Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin – a gothic matryoshka

The chilling nest of stories within stories within stories in this novel is as enduringly chilling as its shadowy central personality. Share and scare!

I first read Melmoth the Wanderer more than a decade ago, after stumbling across a battered copy I picked up for a few pounds in a secondhand bookshop by the sea. Although its author, Charles Maturin, might not be as well known as his near contemporaries – Shelley, Bram Stoker – he succeeded in producing a gothic horror so mind-bogglingly sophisticated that he certainly should be. I was staying in a bed and breakfast in Suffolk at the time, and in the day I walked along the beach, while my nights were spent in an armchair in the corner of my room, reading the book. I remember it was a warm December, and in the evenings I would sit with the windows open. The curtains would flap and a salt breeze would blow into the room, and as I read I could hear the whisper of a name on the wind.

Maturin was a protestant Dubliner and an eccentric priest, prone to sermonising and fond of dancing. In 1820, he wrote to his friend the author Walter Scott, to say that he was working on a novel so terrifying that it would succeed in “out-Heroding all the Herods” of the German school of gothic authors – Schiller, Hoffmann, Goethe – who were enjoying popularity at the time.

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