The Mysteries of Udolpho (124 page)

2.
daughter-in-law
: This term was still in use as a variant for ‘step-daughter' in the nineteenth-century, although it was considered incorrect.

3.
embattled
: Furnished with battlements or crenellated embrasures.

4.
a cup of the waters of Lethe
: A cup of forgetfulness. In Greek mythology Lethe was one
of the rivers to Hades, the underworld. Those who descended to Hades were obliged to drink of the waters of Lethe and forget everything they had done on earth as mortals.

5.
‘with gay visions of to-morrow'
: Unidentified.

6.
‘To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new'
: Milton,
Lycidas
, l. 192.

1.
Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]
: I.xlviii; ‘What transport to retrace our boyish plays' in the original.

2.
a train of friars, and then of nuns
: Through having both nuns and monks reside under one roof, Radcliffe is frequently derided for her ignorance of monastic rules. However, an avid reader of travel literature, she may well have had in mind the Catholic monastery in Languedoc at Prouille a kilometre or two down the hill from Fanjeaux, south-east of Toulouse, established by Dominic Guzman (1171?–1221) in 1206. Here Dominic provided a home for women who had converted from the Albigensian heresy and who sought some equivalent spiritual life to the one they had been leading as heretics. His foundation also gave itinerant preachers a useful base. Thus, as the Dominican order took shape, Prouille had a small community of friars as well as nuns. The monastery had a wall down the middle and a courtyard on each side, separating the quarters for nuns and friars. This building can still be visited, but is now occupied only by nuns.

3.
The veil of the abbess… smile of welcome
: Radcliffe's kindly abbess is given a romantic appearance. In eighteenth-century England there were no Catholic parish priests or monastic institutions apart from two small unproclaimed nunneries at Hammersmith and York. Because the English were generally unfamiliar with the dress, establishments and practices of Catholic clergy, imagination could be and often was given free play by Gothic novelists. See Sister Mary Muriel Tarr,
Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Nature and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820)
(Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 1946).

1.
Gray [‘Ode for Music']
: ll. 32–4. The original edition was entitled, ‘Ode performed in the Senate-House at Cambridge, July 1, 1769, at the installation of His Grace Augustus-Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, Chancellor of the University. Set to Music by Dr Randal, Professor of Music', although it was called simply ‘Ode for Music' on the first page of the text. Gray, with ‘great reluctance' but unsolicited, had taken on the task of writing the verse for this occasion because he felt himself ‘bound in gratitude' to the Duke, who, while Prime Minister, had been responsible for his appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge in July 1768. Having flattered the Duke in his Ode, however, Gray and the verse were immediately targets for abuse and merciless parody in the press – vitriol instigated by the Duke's enemies. Despite all this, it is recorded that, after the installation ceremony, the company went off cheerfully to ‘dinner, in Trinity College Hall, where were seven turtles and a number of haunches,
with plenty of Claret, Champagne, and Burgundy'. See Roger Lonsdale, ed.,
The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith
, pp. 264–7.

1.
Pope's Homer
: Translated from
The Iliad
(1715–20), xv.752–7; ‘Bursts as a Wave that from the Cloud impends' (l. 752) in the original.

2.
‘Liquid notes, that close the eye of day'
: Milton, ‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray', l. 5.

1.
[Shakespeare] Midsummer Night's Dream
: III.ii.198–201, 215; ‘The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent' (l. 199) and ‘Oh, is all forgot?' (l. 201) in the original.

1.
[Shakespeare] Romeo and Juliet
: IV.i.45.

1.
Shakespeare [The Tempest]
: I. ii.406.

2.
oriel
: A large recess with a window, of polygonal plan, projecting from the outer face of a building, usually in an upper storey, and supported either from the ground or on corbels. Formerly sometimes forming a small apartment attached to a hall, or the like (
OED
). Here it structures the closet of the Marchioness.

1.
Shakespeare [Midsummer Night's Dream]
: V.i.369–72.

1.
Thomson [‘Hymn on Solitude']
: ll. 1–2, 25–6, 29–32; ‘And the faint landskip swims away' (l. 30) in the original (1729).

1.
Thomson [The Castle of Indolence]
: I.xxxi.

2.
such reflections… for eternity
: The Count's melancholy reflections on transience and death in the dilapidated saloon, like the frequent melancholy reveries of Emily and St Aubert in contemplation of the sublime and picturesque in nature, are important to Radcliffe's ethical and religious view. Following the poets James Thomson, James Beattie, Robert Blair and William Collins, Radcliffe sees melancholy – especially at twilight hours – as healing, restorative and redemptive.

3.
Whether the spirit… to the sense
: Belief / disbelief in the supernatural and the visibility of spirits had become serious topics of discussion in the latter half of the eighteenth century with Dr Johnson's investigation of the Cock Lane ghost in 1762. See E. J. Clery,
The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

4.
fictions of the Provençal writers
: Given the location of Chateau-le-Blanc, it is appropriate that it should be hung with ‘depictured scenes from some of the antient Provençal romances' and that ‘a volume of old Provencçal tales' lies in an ‘obscure corner' of the deceased Marquis de Villeroi's library.

5.
The Provençal Tale
: Rictor Norton (
Mistress of Udolpho
, pp. 99–100) has traced this as a version of the story of Sir Bevys of Lancaster reproduced in Thomas Warton's
The History of English Poetry
(1774–81), with which Radcliffe appears to have been familiar.

1.
Shakespeare [ Julius Caesar]
: II.i.230–33.

2.
rudely cut with a pen-knife
: The subsequent length of the poem and the instant recognizability of Valancourt's handwriting have made Radcliffe's utilization here of a common practice – engraving on stones – a subject for readerly mirth.

1.
[Shakespeare] Hamlet
: I.iv.40–42; 44.

2.
executed upon the wheel
: A reference to the barbaric medieval practice of killing by binding on a revolving wheel and striking with an iron bar.

3.
Tacitus
: Cornelius Tacitus (ad
c
. 56–
c
. 118), a Roman historian among whose surviving works is an account of the Roman conquest of Britain in his
De Vita Iulii Agricolae
.

1.
Shakespeare [Hamlet]
: I iii.59.

1.
[Rogers] Pleasures of Memory
: i.169–73. Samuel Rogers's
The Pleasures of Memory
, a long poem in which the author reflects as he wanders around the villages of his childhood, went through four editions in its first year and had sold 23,000 copies by 1816. Reference is to a facsimile edition in the Revolution and Romanticism series, chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989). Quoting the stanza chosen here by Radcliffe, he comments in his Introduction that ‘it is likely in fact that [William] Wordsworth first encountered Hartley's associationist theory of the mind through
The Pleasures of Memory
'.

2.
the liburnum… the cerinthe
: Probably the common
Laburnam anagyroides
of Europe, a small leguminous bush having racemes of yellow flowers, somewhat similar to wisteria. Cerinthe, the habit of which is difficult to trace with certainty, appears to be named for Cerinthus, a heresiarch of the first century who denied the divinity of Jesus, but held that a certain virtue descended into him at baptism, which filled him with the Holy Ghost.

1.
Gray [‘Ode on… Eton College']
: ll. 11–18; ‘soothe' (l. 18) in the original.

1.
[Shakespeare] Macbeth
: III.ii.50–53.

2.
Spanish Pavan
: A grave and stately dance in which the dancers were elaborately dressed (
OED
). It is of Italian origin; occasionally the name appears as ‘Padovana' (or ‘Paduana'), indicating Padua as the home of the dance. (The derivation from the Latin
pavo
, a peacock, is now generally discredited.) See Percy A. Scholes,
The Oxford Companion to Music
(London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 778.

3.
To a warm imagination… can shew
: Cf. Burke's
A Philosophical Enquiry
, Pt II, Section III on Obscurity, particularly, pp. 99, 107.

4.
Refines… roll
: Unidentified.

5.
[Beattie] The Minstrel
: I.xxi.

6.
He spoke of… stamp upon the world the history of the deluge
: An allusion to the theories of the theologian Bishop Thomas Burnet, whose
The Sacred Theory of the Earth
(1681–9), first published as
Telluris theora sacra
, was an imaginative and romantic cosmogony suggested to him by a journey across the Alps; it was praised by Addison in No. 146 of the
Spectator
. Burnet attributed the formation of the geological features of the Alps of which the Count speaks, as well as the changing seasons, to the cataclysmic flood in the time of Noah which followed the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As God's judgement on the world, the great flood had meant the loss of original nature and a separation recalled in melancholy contemplation of the post-lapsarian natural world.

1.
Beattie [Retirement]
: ll. 45–7.

1.
him, that left half told/The story of Cambuscan bold'
: The reference is to Chaucer, who in ‘The Squire's Tale' in his
Canterbury Tales
left unfinished the story of ‘Cambyuskan', King of ‘Sarray in the land of tartarye'. See
The Canterbury Tales
, ed. A. C. Cawley (London: Dent, 1958; Everyman, 1994), pp. 290–309.

2.
Milton [Il Penseroso]
: ll. 109–10; ‘Or call up him' in the original.

1.
Gray [‘Ode for Music']
: ll. 61–4.

1.
[Shakespeare] Macbeth
: V.i.71–4.

2.
‘the peace that passeth all understanding'
: Philippians 4:7, in the King James version of the Bible; ‘the peace of God' in the original.

1.
[Shakespeare] Macbeth
: I.vii.7–12.

2.
noviciation
: Noviciate, the probationary period before taking religious vows. In
The Italian
(1796), Vol. I, Ch. XI, Radcliffe uses ‘noviciation' to refer to the admission of a novice: ‘When this ceremony had concluded, another began, and he was told it was that of a noviciation' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 119).

3.
not human, but formed of wax
: The description of what was hidden behind the black veil is derived from the first volume of Pierre Jean Grosley's travel book
New Observations on Italy and Its Inhabitants
(French edition 1764; English translation, London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1769), in which Grosley relates that he was shown the waxen image of a woman in the Benedictine church of San Vitale in Ravenna. Her lover had had it made when, returning from a journey, he had found her dead and already three days buried. Having caused the vault to be opened so that he could gain comfort from beholding her once more, he saw her just as she was later presented in the wax: ‘Extremely beautiful, among the damp regions of the dead; a lizard is sucking her mouth, a worm is creeping out of one of her cheeks, a mouse is gnawing one of her ears, and a huge swolen [
sic
] toad on her forehead is preying on one of her eyes' (Vol. I, p. 205). Grosley
then comments, ‘at first sight I took this to be no more than a pious contrivance for mortifying pride, and alienating the heart from too violent a love of sublunary inticements'. This, too, accords with Radcliffe's explanation of the wax image as a memento mori ‘designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho'. See J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘Ramond De Carbonnières, Grosley and Mrs Radcliffe',
Review of English Studies
, Vol. 5, No. 19 (July 1929), p. 299. Partly decomposed corpses, or transis, were frequent representations of death in macabre Catholic iconography of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. See Philippe Ariès,
The Hour of Our Death
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983), pp. 110–18.

1.
Shakespeare [Titus Andronicus]
: III.i.111–13.

1.
Milton [Comus]
: ll. 1012–17; ‘Where the bow'd welkin slow doth bend' (l. 1015) in the original.