Melmoth the Wanderer

By Charles Maturin

In this masterpiece of Gothic horror, the story of a man doomed to wander for eternity unfolds through an eerie series of macabre encounters.

After selling his soul to Satan in exchange for immortality, Melmoth is now doomed to spend eternity preying on the helpless and vulnerable. His only chance at relief is to find someone who will take his place, and so he wanders with the tortured hope of finally knowing peace. In this baroque and darkly humorous novel, Charles Maturin pieces together the story of Melmoth through the eyes of those who have encountered him over the centuries—from a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition to an inmate at a London insane asylum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504080910

Charles Maturin

Charles Maturin (1780-1824) was an Irish writer and clergyman. Born and raised in Dublin, Maturin was raised in a prominent Huguenot family. Educated at Trinity College, he became ordained as curate of Loughrea, County Galway, before returning to Dublin in 1903. Due to his position in the Church of Ireland, he was forced to publish his writing under a pseudonym, achieving some acclaim for his early novels. In 1816, his play Bertram was staged at the Drury Lane theatre in London. Although he was encouraged by Sir Water Scott and Lord Byron, he received a devastating review from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who deemed the play “melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind.” Forced to reveal his identity in order to claim his profits, Maturin was barred from advancement by the Church of Ireland and turned his attention to novel writing. In 1820, his Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer was published to critical acclaim, earning Maturin a reputation as a leading Romantic, influencing such writers as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac. Controversial in his lifetime, viewed as an eccentric in his native country, Maturin would serve as inspiration to his grandnephew Oscar Wilde, as well as countless writers, artists, and aesthetes.

Book preview

CHAPTER I.

Alive again? Then show me where he is;

I’ll give a thousand pounds to look upon him.

Shakespeare.

In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinity College, Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle on whom his hopes for independence chiefly rested. John was the orphan son of a younger brother, whose small property scarce could pay John’s college expences; but the uncle was rich, unmarried, and old; and John, from his infancy, had been brought up to look on him with that mingled sensation of awe, and of the wish, without the means to conciliate, (that sensation at once attractive and repulsive), with which we regard a being who (as nurse, domestic, and parent have tutored us to believe) holds the very threads of our existence in his hands, and may prolong or snap them when he pleases.

On receiving this summons, John set immediately out to attend his uncle.

The beauty of the country through which he travelled (it was the county Wicklow) could not prevent his mind from dwelling on many painful thoughts, some borrowed from the past, and more from the future. His uncle’s caprice and moroseness,—the strange reports concerning the cause of the secluded life he had led for many years,—his own dependent state,—fell like blows fast and heavy on his mind. He roused himself to repel them,—sat up in the mail, in which he was a solitary passenger,—looked out on the prospect,—consulted his watch;—then he thought they receded for a moment,—but there was nothing to fill their place, and he was forced to invite them back for company. When the mind is thus active in calling over invaders, no wonder the conquest is soon completed. As the carriage drew near the Lodge, (the name of old Melmoth’s seat), John’s heart grew heavier every moment.

The recollection of this awful uncle from infancy,—when he was never permitted to approach him without innumerable lectures,—not to be troublesome,—not to go too near his uncle,—not to ask him any questions,—on no account to disturb the inviolable arrangement of his snuff-box, hand-bell, and spectacles, nor to suffer the glittering of the gold-headed cane to tempt him to the mortal sin of handling it,—and, finally, to pilot himself aright through his perilous course in and out of the apartment without striking against the piles of books, globes, old newspapers, wig-blocks, tobacco-pipes, and snuff-cannisters, not to mention certain hidden rocks of rat-traps and mouldy books beneath the chairs,—together with the final reverential bow at the door, which was to be closed with cautious gentleness, and the stairs to be descended as if he were shod with felt.—This recollection was carried on to his school-boy years, when at Christmas and Easter, the ragged poney, the jest of the school, was dispatched to bring the reluctant visitor to the Lodge,—where his pastime was to sit vis-a-vis to his uncle, without speaking or moving, till the pair resembled Don Raymond and the ghost of Beatrice in the Monk,—then watching him as he picked the bones of lean mutton out of his mess of weak broth, the latter of which he handed to his nephew with a needless caution not to take more than he liked,—then hurried to bed by day-light, even in winter, to save the expence of an inch of candle, where he lay awake and restless from hunger, till his uncle’s retiring at eight o’clock gave signal to the governante of the meagre household to steal up to him with some fragments of her own scanty meal, administering between every mouthful a whispered caution not to tell his uncle. Then his college life, passed in an attic in the second square, uncheered by an invitation to the country; the gloomy summer wasted in walking up and down the deserted streets, as his uncle would not defray the expences of his journey;—the only intimation of his existence, received in quarterly epistles, containing, with the scanty but punctual remittance, complaints of the expences of his education, cautions against extravagance, and lamentations for the failure of tenants and the fall of the value of lands. All these recollections came over him, and along with them the remembrance of that last scene, where his dependence on his uncle was impressed on him by the dying lips of his father.

John, I must leave you, my poor boy; it has pleased God to take your father from you before he could do for you what would have made this hour less painful to him. You must look up, John, to your uncle for every thing. He has oddities and infirmities, but you must learn to bear with them, and with many other things too, as you will learn too soon. And now, my poor boy, may He who is the father of the fatherless look on your desolate state, and give you favour in the eyes of your uncle. As this scene rose to John’s memory, his eyes filled fast with tears, which he hastened to wipe away as the carriage stopt to let him out at his uncle’s gate.

He alighted, and with a change of linen in a handkerchief, (his only travelling equipment), he approached his uncle’s gate. The lodge was in ruins, and a barefooted boy from an adjacent cabin ran to lift on its single hinge what had once been a gate, but was now a few planks so villainously put together, that they clattered like a sign in a high wind. The stubborn post of the gate, yielding at last to the united strength of John and his barefooted assistant, grated heavily through the mud and gravel stones, in which it left a deep and sloughy furrow, and the entrance lay open. John, after searching his pocket in vain for a trifle to reward his assistant, pursued his way, while the lad, on his return, cleared the road at a hop step and jump, plunging through the mud with all the dabbling and amphibious delight of a duck, and scarce less proud of his agility than of his sarving a gentleman. As John slowly trod the miry road which had once been the approach, he could discover, by the dim light of an autumnal evening, signs of increasing desolation since he had last visited the spot,—signs that penury had been aggravated and sharpened into downright misery. There was not a fence or a hedge round the domain: an uncemented wall of loose stones, whose numerous gaps were filled with furze or thorns, supplied their place. There was not a tree or shrub on the lawn; the lawn itself was turned into pasture-ground, and a few sheep were picking their scanty food amid the pebble-stones, thistles, and hard mould, through which a few blades of grass made their rare and squalid appearance.

The house itself stood strongly defined even amid the darkness of the evening sky; for there were neither wings, or offices, or shrubbery, or tree, to shade or support it, and soften its strong harsh outline. John, after a melancholy gaze at the grass-grown steps and boarded windows, addressed himself to knock at the door; but knocker there was none: loose stones, however, there were in plenty; and John was making vigorous application to the door with one of them, till the furious barking of a mastiff, who threatened at every bound to break his chain, and whose yell and growl, accompanied by eyes that glow and fangs that grin, savoured as much of hunger as of rage, made the assailant raise the siege on the door, and betake himself to a well-known passage that led to the kitchen. A light glimmered in the window as he approached: he raised the latch with a doubtful hand; but, when he saw the party within, he advanced with the step of a man no longer doubtful of his welcome.

Round a turf-fire, whose well-replenished fuel gave testimony to the master’s indisposition, who would probably as soon have been placed on the fire himself as seen the whole kish emptied on it once, were seated the old housekeeper, two or three followers, (i. e. people who ate, drank, and lounged about in any kitchen that was open in the neighbourhood, on an occasion of grief or joy, all for his honor’s sake, and for the great rispict they bore the family), and an old woman, whom John immediately recognized as the doctress of the neighbourhood,—a withered Sybil, who prolonged her squalid existence by practising on the fears, the ignorance, and the sufferings of beings as miserable as herself. Among the better sort, to whom she sometimes had access by the influence of servants, she tried the effects of some simples, her skill in which was sometimes productive of success. Among the lower orders she talked much of the effects of the evil eye, against which she boasted a counter-spell, of unfailing efficacy; and while she spoke, she shook her grizzled locks with such witch-like eagerness, that she never failed to communicate to her half-terrified, half-believing audience, some portion of that enthusiasm which, amid all her consciousness of imposture, she herself probably felt a large share of; still, when the case at last became desperate, when credulity itself lost all patience, and hope and life were departing together, she urged the miserable patient to confess "there was something about his heart; and when this confession was extorted from the weariness of pain and the ignorance of poverty, she nodded and muttered so mysteriously, as to convey to the bystanders, that she had had difficulties to contend with which were invincible by human power. When there was no pretext, from indisposition, for her visiting either his honor’s kitchen, or the cottar’s hut,—when the stubborn and persevering convalescence of the whole country threatened her with starvation,—she still had a resource:—if there were no lives to be shortened, there were fortunes to be told;—she worked by spells, and by such daubry as is beyond our element. No one twined so well as she the mystic yarn to be dropt into the lime-kiln pit, on the edge of which stood the shivering inquirer into futurity, doubtful whether the answer to her question of who holds?" was to be uttered by the voice of demon or lover.

No one knew so well as she to find where the four streams met, in which, on the same portentous season, the chemise was to be immersed, and then displayed before the fire, (in the name of one whom we dare not mention to ears polite), to be turned by the figure of the destined husband before morning. No one but herself (she said) knew the hand in which the comb was to be held, while the other was employed in conveying the apple to the mouth,—while, during the joint operation, the shadow of the phantom-spouse was to pass across the mirror before which it was performed. No one was more skilful or active in removing every iron implement from the kitchen where these ceremonies were usually performed by the credulous and terrified dupes of her wizardry, lest, instead of the form of a comely youth exhibiting a ring on his white finger, an headless figure should stalk to the rack, (Anglicè, dresser), take down a long spit, or, in default of that, snatch a poker from the fire-side, and mercilessly take measure with its iron length of the sleeper for a coffin. No one, in short, knew better how to torment or terrify her victims into a belief of that power which may and has reduced the strongest minds to the level of the weakest; and under the influence of which the cultivated sceptic, Lord Lyttleton, yelled and gnashed and writhed in his last hours, like the poor girl who, in the belief of the horrible visitation of the vampire, shrieked aloud, that her grandfather was sucking her vital blood while she slept, and expired under the influence of imaginary horror. Such was the being to whom old Melmoth had committed his life, half from credulity, and (Hibernicè speaking) more than half from avarice. Among this groupe John advanced,—recognising some,—disliking more,—distrusting all. The old housekeeper received him with cordiality;—he was always her whiteheaded boy, she said,—(imprimis, his hair was as black as jet), and she tried to lift her withered hand to his head with an action between a benediction and a caress, till the difficulty of the attempt forced on her the conviction that that head was fourteen inches higher than her reach since she had last patted it. The men, with the national deference of the Irish to a person of superior rank, all rose at his approach, (their stools chattering on the broken flags) and wished his honor a thousand years and long life to the back of that; and would not his honor take something to keep the grief out of his heart; and so saying, five or six red and bony hands tendered him glasses of whiskey all at once. All this time the Sybil sat silent in the ample chimney-corner, sending redoubled whiffs out of her pipe. John gently declined the offer of spirits, received the attentions of the old housekeeper cordially, looked askance at the withered crone who occupied the chimney corner, and then glanced at the table, which displayed other cheer than he had been accustomed to see in his honor’s time. There was a wooden dish of potatoes, which old Melmoth would have considered enough for a week’s subsistence. There was the salted salmon, (a luxury unknown even in London. Vide Miss Edgeworth’s Tales, The Absentee).

There was the slink-veal, flanked with tripe; and, finally, there were lobsters and fried turbot enough to justify what the author of the tale asserts, suo periculo, that when his great grandfather, the Dean of Killala, hired servants at the deanery, they stipulated that they should not be required to eat turbot or lobster more than twice a-week. There were also bottles of Wicklow ale, long and surreptitiously borrowed from his honor’s cellar, and which now made their first appearance on the kitchen hearth, and manifested their impatience of further constraint, by hissing, spitting, and bouncing in the face of the fire that provoked its animosity. But the whiskey (genuine illegitimate potsheen, smelling strongly of weed and smoke, and breathing defiance to excisemen) appeared, the veritable Amphitryon of the feast; every one praised, and drank as deeply as he praised.

John, as he looked round the circle, and thought of his dying uncle, was forcibly reminded of the scene at Don Quixote’s departure, where, in spite of the grief caused by the dissolution of the worthy knight, we are informed that nevertheless the niece eat her victuals, the housekeeper drank to the repose of his soul, and even Sancho cherished his little carcase. After returning, as he might, the courtesies of the party, John asked how his uncle was. As bad as he can be;—Much better, and many thanks to your honor, was uttered in such rapid and discordant unison by the party, that John turned from one to the other, not knowing which or what to believe. They say his honor has had a fright, said a fellow, upwards of six feet high, approaching by way of whispering, and then bellowing the sound six inches above John’s head. "But then his honor has had a cool since, said a man who was quietly swallowing the spirits that John had refused. At these words the Sybil who sat in the chimney corner slowly drew her pipe from her mouth, and turned towards the party: The oracular movements of a Pythoness on her tripod never excited more awe, or impressed for the moment a deeper silence. It’s not here, said she, pressing her withered finger on her wrinkled forehead, nor here,—nor here; and she extended her hand to the foreheads of those who were near her, who all bowed as if they were receiving a benediction, but had immediate recourse to the spirits afterwards, as if to ensure its effects.—It’s all here—it’s all about the heart; and as she spoke she spread and pressed her fingers on her hollow bosom with a force of action that thrilled her hearers.—It’s all here," she added, repeating the action, (probably excited by the effect she had produced), and then sunk on her seat, resumed her pipe, and spoke no more. At this moment of involuntary awe on the part of John, and of terrified silence on that of the rest, an unusual sound was heard in the house, and the whole company started as if a musket had been discharged among them:—it was the unwonted sound of old Melmoth’s bell. His domestics were so few, and so constantly near him, that the sound of his bell startled them as much

Reviews for Melmoth the Wanderer

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reasons to read: published 1820 (bingo), 1001 books,Legacy: This book was written by Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish Protestant clergyman (ordained in the Church of Ireland) and a writer of Gothic plays and novels. This is his best known works. According to the editors of 1001 Books..., this book is a transitional novel in literary history. It is the final example of Gothic traditional with key features; wild, remote, or otherwise exotic.Style: the book is a succession of strange stories, entrapments, dangerous lure. There is the opening of the book where John Melmoth the student goes to his uncle's home. The following stories include; the Tale of the Spaniard, the Tale of the Indians, The Tale of Guzman's Family, and back to the Tale of the Indians.Characters: John Melmoth, a student who inherits his uncle's money. He also acquires a manuscript which tells the story of an ancestor also called John Melmoth.Identity; John Melmoth, the ancestor, gained satanic immortality in exchange for his soul. A Faustian bargain. He is seeking his release from this covenant with the devil by seeking another to take his place. The book explores the nature of temptation and torment.Contribution: the book/author contributed to Poe, Wilde, Baudelaire and others.Readability: it is long. Each story is interesting but could have been made shorter. There is a lot of descriptive words and it was not always easy to stay engage. I listened to the audible production, narrated by Gerry O'Brien.Rating 3.6

[jbd1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a weirdly long book about which to say "I couldn't get into it," but somehow I read all 500+ pages and still feel that way. I love gothic novels, but this one just felt like it went on and on and on ... and on ... and on ... and on ... with stories-within-stories-within-stories and lots of anti-Catholic rhetoric. I don't know. I may just have to try again someday.

[tungsten_peerts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I shouldn't put down a review -- I'm only 50 pages in -- but I'm compelled to initiate this for two reasons: 1) this novel is already such delirious fun, and 2) I want to warn readers off Chris Baldick's Introduction -- it's of the "here are some facts about the novel you're about to read, which after all isn't very good" variety. Lordy. Why write an intro at all, dear Chris, if you don't like the goddamned book? Even from my meager accomplishment of 50 pages I feel like Baldick must have missed the point badly: his intro would have been less boring if he'd HATED Melmoth. Read it after the novel if you must.You will want the notes in the Oxford edition, and you should repair to them when lost because they enrich the experience. Good lord, the storminess of this! And it's FUNNY (and on purpose, I think).

[gracefulphoton · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A confusing book. At times incredibly tedious, and generally bewildering in its structure (I summarized a point in the book to a friend as: a character is telling a story about reading a story in which a character tells a story), the book is saved by having some of the genuinely creepiest scenes I can remember reading, and indeed the menace of the titular character is only cemented by his general absence punctuated by unexpected appearances that never bode well.I'm reasonably glad to have held out for the OUP edition of the book because the Intro made good progress in explaining why the book is still in print. As a fan of Ann Radcliffe I understood it to be an important marker in Gothic literature, but I really appreciated the introduction's point that the very structure of Melmoth entails a destabilization of the orthodoxy that Maturin set out to reinforce. At times I found the 500 pages required for this trying, but if you enjoy long reads (as I do) this will surely appeal!

[leslie398 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really didn't care for this classic, supposedly a Gothic horror novel, but I don't want to give it just 1* rating because as a classic it must have some merit that I just didn't see.It started off OK - Gothic horror is not a genre I care much for but I have enjoyed some of them so I was willing to give it a chance. But just as the story seemed to be getting going, the main character John Melmoth helps rescue a Spanish man who had been in a shipwreck. The Spaniard proceeds to tell John his life story. That story within a story contains another story told to the Spaniard about a girl in India. The Indian's Tale goes on to contain not one but two other stories! Finally the Indian's Tale is finished (at about 90% of the way through the book) but the reader never gets to hear the end of the Spaniard's Tale. The ending is abrupt and anticlimatic.Most of the book struck me as Maturin telling horrible stories about Catholics, especially the priesthood. Having chosen Spain as the setting for most of the book, he makes use of the Spanish Inquisition freely but even the 'friendly' priests are portrayed as worldly, power-hungry, bitter or impotent. Melmoth the Wanderer came across to me as pathetic more than frightening but to be frank, after the first third of the book I wasn't paying close attention any more.

[booklove2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Melmoth had been on my radar as a book I might get around to on that ever-lengthening list of books I might get around to. Sarah Perry's book just happened to be called 'Melmoth' so I figured I should get to the Maturin before the Perry. Melmoth features a series of nested spooky stories: one leading to the next. Though somehow these slightly connected stories didn't connect as much as I thought they would by the end. I think Maturin can really look at things differently with some unique perspectives and turns of phrase. Maturin reminds me a bit of Hawthorne in this way. My Hawthorne knowledge might only extend to 'The House of Seven Gables', but it's such a great book on a psychological level. At times, the writing seemed like it might be from a much later time than 1820 and be emulating the writing from the past, for example, 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke -- if you like one, you'll probably like the other.

[toddsherman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“Miserable wretch that I am! At this moment, a voice from the bottom of my heart asks me ‘Whom hast thou loved so much? Was it man or God, that thou darest to compare thyself with her who knelt, and wept—not before a mortal idol, but at the feet of an incarnate divinity?’”—Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles MaturinWhat a great beginning, dripping in all the best gothic goo and sticking to the back of the brain. Hidden portraits with hidden histories in houses of decrepitude and ancient sins. Torture, bloody death under trampling hooves, breaking spirits on wheels and in dungeons and looming over cliffs toward hell-tossed oceans. I wanted to love this book. And the neck had been so damn snug in that lunette. What happened? Well, while the blade went singing to that doomed soul kneeling in puddles of blood, the narrative had been hijacked and hijacked again and hijacked once more. Hi-hi-high treasonous prose! Not remaining faithful to the set-up, playing Russian nesting dolls with the plot, whisking away the cobwebs only to find that behind that rusting and molding door is another goddamn door. Goddamn! That’s right, Melmoth sold his soul to the Devil and searched the world for a sucker to take his dark mantle from off his shoulders—kind of a reverse of Diogenes with demon’s blood in the lamp instead of light. So, like many other Gothic tales of its time, I was disappointed. Yet, in awe when some powerful passage would clout me at the base of the nose when nearly nodding off. Did he just . . . ?It would take the likes of Poe to distill this kind of story into a truly affecting work. And since I’m a condenser by nature, a writer who cuts and squeezes until all the infection is out, to the detriment of the body, maybe, I couldn’t help but wish this thing move along a bit more briskly. Let the bloodletting commence! But without this kind of work, with its kind of unique power and sutured narrative to one hundred and fifty-year-old flesh, there would never have been a tradition of dark yet metaphysical literature to challenge readers and lovers of the macabre. Not all vampires are sparkly. Not all depictions of the Devil are devilish. (“The Brothers Karamazov” attests to the truth of that.) Not all narratives need be straight-forward—bent by scabrous fingers on dark designs. I just wish “Melmoth the Wanderer” hadn’t wandered so much.

[joe73-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best novels ever written. It was long, tedious and a Chinese puzzle box full of wonder. You have to really stay on your toes to understand this story but when it is all done and you have wiped the blood from eyes you will thank yourself. Finishing it is a major achievement for anyone who reads on a regular basis. I wonder what this would have been like if Umberto Eco had penned it. It takes some real stamina.

[jhemlock-1711 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best novels ever written. It was long, tedious and a Chinese puzzle box full of wonder. You have to really stay on your toes to understand this story but when it is all done and you have wiped the blood from eyes you will thank yourself. Finishing it is a major achievement for anyone who reads on a regular basis. I wonder what this would have been like if Umberto Eco had penned it. It takes some real stamina.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully atmospheric and gloomy with some splendidly misanthropist screeds, this novel is the apotheosis of the Romantic horror novel. The structure is contrived, with its stories nested like a set of matryoshka dolls, and the relentless anti-Catholicism is heavy handed. Still, the highlights are worth the slogs through the languors, and if this sort of thing is your cup of tea, then there's a whole Brown Betty potful of Gothic delights to be savored here.

[veilofisis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are Faustian stories about the Devil and Faustian stories about Faust, but Melmoth the Wanderer transcends the conventions (and the trappings) of both. Nested narratives that nearly defy our ability to maintain just who is speaking and who is listening spiral out of each other like smoke rising from a censer and coalescing with dreamy fog. This is the story of a man who sells his soul for a little extra time—of a man who currently has one-hundred-and-fifty years to prey on the helpless, the innocent, the guilty, the tortured, the desperate, the insane; to win them by hook or by crook into trading places with him and taking over his ultimate damnation. In Melmoth the Wanderer we are presented at times with stories within stories within stories within stories within stories—each detailing the sufferings of a mankind determined, apparently, to keep on suffering—and through it all, sparkling like a jewel in a pile of spent ashes, recurring when least needed and most expected, tying together the helpless and essentially unrelated skeins of a persecuted humanity throughout the centuries of his eerie, tormented existence is Melmoth the Wanderer.Drawing heavily on the bombastic nature of the Gothic tomes that came before him, Charles Maturin took the languid language of Mrs. Radcliffe and tempered it with the vicious cruelties of the Lewis set, the political musings of Godwin, and the surrealism of Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley. It is both indebted to the whole of the Gothic tradition, and hence considered the last of the great Gothic novels, and yet also an incredibly inventive and original piece of writing that is less the ‘last great Gothic novel’ and more the first in a new school that would eventually include such luminaries as Poe, Wilde, and even H. P. Lovecraft. It is also very much concerned with itself as a text, and its embedded narratives have impacted the whole of literature, whether through Maturin’s imitators or those who imitated his imitators. In fact, his format has to be read to be believed—it is a brave and eccentric way to tell a brave and eccentric story.Maturin’s Gothicism is high on theatrics, but also on subtle and sometimes overwhelmingly complex philosophy. A Protestant clergyman who moonlit as a writer of sensationalistic and sometimes overtly anti-religious fiction and drama, Maturin lived a life of contradictions. And above all, Melmoth the Wanderer explores the nature of religion in its rawest and ugliest of dimensions; seemingly a strictly anti-Catholic text, Melmoth reveals itself to have a beef with nearly every major religion, including Protestantism, and, at its heart, essentially every other aspect of the human experience. Maturin takes no prisoners. And though, in his dubious and distracting ‘footnotes,’ Maturin insinuates that the things coming out of his characters’ mouths (particularly the Wanderer’s) should not be taken for his own opinions, he has loaded his text with so many of these caustic observations that one cannot help but conclude that, even if he doesn’t agree with what he’s saying, it can hardly matter: his words stand alone. Whether Maturin intended his text to work on the levels that it does or not, Melmoth the Wanderer is a deeply antagonistic novel—not just in regard to religion, but in regard to nearly the whole of human history and thought. And, the contradiction to crown them all, it is also a book that revels in the beauty of religion at its purest: a kind of poisoned love-letter to the possibilities of justice in a world gone mad.Writers as diverse as Balzac, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Vladimir Nabokov have referenced and admired Melmoth the Wanderer for its troubling, deeply romantic themes and its central character, who embodies them in the most hallucinatory and disturbing of ways. Melmoth, then, and Melmoth the Wanderer as a whole, serve as a mouthpiece for the rationalizations and, occasionally, the ravings of a man of uncommon considerations. It is a novel that out-Herods Herod at every available opportunity and also a novel of rare and almost incapacitating power. If a modern reader can manage to get along with its bizarre and maddening format of stories within stories, he will be rewarded with an experience that simply cannot be put out of mind: Melmoth is the stuff of nightmares, sure, but also of dreams—and visions.

[tomveal · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Melmoth the Wanderer was a prominent ripple in the Romantic Era's flood of supernatural fiction. Devoured by schoolboys throughout the 19th Century, it gained a following abroad, too, most notably in France.Much though it appealed to the likes of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde, Melmoth has aged poorly. Today's reader is likely to find it slow-moving and prolix, as well as preachy to the point of self-parody. The author, the Rev. Charles Maturin, supplemented his meager clerical income by writing plays and novels. He feared, though, that such work would blight his career in the Church of England. That may be why he attached to this, his most popular, production an optimistic and unlikely moral. He took it from one of his own sermons, which he quotes in the novel's preface:"At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his word - is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? - No, there is not one - not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!"The Wanderer, searching for a soul to accept that bargain, stalks through a series of nested tales, a longaevus with supernatural powers and human passions. His failures in his quest are mostly unbelievable, and there is much else to disparage: The prose, consistently overwritten, sometimes blots out the sense. Many of the characters are flat stereotypes. The author's smug anti-Catholicism grates. And the narrative stumbles to an unsatisfying stop, as if has filled its requisite number of pages and need not go on.Nonetheless, Baudelaire admired Maturin, and Honoré de Balzac called this book "the greatest creation of one of the greatest geniuses of Europe". If one makes the mental effort, it is possible to glimpse why.The title character, when not smothered in rhetorical excess, is a compelling figure: a Romantic anti-hero whose immense power is linked to despair. He has chosen to become an agent of evil, yet he retains a nostalgic sympathy for the mortals he is trying to entice into Hell. In the end, he cannot avoid falling in love, abandoning a nearly caught prey to Heaven, and yielding to old age and dissolution.Also, while much too lavish with words, Maturin is economical of special effects. He offers no profusion of horrors. Melmoth, the only supernatural being on stage, violates the laws of nature only infrequently and mostly between chapters. The dread that pervades the book rises from within the characters' minds rather than from without, and what they dread is what the young Romantics dreaded: monotony, conventionality and subordination, more than things that go bump in the night. Compared to the typical 19th Century Gothic, or 21st Century horror, novel, Melmoth is surprisingly sophisticated and subtle.So, while I cannot commend it with Balzac's enthusiasm, its appeal, though much faded, is not entirely gone.

[jontseng · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lonely and thought-provoking. One of the finest Gothic novels, although that may be faint praise..