When the promised anthology failed to appear in due course, Scott pulled together the poems he had in hand and privately printed a sampler, titled An Apology for Tales of Terror. Only five copies of this 1799 book survive, and its mere existence has led some to believe, erroneously, that the Apology is the first edition of the present work.
Tales of Wonder was published in 1801 in two volumes in London, printed by W. Bulmer and Co., and sold by J. Bell. A second edition was issued later that year, in one volume, with Robert Southey’s poems removed. (1) The single-volume second edition was the bookseller’s response to complaints about the price of the two-volume set, and the inclusion, in the second volume, of many poems readily available to readers. The first Dublin printing in 1801 was the one-volume version. The two-volume version did not lack for buyers, however: an 1805 printing in Dublin, “printed for P. Wogan,” is based on the two-volume original, and includes Southey’s poems once again. (2)
Another book, confusingly titled Tales of Terror, appeared later in 1801, and as the bookseller suggested it as a suitable companion for Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, it was mistakenly assumed by many to be Lewis’s own work. The authorship of the spurious Tales of Terror has never been determined. The anthology contains a number of inflated parodies of supernatural ballads, alongside some that seem to be in the Lewis vein. Aside from an interesting verse Apologia for the Gothic that reflects contemporaneous debates about horror and The Sublime, it is otherwise a sophomoric production, perhaps intended to ridicule Lewis. Lewis seems to have ignored it, or to have quietly enjoyed the further notoriety it produced. It cost someone a good deal of money to produce, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Lewis participated in some way.
More than two decades ago, I came into possession of a dog-eared copy of Henry Morley’s 1887 compilation, titled Tales of Terror and Wonder. Morley cobbled together the Lewis original with the spurious Tales of Terror, and, where pages were missing from his copies of the two books, he simply omitted those poems. Morley’s introductory essay has so many rabbit holes of error that it is best not to read it, nor to torment others by citing it.
My original intent, when embarking on this project, was simply to find Lewis’s first edition and to make it available once again.
At first glance, many of these poems seem to be works of pure imagination. Many occupy a Gothic realm of knights, libidinous monks, devils and witches, ravished damsels and haunted woods. Once I had determined to annotate the poems, however — intending to limit myself to defining arcane words for today’s students or general readers — I discovered that many of these poems have a deep history, rooted not only in their literary sources but also in specific times and places. My intertextual detective work has sought out alternate tellings of the narrative in these poems, in some cases finding the actual source, one dating back to 300 BCE.
The research into these poems also introduced me to the work of several generations of scholars who collected Runic poetry and English and Scottish ballads. These eccentrics — some clerics and some gentlemen with the income and inclination to explore monastery libraries or transcribe Runic stone carvings — were at work in a serious intellectual project: to ground Britain in an alternate pre-history that was neither Biblical nor Greco-Roman. This pagan yearning for Icelandic and Danish and Saxon literary and historical roots, is celebrated in some of the poems in this book. Although there are no dour Druids here, the lore of Wotan/Odin and the sombre epics of the North figure large.
The annotations in this new edition document the origins of the poems Lewis translated or selected. In some cases, I have inserted alternate translations or originals; in others I am content to point interested readers to the sources. The great mother lode of English and Scottish ballads can be found in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, LeGrand’s Fabliaux, and Evans’ A Collection of Old Ballads. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, although published later in the century (starting in 1868), is also cited frequently in the notes, since the Child ballad collection is comprehensive and the numbering of the ballads therein has become a standard cataloging reference.
It should not be forgotten that the literary ballad, where it is not a complete invention, is fossil evidence of a work intended to be sung, and accompanied by some kind of instrument. Some supernatural ballads were also transmitted in broadsheets and printed collections, often with musical notation. Ballad-singing was a tea-time entertainment, and sophisticated settings of such ballads by Haydn and Beethoven kept the text of the ballad in the public eye as song lyrics. The leap from folk-lyric to literary ballad set a higher standard for the ballad-as-text, and Lewis and his peers made it their business to add metric regularity and poetic diction into the sometimes rougher-hewn originals. Sometimes the texts are Anglicised or modernized; other times a new-fangled poem is cast in archaic language, either for atmosphere or as an outright literary hoax.
These editors, who collected ballads from oral transmission, also stood on the shoulders of monks and chroniclers who passed along, in Latin, wonderful tall tales such as “The Old Woman of Berkeley.” One approaches these ballad compilations with awe and caution commingled: some of the poets in this collection were involved in the creation of mock ballads that passed back into the literature.
Now that this first of two volumes is in hand, it is possible to step back and look at the remarkable range of work Lewis has assembled, skewed as the first volume is with the compiler’s eagerness to put his own work forward. Here we are treated to a ghost/vampire tale first penned around 300 BCE; a Runic funeral song from the tenth century CE; a meeting between the Saxon invader of England and a Roman ghost; a Nordic warrior woman’s incantation to raise her father from the dead; Goethe’s blood-curdling multi-voiced “Erl-King” and fatal water nymphs; the monk and nun who try (unsuccessfully) to save their witch mother from the Devil; a proud painter’s encounters with Satan; a doomed romance set in the horrific landscape of the War of the Spanish Succession; and the endless forest ride of “The Wild Huntsmen.” (In the second volume, the reader will encounter work by Burns, Dryden, Jonson, Gray, and Bürger, as well as items from the Percy and Evans collections of old ballads.)
One caveat for the reader weaned on modern poetry is that even the “Romantic” poets featured here employ forms, meters and language from an era earlier than their own, even sometimes to the extent of perpetrating a literary hoax à la Ossian. The Gothic esthetic by its nature is backward-looking. It takes some adjustment for today’s reader to enjoy these poems for what they are, and read them in the context of their own time. Against the stifling moral and correct tone of most 18th century verse, this is pretty strong stuff, a bracing counter-esthetic.
We need also remember that Lewis — whose Gothic plays shocked and appalled London audiences, and whose lurid novel, The Monk, mixed sex and demon possession — invested much in this book. Far more than just self-promotion of his own Gothic verses, the range of material selected demonstrates the unbroken interest in the weird and wonderful stretching back to antiquity.
A certain degree of macabre relish, what I call “the smile behind the skull,” is also evident throughout. The poems here are unlikely to frighten anyone other than the superstitious, or very small children; instead, they delight those of a Gothic predilection who enjoy the sublime frisson of danger and supernatural awe. The tone of this book sets the mode for erudition, arcane allusion, atmosphere and devastation — with a dose of Grand Guignol humor for the initiate — that we will see later in Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft would have recognized Lewis and the antiquarian eccentrics whose work anticipates Gothic poetry, as brothers.
I would like to acknowledge Lance Arney, who many years ago undertook the task of typing the 1887 Tales of Terror and Wonder into a computer. He raised the question of whether some of the poems in that edition were so absurd as to be parodies, and, as it turned out, he was correct.
In one of those delightful (or dismaying) coincidences of publishing, my first edition of Volume I of Tales of Wonder was published in October 2010, and Broadview Editions issued its own Tales of Wonder, edited by Douglass H. Thomson, the same month. I had not been familiar with any of Dr. Thomson’s remarkable work except his research, published online, into the Walter Scott Apology for Tales of Terror, to which I had referred readers.
Thomson’s masterful introduction and notes go into great depth about the place of Lewis’s work in the development of Gothic romanticism, and he devotes many pages to the problem of parody in the supernatural poems Lewis wrote and chose. Although he limits himself to Volume I and selections from Volume II, and a few selections from the spurious Tales of Terror, Thomson’s edition is indispensable for scholars.
My somewhat different focus requires the republication and annotation of both volumes, as Lewis presented them in 1801, illuminated by a study of the textual and narrative sources of the poems, and such information about the poets as will shed light on the interpretation of the text. I am also undaunted by the “tales of plunder” accusation against Lewis for using already-familiar poems and ballads, since most of the texts presented here will be new to today’s reader. My aim in this two-volume edition is to serve the educated general reader (whose existence I still believe in) as well as the academic. Happily, since this project is published in print and in ebook format with today’s “on demand” printing, I can continue to revise Tales of Wonder as new information comes to hand.
I hope that this new edition of the real Tales of Wonder will help restore Matthew Gregory Lewis to his rightful place in the history of Gothic literature and of Romanticism. Although biographers of Mary Shelley have made note of “Monk” Lewis’s visit to the Villa Deodati in 1816, and the sharing ghost stories among Lewis, Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, and Percy and Mary Shelley, none seem to have realized who among them had the most to say about the writing of a ghost story.
I am delighted that Tales of Wonder is finally coming into its own.
Volume 1 can be purchased here from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922558612
