HAMMOND COLLECTION
Ambrosio, or The Monk (1799)
Matthew Gregory Lewis
In the autumn of 1794 Matthew Lewis dashed off a triumphant note to his mother in England. "What do you think of my having written in the space of ten weeks, a romance of between three and four hundred pages octavo? I have even written out half of it fair."
The book the twenty-year-old Lewis had penned in a "rage of writing" was The Monk. It is the creation of a precocious youth nurtured on Goethe and the gothic novels of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Ambrosio, a sixteenth-century Spanish monk revered for his sanctity, breaks his vows and plummets into an orgiastic hell. Incest, rape and matricide are the ingredients of Lewis' satanic brew. One critic has written of the writer's "museum of atrocities [filled] with a large variety of articles of vertu, including the Inquisition, the Wandering Jew, and the bleeding nun." From "Lewis' infernal brain," Byron wrote, "thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train."
The novel captured the imagination of a generation. "Monk" Lewis became the prize display of London drawing rooms. Sir Walter Scott described him as "a child and a spoiled child but a child of high imagination." The first editions of The Monk quickly sold out but early adulation yielded to criticism of a "libidinous and impious" story.
The furor reached Dublin where a local burgher reproved a librarian who offered the novel for sale. "A shocking bad book to be sure, sir," she replied. "But I have carefully looked through every copy, underscored all the naughty passages and cautioned my young ladies what they are to skip without reading it."
Lewis, a member of Parliament, was also a playwright and poet. Several of his plays achieved a certain success but none rivaled the notoriety of The Monk. In 1818 Lewis died of yellow fever on shipboard. He was returning to England from his sugar cane plantations in Jamaica.
I would give many a Sugar Cane
Monk Lewis was alive again.
BYRON
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