The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry

A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in ‘low-brow’ titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes ― inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies ― were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian.
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