Roger Luckhurst – Late Victorian Gothic Tales

Roger Luckhurst (ed.) – Late Victorian Gothic Tales    (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009)

Introduction
Note on sources
Note on Illustrations
Select Bibliography
A Chronology Of The 1890’s

Vernon Lee – Dionea
Oscar Wilde – Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
Henry James – Sir Edmund Orme
Rudyard Kipling – The Mark Of The Beast
B. M. Croker – The Dark Bungalow At Dakor
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Lot No. 249
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -The Case Of Lady Sannox
Grant Allen – Pallinghurst Barrow
Jean Lorrain – Magic Lantern
Jean Lorrain – The Secret Hand
Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan
M. P. Sheil – Vaila

Explanatory Notes
Blurb:

‘He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and pringled in his skin. Coming in such a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head…’

The Victorian fin de siècle: the era of Decadence, The Yellow Book, the New Woman, the scandalous Oscar Wilde, the Empire on which the sun never set. This heady brew was caught nowhere better than in the revival of the Gothic tale in the late Victorian age, where the undead walked and evil curses, foul murder, doomed inheritance and sexual menace played on the stretched nerves of the new mass readerships. This anthology collects together some of the most famous examples of the Gothic tale in the 1890s, with stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee, Henry James and Arthur Machen, as well as some lesser known yet superbly chilling tales from the era. The introduction explores the many reasons for the Gothic revival, and how it spoke to the anxieties of the moment.