Events, Projects, People, Publications: The Centre for the History of the Gothic

The Centre for the History of the Gothic was inaugurated in June 2014 and brings together colleagues from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities who have an interest in the historical and national contexts in which the Gothic of the eighteenth century emerges and the influence that it had on the nineteenth century Gothic. Members are also interested in how the Gothic has developed from the eighteenth century to the present day and the various forms (poetic, theatrical, and other media), which it has come to inhabit.

Interested in Gothic Studies projects organised through the Centre?  Want to meet the University of Sheffield staff and students who produce academic and non-academic work in the Gothic?  Want to stay up to date with all the Gothic-related events and happenings?

Visit http://www.sheffieldhistoryofthegothic.group.shef.ac.uk/ to find out more! Come explore the site and learn all about The Centre for the History of the Gothic at the University of Sheffield.

Announcing: The Dark Arts Journal

The Dark Arts Journal: New and Emerging Voices in Gothic Studies is a new platform which exists to publish and promote upcoming and emerging voices in the exciting field of Gothic Studies. The journal is affiliated to Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and to The Centre for the History of the Gothic, based at Sheffield University.

The journal operates on open access policies and has its own peer review process. Updates are published twice a year and previous editions will be available for download in pdf format.

The DAJ is part of the Dark Arts Network, a tool for allowing exciting young scholars to gain experience, gain connections and contribute to their field.

Issue One, Volume One will launch in October 24th 2015.

You can visit the journal’s website by clicking here.

You can also follow them on Twitter (@DarkArtsJournal) and find out more on the hashtag #GothsAssemble.

A Gothic Story: Revisiting Strawberry Hill

On a recent visit home, my mum wanted to take me out for the day, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Travelling from Essex, and on one of the hottest days this summer, I dragged my mum from one side of London to the other to visit a very Gothic location buried in the suburbs of Twickenham. Three hours, three trains, and a small detour via the Thames embankment later, we arrived at a Gothic house that you may just have heard of before: Strawberry Hill.

(Strawberry Hill, and Laura Fords ‘Days of Judgement (Cats I-VII))

In fact, for all lovers of the Gothic, Strawberry Hill is a very familiar name. Constructed in the eighteenth century by Horace Walpole, this house, or castle, stands as an apt reflection of the theatrical, eccentric, and Gothic tastes of its owner and designer. As well as reviving the Gothic style through his architectural creation, Walpole was also a politician, a collector, and of course the author of the first Gothic Novel, The Castle of Otranto, which was published anonymously in 1764.

The white walls and Gothic turrets of the castle are hard to miss, and even in Walpole’s own time people found this distinct building strange and out of place. However, once built, Walpole reveled in the tourism that his castle and vast collection of pictures, sculpture, furniture, and artefacts inspired. In fact, his castle proved such a popular attraction that he introduced a ticketing system for visitors, and even created a guidebook that was printed at Strawberry Hill’s very own printing press.

It is an edited version of this book that serves as both ticket and guide for modern visitors. You are encouraged to explore the house independently, although there are plenty of helpful volunteers scattered throughout the rooms, and with a wealth of knowledge, who are very happy to answer any questions.

A Description of Strawberry Hill

Today, like Walpole had intended, the house still offers a very Gothic and indeed a theatrical journey. Beginning with the ‘gloomth’ of the hall and staircase, in which ‘by a cord of black and yellow, hangs a Gothic lanthorn’[1] that provides a suitably gloomy atmosphere, each visitor is then guided through a multitude of varied and carefully crafted rooms, before finally finding themselves in the grand splendour of the Gallery. The Gallery is awash with lavish red wallpaper, the ceiling covered with intricately designed, white fan-vaulting laced with gold, and containing five recesses hung with paintings and covered with small mirrors. It is truly a journey from darkness to light.

This was actually my second visit to Strawberry Hill, but it was just as fascinating as the first. The ongoing restoration of the house has meant that more rooms are open to the public and restored to their eighteenth-century and Gothic brilliance. Moreover, the house is currently home to an exhibition of contemporary sculpture by Laura Ford. Many of Ford’s sculptures on display here were made especially for this exhibition and with the history and atmosphere of Strawberry Hill in mind.

Ford and her creations are an ideal choice for the first exhibition of contemporary sculpture at Strawberry Hill. Her sculptures have been described as ‘faithful representations of fantasy with sometimes bitter sweet and menacing qualities mixed with tenderness,’ and also as being ‘intensely crafted but playful.’[1] These are descriptions that seem fitting for the Gothic which is often formulaic but playful, terror-inspiring and yet also theatrically camp. Ford’s creatures draw on these themes through their distinctly child-like and anthropomorphic qualities, appearing as animals, dolls, or children playing dress up, and that engage with, and are enhanced by, their Gothic surroundings.

'Medieval Cloud Girls'

Walking through the house and its gardens, then, each visitor is not only met with Walpole’s Gothic architecture and distinct interior design, but also the various contemporary sculptures that have been specifically placed in each room or part of the garden.  Outside, on the main lawn, a set of cat sculptures cast in bronze and entitled ‘Days of Judgement (Cats I-VII)’ stand against the white backdrop of Strawberry Hill. Inside the rooms of the house, the sculptures appear simultaneously playful and creepy, feeding off of their Gothic setting. For example, upon entering the house, and finding yourself in the gloomy hall, you are greeted with a sculpture titled ‘Sorrow Filled Cat I.’ Standing in a corner beneath the staircase, this cat is attired in a dress and bonnet, staring sorrowfully upwards and appearing like a child’s toy and uncannily alive.

'Sorrow Filled Cat I'

So, what are you waiting for? Walpole’s Gothic castle awaits.  

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[1] http://www.lauraford.net/index.php/information

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[1] Horace Walpole, A Description of Strawberry Hill (Strawberry Hill: The Strawberry Hill Trust, 2015), p. 12. 


Mary Going is a PhD student studying Gothic Literature at the University of Sheffield.  She is the thing the monsters have nightmares about.

Updates (I mean... creepy, terrifying, important Gothic updates... whoooohhh!)

Greetings Goths!

Sheffield Gothic has been very busy these last few weeks... here are a few things of note!

SUP YO?!?!

The Centre for the History of the Gothic has launched a new website detailing Gothic projects, events, and other information related to the University of Sheffield Gothic program.  Please check it out at http://www.sheffieldhistoryofthegothic.group.shef.ac.uk/

The "Summer of 1816: Creativity and Turmoil" Conference, to be hosted at the University of Sheffield, has just released a Call for Papers.  The Summer of 1816 was of course the time when Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Lord Byron, John Polidori and Claire Claremont came together, for the first time, in Geneva, and were inspired to create some of the most seminal works in Gothic fiction.  Check out the CFP at  https://1816conference.wordpress.com/

Sheffield Gothic is pleased to announce its on-going collaboration with The North West Gothic ERC Research Network, based at Manchester Metropolitan University.  We'd like to thank the organizers at MMU for this amazing opportunity to connect with other Gothic researchers, and look forward to working with them in the future!

The meeting schedule for the Sheffield Gothic Reading Group is currently up on this website.  The general theme for this semester is 'religious Gothic' - be sure to mark the dates and come by for the classic combination of cake AND death!

There is currently an open call for blog post up for this website - if you're interesting in writing for us, please contact gothicreadinggroup@gmail.com to find out more!

As ever feel free to contact us and follow us on twitter @SheffieldGothic

#GothsAssemble #WeAreTheBarbarousGoths

Reimagining the American Haunted House (Part Three): William Castle's "House on Haunted Hill"

This is the final installment in the blog series on haunted houses in American literature (drum-roll please!), and because I’m secretly very ornery I’ve decided to write about a film which isn’t (ostensibly) particularly American and about a fictional haunted house which (probably) isn’t actually haunted.  

William Castle’s “House on Haunted Hill” (1959) is a famously gimmicky horror film starring Vincent Price in one of his most playfully fiendish roles. It is considered a camp horror classic, and it's success at the box office inspired filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock to cash in on the popular appeal of low-budget horror.  The film is also, fittingly enough, a pseudo-study on what defines a traditional 'haunted house.'

Price plays an eccentric millionaire who invites five strangers to a supposedly haunted house he has rented for a rather unconventional party, offering them each $10,000 if they can stay in the house all night.  The house itself has a dark history – the owner (played by Elisha Cook, Jr.) promises, in an opening monologue, that this is the “only really haunted house in the world” and throughout the film his doom-and-gloom character re-emphasizes the possibility of the supernatural.  His family was murdered there, and he repeatedly insists that the house has somehow left its mark on all who enter.  Perhaps it has – the real danger is ultimately not ghosts and ghouls, but the living people staying there.

Vincent Price hosts a party... what's the worst that could happen?

The premise suggests Agatha Christie and the execution suggests Roger Corman.  William Castle employs nearly every possible horror cliché imaginable in order to keep the shocks coming – doors that slam shut on their own, the ceiling drips blood, a disembodied head is found in a suitcase (before mysteriously vanishing again), a vat of acid plays an important role, and, seemingly for no reason, a creepy old woman appears out of nowhere before floating away.  The gimmickry didn’t stop at the fourth wall, either.  Castle, at the time of the film's release, installed a pulley system in some theaters which allowed a plastic skeleton to pop out at the audience at the appropriate time. 

The fourth wall was also broken down within the film – Vincent Price’s disembodied head addresses the audience directly in the opening shots, casting the audience as potential guests and victims.  Another character promises that the ghosts will soon come for the audience themselves at the end of the film.  Such techniques effectively bring the audience into the movie and expand the movie to encompass the audience.

No, really, what's the worst that could happen?

It seems impossible that such a jumble of cliched effects could disturb anyone, especially since the movie appears to almost consciously point to its own cheesiness, going for the cheap thrills rather than slowly building dread.  However, in the film’s goofy fakeness there is an important element of horror.  The underlying question of the film is whether or not the house is actually haunted.  The audience is set up to believe so, yet ultimately the answer is immaterial - ghost may or may not be responsible for certain occurrences, but there are more profound evils at play in the house than slamming doors.  As both audience and characters explore the house their understanding of the situation (both supernatural and otherwise) is repeatedly reinforced, subverted, reinstated, and subverted again.  Within the film the gimmickry of horror – the fake heads, strange noises, and tales of gruesome murders employed by Vincent Price’s character (who is ultimately revealed to be a literal puppet master) - actually manages to turn the characters against each other more effectively then a real haunting probably would have.

 “Ah,” I can hear you say, “but is it Gothic?”  Does the self-conscious use and subversion of trite conventions and clichés not place this film more in the realm of parody than anything else?  I would suggest that the film is still an effective horror movie which only grows more Gothic in its persistent exploitation and subversion of expectations – the Gothic, after all, is arguably about recycling tropes in an increasingly unstable and chaotic uncanny space. 

"We're out of cheese twists!" "NOOOO!! Ugh, this party is the worst..."

Moreover, the underlying fears and anxieties within the story do distinguish the film as Gothic.  Sexual jealousy and hatred twist the marriage of the host and hostess, and a heroine falls prey to ‘sensibility’ as various people attempt to ‘Gaslight’ her.  The veneer of a socially acceptable ‘party’ is continually broken as metaphorical ghosts from the past return and the characters' psychological states are twisted by events.  Then there’s the house itself.  Like the other houses discussed in this series it fulfills the basic requirement of any haunted house - it is unheimlich, the ‘un-house’ which denies familiarity and readability.  At one point a character jokes that, “If I was going to haunt anybody this would certainly be the house I’d do it in.” This is particularly telling because that is exactly what happens – the characters and the audience project their own assumptions about the nature of a ‘haunted house’ onto the house (haunted or not), and ultimately the personal secrets and immorality of the characters leads to some very real murder and mayhem.

In many ways these elements make the House on Haunted Hill a distinctly American haunted house.  As examined in earlier posts the American haunted house seems to be defined primarily by its ability to take an old and established trope and twist it into something new.  Many would say that the inclination to make a haunted house a kind of Disneyland ride is typically American, as is the attempt to tame something untameable only to have it eventually come back to bite you.  American anxieties about history define American hauntings, but in this film a 'haunted' history becomes a weapon for the kind of present day deviance only Vincent Price could deliver.

The film has a rather effective twist ending but even without that aspect there is a constant shift between supernatural and not which destabilizes the sense of reality.  Ultimately, despite its persistent cheesiness, the film manages to ask so important questions: What are ghosts? Are they actual physical manifestations or are they just bad feelings and uncanny spaces?  What is more frightening – the dead or the living?


Kathleen Hudson is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sheffield studying narrative in early Gothic literature.  She should be writing her thesis, but she's actually probably off somewhere pretending she's Vincent Price: 

Reimagining the American Haunted House (Part Two): H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House"

This blog is the second installment in a series examining American ‘haunted houses' in Gothic literature.  As I suggested in an earlier post, when most people think about haunted houses they usual have a fairly standard picture in mind... the creepy castle, the abandoned shack, the old ruin.  However, because America has a unique history certain American Gothic texts manipulate the classic ‘haunted house’ trope in order to explore a specific cultural identity.

H.P. Lovecraft is one of my favourite Gothic authors if only because he is so very strange, straddling the boundaries between the Gothic, Weird Fiction, and Science Fiction.  It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, then, that when Lovecraft does write about a haunted house he twists the traditional formula into one in keeping with his own  particular mythos.

The Dreams in the Witch House (1933) is set in “the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham,” playing with America’s definitions of a ‘haunted house’ and with what constitutes a national ‘haunted history.’  Protagonist Walter Gilman takes an apartment in “the old Witch House” expressly for the purposes of academic study as he attempts to apply modern mathematics and scientific theory to the work of a legendary witch from centuries before.  His new domicile was formerly occupied by a witch named Keziah Mason.  Mason disappeared from a Salem jail during the Witch Trials in the 1600s, leaving behind her a kind of supernatural imprint that makes the very walls of the Witch House uncanny and dangerous.  As Walter unearths a weird kind of supernatural geometry connected with the house and Mason's activities he accidentally falls through a portal to a hell dimension, home to the Elder Gods which populate Lovecraft's fiction.  Refusing to believe his own senses, Walter eventually succumbs to the evil of the house, sells his soul to a Devil-figure while in a dream-state, and is killed by Mason and her familiar, a rat-man creature named Brown Jenkins.

The rat-man. You're welcome.

Within the space of the Witch House boundaries are fluid to the point of being almost non-existent…people fall between the human world and an Elder God world almost unintentionally.  Walter frequently ends up in places he shouldn’t be, unsure whether he can ever escape or, indeed, whether there is even a place to escape to:

“He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-slopped egress he doubted greatly.  Besides, would not an escape from the dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house – an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought?  He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.”

Once in a transgressive space, Walter's senses deny boundaries in their inability to navigate slanting floors and basic architecture.  However, the house takes on a doubly uncanny significance when Walter is unable to separate dreams from reality, a dream-house from an actual material space.  

This is interesting given that the story almost immediately starts by anchoring the narrative in a specific time and place – the original evil of the Witch house occurred in 1692 in an area famous for the Salem Witch Trials.  Even a casual reader has immediate associations with that historical context and some very specific cultural traditions and images.  Like many 'haunted' houses in fiction, this house refers to a specific time and crime, yet also articulates a more general anxiety connected to the Salem Witch Trials as a sort of symbol of repression, hysteria, and an uncanny un-identity.  Anxieties about a particularly dark time in American history resurface and reclaim the present just as an actual ghost would.  Moreover, such historical context suggests that the reader can assume that certain historical facts are true and that space in this instance is ultimately fixed and navigable.

However, just as the physical boundaries of the house are fluid, so too are the historical realities associated with it.  Lovecraft reworks the traditional Puritan/Devil story to conform to a Cthulhu mythos.  The original tales of Salem witches include stories of familiars (little demonic creatures who serve witches) and the “Black Man” who comes to his disciples in the night and forces them to write their names in his book (and therein presumably sell themselves to Satan).  In Lovecraft's Witch House those old tropes remain – the witch, the familiar, the Black Man – yet this story also accommodates Lovecraft’s familiar villains, ancient “primal evils” such as Azathoth, an Elder God.  The Black Man, a figure belonging to a specific regional heritage, becomes the messenger of a timeless and space-less elder god, and the haunted house, a material and relatively stable area, becomes a portal to an alternate and unheimlich dimension.  Blood sacrifice, magic, folklore are all reworked and reincorporated into Lovecraft’s reimagining, an adaptation and re-working of history as well as fiction. As such he uses the idea of a ‘haunted house’ to subvert the traditions attached to it – to de-familiarise cultural history and thus blur our perceptions of reality. 

"I'm bored...wake up...make me a snack..." (From Stuart Gordon's 2005 adaptation)

Ultimately, as with all spaces of ‘history,’ the house is revealed to be a graveyard – whatever the true nature of history and identity the story ends, with typical Lovecraftian optimism, with the discovery of a secret horror, in this case a legacy of human sacrifice.  In the "immemorially sealed loft" Walter experiences a timeless evil that is also part of an active attempt to seal off a physical space, the history it represents (the hysteria of the Witch Trials), and the forgotten history (the remains of human sacrifices) which has enabled evil to fester.  By failing to place history in a proper context, however, one risks repeating it.  History in The Dreams of the Witch House is troubling cyclical as yet another victim, Walter, fall prey to an evil that is both anchored in a culturally significant time and space and part of a timeless space without boundaries.  Much like Arkham, this particular American haunted house is both "changeless and legend-haunted."  The house which is introduced as unheimlich develops as the ultimate ‘un-home’ not only because it denies the physicality and materialism of homeliness but because it de-familiarises history and cultural identity for both protagonist and reader.

Kathleen Hudson is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sheffield, studying Gothic narrative in early Gothic texts.  She has visited the Witch House but is waiting until her PhD is completed before she transcends the inter-dimensional plane.

Reimagining the American Haunted House (Part One): Charles Chesnutt & 'Tales of the Conjure Woman'

 In the tradition of Sheffield Gothic’s perpetual question “but is it Gothic?” this is the first in a three part blog mini-series about haunted houses in American literature. However, none of the houses I’ll be discussing are the conventional kind of creepy castle. Rather, I’d like to look at how the concept of the haunted house and America’s unique historical identity merged to create some interesting Gothic texts. As such my first text is not is not strictly considered a Gothic work. 

Charles Chesnutt was a mixed race author in post-Civil War America writing in response to other, less comprehensive attempts to determine a racial identity. His "Tales of the Conjure Woman" (published 1887-1924) can be classified in various ways - the frame narrator, a white northerner named John, may see the tales told to him in regional dialect by the freed-slave narrator Uncle Julius as comical fairytales (though decidedly more Grimm brothers than Disney) but he is pretty much the only one who does. Chesnutt himself identified Julius’s folkloric Gothic tales as part of a Post-bellum and Pre-Harlem Renaissance impulse to re-write repressed narrative.

As such, the characters in "Conjure Woman," white and black, Southern and Northern, explore the legacy of slavery in America – most importantly, African American characters are caught between an profound need for individual self-expression and the lingering psychological effects of a life spent in slavery. Under slavery ‘talking back’ or articulating some kind of narrative was often a severely punishable offence. Slavery as an institution also prevented the education of slaves, hampering their ability to convey stories to a mainstream audience. As a result, slaves turned to alternative and subversive oral folklore to keep their identities alive, protecting themselves by shrouding their messages in metaphor and symbolism. Chesnutt’s ‘Uncle Julius’ character uses folk tales as metaphors for the horrific realities of slave life, peddling them to a Northern couple who have, in the framing device, only recently moved South and are unaccustomed to Southern ways.

The stories themselves and the manner in which they are told express the horrors of slavery through a post-slavery voice, and arguably Chesnutt's exploration of repression and trauma makes the "Conjure Woman" tales distinctly Gothic texts, an African American experience functioning as American Gothic literature.

Charles Chesnutt

‘The Plantation’ as a cultural haunted house frequently figures in Chesnutt’s tales, but he also suggests that more humble dwellings also have the ability to hold or embody the souls of the dead or repressed. Chesnutt's short story "Po' Sandy" (1888, published as part of Chesnutt's "Conjure Woman") sees, in its framing story, the new white landowner John attempt to recycle some wood from a broken-down structure on his property in order to build a kitchen. Uncle Julius tells him that the structure is haunted by a slave named Sandy. Sandy was turned into a tree by his wife, Tenie, so that the two of them could remain together rather than being sold or killed as the property of their masters. In a brutal turn of events symbolically indicative of an institution that reduces human beings into objects Sandy is then cut down and the wood used to make the now disused structure.  Once she realizes what has happened Tenie goes insane with grief.

John scoffs at this bit of folkloric imagination, but John’s wife Annie refuses to use the wood and instead gives the old place to Uncle Julius's church group. Charles Crow notes that “Julius’s story is Gothic for Annie, comic for John,” or, more to the point, Gothic for those who recognize the dehumanizing consequences of slavery and who are, perhaps, part of a disenfranchised group themselves (American Gothic, p. 96). Thus "Po' Sandy" not only reflects slavery and racial discourse but can also be read as a proto-feminist work. Annie's sympathy for Tenie (when the story ends Annie's first thought is not "poor Sandy" but rather "poor Tenie") and their parallel characterizations (both are subject to a paternalistic reading of their identities which negates their voices and forces them to turn to covert methods of expression), refocuses their personal narratives as not only cross-racial but also gender-specific. It is an interesting moment of intersectionality in which gendered and racial repression reflect the injustices of a patriarchal tradition.

At its core, "Po' Sandy" can be read as a pseudo-haunted house story where a sin of the patriarchal/aristocratic group creates a space for recurring tension. Even without the supernatural implications the symbolic meaning of the tale is profound.  Whether Sandy is a literal or figurative tree doesn't matter - he is a being with roots whose life is destroyed by an institution which sees him as an object. 

 The structure in the story is literally built out of the body of a slave, a figure who is denied agency and human love by a patriarchal authority and is then utterly torn apart. This story is distinctly American Gothic in that it epitomizes tensions about problematic national identity. A structure (or country) built literally using the flesh and blood and suffering of an entire race is in many ways inherently tainted, inescapably haunted. A space (or country) so created must forever be a source of recurring historical and emotional trauma that ultimately either makes the structure unusable or requires a spiritual exorcism, a moral realignment such as the transformation of Po' Sandy's remains into a place of worship. Anxieties about the promise of America as an ideal built on freedom and personal liberty are articulated particularly in slave and post-slavery narratives of figures such as Chesnutt, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and others. While all such texts may not be explicitly Gothic they do imply Gothic imagery and sentiments and suggest that America-the-country is also a kind of national haunted house.

Kathleen Hudson is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sheffield studying narrative in the Gothic. What's a ghost's favourite fruit? A Boo-berry!  Hahahaha... sorry.