Throughout the nineteenth century novelists rework the devices of eighteenthcentury gothic into new forms of sensational extremity: monster stories from Frankenstein (1818) to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897), stories of crime and detection from Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) to the Newgate novel and Sherlock Holmes. Even historical fiction fromScott andHogg to Ainsworth and Reade is gothicized. Whether they appear as preternatural fantasy in the demonic bargains made by Melmoth and Dorian Gray or as scandalous disruptions of mid-Victorian domesticity in the sensation novel, sensational disturbances are always woven into the larger fabric of nineteenth-century fiction. Their extremity is in constant dialogue with the programmatic moderation of realism.

That dialogue already shapes the first “Gothic Story,” Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole calls it “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” offsetting the traditional romance's “imagination and improbability” with the novel's realistic fidelity to “nature,” while “leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention.” This liberating opportunity works in tension, however, with paranoid plotting that enacts an uncanny return of the repressed in its imaginative revival of outmoded superstitions and its supernatural retributions, visiting the sins of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generation. Both forms of return, intimations of the preternatural and insistent exposure of past transgressions, animate the fiction that emerges from the ruins of Walpole's haunted castle.