Elizabeth Bobbitt and Dale Townshend
This year marks 200 years since the posthumous publication of Ann Radcliffe’s St Alban’s Abbey; A Metrical Tale, a lengthy poem by the so called ‘Great Enchantress’ of early Gothic fiction that is set during the first year of the Wars of the Roses (May 1455). In celebration of the poem’s publication in 1826, the AHRC-funded Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now project recently sponsored a study day hosted by the Adult Learning Centre at St Albans Cathedral. The day included a guided tour of the cathedral, during which participants read aloud excerpts from Radcliffe’s extraordinary poem, comparing her descriptions of the then dilapidated abbey with the space as it is experienced by tourists today while trying imaginatively to reconstruct what it looked like when she visited it in the early years of the nineteenth century. Following the tour, Rosie Garland (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) led a creative writing workshop, in which attendees composed their own poetry in response to both Radcliffe’s narrative and St Albans Cathedral itself.
Printed alongside Radcliffe’s last novel entitled Gaston de Blondeville, two other narrative poems, and a collection of twenty-six shorter lyric poems, St Alban’s Abbey is little known today. To admirers of Radcliffe’s distinctive Gothic fictions of the 1790s, it represents a monumental shift in the writer’s creative practice. Where her Gothic romances are set on the Continent in France and Italy, for instance, St Alban’s Abbey is set in Radcliffe’s native England. While her 1790s novels take place on the cusp of the European Enlightenment, St Alban’s Abbey is a poem firmly rooted in the Catholic ritual and civil conflict of Britain’s medieval past. And unlike her earlier works, in which apparently supernatural occurrences are ultimately explained by rational and earthly means, St Alban’s Abbey is shot through with instances of ghostly hauntings. In St Alban’s Abbey, then, Radcliffe enacts a sharp turn away from the prose that earned her an exalted place among the bestselling authors of her day in favour of antiquarian metrical romance, a form popularised in the early years of the nineteenth century by Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810).
During our study day, we explored Radcliffe’s St Alban’s Abbey at the very site where its action takes place, hoping through this to gain a greater understanding of the creative impetus behind the poem, and Radcliffe’s motivation in effecting such a major creative shift from her earlier work. More broadly, the event was informed by our mission at Ann Radcliffe, Then and Now to recover and reinterpret Radcliffe’s life and work for a modern audience. As part of this project, Professor Dale Townshend and I are editing Radcliffe’s posthumously published works, including St Alban’s Abbey, for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe. Not only will the various volumes of this edition constitute the first full scholarly edition of Radcliffe’s works, but it will also be the first time that Radcliffe’s poem has been reissued since its initial publication in 1826.
Our study group set off to follow in Radcliffe’s footsteps to the site she explored time and again, we are told by T.N. Talfourd, with ‘unwearied zeal.’ As we progressed through our tour, expertly led by our knowledgeable volunteer tour guide, Laurie Gibson, we marvelled at the painstaking architectural and decorative details of the medieval abbey-church that Radcliffe evokes in her poem. In the south transept, for instance, we saw the upper gallery where Baron Fitzharding, a Lancastrian knight in the narrative, looks down on the wounded of the First Battle of St Albans in search of news of his father’s bloody fate. In the north presbytery aisle, meanwhile, we examined the brass of Thomas Rutland, a sixteenth century sub-prior of the abbey, that hangs on a stone wall. Much admired by Radcliffe, Rutland’s brass is included in her antiquarian end notes to St Alban’s Abbey. The remains of the arched doorways that once led to the abbey’s medieval cloister are still visible in the cathedral yard today, and it was here we stood to listen to the bells toll in celebration of a summer wedding. As we stood together at the Abbey Gate, we mused on whether Radcliffe herself stopped to listen to the bells peal as she wandered through the remains of the abbey-church, the site in the early nineteenth century given over to ruination and neglect following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 and the ravages of Oliver Cromwell’s army during the Civil War.
Our study day allowed us not only to follow in Radcliffe’s footsteps, but also, like Radcliffe herself, to revel in the imaginative power of place. As a Romantic tourist, Radcliffe deliberately sought out historical sites that particularly awakened her own creative sensibilities. During the creative writing workshop, we adopted Radcliffe’s creative practice, using St Albans Cathedral as a prompt or catalyst for our own creative and scholarly expressions. Thank you to all who came along. You made the day unforgettable!
Below is a sample of the creative work that resulted from our creative writing workshop, a short poem that imaginatively explores the fate of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV and Margaret de Bohun. As uncle to Henry VI, Gloucester served as protector of England during Henry VI’s minority. Under Henry VI’s early rule, Gloucester remained heir presumptive until Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife, gave birth to their only son, Edward, in 1453. Eventually convicted of treason, the duke died under suspicious circumstances at Bury St Edmunds in 1477. His grave was discovered at St Albans in 1703, his body embalmed in a mix of alcohol and aromatic spices. The site became a popular tourist attraction in the eighteenth century, and visitors to the cathedral can still see the site of his grave today.
Duke Humphrey of St Alban’s
Only the best for you, Duke Humphrey.
Our local brew and altar wine
Could never slake your dogged zeal
To be pickled in more than common brine.
Cognac –a speech—rapt attention—
Every eye and every tongue
Buzzing hot in speculation
On all your worst exploits, far flung
And local –sins long past, forever young.
Professor Michael Gamer (University of Pennsylvania)
