ABSTRACT

In the Irish novelist John Banim's Revelations of the Dead-Alive (1824), the narrator is transported to London in 2023–24, where he finds that the local intelligentsia read Sir Walter Scott not as the progenitor of the historical novel but rather as the last in line of an earlier Gothic style:

[Horace] Walpole's little crude tale is the first parent of all that wild legend in our language; that Lewis is its more fruitful propagator; and that Ann Radcliff [sic] is its first, and [Scott], its last and most successful adaptor or modifier.

(Banim 1824: 95–96)