A ‘rise of supernatural fiction’? The idea appears paradoxical. Certainly it cannot refer to the place of the fantastic in the hierarchy of literary genres, more marginal than elevated. Its popular success has more often been described as a spread or even contagion than as a rise. This will not, then, be the chronicle of the ‘rise’ of a genre of ghost stories as a triumphal progress through time. What I will be discussing concerns less the career of an already recognisable category of fiction, than the conditions which made such a category possible; in other words, the subject under consideration is the emergence of the supernatural into fiction. For the now all-too-familiar repertoire of spectres, sorcerers, demons and vampires was not from the first unproblematically available as a resource for writers of fiction. Works like The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, today identified and dealt with by literary critics as early examples of the Gothic novel, as if that label were already securely in place at their time of writing, will here be seen as breakthroughs in the difficult overcoming of barriers to the fictional use of the marvellous.

The dates 1762 to 1800 given in the title mark the extent of a problematic. The period of the study properly begins two years before the publication of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The highly publicised visitations of a ghost in the East End of London, the subject of chapter 1, was an event which for us illuminates the conditions of Walpole's experiment.