransacked the various sources of information open to us" in order to collect anecdotes of calamities and atrocities from around the world (1:i). Some sources are heavily mined—heavily plagiarized, one might say. But one of the real curiosities of the anthology is the way in which the very act of excerpting and juxtaposing these sensational anecdotes seems to level the quality and tone of the writing, so that a sense of a single authorial voice emerges out of what is really an assembly of disparate voices. The Register exposes one of the characteristic features of writings about atrocities—the inevitable repetitions...