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'Myself creating what I saw':1 The Morality of the Spectator in Eighteenth-Century Gothic

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From: Gothic Studies
Date: 20061101
Author:Price, Fiona

A sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit's cowl: - When your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness.2

In her criticism of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764) Reeve captures what would become two of the Gothic's most significant features: its insistence on emotional excess and its preoccupation with the visual. At a time ...

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