In the robust and expanding field of Gothic studies, William Blake remains a spectral, marginal figure. Bundock and Effinger’s Introduction opens by exploring Blake’s prominence in contemporary Gothic art and culture, a fact made ironic given the relative dearth of scholarly work on Blake’s Gothic sensibility. Bundock and Effinger suggest how the Gothic as an historiographical, affective, and aesthetic concept might inform Blake in several substantial ways. The Introduction then expands in four directions. The first considers terror, horror, and the ‘Gothic body’ in Blake. The second considers the intersection of Blake and the Gothic in terms of visual art and iconography. The third surveys extant criticism on Blake and the Gothic to illustrate the hitherto missed opportunity this collection attempts to take. The fourth and final section is a ‘descriptive catalogue’ of the chapters that follow, offering summaries of each contribution and explaining the order of presentation.

Ana Elena González-Treviño encourages us to think about Blake’s art graphically and, more specifically, topographically—though, to be clear, Blake’s topography is always multilayered such that place, gender, body, and history intertwine. González-Treviño reads Blake’s Thel as ‘probing...into the body of nature in order to acquire some sort of knowledge about nature and about herself’, a knowledge from which Thel recoils but that Oothoon seems prepared to engage. Inspired by folktales and mythical precursors to read how femininity is literally and figuratively entombed in the landscapes of both Thel and Visions, González-Treviño explores how both works stage ‘female desire and the legitimacy of intuitive knowledge, especially regarding the natural world’. And yet, for González-Treviño it is not simply that female characters in Blake are more ‘natural’; rather, if femininity does open up conduits to an encounter with radical materiality, these characters react with understandable anxiety after gazing upon the unveiled face of nature.

In 1880s London, Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner were both engaged in the socialist movement. An admirer of Schreiner, Harkness dedicated a socialist allegory to her in the late 1880s. However, in In Darkest London, Harkness uses allegorical forms less as propaganda tools and more, as Schreiner did, to evoke a sense of religious mystery. Mysterious, allegorical elements create a liminal space within Harkness’s otherwise realist novel, in which can exist the hope of a better future. This chapter sheds light on Harkness’s work through tracing her participation in the religious socialist aesthetic developed by Olive Schreiner. In situating Harkness in the context of 1880s and 1890s socialism and theology, the chapter argues that Harkness’s work was part of a literary discourse that contributed to the development of early twentieth- century Christianity and social work.

Margaret Harkness’s London is a city of mobility, both local and global. In her fiction, she utilises a familiar trope in late nineteenth-century urban writing, the figure of the peripatetic protagonist, in order to produce a complex urban panorama. This chapter considers perspectives on the city in Out of Work and In Darkest London from the viewpoints of two kinds of urban walkers: the slum saviour and the unemployed man. It explores the formal conventions wrought by this exploration of viewpoints, most notably, a shift from progressive to episodic narrative development.

Stephanie Codsi considers a Gothic constellation wherein Blake’s gruesome representations of dissection and critique of mathematical, disinterested calculation intersect with irony and self-parody. Finding a productive analogy between Gothic theatricality and spectacles of torture centering on figures such as Los and Jack Tearguts, Codsi traces the effects elicited by Blake’s art in the reader or viewer, effects that range from revulsion to laughter. In this context, a certain version of the Gothic becomes useful to Blake precisely for its regressiveness: by reading medical science as the field populated by so many absurd, blinkered Victor Frankensteins, Blake would cast rational demonstration and scientific surgery as philosophically and morally retrograde, as frighteningly primitive in their treatment of life as merely physical, appetitive, or—if we can pun on the horrible apes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—primate-ive.