Shown over the Halloween period in 2014, The Art of the Gothic is presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon’s foray into the art and literature of terror. The series is not currently available on BBC iPlayer, but can be accessed (for education purposes) through Box of Broadcasts. Of the three episodes in the series, only the first focuses on eighteenth-century and Romantic-era examples; the first episode provides the focus of this review.

Art of the Gothic follows the format of Graham-Dixon’s previous series (Art of Spain, Art of America et al) and is, as we might expect, stronger discussing the visual arts and architecture than it is the literary. The presenter’s enthusiasm for Salvator Rosa and Henry Fuseli is obvious; his description of Shakespeare as a ‘forgotten’ writer for the Georgians, or his rather pat assessment of Northanger Abbey as simply a parody of the Gothic mode, may provoke a few scholarly winces. None of this is to say that the series has nothing to offer students and teachers of literature, as Graham-Dixon works hard with the difficult task of putting literary texts on screen. Of particular interest in the first episode is the opportunity to view Thomas Chatterton’s faked ‘medieval’ manuscripts and, as the presenter puts it, his cannibalisation of the past – forging medieval art on top of more prosaic (but authentically medieval) documents.
Early Gothic fakery is prominent, ranging from the pretence of ‘found documents’ in The Castle of Otranto to the mock medieval ruin at Hagley Hall, touching on the Ossian hoax along the way. What comes across in the episode is the Gothic as a kind of deliberate contra-authenticity – not merely inauthentic (suggesting that an experience is a ‘lesser’ one for not being based in reality), but an imaginative challenge to the shortcomings of real life. Graham-Dixon lightly skips over the anti-Catholicism of the period but suggests that the Gothic was a search for the mystery and grandeur denied to Britain by the Reformation, a period the presenter refers to as a ‘cultural cataclysm’. Though he pads his thesis with not a little melodrama about our cultural ‘dark side’, the presenter’s implication that the attraction of the Gothic lies in its celebration of the subjective (an impressionistic understanding of history and culture, allied with the pleasures of sensation) is an excellent starting point for discussion.

The chief value of the episode, however, is its sense of fun. Graham-Dixon understands that his material is not afraid to be silly, and neither is he (he is unable to resist an innuendo about Otranto’s giant helmet). Unlike the BBC Gothic season’s other, more po-faced, offerings, Art of the Gothic captures the mode’s affinity for the comic turn. Tracing a (to scholars, familiar) line from Horace Walpole, to Beckford, to M.G. Lewis, Graham-Dixon foregrounds the excess of the early Gothic. Beckford’s Vathek, in particular, is treated as an extension of the author’s hedonistic and questionable escapades. The presenter dwells long on Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey. Though Graham-Dixon does not press the point, the abbey’s rapid erection and subsequent collapse seem symbolic of how the presenter views the early Gothic as a whole: a grandiose monument to faux-medievalism, built to excite the sensations but conscious of its own absurdity, and brought crashing down when the party is over. The word that the episode searches for, but never arrives at, is ‘camp’ – the conscious poise of an outsider aware of the essential ridiculousness of what they do, but singularly determined in the execution of it. For the series however, silliness ends with the French Revolution. Excess remains, and Art of the Gothic sees the violence of the revolution reflected in the nastiness of The Monk – an argument it uses to propel the series into the nineteenth century and (so the series claims) its fear of modernity.

In summary, Art of the Gothic is a visual indulgence. Its narrative holds few surprises for any student of the early Gothic, but it shows a great many things that the written word does little justice to. The great ‘Gothic meringue’ of Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill alongside the gothic temple hidden in the gardens of Stowe, is a meaningful juxtaposition that would be difficult to achieve in any other medium. The programme’s account of a complex artistic and literary mode is occasionally simplistic, but its argument is interesting and conceptually sound. For all its faults, Art of the Gothic is a fair introduction to the early Gothic and a helpful friend to the uninitiated.

The Art of the Gothic was first broadcast on BBC4 on October 20th 2014. It is currently available on Higher Education digital resource, Box of Broadcasts.