ELH

I

It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun, “Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.” Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems?

— Anna Letitia Barbauld ¹

The place of nationality in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) appears obvious: the text promises to reveal the secrets of an alien national identity to English readers. The novel’s very title makes this promise, as does the much-admired frame tale that precedes the narrative proper. Anna Letitia Barbauld, in her introduction to Radcliffe’s novels in The British Novelists (1810), writes of this frame:

Nothing can be finer than the opening of this story. An English- man on his travels, walking through a church, sees a dark figure stealing along the aisles. He is informed that he is an assassin. On expressing his astonishment that he should find shelter there, he is told that such adventures are common in Italy. ²

The Italian who has explained the mores of his strange country proceeds to give the English traveler a manuscript — one that, in good Gothic fashion, turns out to be The Italian itself. Though the assassin in the church does not figure in what follows, this lack of direct plot connection between prologue and tale confirms rather than negates the promise that the novel will exhibit and explain alien behavior. The otherwise unmotivated preamble on the ways of the Italians suggests that the text in its entirety should be taken as emblematic of Italianness, Catholicism, a mysterious and un-English way of life.

Similar promises and textual conceits may be found in many Gothic novels, including that work most often cited as the first Gothic, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole, writing under a pseudonym, claims in the preface to the first edition [End Page 853] that the text of Otranto was “found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England” and “printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.” ³ He offers his “translation” of this manuscript to the English reader — just as Radcliffe offers The Italian — as an entertaining artifact of another age and country, a window on a world displaced by time and distance: “I have no doubt but the English reader will be pleased with a sight of this performance.” ⁴

In the wake of the remarkable success of Otranto, however, Walpole admits to having written the book and undertakes to explain his reasons for doing so. A new set of concerns is articulated in his preface to the second edition (1765), concerns that have more to do with eighteenth-century England than sixteenth-century Italy. Otranto is now claimed, not as a found manuscript, but as a generic experiment in which the author self-consciously set out to “blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” ⁵ The literary implications of this attempt are not only personal and self-promotional, but explicitly national as well: in writing his new form of romance Walpole sought to imitate the “mixed” style of Shakespeare rather than a classical model, and to defend the English bard — “our immortal countryman” — against the vilifications of his French detractor, Voltaire. ⁶

The same domestic literary concerns mark The Italian, so that a text that seems to hold out to its late-eighteenth-century English readers the pleasures of a pure exoticism actually involves them as much in modern Englishness as ancient Italianness. The insistent presence of chapter epigraphs drawn from English literature — from Shakespeare and Horace Walpole himself to Milton, Collins, Gray, and Beattie — indicates that the novel seeks to belong, as did Otranto and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) before it, to a specifically English literary tradition. ⁷ Other, less obvious borrowings demonstrate the same ambition. That The Italian is offered as a found manuscript, for example, serves at once to confirm as canonical a line of English writers from Samuel Richardson through Walpole to Clara Reeve...