“False! False!! as Hell!!!”: A Reader’s Response to The Monk

In October 1796 Matthew Gregory Lewis, M.P., aged twenty-one, revealed himself to be the author of the recently published triple-decker The Monk and all hell broke loose. Lewis had embraced the “Gothic imagination” popularized by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe that “inspir[ed] terror and power … by creating sublime effects” (Groom 77). But instead of […]