Gothic Library - Clara Reeve - The Old English Baron - 1764

29 Nov, 2024

The Old English Baron prefatory material and part 1

It's time for a new entry in Callie Reads Gothic Fiction! This time I'm reading The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve.

Before I get started, first, hello! I also realized that I should introduce myself:

My Ph.D. is in British and US literature ("transatlantic" is the fancy term), focused on late 19th and early 20th century weird fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. I approach those things most often using genre theory, "anxiety literature" methodology,¹ and plain old traditional close reading. This series -- of which The Old English Baron will be the fourth -- is a blown-up version of a reading blog, as I reread classics of the Gothic genre. We joke a little, we learn a little, it's fun.

Now, for the book. The Old English Baron was originally titled The Champion of Virtue, and was first published in 1777, then republished under its current title in 1778. One interesting historical fact is that this is the time period in which England lost the war with the revolutionary US forces and surrendered. Some readers of OEB have made a lot of hay about that, given what goes on in the book. And maybe we'll talk about it too!

In the first edition, Reeve plays the good old "found manuscript" trick, as Walpole did in Otranto, and just like Walpole, she published it anonymously and then put her name, and a bolder introduction, on the second edition.

Here, she both cites Otranto as her source material while also criticizing it for being too unrealistic. So she's charting a middle ground, in her preface, saying she's improving on Otranto while simultaneously walking in its footsteps.

Walpole was not amused. He considered OEB as a blatant rip off, and, worse, dull. Mostly people have agreed. Walter Scott wrote it off as derivative and boring as well, and only in past few decades, wherein scholars have tried to bring women's writing out of the dark corners of their traditions and into the spotlight, have people reevaluated the novel. Maybe it is dull though! They're not all winners. Let's find out together.

Plot Summary

The book opens with an evocation of the historical period, when England was kicking French ass as well as engaging in various crusades for the church.
Sir Philip Harclay returns from a long time in Europe and Asia, fighting holy wars, killing people in other religions, the way you do. He retires to his estate and once he sets his own affairs in order -- they thought he was dead and the law is holding his stuff, this novel starts where *The Hobbit* ends -- he decides to go visit his friend who hasn't written in a really long time.
So his friend's dead, as it turns out. He took over the estate and responsibilities from his father, in turn, but shortly after, as the peasant on the road tells Philip, he died in wars with the "Welch" (Welsh).
Walter Lovel, his relation, took over, sold the castle to a guy named Fitz-Owen and moved away.
After a night at the peasant's house, Philip goes on, meets Fitz-Owen, his sons, and Edmund, a peasant boy that Fitz-Owen effectively *but not officially* adopted. His sons were great friends, and so the lord has been allowing him to be trained and tutored alongside the noble children, thinking he'll be a wonderful personal servant, kind of like a squire, when they go to war.
Philip noticeably pauses when he meets Edmund, though, and this is a dirty trick Reeve pulls here, we aren't told at this time *why*. Over the course of the evening he is so charmed by Edmund he offers to really and truly adopt him. Edmund politely refuses, feeling too close to the Fitz-Owen family to leave.
Philip leaves soon after, though he tells Fitz-Owen he will always support Edmund, because his earnest personality and fine skills and natural superiority will likely breed envy in others.

That's where I'm stopping the plot summary right now. It's not much, but on the other hand, there are no chapter breaks, and this seems like a good spot. I want to quote this to you: there's a bit of an attempt in Reeve's part to do what Walpole faked in his intro and then abandoned. Reeve adds notes in, as though she's really transcribing or translating from a genuine medieval manuscript. The section we're ending on ends with this passage:

Here follows an interval of four years, as by the manuscript; and this omission seems intended by the writer. What follows is in a different hand, and the character is more modern.

A nice, neat way to do a time jump, right?

You can probably see the plot twist coming already, but we'll leave it be for now. I will note though that even shortly after its publication it was also criticized for telegraphing the plot twist so heavily that you can tell what's going to happen in the first few pages. I think it's probably not a weakness in Reeve's plan. Authorial intention is of course not important to interpretation, but it's still nice to contextualize things. Reeve seems to have specifically set out to amend the problems of Otranto, and while the bombastic supernatural events are the most obvious "problems," Otranto, as we talked about months ago, destabilizes the sense of the normal. Even though there's a tidy ending where all the bad people are punished, we're still left feeling odd.

So, while Reeve wasn't exactly totally conservative, she's engaged in a kind of revisionary project here, trying to capture the net benefits of "the romance" (as she calls it) without succumbing to either the "sad" facts of history or the uncomfortable disintegration of cultural norms that we view now as the Gothic's bread and butter.

I want to end this one here, with that idea: the Old English Baron is a gothic novel, but it doesn't do a lot of the things that we associate with the genre now. Because there wasn't a genre yet. The imitations of Walpole came quickly, so I'd be hard pressed to tell you what the "second gothic novel" was, but this one is close.

1: basically the idea that literature expresses a culture's anxieties. It's especially influential in Victorian studies, especially in Gothic lit.^

Part Two

Here, we're going to go to France (for the warfare) and then discuss some good old fashioned nationalism.

Plot Summary

Sir Philip's guess comes true: a "cabal" of youths in the household begin to try their best to fuck up Edmund. At first they just accuse him of being "uppity."²
But then they go to war! Robert is the baron's oldest son, and the baron plans to attach Edmund to him as his squire. However, the "cabal" has gotten to Robert, who thinks Edmund is acting above his station.
The principle dipshit in this conspiracy is a guy named Wenlock, a distant relation who is, naturally, in love (or lust) with the baron's oldest daughter.
Without realizing it, she is, in turn, beginning to fall in love with Edmund, after he saved her from drowning in a river this one time.
There's a brief interlude where Joseph, an old servant who worked for the Lovells before Fitz-Owen bought the place, tears up looking at Edmund, and they speak kindly to each other.
This exchange includes one of the more banger lines in the novel. Edmund says "Words are my only inheritance."
Yes, you can take a moment. The cliches are piling up a bit, aren't they?
So, anyway, remember that war? Well, Edmund is instead attached to the baron's second son, William, who is his best friend. And we get a litany of Edmund being incredible at everything. Eventually, the conspiracy moves on from being Mean Girls to trying to get him killed.
They set it up so he goes on a nighttime raid of a French supply line, but they talk both Fitz-Owen brothers into staying at camp. Edmund will be alone with them, and they'll wander off into the night when they encounter the French, guaranteeing Edmund dies.
It's worth noting that Edmund has been such an ass kicker that Robert grudgingly respects him now, but still thinks he doesn't know his place.
The plan backfires. Edmund, hearing Robert complain, offers to go in Robert's armor, so Robert can claim the glory of the battle after the fact. Shamed, Robert gets off his ass and goes with the party, and brings William along. Naturally, the three of them win the day and the "cabal" is shamed.
Edmund is nearly knighted before Wenlock shouts that he's just a peasant, and the duke, like some dumbass, immediately stops his ceremony he's already begun.
The baron's wife dies and the sons are recalled.
There have been a few more notes about the manuscript being too damaged to read, mostly to allow for more time skips, but here the redactor narrator says there's some cryptic statement about Wenlock's plan working and then they move on immediately to say the baron's wife died. That's... weird, huh?
That's all for now!

So far not much "gothic" stuff, right? To be fair, the genre still didn't exist, so the word kind of just meant "medieval." So all the knights and armor and stabbing and such is plenty "gothic" in that sense.

Now, the nationalism, like I said. Last time, I mentioned that this novel was published around the time the English admitted defeat during what we now call the Revolutionary War, in the US. The timeline in the book I have (the Oxford World Classics edition) doesn't specify months, so I don't know exactly when Reeve was writing the manuscript. However, the English were losing their biggest, most lucrative colonies when she was writing. The French were keeping theirs -- and, anyway, it was sort of an open secret that the French were helping the colonists fight the English. Not, like, they weren't in a treaty or anything. But there was plenty of French-held stolen land in the Americas too, so there were ways they could help. Famously, I guess, Ben Franklin spent a lot of time in Paris convincing France to help out, in between his constant sex and drug parties.

So what I mean is that English people were generally pissed about world affairs. And what do people do when they don't like the way things are right now? They get nostalgic for the past!

Reeve, unlike our other authors so far, is not seeking the past in order to locate an exotic other, but to lay her hands on what she feels her culture is missing at the time of her writing. The introduction to this edition points out that, the same year the book was published, a huge group of army officers organized a faux-medieval tournament... on the Delaware River. In the US, not in England!

Now, Reeve isn't trying any harder than the other writers so far to be historical, not in the sense we'd mean the term: the characters talk like 18th century gentlemen, the prose is 18th century prose, and the "revisionism" (Trainer's term -- they edited this book) of the class situation serves to make of it something neither medieval nor "modern" (18th century).

So what's happening then? Well, Reeve is showing us a just, honorable, upright, brave, gentle, kind, blah, blah, blah English youth, pitting him against France, and then embroiling him in gothic shenanigans at home in England. Unlike all the other gothic we've read so far, the weird shit doesn't happen "over there," it happens "right here."

Hopefully I can develop that idea more as we go, as well as talking about the class revisionism and such.

2: I'm using this word advisedly. In the US it's historically almost always used to describe Black people who are, you know, acting with self respect and aren't being sufficiently deferential to a white person. It's racist, is what I mean. We may not have race stuff in OEB, but we've got boatloads of classism. ^

Part Three

Now we're back in England and things finally start to get spooky! We're actually hitting a trope for the first time that is going to be extremely familiar to everyone.

Plot Summary

Ever so slowly, Dad Fitz-Owen is swayed to think slightly less of Edmund. He's not aware there's a conspiracy.
Edmund goes on a walk one day with Father Oswald, who tells him there's a legend about the east wing of the house being haunted.
The conspiracy somehow overhears this, even though they're off in the woods. They accuse both Oswald and Edmund of mocking the baron, the household, and his decisions. Which of course isn't true, and they end up corroborating each other's story independently.
To try to restore some sense of order in the household, the baron makes Edmund sleep in the haunted room for three nights. This will prove both Edmund's bravery and that the room isn't haunted, so he can spare the expense of building a new wing and just open that one again. He is, once again, tired of the conspiracy's shit. And this is somehow, all that it took for things to be obvious: he's aware they're overtly working against Edmund, which he wasn't before for some fucking reason.
Edmund happily complies. The first night, it's appropriately spooky and run down, with rat nests and cobwebs, the works! He hears a sound, described as the sound of someone trying to move through a narrow corridor. He opens the adjoining rooms and finds nothing, though a draft blows out his lantern (of course it does).
Joseph, the servant from last time, appears clandestinely, with some wood for a fire. He tells Edmund he can explain the legend behind the room, and he'll do so the following night.
Edmund has a dream in the room, that a noble couple -- literally, a couple of nobles -- enter the room, bless him, weep over him, and say their house will finally be restored.
Edmund meets with the baron, who's willing to waive the other two nights, but Edmund insists he do them. They also discuss what to do: apart from William, the cadre of dudes around Roger and Wenlock will now have nothing to do with Edmund. They refuse to come out of their rooms to eat. They are babies. The baron now wants to find a way to honorably send Edmund away, so as to both provide for him while ending the disruption to his family. Edmund says he would willingly go back to war in the spring, and they agree to that.
Later, he meets Oswald, tells him about his night, and Oswald insists on coming in the night to hear Joseph's story.
His story is this: Walter Lovell was the person to tell the family that the old lord Lovell was dead. A messenger had come very recently, saying he was well and heading home. Lady Lovell was pregnant, and very visibly suffered grief but held up with "Christian determination," since, you know, she was bearing the only heir and all.
Walter told the family she was losing her mind when he arrived a few days later and shut her up in her rooms. She died afterwards, but one of Joseph's fellow servants saw her the night after she supposedly died, heading into the nearby woods.
Joseph finally admits what we all saw coming: Edmund looks exactly like the old Lovell baron, and he believes Edmund to be the baron's son. Edmund relates his dream.
The three investigate the passages Edmund could not see in, the night before. They find a bloody suit of armor Joseph recognizes as his, and sound the floor before concluding the body was buried under the boards. They lock up the rooms and leave them, so as to show them as they found them.
Edmund and Oswald determine to visit Edmund's mother the following day and ask her what the hell, exactly?

More stuff this time! The most obvious thing to discuss is the entire cluster of smaller tropes we find in a sequence, used over and over. First, a person, for some reason or another, agrees to sleep in a haunted room. Here, there's a very mild supernatural element -- the door opens to Edmund's hand but no one else's. But, either way, some supernatural phenomenon takes place, which divulges more information about the situation.

Despite how this novel isn't as well-remembered or considered to be influential, we've all seen that sequence a dozen times, right? Every haunted house movie is basically this. It appears in the "B plot" of Mysteries of Udolpho, though of course Radcliffe ultimately explains the ghost as something else, that was her whole thing.

There were, obviously, ghost stories before the gothic, so I can't swear to you that this is the first place it appears in English fiction. It could be a folk story trope for all I know. It does sound a bit like one, to be honest. But it does seem safe to assume this is the injection point, the way this trope gets layered into the foundational "trope list" of the gothic. It's what made the trope visible to others who would go on to use it, and then of course those authors influenced more, and so on, you get it.

The other particularly interesting thing here is the dream. I skipped a dream that Sir Philip had in the beginning for the sake of brevity, but he also dreams when he stays at the peasant's house, that first night. He dreams Lovell comes to him and says he's murdered. He also begins to see a ceremony or feast honoring a youth, but a voice cries out that it's not for humans to see what has been ordained. So he was somehow having a vision of the future and a higher power stopped it. That's... that's weird.

Think about it, right? If your world is entirely Christian, then any "supernatural" stuff is the result of God doing things (this is not necessarily true, but it is broadly true for the brand of Christian protestantism Reeve would have been acculturated into). So any visions of the past or future would be due to God. And in fact we see this in a wide variety of magical literature in the Christian tradition: calling on an angel to act as an overseer to a magical ritual, the magician would ask for visions in their bowl of water, burnished stone, or curling smoke (again, they also called on demons sometimes but still).

But here the vision is apparently coming from something that's not the "branch office of Yahweh" or whatever, because a spirit keeping up God's commands needs to stop the vision.

So where the fuck did it come from? My tentative idea is that the sympathy of Philip, and later of Edmund, allows them to see these visions. It's not that they're "given" visions so much as they come across the certain patterns of information and, in the first case, they must be stopped, and in the second it's acceptable, as this is the mechanism by which God's Providence will act.

My final note here is that "God's Providence" is an influence into the final ideas of the novel, I think, but I should wait until then to discuss them. For now, just keep in mind that the particular way this problem is being solved is a little different than we'd expect: Edmund isn't forcing his way into locked rooms to triumphantly discover the secrets he needs to vindicate his claim. He's passively allowed God's will to act in the world, and merely stirring his courage to meet the situation as it rises.

Part Four

What could we possibly do after a night of revelations, spooky shit, and visionary dreams? Go talk to mom, of course! I remember this part of Earthbound!

Plot Summary

I'll try to keep this one brief:

Edmund resolves to go to Sir Philip, as he's privileged and respected and can take up Edmund's case before the other nobles.
Edmund and Oswald go to Edmund's mother, who requires some buttering up and some threats to talk about how she ended up adopting Edmund.
She had miscarried a child, and was sitting around lonesome when her husband came home with a baby. He said he found it on the bridge into town, and thought both that she would want to take it in and also that it might be a rich person's baby. If so, they would be rewarded for saving it. It's wrapped in expensive stuff, you see.
She adopts the baby, like, for real. She doesn't think about reward, only that she has a kid. She had several others, but loved them all equally.
However, the following day, her husband comes back: they found a dead body under the bridge, he and his friend. They strip the body of valuables and bury it. It was a woman. Interestingly, they don't put 2 and 2 together: Oswald asks, well, were there any other people who died at the same time? She affirms that the Lady Lovell died. This shows us that Walter's scheme has succeeded: everyone in the area is so convinced she died in the castle and was buried that a woman seen after the burial, who dies shortly after, couldn't possibly be her.
Edmund's foster-mother kept the jewelry, and didn't sell it. They take some of it, with the family emblems, as evidence, and get her to affirm she'll speak to the authorities when they call on her.
Her husband has threatened to kill her if she speaks, by the way, so this is a bigger ask than it seems. But Edmund promises to reward them, so there's that to ease the asshole's anger.
On the way back, they run into Joseph, fill him in, and tell him Edmund is going to go to Sir Philip, and Joseph tells him one of Philip's servants is nearby visiting family. They break up determined to convince this servant, John, to leave that night and guide Edmund.
Edmund runs into Lady Emma, but I'm stopping here despite this all running together fairly closely.

A short section, but a relatively contained one. Feel free to raise your hand if you saw the entire back story coming, it's fairly cliched. It is, in fact, very similar to Otranto's, at least in outline: noble child is lost to his parents and raised as a peasant, but everyone can tell he's just better somehow because of his fine manners and upstanding nature.

If you want to grit your teeth, yeah, fair, but the gothic in the 18th century doesn't often question that part of society. And even when it does, it tends to fall back on it in some places, as in The Monk where mean birth doesn't mean "lowness," but high birth does mean some level of "highness."

Here, Reeve is specifically intersted in buttressing the social order as-is in England at the time, so of course the nobility are just better. But some critics claim that she's actually underwriting the claims of the middle class, the bourgeois. I think it was Foucault who said, of histories, that the middle class is always rising, but it's a significant component of 18th century English life. This is when we see an explosion of handbooks meant to teach the reader manners, genteel conversation topics, and the like. The rich don't need those, they went to good schools. The poor don't need those, they're busy being exploited to death. It's the middle class that needs shit like that. They want to rub elbows with the rich, to be taken as one of them, and since they can't magically change history to come from money, they have to learn to act like they came from money.

Reeve, in fact, went on to write at least one book about stuff like this, as well as a history of the romance as a literary genre. So she's specifically interested in the project of middle class cultural "improvement."

How does this come into the novel though? I'm not certain I'm totally convinced of this, but it's one of the most important interpretations of the novel out there so I wanted to give it to you. The idea, as best I can understand, is that all the rich privileged people in the novel recognize Edmund's excellence even when he's thought to be "nobody." The fact they give him a good education and similar opportunities (at least, to fight in a war, not to own land) means someone who "works hard" can rise in the social ranks.

Now, I also think the book is reflecting some anxiety about capitalism, but this might be something I am carrying in from other fantasy fiction. However, here's how that works: no one works for a living in this book -- that is to say, no one "on screen," so to speak. They certainly work: Joseph works all damned day long, and Edmund's family works their asses off. But the rich just have money, and somehow keep having it ("somehow" being because all these people are indentured servants creating profit out of the land but you knew that).

My point though is that, if and when Edmund becomes baron, Joseph won't have to work another day in his life. He's already old. And this is kind of a thing in feudalism, at least in its ideal form: people didn't receive wages, they just sort of got what they needed. Now, we rightly consider that to be exploitative, but a lot of people historically have argued that capitalism is more so. In the Victorian period, about a century after Baron, many people argued that giving someone a wage every week destroyed the bond between worker and manager, or worker and owner. There was no sense of common feeling, no social relationship anymore.

That's... that's not the fault of wages, of course, but of social forces. In theory medieval relationships of noble and peasant were marked by a mutual respect. In actuality? Not so much.

But we're not dealing with actual history. We're dealing with Reeve's idealized history here. And she absolutely believes that good nobles and good servants live a life of mutual respect. And in that kind of situation, you actually get a sort of small utopia, where people work, but when they can't, they are taken care of by their benefactor.

I think those relations, such as they actually were, were breaking down further in the 18th century, and there was an anxiety surrounding that change, and I think Reeve is echoing that in her idyllic medieval world, where bad things happen, but between most nobles being good and God's Providence working behind the scenes, the bad things don't last very long, and everyone gets their just desserts.

It's not bad, so far as a fantasy goes, right?

Part Five

Now we're really getting to the good shit. Edmund's off, and the assholes are left to do what they will. Kind of.

Plot Summary

Edmund runs into Lady Emma in the garden after supper. They have an awkward conversation where he admits he's considering leaving, and she says it won't fix anything, as Wenlock is the cause of the trouble. A nice version of "don't blame bad people when they say things are your fault." Fair.
She asks if he really wants her to marry Wenlock, and he slowly admits he has "a friend" (yes really) who wants to ask for her hand when it's appropriate to do so. She gets offended, but Edmund makes more clear he's departing and they speak once more.
On his third and final night in the chamber, they hear the groan at midnight. I want to quote this line:

At the hour of twelve they heard the same groans as the night before in the lower apartment; but, being somewhat familiarized to it, they were not so strongly affected.

They sneak away, Edmund meets Philip's servant, who's the son of the peasant from way back in the beginning. Philip hired him years ago. They all part ways and the action turns back to the castle.
Oswald sneaks into William's room and leaves him a letter, saying, very carefully, that "the peasant Edmund is no more" but a friend remains who would like to repay him. Oswald also sneaks a letter onto the Baron's breakfast setting, along with the key to the chamber. This letter says it's from the guardian of the haunted chamber, and that until the appointed person comes to reveal its secrets, it is to be shut up.
The family gather up to figure out these mysteries. Wenlock, showing more intelligence than he has thus far, guess it's to cover up Edmund leaving, but immediately says it's because Edmund wants to sneak in at night and rob them.
At the end of these proceedings the Baron orders Wenlock and his asshole friend to sleep three nights in the chamber the way Edmund did.
They bicker and argue and nearly get in a fistfight, but the ghost appears to them visibly, groaning, dressed in full armor, and points to the door. They don't need a second hint and fuck off. They are freaking out so badly they collapse at the door to the baron's bedchamber. There's a whole mess; they blurt out what happened and so all the servants know there's a ghost (they knew already). They send Oswald to check the room. The ghost is gone. He and Joseph put out the fire and lock it up, giving the key back to the baron. There's general consternation.
William and Emma talk. Emma figures out that the letter William received means that Edmund is not a peasant, but they know no more than that. They agree Edmund is the best match for Emma, who stumbles into admitting she's in love with him. William approves.

You can see that we finally get some good ghost shit, even if it's quiet. That's not to the detriment of the story, particularly as the entire thing is centered on God's justice. The ghost does nothing but indicate where to look when Edmund is in there. When the two assholes go in, it runs them out. This is haunting as guidance, as divine intervention.

So I thought I'd talk about the predictability of the plot. That's not a bad thing. Famously, classical Greek plays were generally adaptations of stories the audience would already know: the idea was to listen to the language, watch the performances, and enjoy those, the way it was made, not what it was doing. So too a story that's predictable isn't inherently bad. You can still enjoy the way it gets to where it's going. And indeed, many older stories and poems will tell you what's going to happen, even if it isn't a familiar story.

So, we shouldn't hold against The Old English Baron the fact that we know nearly from page 5 that Edmund is an orphaned noble and that the old baron was murdered and haunts his castle. Of course that's what happened. The thing is, the very predictability of the plot supports the theme of accepting God's hand in life.

And indeed, I think what's happening is an argument is being made: of course we know what's going to happen, because it's a "romance." As I mentioned a while back, Reeve ended up writing a survey of romance literature, and she had a strong opinion on what constituted it. She felt history was true and often sad, and so romance should be the happier side of life. And since the story is also so heavily indebted to God's Providence, there can't be anything but a just ending -- because God wouldn't allow injustice, theoretically, and this is a romance, which allows us the room to enjoy that claim.

Reeve knows as well as anyone else that the world often sees injustice. We might even suspect she feels the loss of the war with the colonists wasn't just, or at least wasn't the best thing for her country. She's living through tough times. So the romance allows her to explore the inevitability of God's goodness on Earth, while in "history" we might need to accept it's often as likely as not reserved for outside of life itself.

Part Six

We're running at the ending now! Let that camera pan up to the sky, because we're transitioning back to Edmund.

Plot Summary

Meanwhile, Edmund makes it to Sir Philip's place. Philip welcomes him gladly, and is transported in grief and in happiness to learn what really happened to his friend, and that Edmund is his heir. He remarks that he, too, noticed the similarity immediately. Remember when he pauses for no reason the narrator will tell us? Yeah, that.
Philip lays his plans to deal with Walter Lovel. Edmund speaks against trying immediately to call a trial, because he wants to avoid shaming Fitz-Owen. Philip decides on a trial by combat. They may sound like 18th century toffs, but this is the medieval period after all!
Philip sends his old friend from the wars and a few servants with a letter to Walter, telling him he seeks satisfaction for wrongs done to the old Lord Lovel. Walter denies any wrongdoing, but the letter also threatens to denounce him publicly, so he still agrees to meet.
Philip calls in another noble, Clifford, to act as an impartial judge. He avoids telling Clifford what the matter is, and writes his will, in which Edmund is named his adopted son and heir, and a list of charitable donations is spelled out for us, to remind us Philip is a Good Guy.
To be fair, this genuinely is. He insists his estate continue to support the disabled soldiers he's taken in, and so on. Fair enough, Philip.
Meanwhile, again, back at Fitz-Owen's place, the shit finally hits the fan. Oswald manages to play Wenlock and his goofy friend against each other, until they fall out, and Oswald orchestrates things so that the Baron hears it. He insists on having it all out, gathers the family and servants, and they all go ape shitt ratting him out.
As it turns out, he's convinced all the servants he's going to be the new son-in-law, and so they didn't report his shit back to Fitz-Owen earlier. And Robert was being played, so of course he didn't know.
Fitz-Owen sends him packing, after he blows up and incoherently screams at everybody. He writes Wenlock's mother, telling him he done fucked up, but not how. This is a neat little piece of statesmanship honestly. It gives Wenlock a chance to improve himself without his reputation being entirely ruined to begin with; it also gives Fitz-Owen leverage, because everyone will believe that he had good cause, but they still won't know why and Fitz-Owen can tell them if Wenlock tries anything.
Cut again: the battle happens smoothly. Everyone gathers in Scotland, presumably to be out from under the purview of their own laws briefly. Philip kicks Walter's ass, first in listing and then on foot. Walter is badly wounded, and confesses he caused his brother's murder, but didn't commit it himself.
They bear him away to the host's castle and get him to confess more by pretending that he's closer to death than he really is. They get it all avowed by several witnesses.

A good chunk of pages went into this section, or sections really, but I felt they probably should go together, since they're all beginning to draw the novel to a close. It could even appear that this should be it! There should be nothing but denouement. But the novel's all been about people talking mostly, and some ghosts, so there's more to do.

Now, we tend to be very clear that the gothic in some way undermines or disrupts a cultural assumption. Something we assume to be absolutely true is shown not to be. It can be as simple as "you're safe at summer camp" or as complex as "humanity's inherent nobility is a lie exposed by fear." But does this novel do that?

I would say it uses the mechanism but not the goal. It's true to the letter of the genre but not the spirit. The Old English Baron uses disruption to put things back on the right track.

In fact, what it is, is that something else disrupted the natural order of things, and the gothic grotesque ruptures the everyday world because of that. The vengeful ghost can't haunt a room unless it's murdered and buried there, after all. This is actually true to Otranto, in which another tale of usurpation and murder leads to a haunting and miraculous grotesques. But Manfred's energy and the novel's strange conclusion leave us feeling as though things are somewhat arbitrary.

Here, instead, there's arbitration. But more on that next time.

My final thought, I think, is that Reeve's fight scene whips ass, actually. Gothic novels aren't necessarily known for their action, in our modern sense of, like, "action films." The duel stands out among the books we've done so far.

Part Seven

This is it! I'm finally writing up the end of The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve.

Now that the action is mostly finished, we have all the ends to wrap up. And it's a bit more interesting than that makes it sound.

Plot Summary

They haul Walter to the host's castle and summon a doctor, who initially pronounces him near death's door.
Philip brings in witnesses and convinces Walter to confess his crimes. Not without some cajoling I must say, and in fact, as he mends, they convince the physician to continue telling Walter he's dying.
Philip writes to Fitz-Owen, telling him to come attend his brother. Fitz-Owen is initially pissed at Philip, and his son Robert is angry at Edmund, but they are forced to admit Walter is telling the truth.
Father Oswald tells the tale of speaking to Edmund's adopted mother. Edmund admits to having the key to the haunted rooms. Edmund presents the jewels his birth mother left behind that his adopted mother kept for so long. Walter moans and groans, at this time feeling remorse for what he did.
There's some simplified legalistic stuff: Fitz-Owen bought the castle he lives in from Walter, but Walter didn't have the right to sell it; it's Edmund's by right. Fitz-Owen complains about the cost, but Philip points out Edmund is going to be owed decades of arrears. The host, acting as judge, says one cancels the other out, especially as they have insisted Walter pass on his legacy to Fitz-Owen's children.
Walter tries to escape. They catch him almost immediately and put him under more severe watching. Philip's old Greek friend takes him in hand specifically.
Fitz-Owen and Philip talk privately. Philip advances Edmund's suit to Fitz-Owen's daughter. Fitz-Owen isn't against it necessarily, but wary and irritated. However, Robert has fallen in love with the host's daughter, and the host has nothing but good things to say about both Philip and Edmund. He's also basically ok with Robert and respects Fitz-Owen for dealing with a difficult situation well.
So the host agrees to bless Robert's attempt to woo his daughter if Fitz-Owen accepts Edmund's suit, or, at the least, allows Edmund to profess it to the lady herself.
If this sounds like trading horses, well, look, it was an 18th century woman writing about women in the medieval period. There are layers here.
Back at the haunted castle, they return and as the horn blows to announce their arrival, every door in the castle slams open all at once. Joseph cries out that the castle is welcoming its rightful lord.
They go to the haunted room immediately, and find the body, still in its armor with the coat of arms. After dinner, they send for Edmund's adopted parents and find their stories, delivered separately, agree, and agree with what they've heard already. They very carefully mention that there should be an account written of this by the local priests. This would be because the book had tried, a few times early on, to behave as though it was a translation of a medieval text, and so Reeve thinks to give us some reason to expect it to exist.
The real denouement arrives. Everyone marries off. Philip turns his castle into a home for disabled soldiers and moves in with Edmund and Emma. Fitz-Owen cleans up a smaller holding, but spends most of his time visiting his children. We're told how each died surrounded by family. It's the biggest of the big happy endings basically.
And also Philip's Greek friend wants to retire back to Greece to find his son and spread Christianity, so he hauls Walter away to do his penance by crusading in exile. So that's nice. 😬

Now. I did say once the last bit had more than it seemed. I could almost accuse it of being some kind of proto-detective fiction, and of course since that genre comes from the gothic I wouldn't sound that crazy. But it's not really, it's more that it's doing the things that nascent detective fiction got from the gothic: digging up graves, opening hidden rooms, and so on.

The reason it's not detective fiction is, as I sort of alluded to earlier, that Providence is arranging everything. The detective is not figuring things out; the characters are being arranged carefully by the hand of God so the murder will out.

I mentioned last time what is probably the smartest idea I can bring to this: this novel inverts the "typical" gothic narrative by making the gothic horrors products of a destabilization in the social fabric (as opposed to a crime revealing how unstable the social fabric really is).

Theodore, from Otranto, was also revealed to be a nobleman's son, but that ends up meaning fuck all. Edmund is revealed to be a nobleman's son and he wins the lottery, basically -- but he's also a shining paragon of honor and chivalry, up to and including behaving precisly as he ought to in his perceived social position. The rich really are better than the rest of us, as it turns out.

It's a neat, tidy story, and somewhat disappointing as an example of early gothic, though of course what business do I have saying that? It is an example of early gothic, one of the earliest there is, so fuck my opinion, really. I suppose the intelligent thing to say is that it wasn't as influential as the other books we've talked about so far. Or, let's be honest, it was almost as influential but nobody called it out by name because it had a slightly bad reputation as a knock-off of Otranto.

It's hard being the second person to do something, right?

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