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By Root 424 0

occurred in March 1796, though some copies of the book printed in 1795 have apparently been found. England was at war with France in those days, and had been so since 1793. The government of William Pitt the Younger had at that point immediately embarked upon policies that sought to prevent the contagion of French revolutionary ideas, and must therefore be seen as having become a rather reactionary administration. Habeas corpus was suspended, for example, and the Traitorous Correspondence Bill was passed. The first attempts to abolish the slave trade in Britain, embarked upon by William Wilberforce in the House of Commons with the motion “This House advocates the abolition of the slave trade,” had come to an end in 1792 with the insertion of the word “gradual” before the word “abolition.” This philanthropic endeavor was also a casualty of the war with France.

The United States, meantime, was drawing to the end of the administration of George Washington. He would be succeeded next year by the vice president, John Adams. The most remarkable event of recent years had been the introduction by Eli Whitney of the cotton gin, which rendered so profitable the cultivation of short staple cotton in the American South. So far as Europe is concerned, the worst stage of the French Revolution was over and the Directory had been formed. The final suppression of the royalist counterrevolution in La Vendée occurred in the month when The Monk appeared. This too was when the promising young general Bonaparte married Josephine de Beauharnais, one of the lights of Parisian society.

Matthew Lewis’s father had a sugar plantation at Savanna la Mer, in the far west of the island of Jamaica. In the eighteenth century, this property employed about four hundred slaves. Thanks to this investment and others, Lewis, like his father, was always able to enjoy a private income. The father returned to England and became both chief clerk in the War Office and deputy secretary of war, posts that he held throughout what was for England the disastrous American war. Lewis’s mother was also of a family with property in Jamaica; indeed, their land and that of the Lewises adjoined.

Lewis was brought up in England and sent to the well-known school of Westminster, in the shadow of the houses of Parliament and of Westminster Abbey. He then went to Oxford. Many of his holidays were spent at Stanstead Hall, Montfichet, Essex, then the seat of the Sewells, his mother’s family. It was an Elizabethan house, and in the twentieth century it would belong to the statesman Rab Butler and his family. Here, probably, Lewis gained his appetite for ghosts, doors and windows that fly open without being touched, and winds that sound like screams.

While Lewis was at Westminster, his parents separated. Lewis devoted much time to trying to prevent the break between them from becoming absolute. This endeavor failed. Meantime, he traveled in France, Holland, and Germany (where he met Goethe) and wrote a great deal: plays principally, but also some novels. He told his mother that he wrote The Monk in the summer of 1794, being then nineteen years old. It was an immediate success, if a succès de scandale: and attempts were made to prohibit it, an action that only enhanced the book’s circulation. Lewis became famous.

For a time, everything went well for him. He was elected to Parliament for Hindon, Wiltshire, and lived in the fashionable Albany block of apartments in Piccadilly. He was taken up by the Whig hostess Lady Holland and often visited Holland House in Kensington, the great Whig headquarters. He came to know everyone worthwhile, from Walter Scott to Byron. A letter to his mother of August 1797 indicates his social success: “I was unexpectedly summoned to Oatlands [the house of the king’s second son, the Duke of York] on Saturday last; where I remained till the end of this week and during my absence my letters were all kept for me at Stoke park.… The party at Oatlands was very large, and very gay. We had excellent music every night and the Egham races every morning. But unluckily