Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900

The second volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints Gothic chapbooks. These shorter and cheaper pamphlets capitalized on the Gothic’s popularity and were marketed to working-class audiences. Chapbook publishers such as Ann Lemoine and Thomas Tegg took advantage of copyright law’s failure to address formats beyond the book in order to abridge, excerpt and adapt versions of popular novels and dramas, particularly works by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. By commissioning elaborate frontispieces for almost all Gothic chapbooks, publishers also pioneered a visual language for the Gothic. Although many chapbooks were published anonymously, prolific chapbook writers, such as Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson, have been dismissed as hacks because of their reliance on Gothic formulas and practices of adaptation. The Gothic chapbooks included in this volume challenge the marginalization of chapbook writers and publishers and frame the interplay between original and adaptation as central to studies of not only the chapbook form but also the Gothic itself.