Mathew Lewis

Biography

Lewis, along with Charles Maturin and Mary Shelley, is usually categorized as a Gothic horror novelist. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and Caleb Williams by William Godwin were undoubtedly influential on Lewis. In reality, Lewis addressed a letter to his mother a few months before he started writing The Monk, claiming that the villain Montoni from The Mysteries of Udolpho and himself had a striking likeness.

 

Lewis borrowed Radcliffe's supernatural fascination and Godwin's narrative drive and interest in crime and punishment, but he used a different literary method. Unlike Radcliffe, who used the terror-Gothic genre to hint at imagined horrors, Lewis distinguished himself by revealing the specifics of the terrible events, garnering him the moniker of a Gothic horror novelist. Lewis creates a more novelistic experience for the reader by providing actual information rather than the scared sensations prevalent in Radcliffe. Ed Cameron claims that "Lewis disregards and frequently parodies the tenderness inherent in Radcliffe's writing" in his piece "Matthew Lewis and the Gothic Horror of Obsessional Neurosis."

 

Lewis' monodrama The Captive depicts the story of a lady who is forced into a mental institution against her will by her husband, and who progressively becomes insane as a result of the horrific events she observes there. It's a brief screenplay with only a few pages, but it was played over a few hours, creating the idea that much of the labor must have taken place in the asylum's gradual reenactment of physical violence. Due to fainting females in the crowd, the concert was halted halfway through. "Audience tears have traditionally been reckoned the highest type of acclaim... [But] a poet must have a strange taste who would be rewarded with hysteric fits," according to the Morning Chronicle's assessment. This shows that Lewis had the attitude of delighting in putting audiences in "fits" and being "rewarded" for it.

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